Well, it's been a quiet week here at Bloody Nib Manor. That is if one discounts the fact that the local gun shop has been plywooded over for fear of it being invaded by hordes of kiddie revolutionaries wanting to live in real life the musical Les Miserables while forgetting the song Empty Chairs at Empty Tables. Ah, youth! It's somewhat like the romantization of the wilderness; one goes into the forest believing that every bear is Gentle Ben or Yogi only to find one's self another Timothy Treadwell. In other words, a nice meal. And the local entrepreneurs have been displaying their offering of illegal fireworks for sale for Independence Day by firing them off repeatedly and enthusiastically every night. There's nothing quite like watching a drama on the television only to have the dialogue drowned out by an aerial motor exploding. Of course, the local constabulary does nothing and has never done anything about this, as they have never enforced the laws about loud music from automobiles, or loud parties that go on until four o'clock in the morning. But the parties are usually for mihos and mijas from one to five years old, so who can complain. What three year old lad would love to see his parents and family drunk and fighting with no other kids his or her age are no where in sight.
But, let's get down to matters of a greater sort: Actors and actresses.
You friend, admittedly, lost his taste for motion pictures and much of television years ago. This is probably due to the fact that he is an old git and really doesn't appreciate moving pictures about comic book super heroes or cop shows in which the policemen/women are constantly undergoing a sort of existential angst the even the most Sartetian film maker in France abandoned forty years ago. This writer likes movies and television programs with heroes/heroines, who, while they may be flawed, do not sit and ponder if it is the right thing morally, or because of their personal "ghosts", before they arrest or even kill a person who is trying to kill them or save a child from a pedophile, a woman from being raped, or a store owner from being killed for $200 in his till. In other words and to put it simply, your friend likes stories of heroes and the heroes journey. In this way he is a simple man. And perhaps a simple-minded man. But he would rather read about the journey of Odysseus, flawed man and liar and rogue that he was, but who returned home and saved Penelope from the suitors and his son from poverty without a second thought about his past sins, than your friend would watch a deconstructionalist modern detective television series or a pondering Batman. It all really comes down to the Chandler formula: Down these mean streets must a man go who is not mean....
All the boring above is a too long introduction to the me of the matter. And it's just a way of saying that contemporary films, television and actors/actresses are just silly and stupid and adolescent in their outlook and opinions. Screenwriters and directors are really, nowadays, awful people. They seem to think that they are really artists of some sort, when, in fact, they are not much more, perhaps, much less, than the pulp writers of the 1920s to the 1950s. The modern writer and director are just pushing out stuff no better than the old Republic Studios cowboy movies but without the ethos of the Republic pictures. The modern stuff, even with it's CGI, really amounts to, in it's high points, a horse and rider jumping off a 100 foot cliff into a river from an old horse opera.
The actors/actresses, are really, in a way, worse than the screen writer/directors.
Let us face the facts: An actor/actress is really nothing but a dancing monkey on the end of a golden chain. They do what they are told to do be the screenwriter or the director. They create no more than does a three year old kid claiming that he's a tyrannosaurus rex or a homeless man with his dirty paw stuck out saying that if you give him a dollar he'll put it in his daughter's college fund. In fact, those two examples show more creativity than does the average actor.
Imagine to yourself, dear reader, that you have gone to college or university for four years and received a degree in engineering or English, and when you go out to find a job you can only find a job at Tinker Toy figuring ot new ways to make Tinker Toy structures (not even Lego structures) or you get a job correcting the English usage of people who are applying for visa to the U.S. You've spend four years of study reading, studying and hoping that you will get a job as an engineer on a dam project or in aerospace; four years studying English literature hoping to be a writer or a translator of great works. And you end up not even designing kid's toys or the bad English of Chinese students wanting to get into UCLA instead of writing a novel. Do you think you would be a bit disappointed and, in fact experiencing an existential crisis of the worst French type?
Consider the actor/actress who has studied acting at a college or university. That person has spent four years learning how to lie and not perform on stage. That person has usually studied the works of Shakespeare, Marlowe, Jonson, Odet and O'Neil and how to perform the roles in the context in which they were written if they are lucky, which is not often. And when they come out of the acting schools they find that the work that they have done is useless in the modern world. Shakespeare is always a go to if the actor/actress can find a gig, but there are damn few Shakespeare plays being performed on television and the movies, which is where said actor/actress wants to be. Instead said actor/actress finds him'her self auditioning for what are really B-movies with big budgets, or television programs that are stupid funny or stupid dramatic. They don't even rise to the 1950s movie Panic in the Streets or the 1950s television show Peter Gunn. They hardly rise to the level of soap operas. In effect, they've spent four years studying engineering only to end up playing with Tinker Toys. Or to put it in musical terms, they've graduated from Julliard and they are playing in the subway, though well paid, instead of the orchestra. It's akin to spending years in the Royal Shakespeare Company only to find one's self working music halls and vaudeville.
Of course, a lot of actors/actresses never went to college for acting. They may have attended acting workshops while working at the local Von's or Ralph's, or maybe, because they were/are pretty or handsome, they caught the eye of some director/producer. Perhaps the actor/actress was the son/daughter of a friend of a producer/director.
To put it short, actors/actresses depend as much on luck as does the average race track tout. They may act/lie better than the clerk at the local 7-11, and even better than the local beggar saying that he wants a handout for the cos of his mother's cancer treatment, but they are actors/liars and are not to be trusted or even honored. They are, in fact, dancing monkeys who will tip their cap to anyone who gives them a penny. They will dance a waltz if the organ grinder says that they should dance a waltz. They will dance a can-can when the organ grinder demands that they do so. They'll play the sad clown when they are happy and the angry clown when they are content.
It s important to remember that up until the 1920 actors and actresses were considered "not quite right." The actors threatened one's daughters with shame and bastard children, and actresses were considered "loose" women. In fact, this writer's grandfather,m who was not a particularly religious man, considered all actors and actresses as "whores' of some sort or performing simians.
But times have changed and we are supposed, for some reason, to regard and appreciate, in fact follow, the words and thoughts of a person who is a paid liar. They are better than we are because they are on television or on the silver screen. They live lives of luxury that could not be imagined in the Regency or Edwardian era, but they know better than the shop keeper or the clerk or the craftsman because they are on television. They know better than we do because they are dancing at the end of a golden chain at the command of an organ grinder, whether it be Instagram, Twitter or Facebook. They'll lie to keep that golden chain and that organ grinder while you live and think free. They don't even promise a golden chain for you. All they can promise is an iron collar and rags and a mouth that is sewn shut.
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