Hollywood

Allow me to state the main conclusions of this essay right up front:

• I would not care if I never saw another Hollywood movie or television program as long as I lived.
• I do not think there is a single actor or director in Hollywood today who has enough intelligence or artistic talent to justify my spending thirty minutes or more of my precious life on this planet watching him or her or it ply his or her or its “trade.”
• I do not believe that a professional faker, a person who by “career” choice has demonstrated that he/she/it lacks any of the more meaningful or useful human skills or capabilities by means of which children develop into responsible adult citizens, has anything to teach me about the responsibilities of adult citizenship, such that I ought to give a damn what any such professional faker has to say about political, moral, or, for that matter, artistic questions.
• I believe that a faker’s “trade,” the most famous and influential (i.e., richest and least artistic) practitioners of which have given themselves over to serving as willing mouthpieces and propagandists for the Marxist tribunal that is currently sweeping away the world’s last vestiges of human freedom, has effectively made itself a public enemy, a subversive entity, and therefore deserving of severe scrutiny, public boycotts (if there were still any sort of “public” in modern life), and certainly the conscientious abstention of any individual with enough dignity left to rate his own soul, and his sense of liberty and justice, above his dubious and trivial need for mind-wasting “entertainment.”

Come to think of it, perhaps we may just end this right here, having stated the conclusions, and not even bother getting into the muck of arguing for it — except to note that yet again, Plato was right.

However much we may wish to deny this, we all have a vested emotional interest in believing the absurdity that today’s deteriorated social reality is a recent development imposed on an otherwise essentially healthy civilization — beginning around 1967, let’s say — rather than the inevitable result of generations of decay. Hence, as I have explained in detail elsewhere, sensible people will often agree when you say that modern public education has been the leading force in the dismantling of liberty, but then will almost universally insist that “the schools need to get back to focusing on the basics like they did in my day,” as though the schools of “their day” were not the necessary precursors to the schools of today, governed and manipulated on the same essential philosophical premises as today’s — as though totalitarian apologist John Dewey was not the world’s most influential education theorist in 1910, 1920, 1930, and 1940, just as he remains in 2021.

Likewise with today’s Hollywood, which older folks will happily dismiss as a pile of leftist and/or infantile hokum, while maintaining that of course the movies and stars of this or that “golden era” were fundamentally harmless, if not quite apolitical.

Cary Grant (among whose movies I remember particularly enjoying two, Only Angels Have Wings and, to a lesser extent, The Bishop’s Wife) built his career persona and reputation, which is now routinely eulogized as representing the epitome of debonair stardom and wit, by modelling adolescent “sexual tension” and cheeky innuendo. As a middle-aged man behaving as though flirtation with strangers (typically strangers half his age) and trite sexual conquests were the core of adult life, Grant, along with an endless train of popular lesser lights, played an important role in normalizing a fundamental immaturity, vanity, and the reduction of sexuality to casual play without emotional depth. This amoral trajectory helped to snap the tethers of family permanence, personal discretion, and public modesty which had made political freedom and civil society viable in practice — not to mention helping to dry up one of the sources of serious art, the longing for eternity at the core of adult Eros.

Today, however, “conservatives” like Mark Steyn will celebrate Archie Leach and the ersatz manhood his manufactured star persona projects as though he represented the heights of sophistication and admirable character. But if you want to know what the “Cary Grant lifestyle” means in reality, you need only consider that Archie Leach spent much of his life addicted to alcohol and LSD, and running through marriages and other “relationships” the way most of us run through sweat socks. He seems never to have found a damned bit of meaning (or even, to be modern, “identity”) in life, beyond being supremely famous as a fake person who pretended to be other fake people.

Matt Damon, a talentless millionaire nobody (the kind who makes otherwise sensible people pine for the days of Cary Grant), has spoken out bravely about the same thing all his fellow Hollywood millionaire nobodies are speaking out about these days, namely the wonderfulness of communist quota systems and the evil of all who dare to be non-compliant. 

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA), the organizing body that hands out the [Golden] Globes, is facing intense scrutiny over its lack of diversity, while celebrities have voiced their skepticism over the organisation’s attempted reforms.

Now, two-time Golden Globe winner Damon has added his voice to the issue. In an interview with Hoda Kotb and Savannah Guthrie on Tuesday’s “Today Show,” Damon said: “If [the Globes] go away, I don’t think anybody’s really going to lament that,” he said.

“I don’t think the world needs to mourn the death of an awards show,” Damon added.

True enough on that last point. And the reason why I for one will join Matt Damon in not mourning the death of a show that grants awards to talentless nobodies who pontificate about the wonderfulness of communist quota systems is that…well, let’s just say there are a lot of things the death of which would give the world little cause for mourning — Marxist tribunals for example, particularly as trumpeted by pampered millionaire celebrities who would not give up their privileged status and wealth to save their own grandmothers, but have no qualms about smearing and destroying the careers and reputations of unknown, unwealthy people who happen not to conform adequately to celebrity Marxist agendas, because they do not enjoy the celebrities’ luxury of living in the cocoon world of socialite socialism.