Certified_Heterosexual
The Falklands are Serbian, you cowards.
I've started to wonder about something which seems stupid but probably isn't: is acting an ethical profession? That is to say, is acting immoral as a profession?
As someone who has been deeply interested in film for at least 10 years, I've taken it for granted that actors and actresses are thoroughly awful people. They're flakes, that they seem to have a high rate of emotional problems, that their personal attachments are notoriously unstable, and that they are typically liberal to the point of complete sociopathic depravity.
The novice Hollywood observer might ask, is a particular actor/actress gay? But the more experienced observer understands that "straight" and "gay" are barely meaningful designations in Hollywood. Actors and actresses are narcissists and will usually fuck anything. They are, to coin a term, narcisexual.
Working backward from what actors are, you realize that this is what's required of acting as a profession. Because the acting profession consists entirely of believably lying, showing people a reaction that isn't real. Manipulating other people to have a strong emotional reaction to the lies you are telling. Well, I've just described the narcissist playbook, and if that isn't enough, actors like narcissists crave validation and praise and are deeply wounded by criticism.
If success in some profession demands a person be mentally unwell, then whether it rewards him or not (and usually it does not), it is exploitative. This raises the obvious question of our culpability. We demand talented (i.e. severely unwell) actors/actresses to provide us with escapism, catharsis, stimulation— the more the better, we'll consoom it all. Actors become for us emotional totems.
We say art can "elevate" humanity, but what does that really mean? Get us high? Flatter us? Make us restless for something unattainable? One can readily see the elevation in religion, which causes us to transcend the self, but that isn't quite what's going on with art, is it? Art is not connecting us to each other, it is not humbling us— indeed, it seems to do the opposite. Am I wrong here?
Our best actions are those that provide something for others, because in doing so they integrate us into a larger whole and--selfishly speaking--thereby confer on us a kind of immortality. It is easy to say that acting-as-art provides us with a reward, but is it a social or a selfish reward? Are we exploiting others in our appreciation?
To complicate this question, in the modern era art is actually, deliberately used to manipulate us. It presents the world falsely, not only to amuse but to propagandize. The actors and actresses are complicit in this. Why do we accept this as normal?
Actors and their professional overseers (directors, screenwriters, producers) are engaged in a type of fraud, and I think that uneasiness about/disapproval of the nature of their project is a healthy impulse. To categorically endorse the acting as a moral profession, someone would have to think "entertainment" had much greater spiritual significance in its own right than I believe it has.
A film can take you on an emotional journey, it can provide amusement, distraction, catharsis, or whatever. Sure. But it can't do so without taking you to places that you'd find unacceptably voyeuristic if, say, your neighbor went about finding them in some other way. A person who peeks in windows (whether bedroom windows or windows into the common rooms, where conversations can still be overheard) is a creep. A person who contrived a way to make themselves invisible and walk around real war zones or crime scenes to gawk would be recognized as a misanthrope. Normal people would respond to both of these (hypothetical) peoples' insistences that "I wasn't hurting anyone" with a recognition that, while this is basically true, it's a bit beside the point; something inherently perverse is being revealed. Film and theater simulate the kinds of experiences we imagine we could have if we were all-knowing and had perfect, anonymous access to the best and worst of the real world. (This is why we praise "versimilitude" above all; we know we're being tricked, but we want to be oblivious to this fact, except on our own terms, because it interrupts our fantasy.)
The problem is the way that entertainment has gradually become a sinister, corporate product. We are not only viewing it, it is viewing us, and it wants us to embrace the dictates of consumerism— so that is what it propagandizes. It is also, as with everything in mass society, removed from the influence of one's physical community, and in effect smothers the development of local cultures.
This definitively answers the biggest never-satisfactorily-answered question on the Right: why is the entertainment industry so liberal? The obvious answer is: because it is separated from physical community. It explains why, in place of a conservative or right wing presence, there is only a smattering of libertarian types— aka liberals who just object to left-wing identity politics and perhaps have conservative lifestyle sympathies. Scan any list of "conservative actors in Hollywood" and this is what you invariably find.
A local playwright could never make a living defaming and denouncing everyone in his community, but a Hollywood creative can and does defame and denounce millions of people in order to advance the media party line. One of the occasionally noticed aspects of mass society is that, by facilitating consolidation of "extreme interests," it frees people from having to abide by the norms of local communities. It advances momentum toward individualism and away from interdependence. This is an obviously liberating phenomenon, and as social cohesion decreases it becomes more and more attractive to people because it promises to replace missing social bonds with self-affirmation and a "community of consumption" or "community of perversion."
My speculation here is part of a larger effort to rethink what our orientation should be vis-a-vis society. This starts at the idea of mass society, consolidation, and separation of work from that which produces something for those one is physically related to and that which simply facilitates the massive consolidation efforts of corporate business.
We know what the claims are as to what entertainment provides, but are they really true, are they only true in particular circumstances, and do they meaningfully support physical connectedness? But also we should question what the current structure of the entertainment business does to local forms of expression and local development of culture.
Rest assured, libertarian friends: while I believe that our culture's current relationship with entertainment of all sorts— especially the film/tv/stage triad— are deeply flawed, I don't support any ban or direct suppression of these types of activities. These exist because there's a market for them, and they always have. If we banned professional acting, we wouldn't see it end. We would see prostitutes take it back up, as they have previously when it was suppressed/approbated. Better just to stigmatize and perhaps advocate for the censorship of the worst examples, limit or eliminate one's own intake of film, and turn attention elsewhere.
It's not even about money, it's about attention. Actors and actresses prostitute themselves for money under the current arrangement, but a class of people could be found who'd do perform in movies for virtually free if it made them famous. Fame and notoriety are the coins of this realm, not money. These are people with disordered attentions who communicate disorders of attention to those who give them attention for prolonged periods of time. And attention is the realest, most finite currency. You can make more money. You can't take back attention you have already given. Once it's gone it's gone.
Being narcissists, actors and actresses thrive on attention even more than money. And no longer giving them any is free!
As someone who has been deeply interested in film for at least 10 years, I've taken it for granted that actors and actresses are thoroughly awful people. They're flakes, that they seem to have a high rate of emotional problems, that their personal attachments are notoriously unstable, and that they are typically liberal to the point of complete sociopathic depravity.
The novice Hollywood observer might ask, is a particular actor/actress gay? But the more experienced observer understands that "straight" and "gay" are barely meaningful designations in Hollywood. Actors and actresses are narcissists and will usually fuck anything. They are, to coin a term, narcisexual.
Working backward from what actors are, you realize that this is what's required of acting as a profession. Because the acting profession consists entirely of believably lying, showing people a reaction that isn't real. Manipulating other people to have a strong emotional reaction to the lies you are telling. Well, I've just described the narcissist playbook, and if that isn't enough, actors like narcissists crave validation and praise and are deeply wounded by criticism.
If success in some profession demands a person be mentally unwell, then whether it rewards him or not (and usually it does not), it is exploitative. This raises the obvious question of our culpability. We demand talented (i.e. severely unwell) actors/actresses to provide us with escapism, catharsis, stimulation— the more the better, we'll consoom it all. Actors become for us emotional totems.
We say art can "elevate" humanity, but what does that really mean? Get us high? Flatter us? Make us restless for something unattainable? One can readily see the elevation in religion, which causes us to transcend the self, but that isn't quite what's going on with art, is it? Art is not connecting us to each other, it is not humbling us— indeed, it seems to do the opposite. Am I wrong here?
Our best actions are those that provide something for others, because in doing so they integrate us into a larger whole and--selfishly speaking--thereby confer on us a kind of immortality. It is easy to say that acting-as-art provides us with a reward, but is it a social or a selfish reward? Are we exploiting others in our appreciation?
To complicate this question, in the modern era art is actually, deliberately used to manipulate us. It presents the world falsely, not only to amuse but to propagandize. The actors and actresses are complicit in this. Why do we accept this as normal?
Actors and their professional overseers (directors, screenwriters, producers) are engaged in a type of fraud, and I think that uneasiness about/disapproval of the nature of their project is a healthy impulse. To categorically endorse the acting as a moral profession, someone would have to think "entertainment" had much greater spiritual significance in its own right than I believe it has.
A film can take you on an emotional journey, it can provide amusement, distraction, catharsis, or whatever. Sure. But it can't do so without taking you to places that you'd find unacceptably voyeuristic if, say, your neighbor went about finding them in some other way. A person who peeks in windows (whether bedroom windows or windows into the common rooms, where conversations can still be overheard) is a creep. A person who contrived a way to make themselves invisible and walk around real war zones or crime scenes to gawk would be recognized as a misanthrope. Normal people would respond to both of these (hypothetical) peoples' insistences that "I wasn't hurting anyone" with a recognition that, while this is basically true, it's a bit beside the point; something inherently perverse is being revealed. Film and theater simulate the kinds of experiences we imagine we could have if we were all-knowing and had perfect, anonymous access to the best and worst of the real world. (This is why we praise "versimilitude" above all; we know we're being tricked, but we want to be oblivious to this fact, except on our own terms, because it interrupts our fantasy.)
The problem is the way that entertainment has gradually become a sinister, corporate product. We are not only viewing it, it is viewing us, and it wants us to embrace the dictates of consumerism— so that is what it propagandizes. It is also, as with everything in mass society, removed from the influence of one's physical community, and in effect smothers the development of local cultures.
This definitively answers the biggest never-satisfactorily-answered question on the Right: why is the entertainment industry so liberal? The obvious answer is: because it is separated from physical community. It explains why, in place of a conservative or right wing presence, there is only a smattering of libertarian types— aka liberals who just object to left-wing identity politics and perhaps have conservative lifestyle sympathies. Scan any list of "conservative actors in Hollywood" and this is what you invariably find.
A local playwright could never make a living defaming and denouncing everyone in his community, but a Hollywood creative can and does defame and denounce millions of people in order to advance the media party line. One of the occasionally noticed aspects of mass society is that, by facilitating consolidation of "extreme interests," it frees people from having to abide by the norms of local communities. It advances momentum toward individualism and away from interdependence. This is an obviously liberating phenomenon, and as social cohesion decreases it becomes more and more attractive to people because it promises to replace missing social bonds with self-affirmation and a "community of consumption" or "community of perversion."
My speculation here is part of a larger effort to rethink what our orientation should be vis-a-vis society. This starts at the idea of mass society, consolidation, and separation of work from that which produces something for those one is physically related to and that which simply facilitates the massive consolidation efforts of corporate business.
We know what the claims are as to what entertainment provides, but are they really true, are they only true in particular circumstances, and do they meaningfully support physical connectedness? But also we should question what the current structure of the entertainment business does to local forms of expression and local development of culture.
Rest assured, libertarian friends: while I believe that our culture's current relationship with entertainment of all sorts— especially the film/tv/stage triad— are deeply flawed, I don't support any ban or direct suppression of these types of activities. These exist because there's a market for them, and they always have. If we banned professional acting, we wouldn't see it end. We would see prostitutes take it back up, as they have previously when it was suppressed/approbated. Better just to stigmatize and perhaps advocate for the censorship of the worst examples, limit or eliminate one's own intake of film, and turn attention elsewhere.
It's not even about money, it's about attention. Actors and actresses prostitute themselves for money under the current arrangement, but a class of people could be found who'd do perform in movies for virtually free if it made them famous. Fame and notoriety are the coins of this realm, not money. These are people with disordered attentions who communicate disorders of attention to those who give them attention for prolonged periods of time. And attention is the realest, most finite currency. You can make more money. You can't take back attention you have already given. Once it's gone it's gone.
Being narcissists, actors and actresses thrive on attention even more than money. And no longer giving them any is free!