Hi, well I haven’t blogged you like
a hurricane or even a 5-10 mile per hour gusty wind lately so I thought, “What
better way to spend Lincoln’s or Washington’s birthday than by blogging nonsensical
unsolicited opinions that no one will or should care about?”. In 2014 isn’t
that even more American than staving off the British Empire or freeing the
slaves?
And on this most patriotic of days,
what better topic than Hollywood celebrities? Let’s be honest: Hollywood is the
only city in America that matters. Our movies and TV shows are our Number 1
export. (iPhones are technically an import). Detroit? A cesspool that you
should probably drive a Honda through just so you know you won’t break down
before reaching the exit ramp. Washington? A swamp full of swamp things. New
York? The finance capital of the world: i.e., a glorified horse track full of
parasites trying to make money off the innovation of others. Hollywood IS
America. Hollywood stars are our true kings and queens, our ambassadors to the world,
our trend setters, our bright beacon of hope and dreams in the “buy two and get
the third 1/2 off” workaday reality of our lives!
Philip Seymour Hoffman. Oh for God’s
sake. Granted, I saw The Master and I was so thoroughly depressed and creeped
out I kind of wanted a bag of heroin myself. The guy was a great actor but you
have to wonder if you can seemingly constantly play depressed guys and not get a
little depressed. At some point is that all you get offered? Like, “This
character seems borderline suicidal and tormented by deep, unsolvable
existential riddles---get Phil Hoffman’s agent on the phone pronto!”.
Wait, I’m sorry…..I was just assuming
there were psychological factors that might influence people to become junkies.
Like Kurt Cobain—another smack devotee who seemed terribly depressed. Luckily
I’ve watched enough Dr. Drew to know this is wrong. Philip Seymour Hoffman had
an illness. There was nothing volitional whatsoever about his heroin addiction.
We might as well judge a cancer patient, a schizophrenic, or a hedge fund
manager for being the way they are.
Sometimes I miss the old Dr. Drew
from MTV’s Loveline when he was just offering highly professional, clinical
advice to women complaining of painful sex due to their clitoris ring or guys
complaining that real sex just didn’t quite measure up to the pure magic that
is masturbation.
So, okay, it may be an illness if we
look at it from a certain angle. Heroin is capable of making biochemical
changes in the brain and a person so afflicted can therefore be labeled as
suffering from an illness—and therefore must be shielded from our judgment. But
could we also say this: Adam and Eve are sufferers of the illness of apple
addiction so they should have been treated clinically on Eden Rehab, not
banished from paradise and forced to deal with a fratricidal maniac of a son
and the knowledge of spawning the whole “my screwed up parents messed
everything up my life” mentality?
But, as with so many things, Satan
is the answer. (Letting people think I’m a Satanist can’t hurt my blog hits so
let’s just stick with that. Sex and Satan sell!). The devil himself may offer
the key to sailing through the Scylla of harsh judgment and the Charybdis of
clinical determinism. (If Sting can reference Scylla and Charybdis in The
Police’s Wrapped Around Your Finger, why can’t I? Then again….Sting may not be
a good starting point for any argument that one is not in fact a pseudo-intellectual
twit, is it?).
The problem with the illness
argument is that while it explains the continuing use of heroin, it doesn’t
seem to adequately explain why someone chose to do heroin in the first place.
Are there innate biochemical processes in the brain that compelled the star of
Capote and Boogie Nights to do heroin? I think I have trouble really buying
that myself. But possibly what happened is he was at a big party—say the
Magnolia world premiere or an American Buffalo opening night after-party—and
someone offered him heroin. Kind of like Satan went out of his way to offer Eve
the apple. Of course the serpent not only offered it, but he made a sales
pitch: eat this and you will be like God! Maybe a heroin marketing agent told
him, “Do this and you will SEE God!”.
So is it an illness to succumb to
temptation? Is it biochemistry? I can’t believe it is. One can resist
temptation…..but can we judge it? I say we can only judge it if a) we’ve been
at parties where someone offered heroin and we politely declined, or b) we’ve
stood naked in a pre-civilized paradise when a talking snake offered us a sweet
fruit. I, personally, have never had either life experience, but would I have
acted wisely if I had been tempted? I’d like to think so---but I used to go to
parties and get way too drunk and I can’t say with 100 percent certainty that I
would have made the smart choice. I might have thought, “Well, can William S.
Burroughs, Lou Reed, Kurt Cobain, Lane Staley and God’s first power couple ALL
be wrong?”. Only the good die young and temptation is the path all the cool
kids choose! So maybe I would have gotten hooked too and ended up with this
illness Dr. Drew and Pat Robertson talk about so much.
In other news, Derek Jeter announced
he’s retiring after this year. Can we make a new rule? You’re not allowed to
announce you’re retiring until you’re actually retiring. I mean get ready for a
season full of farewells. It’s going to be truly sickening. “Oh you sound like
a bitter Red Sox fan?”. Bitter? Bitter about three World Series titles in the
last decade? I don’t THINK so, mi amigo. Derek Jeter is a classy guy. He’s a
winner. He always says the right thing. He’s a gamer. He gets it. He brings his
lunch pail to work every day. He likes to get his uniform dirty. Every father
and mother would love to have a son just like Derek Jeter. Global diamond
production would quintuple if Derek Jeter decided to switch to a high fiber
diet.
But that’s just the problem, isn’t
it? Derek Jeter is so aggressively bland it’s almost shocking in its
dimensions. I almost want to believe he’s being oddly subversive and we haven’t
caught onto the joke. Like, “I’m so good at baseball and so good looking that I
can act like a half human, half robot hybrid for two decades and you will love
me all the more for it. Women will want me, men will want to be me, and John
Sterling will want all of the above”. Derek Jeter is an assault on the very
notion of personality and individuality. He’s a blank slate that we can write
on ourselves! He’s a human Etch A Sketch. It surpasses the bounds of my
imagination to understand just how content with the universe, just how
comfortable in one’s ability to inside-out fastballs to right field for base hits,
just how absolutely positive one must be that the female race is assigned a
phone number for the express purpose of one day giving it to us that one would
feel no need to even attempt to develop a personality. If Martians zeroed in
their anthropological study of humans on #2 from the New York Yankees, he, she,
or it would conclude that a personality is a consolation prize we give
ourselves after the Santa Clause of life brings us coal for Christmas but it’s
a useless decoration when we have more stocking stuffers than we know what to
do with. Personality developing, blog writing lost souls must pretend they are
not actors reading off a pre-written, audience tested script like everyone else.
These sad fools actually imagine they are the script (or blog) writers
themselves! Derek Jeter proves otherwise. Jete is a living rebuttal to those
who don’t think we should take things one game at a time, stay within
ourselves, and stay focused on what’s best for the ballclub. And who knows?
Maybe somewhere deep down beneath that cool, calm, impenetrable layer of class
and sportsmanship there is a complex, tortured, brilliant, creative soul
silently screaming to get out if only Susan Waldman will hit the right buttons
during her next Spring Training interview live from Legends’ Field. We will
never know. But do we want to know? Do we even want our athletes to be people
or mere archetypes of idealized People? Numbers and blank slates only? Baby
faced, double play turning Rorschach ink blots?
But is he really that? Imageless?
Guys who say they don’t care about image almost always have an image even if
the image is having no image. Kurt Cobain used to claim that, as opposed to
those shallow hair metal guys of the 80’s, he was just about the music! Last
night Palladia showed a Nirvana show from 1991 and I was reminded that Kurt
wore sweaters during concerts. If a punk rocker wearing a Cardigan on stage
isn’t fostering an image I don’t know what is. Likewise Jeter may have actively
sought praise more than he’s ever let on. In one of his most famous plays he
dove into the stands to catch a foul pop against the Red Sox in 2004. This was
the oddest play I’ve ever seen in my life. It really looked like it was not
necessary for him to dive so aggressively into the stands after catching it.
Pokey Reese of the Red Sox had made a similar play earlier in the game that did
require him to go into the stands. It looked an awful lot like Jeter was
consciously trying to top him—i.e., Derek was FISHING for praise later on. So
maybe his eternal blandness just stems from being so desperately in need of
love and worship that he won’t risk sullying that in any way with an even
slightly offhand, eccentric remark? But why have I devoted paragraphs to the
least interesting man on earth?
In further news—and to inexplicably
reference Kurt Cobain for the third time in this gripping and thought provoking
blog---what else can I say? Everyone is gay. A football player from Missouri
came out as gay. So did actress Ellen Page. In both causes they are being
lauded for their courage. In one case, they deserve it. The football guy, that
is. A movie star? Sort of. But many people in Hollywood are either very liberal
or very gay so I’m not sure it’s that big of a deal. Yes, she could risk losing
out on roles because producers are worried about selling tickets to people in
Iowa who have been told the Bible is anti-gay, pro-river of blood so they’re
sticking with that story, but maybe gay rumors had already done that and she
has been eclipsed by the likes of Jennifer Lawrence and Rooney Mara as the
“spunky independent girl with a vulnerable side” anyway. So if that’s the case,
there is probably little risk.
But I’m actually a little sad that
Juno is a lesbian! And don’t give me that, “You do realize that Juno was a movie
and she was an actress playing a fictional role, don’t you?”. Way to be a
concrete thinker! We can’t help it: we do link our perceptions of actors and
actresses in real life with the roles they play. Possibly it would have
happened anyway as he reached middle age—a time of life when absolutely no one
wanted to see him dancing in tighty whities to Bob Seger hits--- but Tom
Cruise’s box office numbers seemed to sink the more he started to seem like a midlife
crisis suffering, cradle robbing, couch jumping Scientologist. But this is
inevitable. Even if actors think they entirely inhabiting characters, they are
always doing so with the same voice, the same face, etc. So we can never
TOTALLY separate the actor from the role even if we’re only linking them
subconsciously. Like whenever Scarface comes on TV---which is to say, every
day---in the back of my mind I sort of think, “Wow. What HAPPENED to Michael
Corleone? He appears to have developed a Cuban accent, he’s started dropping
way more F-bombs, and he started wearing much brighter clothing”. Michael
Corleone and Tony Montana are as different as two (gangsters) can be. In real
life Tony would have been as irrelevant to Michael as Fredo was at the end of
Godfather II after he found out he had gotten in league with Hyman Roth. He
wouldn’t have even let Tony clean his pool at his Lake Tahoe compound. Yet
filtered through the movies, they are linked by the voice and face of Al
Pacino. So they kind of are the same and not the same at the same time. If that
makes any sense—which it probably doesn’t.
So yes, to SOME degree we have in
fact learned that Juno is a lesbian. She doesn’t really love Paulie Bleeker! Or
Michael Cera. Juno was sort of a masterpiece, I thought, because it was
actually surprising. Most multi-plex movies don’t even try. Chuck Klosterman—a
very funny writer—wrote a short story in which he his fictional alter-ego was
on the verge of being fired as a newspaper movie critic because he gave every
single movie 2 ½ stars. I thought this was hilarious because, honestly, as a
regular moviegoer I’d say that’s exactly the rating 99 percent of movies should
get. Just good enough to be mildly entertaining, but without any pesky risk
taking which could potentially dampen audience word of mouth in Des Moines or
Singapore. That’s the “artistic” goal of filmmakers today. (Who aren’t even
using film anymore now that movie theaters are finally all digital).
Anyway, back to Juno. It was kind of
a thriller in disguise. Thrillers, of course, are so often based on a “twist”.
This trend exploded in the 90’s: Tyler Durden in Fight Club was a figment of Ed
Norton’s schizophrenic imagination! The kid in The Sixth Sense “sees dead
people” because Bruce Willis is dead! The Usual Suspects’ Kevin Spacey is Kaiser
Soze!! Those twists were great….these days they are usually lame and
derivative. So unlike this blog.
But Juno did the same thing. Make a
movie about an accidental teen pregnancy, make the girl an ultra-hipster (with
a tomboy and……fine, maybe slightly lesbian vibe), and make her insist she
doesn’t give a damn about the kid who impregnated her. She was just bored one
night. THEN let him go to the prom with another girl and watch her fold her
hand as soon as he plays this Jealousy Card and tell him she’s in love with him
and make the end of the movie about that! They sing a duet together on her
front porch right before the screen fades to black! Unlike every conventional
romantic comedy ever made, the “love story” that this movie ended up being came
as a genuine surprise, a twist that miraculously worked.
And of course NOT casting a blonde
girly girl made it work all the more. And NOT casting a manly man with
smoldering charisma made it work further still. This was the greatest male
fantasy movie of all time! Be a shy, nerdy kid who still proceeds to impregnate
this super cute girl after a mere one time of having unprotected sex (the
virility of this kid!) and despite all her attempts to resist your charms, have
her break down and confess her undying love to you!
But she likes girls.
Damnit, Hollywood. You have failed
me for the last time. I preferred the illusion of Ellen Page who sort of seemed
like she could be gay but wasn’t and so there’s this weird, uncategorizable
thing about her to the one who is actually gay. I don’t see it as a moral issue
one way or the other, but it make her more……again, categorizable. Like, “Oh,
now I get it. Slap that label on her and move on”. It’s not quite Derek Jeter
bland, predictable categorizeability (not a word but it should be) but closer
than before.
The best comparison might be, oddly
enough, Arnold Schwarzenegger. Clearly he is not gay. A guy who rose to fame injecting
steroids in his buttocks, flexing for photo shoots, wearing skintight speedos,
waxing his body, and rubbing baby oil all over himself is CLEARLY all man. But
like Ellen Page in Juno, Arnold’s success as an action star stemmed from his
contradictions. Whether by instinct or carefully thought out strategy (okay,
probably the former) Arnold understood the Teddy Roosevelt method of action
star acting: speak softly and carry a big stick. Too many action stars not only
punch guys in the face, shoot them in the forehead, toss them out 50th floor office windows, but they ACT LIKE JERKS
ABOUT IT. Arnold? Always impeccable manners. Always soft spoken. A gentle
giant. Take even his famous scene from The Terminator: a guy gives him lip,
doesn’t give him the answer he’s looking for, so he calmly, quietly says, “I’ll
be back”. Then he gets in his car and drives it through the (conveniently) all
glass front enclosure of the building. Then he’s back. He had just informed
him—out of courtesy—that he could expect to see him back real soon. What a nice
guy. He never resorted to name calling or giving him the evil eye. I mean does
he LOOK like Steven Seagull? Arnold could wreak havoc and destroy entire
armies, cities, alien races, barbarian tribes, or whatever the situation called
for but he had impeccable table manners! He was a droll, at times multi-lingual
Derek Jeter with far more longball ability.
So actually the real life image-shattering
move for Arnold wasn’t really him sleeping with his maid. Okay, that was not cool.
But his action star image existed on a separate plane entirely from issues of
marital fidelity one way or the other. No, the image shatterer would be if
Arnold was caught on camera loudly insulting a DMV worker who had just told he
had been standing in the wrong line for the past 85 minutes and needed to get
in the back of the correct line or if he was seen stomping his feet on the
ground after being told by a Genius he should have bought Apple Care if he had
wanted his iPhone’s shattered screen fixed free of charge. THAT would have
flown directly in the face of his movie image. So thank you Arnold for sleeping
with your maid, your fans owe you a debt of gratitude.
Wait, that came out wrong.
Man, we’ve covered a lot of ground
today. I hardly know how to wrap things up but I’ll try: heroin is a forbidden
poppy that is bad for you in the long run but makes you feel awesome at the
time, Derek Jeter is good for you but also flavorless like Brussels sprouts,
Juno shows us we can never trust a girl named after a Roman goddess when she
tells us she loves us, and sometimes you just prefer a down to earth gal with a
mop over these prissy Kennedy clan members in their pants suits.
Or something like that.
