Self-important artiste-asses like Sean Penn laughed at Chris
Rock’s labored and unfunny GAP metaphor about President Bush’s
on-the-job incompetence but quickly stopped laughing when he mocked
theirs. Most of you guys aren’t real star actors, Rock said, just
“popular people.” To his credit Rock turned his corrosive cynicism
on his smug patrons, treating them as a collection of bejeweled
phonies and hacks. This was “mean-spirited,” according to
post-mortem criticism. But why is that any more mean-spirited than
the bile Hollywood pours on Bush? A classless audience deserves a
classless host. At least Chris Rock knows, unlike the Sean Penns,
that he has no class, and suffers no illusions about Hollywood’s
essential idiocy.
The Oscars are nothing more than a comedy show at this point
anyways, as its tragedies are so maudlin and false to reality that
they can’t move audiences to anything except inadvertent laughter.
Most serious modern dramas are like oh-so-serious modern art,
sources of unintentional humor that make the elite ooh and ah but
ordinary people either scratch their heads or chuckle at the
ridiculous pretentiousness of it all.
For all of Hollywood’s fixation on youth and life, its real
obsession is deformity and death. Not one but two
pro-euthanasia movies won awards on Sunday night, Million
Dollar Baby for Best Picture and The Sea Inside for
Best Foreign Film. This is the sort of existential escapist fare
that celebrities who intend to deny the reality of death as long as
possible can’t resist. Wearing the death masks of plastic surgery
— the faces they wish to be remembered by — actors cheered these
movies, finding comfort in their message that once life loses it
hedonistic prospects some Dirty Harry will be around to help them
peg out.
Life devoid of vanity and glamour is the worst fear of Hollywood
celebrities, and these movies suggest to them that perhaps they
won’t have to face it. While they will shed a tear for this or that
disabled celebrity from the comfort of their theater seat, they
certainly don’t want to be disabled themselves — the disabilities
of old age are an intolerable assault upon their dignity. Not that
they don’t revere the elderly, of course. Between feting these
pro-euthanasia movies, Hollywood’s luminaries did find some time to
help raise money for the industry’s old folks home and congratulate
Clint Eastwood’s mom who is in her nineties.
These movies, however, would suggest that a right to die is a
duty to die, so perhaps Mickey Rooney and his friends better grab
their canes and head out of town. Indeed, Hollywood treats
euthanasia not as a tragedy but as a comedy in the classical sense:
it is a happy ending. That is why Hollywood’s depiction of
euthanasia seems more comic than sad, more absurdist than tragic.
By casting euthanasia as a happy, not unhappy, ending, Hollywood
has managed to turn tragedies into comedies yet grows angry when
anyone dares to laugh at the incongruity.
Art that spins suicide as a triumph of the human spirit can’t be
taken seriously. When cowardice is presented as courage and evil
depicted as good, art has cut itself off from the reality it is
suppose to imitate and becomes at best risible, at worst appalling.
The defenders of Million Dollar Baby dismiss criticism of
it as political. No, it is first artistic: the movie is rotten art
because it falsifies reality, presenting a raw act of homicide as
the moral good that in reality it isn’t.
That The Passion of the Christ was almost completely
ignored by the Oscars (in its comic superficiality Hollywood did
consider the movie in the best makeup category, in which it lost to
a Jim Carrey movie) provided perfect symmetry for the evening: a
precise rendering of the reality of Christ’s death made the artists
of Hollywood look away while the sham pathos of Clint Eastwood’s
euthanasia movie drew their most precious gaze. Artists are
supposed to choose the real over the fake; Hollywood chooses the
fake over the real.
Mel Gibson’s movie drew scorn not because it wasn’t real but
because it wasn’t fake. Had Gibson falsified the historical
narrative, bringing it into line with Hollywood sensibilities, he
would probably have won some Oscars. Nobody on Sunday night seemed
to have noticed that after a year of lecturing Gibson about
“gratuitous violence,” Hollywood ended up celebrating the ultimate
act of gratuitous violence, suicide — a turn of events beyond the
satire of Chris Rock.
