Shattering The Illusion

With this year’s Academy Award season over and the next one already into act II, both winners and losers, or rather, award recipients and award non-recipients, have already begun taking stands on undiscovered political issues and digging their heels in deeper on those already known and talked about.

Does anyone benefit from this? Is there a payoff? Does the world become a better place? Or is it all about career, being in the limelight, and publicity?

Some say that actors, directors, musicians, really any entertainer at all who makes a political speech insults and loses half their audience the moment they speak about politics. I disagree with that statement. I think it’s worse than that. Here’s why.

Whatever your politics, it’s hard, really hard to detach the image of the political speech from the entertainer.

Let me repeat the important part: Whatever your politics.

I’ll bet you thought I was going to repeat detach, didn’t you? I was going to, but then common sense stepped in and I realized this problem involves more than even a fairly robust action verb can adequately handle. It involves everyone. That point often gets overlooked, hidden in the piano for safe-keeping and forgotten until someone wants to play some music.

Entertainers, once they voice personal opinions, and not just the opinion itself, but the way they voice it, often with anger and negativity, lose. No, I don’t mean they lose half their audience. They lose something bigger, much bigger than that. They lose the illusion.

Entertainers, particularly actors, thrive on the ability to deceive us, to transcend identity and become something else, a hero, a villain, a pirate, a tycoon, a stow-away, etc… When they voluntarily put themselves in the spotlight of contemporary politics they shatter that illusion, one they’ve worked so very hard to cultivate. Once it’s shattered, like Humpty Dumpty, 80s MTV and network news, you can’t put it back together again to the way it was, no matter how much you desire to.

Like I said, this is true of all entertainers, but of actors it’s especially profound. The big problem is not what politics they espouse, but that they do so publicly.

There used to be a time long ago and far away when who you voted for was secret. People were discreet about it. Others respected it. No one pushed the issue. I’m not sure where that philosophy and practice went. Probably to the same place good taste ended up and common sense is headed for. Whatever happened to it, it’s no longer the norm, that’s for sure.

These days everyone seems determined to not only state their politics on their sleeves, but to rub those sleeves in others’ noses. Its makes for some very emotional and fruitless exchanges, not to mention a lot of dirty sleeves. Why is there wisdom in the old adage, “Never talk politics or religion at a cocktail party?” Because It’s not that folks don’t have opinions, but rather that they do! — and discussions about those two topics can only lead to frustration over the fact that the other person just doesn’t get it, to borrow an awful cliche. It’s a no-win situation with a built-in guarantee.

And for big names, so-called A-list actors to do it on the world stage, is an even bigger ‘no-win.’ They lose half their audience, we lose the entire illusion. It’s like watching a ‘making-of’ documentary about your favorite movie. To this day, I regret viewing the ‘behind the scenes’ bonus feature on a Casablanca DVD. Though thoroughly engaging and fascinating, it shattered for me, an illusion of that last scene at the airport, forever after.

I can no longer watch that movie or that ending the same way, the way that I used to. I loved Casablanca. I still do, but that doesn’t change the fact – and it is a fact – that the illusion is gone.

So it is true with many of these actors whom we’ve come to know and love, not from their own, real lives, but from the work they’ve done in great performances. Regardless of your political stance, and theirs, once their ‘behind the scenes’ is shown to the public, once we see that, it’s a painful reality that we can no longer look at them the same way.

The ‘beautiful friendship’ we had with them is gone. And as we walk along the wet tarmac and into the fog, this time alone, we can’t help but feel regret and sorrow at what once was.