Editor's note: Andrew Breitbart of Drudge Report fame and Mark Ebner have penned a scathing expose on the culture of entertainment celebrities, "Hollywood, Interrupted." From John T, Tom Cruise, and Ann Heche to Eddie Murphy, Oliver Stone, and Courtney Love, "Hollywood, Interrupted" presents the mind-altered behavior of the most reality-challenged celebrities from all walks of life and every genre.
WorldNetDaily is publishing four excerpts from Chapter 1 of the book on four consecutive days. Today's offering, the third excerpt, shows how the entertainment industry, unlike any other, does all it can to ridicule the values of Middle America. Get your copy of "Hollywood, Interrupted" at ShopNetDaily.
The airline industry has not declared war on the American family. Nor have the great steel companies in the Rust Belt produced any grand proclamations demanding fundamental changes to the institution. Professional sports leagues, from the NFL to the NBA to Major League Baseball, have remained tactfully silent on the subject as well. So have taxidermists, timber folk, and assorted pharmacists, dog groomers, and independent candy store operators. But somehow entertainers, people whose job description is to divert our attentions, feel compelled to traumatize us with their insane interpretation of family – both on screen and off.
Hollywood, run and inhabited by Baby Boomers and their Generation X progeny, is on a mission to obliterate the ideal of the nuclear family and to undermine traditional child-rearing practices. The entertainment landscape is littered with high-end product that demeans the family unit, and in their own lives, celebrities fail to set a good example. Shamefully, they are rewarded for rejecting middle-class American mores.
Entertainment executives may argue that they are giving the public what they want when they find new and nastier ways to expand trash TV into the familial realm, but the same cynical, exploitative, anti-family strain is also evident in critically praised films and pay-cable series.
On the big screen, "American Beauty" captured the imagination of the members of the Academy in 2000 when it received the Oscar for Best Picture. The Alan Ball-scripted film captures perfectly the elite point of view that Middle America is a wasteland inhabited by conspicuous consumers, twisted souls, and bad parents.
The only time Hollywood presents the family unit as sympathetic is when it seeks to normalize the abnormal through artistic propaganda. Case in point: HBO Films' "Normal," starring acclaimed actors Jessica Lange and Tom Wilkinson, depicts a couple who after 25 years of marriage must deal with the husband's desire to have a sex change. Middle America is the setting in all its drab d?cor, as the story arc and message fall in line to present the family's acceptance of the father's untraditional desire. The prepubescent daughter in the film represents the unspoiled, open-mindedness Hollywood wishes were commonplace, as she loses no sleep over her father's out-of-nowhere desire to become a woman, while she is struggling with becoming one herself.
"To me, the essence of the piece really was the definition of love," Lange said while promoting the film. "Can you look beyond the external and actually see into the heart of another human being? What happens when you have the external suddenly going through this extraordinary and kind of unnatural transformation?"
Typical patronizing pedagogy on the art of sensitivity from artists who think they are the last defense from the rest of us going on a transgender hate-crime murder spree.
Aired in March of 2003, the film preceded the June report by gossip columnist Liz Smith that Larry Wachowski, one of two brothers behind "The Matrix" films, was rumored to be going through the same process with his wife, Thea Bloome. Bloome was apparently less forgiving, as divorce papers unearthed by "The Smoking Gun" website showed. She noted that her husband "has been extremely dishonest with me in our personal life" and that the couple's separation was "based on very intimate circumstances concerning which I do not elaborate at this time for the reasons of his personal privacy."
Perhaps actress/activist Jessica Lange can hold a private screening of "Normal" for Bloome to show her that her reaction was not so normal. Television programmers' idea of a functional family – ignoring the ridiculous canned-laughter sitcoms and half-hearted "Little House on the Prairie" clones crafted to appease the Family Research Council's G-rated guidelines – is best represented by Alan Ball's other critically acclaimed creation, HBO's "Six Feet Under." The show chronicles the Fishers, a twisted family in the funeral business, each member mired in dysfunctional subplots – an abusive gay relationship, the revelation of the family matriarch's infidelity to the now dead father, forays into group sex, etc. Ask anyone that watches it and they will swear by it. But an exemplar of the ideal family, it is not.
"Sex and the City," a pox on Sarah Jessica Parker's house, will have long-lasting deleterious effects on those women who bought into the hype, thinking that living as successful working women leading promiscuous sex lives well into their 30s will ensure a happy ending.
These trash-talking metropolitan sluts get away with cultural murder saying and doing that which would have a male show with the same premise slapped with a misogyny label.
The truth is the show is in large part penned by liberated gay male writers who are putting their sexual politics into the mouths of babes – an X-rated version of what the "Look Who's Talking" movies did by putting adult voices in the mouths of children. Will our families, let alone the sexes, ever recover from the horror?
Dan Quayle was right
"Hollywood thinks it's cute to glamorize illegitimacy. Hollywood doesn't get it," Vice President Dan Quayle railed in 1992. "It doesn't help matters when primetime TV has Murphy Brown, a character who supposedly symbolizes today's intelligent, highly paid professional woman, mocking the importance of fathers by bearing a child alone, and calling it just another lifestyle choice," Quayle further complained.
Quayle's comments ignited a firestorm from Hollywood, and the former vice president became the laughingstock of almost everyone, except those trying to raise children outside the nannybelt. "Murphy Brown" producer Diane English snidely responded on the evening Hollywood bestowed Emmys to the show, "As Murphy herself said, I couldn't possibly do a worse job raising my kid alone than the Reagans did with theirs."
Anyone with a smidgeon of common sense knows that Quayle was, in essence, right. But the absolute power of the Hollywood PR machine was relentless in mocking Quayle and his message. Candace Bergen herself years later agreed when she told the Los Angeles Times:
"My family has always come first – by a mile. ... I had a very difficult time playing Murphy the first year after the baby, as a distant second priority. It was very distressing to me, and I couldn't get them to change it. Just hated it, and even [my daughter] hated it when she would watch certain episodes. I didn't think it was a good message to be sending out."
In post-Quayle real-life Hollywood, the damage is done. The traditional family unit is regularly contorted and lambasted by sitcom creators. The one-two punch of having too much money and too little common sense instigates atypical life choices that trigger a predictable chain of media events. The life decision is 1) announced through the alternative lifestyle-friendly entertainment press, which 2) features kudos from their peers in the industry as a means to 3) downplay the raised eyebrows from the majority of common folk elsewhere whom they play for bigots.
It's a pro-active form of damage control that works because Middle America has traditionally had so few means to respond, other than through boycotts. Most people would have to live in a pop culture isolation ward if they were forced to respond to every star's public life choices. Plus, most Americans couldn't care less what entertainment industry folks do in their private lives; they just don't like Hollywood's agenda to undermine ideals they take seriously and are trying desperately to underscore at home.
So celebrities benefit from a virtual d?tente in which they get to publicly push the cultural envelope in a conspicuous way, and the rest of the world, for the most part, has to cross its fingers and hope the rot doesn't spread.
Tomorrow: "Celebrity adopto-babies"
Read Excerpt 1: "Hollywood's family values"
Read Excerpt 2: "How the media enable celebrity wackiness"
Get your copy of "Hollywood, Interrupted" at ShopNetDaily.