Posted on 10/28/2004 11:00:04 AM PDT by avg_freeper
AT THE END of every election cycle, we hope to retire the clichés that have bedeviled us. Yet every four years, they reemerge from dormancy, causing pain, discomfort, and minor inflammation. We hold these clichés to be self-evident: (1) that this campaign season, like all those before it and without regard to actual history, will be deemed by some professor to be the most "negative" one ever; (2) that if an Ohio swing voter has a single unexpressed thought, a television producer will be dispatched to rectify that oversight; and (3) that some nitwit celebrity, who prior to the election couldn't find the newspaper's national affairs section if it came wrapped around his Chilean sea bass, will admit to a lifelong disengagement with our political system. To atone, he will then invite a documentary film crew to follow him around as he lectures the rest of us about the importance of voting.
If journalism, like politics, is show-business for ugly people, credit the news-gatherers with this much: We know our limitations. We are aware that we'd make awful actors, as Gridiron Dinner sketches acutely remind us. But this self-awareness seems unfairly one-sided. Celebrities have no idea that they make awful journalists. For the purpose of becoming a journalist is to explore the wider world. The purpose of becoming a celebrity is to explore yourself.
Most celebrities, of course, think that by exploring themselves, they are exploring the wider world. When many of them wake up in their mid-20s, after years of decadent sex and cocaine abuse, they finally discover that there are these things called "elections," which can affect the fate of the republic. Then they learn that you don't even have to audition to participate. Instead, you "register" and "vote" so that you too can "have a voice," as they like to say.
The fact that most people who have any business voting in elections mastered these concepts in ninth-grade civics is of no concern to the celebrity. Because he just discovered the importance of participation, this self-discovery must be not so much shared, as inflicted. And never mind grappling with thorny questions such as whom you should vote for. Or even whether the ill-informed should be encouraged to vote in the first place. That would require a moment's thought. And celebrities weren't put here to think. In this way, they do know their limitations. Any idiot can insist we need to vote. Which is why so many celebrities do.
Shortly after the advent of the "Rock the Vote" advocacy campaign featured on MTV, the genre got off to an inauspicious start with a documentary called The Last Party. Would that the title were literal. Alas, it was not the last party featuring celebrity-civics narcissisme vérité, but the first of many. Hosted by part-time actor/full-time rehabber Robert Downey Jr., The Last Party set the bar about as low as it could possibly go.
Armed with nothing but his pretensions and a camera crew, Downey lit out on the campaign trail. When not talking about his own battles with drug addiction and intimacy issues ("the idea of a vagina brings up a lot of . . . resentment," he shared), he attempted to reveal the pointlessness, the artifice, and the utmost importance of participating in our electoral process. If those themes seemed contradictory, Downey didn't pause over them. Instead he broke into arty asides, such as meditating in a park in his underwear, going for a swim in a public fountain, or jumping up and down on all fours, doing a character he called "goat boy." It's one of the advantages of being a celebrity journalist. Such devices aren't generally available to Jim Lehrer. Two cycles later, in the year 2000, came The Party's Over (and no, it wasn't), hosted by Philip Seymour Hoffman. We know we're in for a rough go when Hoffman, as talented an actor as he is untalented a documentarian, tells us, "I decided to host this documentary because I felt ill-informed." He trudges along the campaign trail with three-day growth and shabby ski-hats, looking like an appetizer-sized version of Michael Moore. (All he's missing is 100 pounds and a point of view.)
Hoffman even gets to Washington, D.C., which he discovers is the political epicenter of our country. Thoroughly impressionable, he seems to adopt the opinion of whoever he interviewed last, be it Noam Chomsky (who offers that most politicians seek to divide and conquer), or Ralph Nader (who suggests that both parties are beholden to corporate interests). By the time he finishes, Hoffman is capable of proffering banalities of his own. "I think this whole thing is about survival of the fittest," he says at one point. He really ought to get a patent on this stuff.
In the 2004 cycle, we are being treated to a double-shot of celebrity documentary do-goodism, which has put me in the unfamiliar position of being an undecided voter: I can't decide who's more annoying, P. Diddy or Drew Barrymore. Mr. Diddy, aka Sean Combs, the rapper-fashion-mogul-all-purpose-publicity-tapeworm, has sampled the work of fellow rap impresario Russell Simmons, who started the voter-registration Hip Hop Summit. Diddy, this summer, started "Citizen Change," which is working in conjunction with MTV's similar "Choose or Lose" campaign. But Diddy has upped the stakes: His slogan is "Vote or Die!" Voting . . . dying . . . voting . . . dying--most would probably go with the former, though the latter has its appeal, as it would mean escaping platitudinous celebrity harangues.
Which is not to suggest Diddy's isn't a serious organization. Diddy says that Citizen Change is "all about making voting hot--it's sexy to speak out." To prove it, he sells Babydoll "Vote or Die" T-shirts for $28, a bargain at twice the price. But he doesn't stop there. His Vote or Die special has been in semi-regular rotation on MTV. In it, he goes out among the people. Or at least he drives his convertible Bentley through Harlem, from which he does most of his commentary, waving at hot women, saying politically conscientious things like "What's up, baby?" It's his mission, he says, to "hip my people to the hustles of what's really going on."
Diddy wants to turn what he estimates is the 40-million strong "hip-hop nation" into a voting bloc rivaling the AARP, since the latter's ranks vote in droves, unlike young people. He has run the numbers and decided that the hip-hop nation is bigger than soccer moms or NASCAR dads. Never mind that a good percentage of those 40 million are below voting age, or that it's impossible to treat them as a monolith. For instance, 72 percent of hip-hop buyers are white people (although 42 percent of those pretend they're black).
"You see how much Bush and Kerry are sweatin' those groups," implores Diddy. "C'mon, y'all. Please, let's get hip hop on their ass." While Diddy does make the salient point that politicians ignore inner-city communities because they vote in such anemic numbers, he has some bizarre ideas about politics. He papers over hip-hop culture's nihilism and glorification of violence, which hamper these communities every bit as much as political neglect, even while showing a montage of rappers displaying jewelry and sipping Cristal in hot tubs. "That's political, that's power," says Diddy. Then he swings us to the harsh streets of South Central L.A., where Big Greg raps: America's a rich man's vision / But a poor man's prison / So don't expect these politicians to give us a pot to piss in. That's the spirit, Big Greg. Easy cynicism coupled with unrealistic optimism are the twin poles of most celebrity political documentaries.
That, and abject stupidity, which is exemplified in Drew Barrymore's The Best Place to Start, also airing on MTV. Casual Barrymore followers probably still think of the 29-year-old as the child darling of E.T., or they recall her boob-flashing on David Letterman, her serial marriages, drug and alcohol bouts, and her flirtations with bisexuality and animism. Convinced that everything has a soul, she at one point advocated the welfare of washcloths.
Not that I'm suggesting Barrymore is a flake. Okay, I am. But it's hard to come to any other conclusion, when she opens her film grandiosely with, "I am a repressed voter. I want to learn about the voting system. I want to be a voter." I want to smack the silly out of her, but you can't have everything. Still, Drew tries. Having admitted elsewhere that she didn't know what the Electoral College was or what the word "partisan" meant, she gets cracking on her education by filming herself at the library, reading the Declaration of Independence, and, like, other important stuff. "But the more I read," she says, "the more confused I got."
So she decides to hit the campaign trail, to learn firsthand what we political reporters already know: It sucks. On Wes Clark's bus, she asks how politicians can spark the interest of younger voters. She is crushed when she gets a boilerplate answer. "If I was, like, an 18-year-old that, like, didn't really care," she says later, "it would have gone right over my head." Hard to believe. But she presses on, accosting leaders and leading entertainers (such as Chris Rock and Bill Maher), trying to get at the throbbing heart of why we should participate civically. After learning who her congressman is (Henry Waxman), she asks him: "So what would you say to young people as far as where they're at, as far as what society is sort of telling them about voting [where] at least in the last election, everything was a little bit janky? What do you say to them to, like, let them not be discouraged?"
She says she came to Washington with enthusiasm, but left "feeling really stupid." She ends up crying to her producer, "I don't know what I'm doing." The producer comforts her with, "That's okay, the good news is that you don't have to pretend you know what you're doing." "Why did I choose politics, why?" Barrymore asks despondently. "I thought, oh, it's something I don't know about, so this will be a great way to learn, and months later, I just feel like such a tool."
Like most celebrities, she soon gets over her insecurity when she realizes that this film is not just about voting, it's about her. She makes a "civil rights quest" to Selma, Alabama, where nearly 40 years ago, aspiring black voters were beaten and clubbed and maimed by thuggish police officers. "I've always been enlightened by struggle," says Drew.
Barrymore walks silently, stoically over the Edmund Pettus Bridge, the scene of the crime. Her voiceover intones, "I have also come to believe that we all passionately want to feel a part of something so that we are not alone, and although voting is a very personal ritual, it brings us all together in the most profound way."
It's supposed to be her big, deep-thoughts moment, the coda that makes all her confusion and self-doubt worthwhile. It left me with a thought of my own: Where are the cops when you need them?
bitingly funny.
thanks for posting it
This is positively priceless and quite correct.
Good for Matt!
This is positively priceless and quite correct.
Good for Matt!
Wow. This is a great article. The author has an amazing way with words.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.