Peggy Noonan does it again. In her piece in the Wall Street Journal she articulates the growing malaise of American's in front of Hollywood. More and more, I am convinced that she is the American cultural voice sans égal. This time she tackles George Clooney's little homily at the Academy Awards. She's not polemic, yet she cuts right to the heart of the problem:
Which gets us to George Clooney, and his work. George Clooney is Hollywood now. He is charming and beautiful and cool, but he is not Orson Welles. I know that's like saying of an artist that he's no Rembrandt, but bear with me because I have a point that I think is worth making.
Orson Welles was an artist. George Clooney is a fellow who read an article and now wants to tell us the truth, if we can handle it.
More important, Orson Welles had a canny respect for the audience while maintaining a difficult relationship with studio executives, whom he approached as if they were his intellectual and artistic inferiors. George Clooney has a canny respect for the Hollywood establishment, for its executives and agents, and treats his audience as if it were composed of his intellectual and artistic inferiors. (He is not alone in this. He is only this year's example.)
And because they are his inferiors, he must teach them. He must teach them about racial tolerance and speaking truth to power, etc. He must teach them to be brave. And so in his acceptance speech for best supporting actor the other night he instructed the audience about Hollywood's courage in making movies about AIDS, and recognizing the work of Hattie McDaniel with an Oscar.
Was his speech wholly without merit? No. It was a response and not an attack, and it appears to have been impromptu. Mr. Clooney presumably didn't know Jon Stewart would tease the audience for being out of touch, and he wanted to argue that out of touch isn't all bad. Fair enough. It is hard to think on your feet in front of 38 million people, and most of his critics will never try it or have to. (This is a problem with modern media: Only the doer understands the degree of difficulty.)
But Mr. Clooney's remarks were also part of the tinniness of the age, and of modern Hollywood. I don't think he was being disingenuous in suggesting he was himself somewhat heroic. He doesn't even know he's not heroic. He thinks making a movie in 2005 that said McCarthyism was bad is heroic.
She ends the piece with an interesting observation. She argues that the Hollywood elite are so immersed in media that they have stopped looking at life (dare I say, reality) and approaching their craft as a response to life. Instead they make movies about ideologies that they assume the rest of us rubes in "red state" America need to be educated to. It's a sign, of course, of the pervasive nihilism that afflicts modern society. Peggy senses it, and is an invaluable critic of this inadequacy of our culture.
Still, I'm left wondering if this is all "rearranging the chairs on the deck of the Titanic?" Is the ship sinking? Is anyone listening to the critics? Has an ideological approach taken too firm a grip on the way Americans live and relate to the reality they are living? What can possibly challenge this adequately?
In front of an audience of ideologically-driven Pharisees, Our Lord has said things like, "Wicked generation, you ask for signs...; St John Baptist fasts, you call him possessed, and I eat and drink, you call me glutton." People with an ideology are so remote from the reality that they are afraid of confronting it. If the Titanic sinks, they will build a bigger one and...drive directly to the iceberg again.
We must pray for their conversion and work in every possible way to transform the culture. But until then....
Good night and good luck.
Posted by: numquamsatis | Mar 10, 2006 at 08:47 PM