Living with Actors

I don’t have cable, but I will flip around from time to time in hotel rooms.  More than once it has struck me that all the emotion, all the drama, all the violence, all the hurt and anger and fear–is fake.  It is staged.  Cameras are all around the actors, whose world is quite small in comparison with the large studio around them.

The average American spends perhaps 2-3 hours a day watching people who pretend to feel things for a living; people whose real emotions are hidden.

Ponder spending time with people who could convince you you were their best friend while secretly hating you.

Given that what Hollywood produces, in large measure, is strong emotion, ought it not to be a deep place, filled with contemplative and deep springs?

I hung out in a bar on Hollywood Boulevard a few months ago, and it was funny to me how often it came up that some group was superficial.  The people who move here from out of State, but not us locals.  The people who live in LA, but not Orange County.

Could we perhaps posit that many actors become actors precisely because they DON’T feel deep emotions?   That pretending to do so is therapeutic for them, that it fills, temporarily, some gap in them?

What is the fallout of surrounding ourselves with icons whose job is merely to pretend they feel things?  Does it wash through our cultural order and promote insincerity, plastic lives, constant grasping for states they merely pretend to reach?

I mentioned narcissistic empathy as a trait of people who desperately want to be able to think of themselves as concerned human beings, but who are incapable of doing so in the concrete, in the particular, in the only places that truly matter.  Is this perhaps one root of Hollywood’s leftist mindset?  That at root they feel nothing deeply, believe nothing deeply, and so latch onto what is easy, what is made easy by political operators?