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.
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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