Left Behind
Are celebrity activists passé?
BY MELIK KAYLAN
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
The French poet Paul Valéry once observed that intellectuals, when they run out of serious things to say, end up by flashing their genitals to get attention. With the coming launch of her new antiwar music video, one could argue that Madonna has reversed the process. As Dennis Miller said about her in a recent interview with Phil Donahue, "After you've shown every orifice from every angle, you might have to make a political statement to get people reinterested in you."
True enough, but her gesture feels so trite and theatrical partly because celebrities as a class seem stuck in the same hackneyed pose--one rooted in Vietnam-era polarities and untrue to the moment.
Consider the recent photo of Joan Baez and Martin Sheen in the New York Times. They are smiling so euphorically at a San Francisco rally that they might be at the opening night of the second coming. "Mobilizing a Theater of Protest. Again," read the headline. A more jaundiced paper like the Onion might have subtitled it, "Hollywood Dreams of Sixties Sequel. Thanks, Saddam."
The fact is, this is a different time. The homeland was attacked. The draft is gone. Saddam is, manifestly, a monster growing in size. Yet you'd never know it from the simple antiwar certainties of so many big-name entertainers--from Sean Penn on his Baghdad pilgrimage to Spike Lee ("the German and French governments should be commended") and Edward Norton ("I almost forgot what it's like to be proud of our government"), both at the Berlin Film Festival.
One senses that the average American is disgusted with these solipsists-turned-activists and that he doesn't, for example, feel the same way about the unknowns marching beside the stars. There's nothing more forced or false than an entertainer misjudging the public mood. And, right now, the public does not want to hear from celebs on serious issues.
Something uneasy has entered into the contract of illusion between us and celebrities. A sharp change occurred in the immediate aftermath of 9/11, when most citizens felt a twinge of nausea at the sight of an Entertainment Weekly cover. This acute aversion to hollow glitz lasted awhile, and seemed to fade, but has now revived due to the unelected tub thumping of Robert Redford, Susan Sarandon and their ilk. We enjoyed them for being mere entertainers, and then we didn't for a while--but we never intended them to be anything more.
Besides, they're not good at it. On the scale of historically maladroit gestures, Sean Penn's visit to Iraq evokes something more fatuous and vain even than Chamberlain's return from Munich. As the imaginary "Hollywood Foreign Policy Review" indicates on its parody cover, they have no expertise to offer but their fame. Their only calling card is their entertainment past, and in these times that counts conclusively against them.
In truth, the media monolith that fed the country incessant celebrity pap instead of news for a decade or more was already exhausted before 9/11, as the public turned increasingly to such alternative sources as the Drudge Report and Rush Limbaugh. The celebrity era was already dying, but "important" journalists such as Dan Rather who bemoaned its prevalence wanted to go back to hard news as they'd known it, with outdated political biases, and most people didn't want that either.
Our entertainer-activists would do well to study the 1960s, but not in the way they think. Today's mistrust of politically predictable media--this time of the liberal mainstream--once again has been leading people to seek alternative news sources. But the Rolling Stone and Village Voice of our time are conservative talk shows and Web sites. The anti-media media are again all the rage--this time in the form of best-selling books by Anne Coulter, Bernard Goldberg and others who deplore the liberal bias of most television news, who tell the public that there is more to reality than they are allowed to see.
And just as the 1960s marginalized an aging galaxy of patriotic entertainers from Bob Hope to John Wayne and put the Dylans and Lennons in their place, a similar sea change is threatening to sweep away performers of our own time whose political default setting is stuck in the Vietnam era. The '60s passed and left them passé. They still don't know it, but their audience does.
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