Posted on 02/28/2009 11:28:38 AM PST by ReformationFan
Lt. Starbuck, in the Age of Starbucks A retired space cowboy takes on a neutered age.
By Mark Hemingway
If you’re a man of a certain age, it’s impossible not to harbor affection for actor Dirk Benedict. While he is a veteran of a number of serious films and impressive stage productions, he’s best known for two roles — Lt. Starbuck, the roguish, cigar-chomping space cowboy always ready with a quip on the original Battlestar Galactica; and Lt. Templeton “Faceman” Peck on The A-Team — not coincidentally, a roguish, quip-ready soldier-of-fortune who had one arm wrapped around the waist of a different babe every week. Neither show lasted very long, but both occupy an outsize place in popular culture.
Benedict wants little to do with Hollywood anymore. Since leaving television, he has written two books and raised two sons as a single father. However, lately he’s has been contributing to Big Hollywood, web entrepreneur Andrew Breitbart’s new venture dedicated to providing a voice for political and cultural conservatives in the entertainment industry. Benedict has also become known for a sparkling and witty rant against the post-modern and politically correct themes of the wildly popular Battlestar Galactica remake on the Sci-Fi Channel (a piece you can find on Big Hollywood here, in all its R-rated glory). It set the blogosphere buzzing, and Benedict the writer now seems to be attracting attention for the very thing he says got him blackballed in Hollywood — his opinions.
“I exiled myself to Montana from Hollywood,” he told National Review Online. “I once wrote a piece about how I’d joined celebraholics, about how I was trying to regain my anonymity — and if I did one interview, it was like falling off the wagon, and my celebrity would start to come back. Then, the next thing you know, I have an agent and I’m back into it.” But unlike those celebrities who retreat to Rhode Island–sized ranches in the mountains, Benedict came of age 50 years ago in a tiny town in Montana. The self-reliance bred in him is a significant part of his identity, so the West was a natural retreat.
“I grew up without television and without movies. There was barely a newspaper, because it had to come from Helena. You had to follow your intuition and develop opinions that came from you, based on your observations of the world,” he says. This, he soon found, stood out in Hollywood. “Other people in Hollywood have opinions — but they’re somebody else’s opinions. It’s just what they heard somebody say,” Benedict observes.
He’s a Rush Limbaugh listener, but it’s not fair to say that Benedict was ostracized only because of conventional politics. Anyone who has read one of his books knows that he’s led a colorful life and been open to any number of experiences that don’t jibe with the typical Republican profile. As a cancer survivor, he’s an evangelical believer in a macrobiotic diet — and yet he has to pause in mid-sentence to light one of his ever-present cigars. And he’s just as contradictory in his politics, a conservative who once did a film written by Maya Angelou.
What he is is an old-fashioned American individualist. He may not quite be Starbuck or Face in real life, but he’s got something of those characters in him. During his recent appearance on Celebrity Big Brother, a wildly popular reality-TV show in the U.K., he was greeted by a snotty British punk-rock singer, who announced: “It’s Dirk [expletive redacted] Benedict.” Without missing beat, Benedict replied, “I seldom use my middle name.” It’s an unscripted quip more than worthy of Face or Starbuck.
According to Benedict, it’s no accident that there’s a strong similarity to the characters and his real-life personality — he made them that way. “I had to fight for the cigar, I had to fight for that devil-may-care, loveable scoundrel, I-don’t-give-a-[expletive redacted] attitude,” he says, explaining how he had to get the TV network executives to embrace his version of Starbuck. “It’s a very male thing, and our culture is sensitive to that.”
Of course, his roguish skirt-chasing characters became popular just as Hollywood was undergoing a significant cultural shift: Women were beginning to find a place in Tinseltown. “As more and more women became executives,” he says, “they loved me and they hated me. But when they got power, there was a great joy in being able to tell me what to do when I came in to audition. I think maybe they all had a guy in their past that had some of that in them, and it was revenge.”
Not being able to shy away from such politically incorrect opinions also might have had something to do with his decision to abandon Hollywood for Montana. And Benedict protests that he never had the pathological hunger for fame that characterizes Hollywood’s biggest stars.
“George Roy Hill [the legendary director of Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid] said to me once, ‘You’ll never be a star,’ ” Benedict recalls. “He started inviting me to his house — which was really Paul Newman’s house, he was renting — and he said to me, ‘You’ll never be a star, and the reason is that you don’t have to have it.’ ”
So who does want to be a star, and why? “Hollywood attracts people who want to be famous,” Benedict says. “It attracts people who are insecure in who they are, and their identification comes from pretending to be other people. But it’s really a profession for 14-year-olds in terms of the intellectual demands on an actor — which is why children are so good at it. It’s difficult for adults to grow up and still be a 14-year-old.”
And, Benedict observes, you don’t have to look very far to find celebrity behavior that validates his theory. Exhibit A: Sean Penn at the Academy Awards. “You hear these things and you wonder ‘How can they say these things?’ ” Benedict says. “Well, it’s child-like. It’s all feeling and emotion, and you need a parent to control that. But these people have become very powerful because our culture worships celebrity.”
Naturally, Benedict has opinions about what actors these days are saying onscreen as well as off — as evidenced by his aforementioned critique of the new Battlestar Galactica. Benedict is troubled by the fact that Hollywood can’t seem to tell a story in which good simply triumphs over evil. Moral ambiguity is viewed as the hallmark of quality. “You can’t do a show about good and evil. Because then somebody has to be responsible,” he argues. “I never said in my article that the new show was poorly executed. The whole article was about what it reflects. The truth is that the new show is better produced, it’s much sexier, faster, sleeker — in terms of style, it makes the old show look like a Model A Ford. But there’s a very deep moral difference between the two shows.”
The title of Benedict’s article criticizing the new BSG — “Lost in Castration” — got people animated. “They castrated the character from that show who is the most male,” he says, referring to how Starbuck was reborn female, the most telling detail in the new show’s surrender to Hollywood’s regnant sexual politics. “They came up with the idea to remove his balls, his humor, his gallantry, and make him an angry, pissed-off woman with a cigar. That is a reflection of our society. What Hollywood couldn’t do to me in 25 years, the producers of this show did to me with a delete button. What the doctors couldn’t do to me when I had prostate cancer, they finally did.” (Benedict is already issuing pre-emptive strikes against the sadly inevitable A-Team remake.“There’s another article I need to write. They’ve been trying to remake The A-Team for 15 years — and they’re going to do exactly the same thing. I’ve always made a joke that they’re going to do the The Gay Team. It’s either going to be four gay guys or it will be all women,” he says.)
His sharply worded remarks reveal how seriously he takes traditional masculinity — and what’s become of it today. Benedict says his third book is going to be about raising his two sons in a cultural climate where men aren’t really allowed to be men.
“Even up in Montana I’ve spent the last 20 years defending the right of my boys to throw a frickin’ snowball, to climb a tree, to jump off a little cliff, to go out in the canoe off my dock without a life jacket,” he says. “All the little boys that refused to give into that were put on Ritalin. The future warriors of America are all on Ritalin in the second grade.”
Given the uniformity of political and cultural opinions in Hollywood, it sounds like Dirk Benedict has reached a place in his life where Hollywood needs him more than he needs Hollywood. But he has other priorities. “The only thing I wanted to do was raise my boys. And I’ve done it. They are a joy to behold, and they are my contribution to the world and I can die happy tomorrow because of what I’ve done,” he says. “They understand this culture that they live in. They’re equipped. I’d rather have that than 25 Oscars.”
Always liked the guy. He wasn’t the main reason I watched, though. ;)
This made my day. Starbuck is a frackin’ conservative!
Another reason why Im not alone in hating the new BSG.
some of it is good The gender change on Starbuck and Boomer confuses me. WHY?
I couldnt get past the 1st season, sorry. Going back to the A-TEAM, he’s right: it’s going to be pc. 4 gays who hate the military because of the dont tell policy.
Ronald Moore really blew a great opportunity with the BSG property and actors he had. Once again, poor writers grab defeat from the jaws of victory....
As for BSG, it started great and then flushed itself down the toilet. Every character on the show is now clinically insane. What a bummer.
It's called PTSD
The human race is cut down to less than 50,000 survivors - and those threatened: you expect puppies and rainbows?
I'd say "lovable rouge" Starbuck I was in denial
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