Smoke & Mirrors

I think it may have something to do with advancing middle age, but i seriously do not understand the weight of glory we give to celebrities in our culture.

I'm pretty old school. I grew up in Western Nebraska with a rotary phone on the wall, a TV console that received CBS, NBC, ABC, and PBS, and plenty of room to play outside. My Grandfather was a Pentecostal Preacher and drinking, dancing, and going to movies were considered sinful even tho my parents weren't as fierce about these thing as my Grandparents were.

This kind of cultural Christianity didn't make much sense to me, and as soon as i hit 16 i pretty much started to live in a movie theater. I may have started watching movies, but ironically I never started drinking, especially after seeing the kids who's approval i had craved act like idiots and fools once i gained a varsity basketball position and could actually personally observe them at the super cool parties that ended up as a bunch of bored high school kids getting wrecked around a keg. Dancing wasn't really a big issue with me -- i never started dating until after i graduated -- my social life was the casualty of unpopularity and being a straight arrow Christian. I like film, and i appreciate those that can make a narrative come to life on either the small screen or the big screen -- especially Joss Whedon, who does both.

However, i remember a few of the observations my Grandfather told me about actors and Hollywood when we would argue the point. He said actors throughout history had always had it tough. They spoke lines other people wrote while pretending to be someone they were not -- they were a lot like kids playing dress-up, except they were being filmed. In Rome actors were not allowed citizenship because the ancients believed that a person's spirit, their animus, was in their words -- and actors spoke someone else's words, and therefore had no honor. On the whole, he said, actors and actresses were vain and often lazy, a group of people who didn't work an honest day for their living, people who encouraged people to obsess on make-believe instead of the things that were real and things that mattered. I thought my Grandfather to be a little harsh in these observations, yet i had to admit there was a kernel of truth in what he said.

How ironic is it that my Grandfather and South Park creators Matt Stone and Trey Parker had almost the exact same take on those who act in the movies and on TV, especially when celebrities turn political... I love how Parker and Stone satire acting and actors, making an this profession and an actor a main contributor in the war on terror when in reality only egomaniacs like George Clooney, Matt Damon, Tim Robbins, and Sean Penn suffer this kind of illusions of grandeur...

The Wife has a fondness for celebrity gossip, and sometimes channel surfs while we watch TV and often stops on Entertainment Tonight or some such bullshit just to piss me off -- she says i'm sexy when i'm angry. I honestly do not understand why anyone would want to hear this crap about the incredible lightness of being a celebrity. The people featured on these things are often sad, pathetic, broken and vain, but they are almost always pretty. I usually stand in horror as she laughs while holding the remote, and i wonder if it has come to the point where a majority of Americans actually identify with these ghosts, these prancing fools practiced in the use of smoke and mirrors to refine their image, who are famous, primary, because their DNA gave them physical features that translated through the camera.

I am sorry for Heath Ledger -- anyone dying that young is tragic, and my sympathy goes out to his wife and child.  Death is never an event to take lightly, or to overlook when it comes for anyone. I sincerely wished this had not happened.

But come on! All my friends who interprets all of life thru pop culture are acting as if Paul Newman or Robert Di Nero had passed away. Ledger's eulogy is turning into an eerie replay of the death of Princess Di, when she turned into "the people's Princess" just hours after her death. In reality she was a rich, spoiled, and emotionally dysfunctional woman of privilege who, because it was expected of her, did very carefully scripted appearances for several notable causes. Has the world really lost an international treasure in the guy who starred in A Knight's Tale? Hell, even his little politically correct Brokeback Mountain, seen by a dozen people and the members of the Gay & Lesbian anti-defamation league, wasn't a risky move for Ledger-- Hollywood loves to pat itself on the back for just this kind of movies, and reward those performances that "dares to break conventions and taboos." He was a virtual lock for bigger and more "serious" roles after Mountain.

Did he have talent? Yes. I actually like A Knight's Tale. I hated Brokeback Mountain; The Duke was probably spinning so fast in his grave that they probably had to call the fire department to the cemetery where he was buried. I did like 10 Things I Hate About You -- i'm a sucker for Shakespeare adaptations. I wish Ledger would have been able to nurture his potential -- by all accounts, his role in the upcoming Batman sequel was a breakthrough performance.

Since when did these celebrities, these people who do not speak their own lines and pretend to be people they're not, gain this much credibility in our culture? I think it is time for Americans to appreciate the advice novelist Stephen King gives to aspiring writers, a truth King learned the hard way:

"It starts with this: put your desk in the corner, and every time you sit down to write, remind yourself why it isn't in the middle of the room. Life isn't a support-system for art. Its the other way around."