A historical aberration grounded in self importance

What is it that makes Americans see movie actors as social and even political role models?

I have long wondered, and Roger L. Simon’s post (“Sex Slaves for He But Not for Thee, The Perverted Politics of the Redgrave Family“) caused commenters to ask similar questions.

The feudal Japanese placed actors in the same class as grave diggers, tanners, the people who hauled chamber pots out to the fields and prostitutes. These were people who did work thought necessary to the function of civilization yet the nature of their work was so distasteful that no one wanted to have any open contact with them.

I tend to agree with this sentiment. The adulation actors receives confounds me. That anyone listens to the political views of actors… well its just beyond my understanding. I don’t ask my plumber for book reviews. I wouldn’t ask my mechanic to rate the latest movie. I certainly don’t want to hear my politician sing or see him dance. Actors should stick to what they are good at and shut up otherwise. Every time I hear some actor spewing his political beliefs it just makes me not want to ever see any more of his movies.

The Roman emperor Nero was a monster, and was considered so by his contemporaries. Throughout history, people have been horrified by his bloodthirsty and sadistic behavior and despite the past century of slaughter and Holocaust, Nero still retains his status as a leading figure in the annals of tyranny.  He might not have killed as many people as Hitler, Mao and Stalin, but in terms of personal cruelty and depravity, Nero’s badness standard remains largely unsurpassed.

What is often forgotten about Nero is what the Romans found at least as horrifying as his cruelty — the fact that he was an actor.  Acting was considered lower class and undignified, and to have an emperor who was prone to perform on stage was considered the ultimate indignity.  Torture, murder, sexual perversion, even matricide — all of these things might have been tolerated in an emperor who still retained the gravitas seen as necessary for his station.

That Nero’s status as an actor did so much to render him beyond the pale highlights what I think may be a largely unrecognized kernel of ancient wisdom.  By citing Nero as an example, I do not mean to to suggest that actors are all depraved sadists, for they certainly are not.  My point is that there is nothing original or new or particularly shocking in the depraved sadism of the Redgraves.  Why something known to the ancients would have been forgotten is a good question to ponder.

Another good question to ponder is how America came to the historically peculiar position of seeing actors as role models.

Here’s another comment to Roger Simon’s post:

…actors weren’t always regarded as the “beautiful people” they are today. Artists like Michaelangelo were often thought of as craftsmen, employed by their patrons as highly-skilled wall-painters. Singers and musicians – mere entertainers, employees of the upper classes. Some Chinese guy 500 years ago paints a chamberpot for Lord Yao and it’s just Lord Yao’s really nice chamberpot. Stick it in a museum and it’s “art.” Why is that?

In other words, society’s perception and treatment of art and artists changes over the years. Sometimes they’re up, sometimes they’re down. I’m wondering what drives these changes and what’s behind our current tendency to exalt the arts as we do. I want to say Romanticism had something to do with it, but I’m not the expert.

Is that it? Did Romanticism elevate artists beyond their station? I don’t know, but “art” is a pretty big category, and while I am quite willing to consider Da Vinci and Beethoven as worthy of high praise and having richly earned their status as cultural icons, I would hardly put, say, Warren Beatty or Robert Redford in remotely the same category.

Still, the examples of Da Vinci and Beethoven lead to another question. We admire these men for their artistic achievements, which rank among the highest in Western civilization. But does that mean their personal lives are worthy of emulation? Why should Da Vinci’s sex life or the fact that Beethoven was a temperamental control freak who drove his nephew to attempt suicide matter to anyone? The idea of the artist being a role model for anyone except a fellow artist escapes me. (The frustrating example of Hitler, who began as an artist, would require another essay…)

Why does modern society do this with artists? For the same reason we do it with athletes? Well, then, why don’t we do it with engineers?

America has not always placed actors on the role model pedestal. Considering that our most devastating political assassination was committed by an actor named John Wilkes Booth who sought to accomplish political change, I’m surprised that it ever happened.

Back in the 1920s, actors were not considered worthy of emulation. Far from it. Whether Barrymore, Valentino, Fatty Arbuckle, there were so many scandals associated with actors that it was the sort of thing to be expected — almost like the way sordid behavior is expected of rock stars today.

But something had changed. Instead of seeing actors for what they were and always had been, America was suddenly shocked:

Morality became a divisive issue during the 1920s in the United States. One focal point of the cultural debate was Hollywood and its movies. Known for promiscuity, gambling and alcohol, Hollywood developed an image as a hotbed of immoral behavior. In the early 1920s the town was rocked by a series of scandals which brought widespread condemnation from civic, religious and political organizations.

This led to the self-adoption of the Hays Code. I have read the Code in its entirety, and what stood out for me was not so much the imposition of moral standards, but the overarching ethos of Hollywood’s own self importance.

Motion picture producers recognize the high trust and confidence which have been placed in them by the people of the world and which have made motion pictures a universal form of entertainment.

They recognize their responsibility to the public because of this trust and because entertainment and art are important influences in the life of a nation.

Hence, though regarding motion pictures primarily as entertainment without any explicit purpose of teaching or propaganda, they know that the motion picture within its own field of entertainment may be directly responsible for spiritual or moral progress, for higher types of social life, and for much correct thinking.

During the rapid transition from silent to talking pictures they have realized the necessity and the opportunity of subscribing to a Code to govern the production of talking pictures and of re-acknowledging this responsibility.

It gets better. Remember, this was at the very beginning of what was seen as a truly revolutionary era: movies with sound. People with power in Hollywood were obviously intoxicated with a sense that they possessed great power to control and influence people, and perhaps they imagined that they were more powerful than any group of people in history.

III. The motion picture, because of its importance as entertainment and because of the trust placed in it by the peoples of the world, has special MORAL OBLIGATIONS:

A. Most arts appeal to the mature. This art appeals at once to every class, mature, immature, developed, undeveloped, law abiding, criminal. Music has its grades for different classes; so has literature and drama. This art of the motion picture, combining as it does the two fundamental appeals of looking at a picture and listening to a story, at once reaches every class of society.

B. By reason of the mobility of film and the ease of picture distribution, and because the possibility of duplicating positives in large quantities, this art reaches places unpenetrated by other forms of art.

C. Because of these two facts, it is difficult to produce films intended for only certain classes of people. The exhibitors’ theatres are built for the masses, for the cultivated and the rude, the mature and the immature, the self-respecting and the criminal. Films, unlike books and music, can with difficulty be confined to certain selected groups.

Talking films were seen as more powerful than books:

D. The latitude given to film material cannot, in consequence, be as wide as the latitude given to book material. In addition:

a. A book describes; a film vividly presents. One presents on a cold page; the other by apparently living people.

b. A book reaches the mind through words merely; a film reaches the eyes and ears through the reproduction of actual events.

c. The reaction of a reader to a book depends largely on the keenness of the reader’s imagination; the reaction to a film depends on the vividness of presentation.

More powerful than newspapers, and more powerful than plays:

F. Everything possible in a play is not possible in a film:

a. Because of the larger audience of the film, and its consequential mixed character. Psychologically, the larger the audience, the lower the moral mass resistance to suggestion.

b. Because through light, enlargement of character, presentation, scenic emphasis, etc., the screen story is brought closer to the audience than the play.

c. The enthusiasm for and interest in the film actors and actresses, developed beyond anything of the sort in history, makes the audience largely sympathetic toward the characters they portray and the stories in which they figure. Hence the audience is more ready to confuse actor and actress and the characters they portray, and it is most receptive of the emotions and ideals presented by the favorite stars.

G. Small communities, remote from sophistication and from the hardening process which often takes place in the ethical and moral standards of larger cities, are easily and readily reached by any sort of film.

H. The grandeur of mass settings, large action, spectacular features, etc., affects and arouses more intensely the emotional side of the audience.

In general, the mobility, popularity, accessibility, emotional appeal, vividness, straightforward presentation of fact in the film make for more intimate contact with a larger audience and for greater emotional appeal.

Hence the larger moral responsibilities of the motion pictures.

My apologies for the lengthy quotations, but I think it is important to read in order to understand that Hollywood has been intoxicated with a sense of its own power for a very long time. More importantly, I think the Hays Code was a major contributory factor to the phenomenon that puzzles so many people. It is hard to read the Hays Code and not understand why it is that so many people take actors seriously and put them on a pedestal. I think it is obvious that this pedestal has much of its foundation in the Hays Code.

It was not even a decade into the Hays Code that Hollywood had a gigantic opportunity to enlarge the pedestal beyond what even the drafters of the Code had imagined possible.

World War II.

It is no exaggeration to say that during the war, Hollywood became an official propaganda arm of the United States government. By any standard, that’s real power. It is thus very easy to see how Hollywood (and actors) were elevated beyond their status. Considering that many actors actually served in the war and became heroes, some of them even deserved to have their status elevated. But in the world of ego-driven make-believe, the difference between what is real and what is created becomes blurred.  No matter, because Hollywood had become all important and all powerful. As if any doubts remained, the Cold War Hollywood blacklist/”witch hunt” period hammered home the point that Hollywood was in control of the culture, that it was supposed to be in control of the culture, and that it needed to police itself and be policed accordingly. Never mind whether the vast majority of Americans were ever consulted about who should be at the controls of “their” culture, much less whether it should consist of a bunch of actors standing on a self-constructed Hollywood pedestal enlarged and strengthened by government.

Simple logic dictates that a pedestal like that cannot be expected to vanish overnight. Sure, I know that the pedestal has become a bubble, you know that the pedestal has become a bubble, but the people who are standing on it still think and act as if their pedestal is there, and real.

Don’t fall for it. They’re just actors.

AFTERTHOUGHT: If I may simplify, I think that by claiming the moral authority to police its own morality in the name of the culture, Hollywood created a very ironic scenario — in which it ended up virtually owning and controlling American morality.  Whether this was a good idea or even intentional is beyond the scope of a single blog post, but there might be a Ph.D. there for someone.

(Naturally, it should go without saying that the power to create is the power to undermine, even to destroy.)