Hollywood’s real problem isn’t stupidly. It’s hypocrisy.
“Hypocrisy can afford to be magnificent in its promises, for never intending to go beyond promise, it costs nothing.” – Edmund Burke
Who knew? The Sony Pictures data hack is the second recent terrorist act precipitated by release of a movie. Earlier we had the Benghazi YouTube video, co-staring Hillary Clinton and a cast of State Department extras. The true heroes died, but isn’t that usually true in real life?
Nevertheless, the Benghazi cast of also-rans rolls on toward 2016. In many ways Washington, D.C., is Hollywood writ large, like graffiti sprayed over the globe. It was always difficult to believe that murderous Benghazi mission attack was caused by a video Islamists didn’t like. It turns out that it was difficult to believe because it was untrue.
The Sony movie attack sequence, courtesy of North Korea, will prove equally untrue. The greatest damage to Sony at this point is from conversations its executives had among each other, now exposed to a worldwide audience. But does anyone really believe that a Sony executive is the only movie studio muckie-muck who has ever referred to an uncooperative actress as a spoiled brat?
I confess that Hollywood has always been a mystery to me. Many actors and actresses seem like intelligent individuals if you read or catch a glimpse of them outside their normal “fan” mode. And their trade does require skills, even if they are skills of deception. John Travolta has a collection of jets that he is rated to fly. Ditto for Harrison Ford. And there must be some among the current generation who had a life before being a celebrity became their life.
Yet come election time, celebrities and movie studio executives pull out their checkbooks and donate to the silliest, uber-left causes they can find. Admittedly, finding these causes and the politicians exploiting them is not a gargantuan task in California around election time.
Maybe they do this to demonstrate that they “walk the talk” and are therefore not hypocrites. I wonder if that builds the fan base. Or perhaps it hints at a deeper problem.
What has always puzzled me about Hollywood is this: How can someone run a business the size of most movie studios and donate to causes that if implemented will choke the life out their firm and take away its profits?
Actors and actresses are in a similar position; their “business” is self-promotion. They must “say the right thing” and “support the cause” to be considered for their next film. So even though they are smart enough to know that Al Gore’s “Inconvenient Truth” is a fantasy film, they must speak and act as if it were a documentary.
Hollywood indeed has a problem. If we assume that Sony is just another typical Hollywood movie studio – they did, after all, buy MGM, which was native to California – then isn’t Hollywood’s problem something other than year round, climate-induced insanity? Isn’t Hollywood’s real problem hypocrisy?
“The core problem of hypocrisy is that it precludes the accurate appraisal of moral worth, privileging appearance over reality.” – Ronald C. Naso, “Hypocrisy Unmasked”
Hollywood, it seems, is not an epic after all. It’s a tragedy.
“If Satan ever laughs, it must be at hypocrites; they are the greatest dupes he has; they serve him better than any others, and receive no wages.” – Charles Caleb Colton (http://www.armageddonstory.com)>
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