Oscar-night politics are always something to look forward to.
The tedium of having to sit through a four-hour orgy of
self-congratulation by people who have obviously had far too much
congratulation, self- and otherwise, already is enlivened only by
the prospect of watching as one or more of the beautiful people say
or do something so ineffably silly that it will accompany them like
an epithet to their graves. But, alas, in the event there was
precious little for us to enjoy in this way. Tim Robbins, accepting
for best supporting actor only used the fact that he was playing a
victim of childhood abuse as a pretext for urging those who were
the real-life victims of such abuse to seek help — and so “end the
cycle of violence.” But he made no mention of the cycle of violence
in the Middle East, let alone the war in Iraq. Sean Penn, accepting
for best actor made an incomprehensible allusion to the supposed
fact that actors were particularly well-qualified to “know” that
there were no Weapons of Mass Destruction in that unhappy country,
but couldn’t be bothered to explain himself further.
Not counting a tribute to Leni Riefenstahl among the honored
dead and apart from Billy Crystal’s jibes at President Bush’s
National Guard Service and the supposedly doleful state of the
economy, the only thing at all close to a political statement came
from Errol Morris, director of The Fog of War, who won an
award for Best Documentary. Because his film was about (among other
things) the war in Vietnam, Morris thought it seemly to remark:
“Forty years ago, this country went down a rabbit hole, and
millions died. And I fear we’re going down a rabbit hole once
again, and if people can stop and reflect on the ideas and issues
in this movie, then maybe I’ve done some damn good here.” Down a
rabbit hole? There, surely, we are tantalizingly close to risible
nonsense, but Errol couldn’t quite close the deal. Perhaps with the
memory of Michael Moore’s boorish performance last year fresh in
mind, he was just a little too ashamed of himself for bringing it
up at all to tell us who Alice was and what she had to do with the
deaths of millions and what was down those twin rabbit holes —
besides rabbits.
I’m afraid that actors are often disappointing in this way:
fatuous but without the nerve to go the whole hog and, like Mr.
Moore, play the buffoon. A correspondent writes that, in claiming
in my diary item last week that Ethan Hawke had “never in his life
done anything but impersonate other people in front of a camera,” I
had neglected to mention that he had done something else.
Even if you don’t count his being unfaithful to Uma Thurman, a
woman who has recently given a very public demonstration of her
handiness with a razor-sharp samurai sword, and lived to tell the
tale, he has another accomplishment to his credit, which is that he
has written two novels. Well, I knew about this but had forgot it.
Boy! Was my face red! I now agree that what I should have said was
that Mr. Hawke is at least as well-qualified to comment on the
matter of presidential qualifications as Norman Mailer or Gore
Vidal. Let us only hope that in the long run he may be as
productive of political foolishness and flapdoodle as they have
been.
My point, I might just add, was not that actors were somehow
less entitled to political opinions than novelists — or, for that
matter, journalists, critics and web-loggers — but that there
ought to be some measure in those opinions, some sense of
proportion, some humility. Maybe even some manners. It wasn’t that
Mr. Hawke had had the temerity to pronounce on the issues of the
day that I objected to; it was the bumptiousness and silliness of
this particular pronouncement. Tell us, Ethan, if you must that you
don’t agree with this or that thing that the President has done. As
a novelist as well as an actor, perhaps you can put your objections
into a pithy and amusing form. But don’t tell us, by implication,
that the President is really a very inferior sort of leader as
compared with one E. Hawke or you shall find that we are laughing
at you rather than him.
Generally speaking, actors are more likely to tumble into such
ridiculousness than other sorts of people. It would probably never
occur to a plumber or a grocery bagger to take for granted his own
qualifications to evaluate those of the leader of the Western world
— and to find them wanting. But a man who, like Mr. Hawke has
represented characters created by Shakespeare and Dickens, and
whose comings and goings, like his divorce from Miss Thurman, are
daily chronicled by the popular media, is eventually likely to get
it into his head that he, too, dwells among the immortals and so is
able to condescend even unto presidents. It’s a sort of
occupational hazard for actors, but one which, like the pratfalls
and humiliations they are called upon to endure on the silver
screen, has a considerable entertainment value for those of us who
are looking on — if only they can be persuaded to give a freer
rein to their folie de grandeur.
