Posted on 02/27/2009 9:14:27 AM PST by Sherman Logan
A retired space cowboy takes on a neutered age.
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.
page “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.”
#ad#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.”
yes, interesting.
“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”
that is a bit interesting, especially since “A-Team” was totally built on the anti-American leftarded premise of “evil US army hunting down the good guys”.
If it was made today, we’d totally call them on it. stuff was a lot more obvious 25 years ago
Seriously though, this reminds me of the saying by George Will, "Wealthy liberals buy newspapers, wealthy conservatives buy hockey teams." Or words to that effect.
Involvement with the popular culture is not a forte of the conservatives. Acting may be on par with a 14 year old's mind but, like it or not, the movies and television have a massive effect on society.
Ping.
I’ve got daughters who will be looking for real men in a few years. I hope there are other dads out there raising ‘em up!
d*mn fine article.
by the way, this is called a puff-piece, and is generally paid for.
movies often do this, they know libs aren’t going to go for a movie like this, so they’re just targeting their supposed audience. they’re of no help or support to us. this is just merchandising.
I wish people weren’t so shallow as to fall for this stuff every time.
However, if they’re willing to go on Rush like Stallone for Rambo 4 and trash the MSM critics, then I can have some respect for that
“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.” oh God bless!!!, aint it the truth and I love the guy just for that alone
Dirk is the man!
I wish he’d join FR.
I think it’s even worse. The new Starbuck is an angry pissed off woman that was molested by her father and basically raped by machines. Then the character goes off into totally inexplicable tangents.
His comments make me understand why I've never warmed to the new BSG. I'm not into gratuitous sex scenes, emasculated males, or unrelenting moral ambiguity.
He’s hilarious.
“Stardoe”...ROFL
Thanks for posting. Very interesting. I must say what I see of this guy I like.
ping
Seconded. I liked the original BSG just because it didn’t take itself too seriously. There were serious moments, but things were camped up just enough to be fun entertainment. Same for the first season of Buck Rogers. The second season of Buck Rogers was just blech!
It makes me like the original galactica even more.
I hope Larson is listening when he redoes the movie as a reboot of the reboot.
I wish he would call Rush on the air.
“make him an angry, pissed-off woman with a cigar. “
I’ve recently started watching BG. Starbuck is an awful character. He’s nailed her exactly. She’s a he. It’s a male character played by a woman. I guess the unpleasant harpy aspect is a new twist to the character. I’ll have to look up the old series and give it a try.
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