George Clooney’s media filter is set to ’smarm’
March 9, 2006
Peggy Noonan absolutely hits one out of the park with this take on what makes Gorgeous George tick:
Orson Welles was an artist. George Clooney is a fellow who read an article and now wants to tell us the truth, if we can handle it.
More important, Orson Welles had a canny respect for the audience while maintaining a difficult relationship with studio executives, whom he approached as if they were his intellectual and artistic inferiors. George Clooney has a canny respect for the Hollywood establishment, for its executives and agents, and treats his audience as if it were composed of his intellectual and artistic inferiors. . . .
And because they are his inferiors, he must teach them. He must teach them about racial tolerance and speaking truth to power, etc. He must teach them to be brave. . .
But Mr. Clooney’s remarks were also part of the tinniness of the age, and of modern Hollywood. I don’t think he was being disingenuous in suggesting he was himself somewhat heroic. He doesn’t even know he’s not heroic. He thinks making a movie in 2005 that said McCarthyism was bad is heroic.
How could he think this? Maybe part of the answer is in this: The Clooney generation in Hollywood is not writing and directing movies about life as if they’ve experienced it, with all its mysteries and complexity and variety. In an odd way they haven’t experienced life; they’ve experienced media. Their films seem more an elaboration and meditation on media than an elaboration and meditation on life. This is how he could take such an unnuanced, unsophisticated, unknowing gloss on the 1950s and the McCarthy era. He just absorbed media about it. And that media itself came from certain assumptions and understandings, and myths.
Most of us take don’t take Clooney’s guff with any sort of seriousness. As nobody expects the film industry to provide counterpoint films or at least a platform to discuss controversial themes, popular films like Clooney’s latest three — and like Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 911–absorb into the collective consciousness of a majority incapable of cynicism.
I think Clooney and the other hollywood types are unabashedly entertainers and realize that…granted do get a bit self-important at times. Putting folks in the seats is job one, everything else is secondary. I think it’s cute in fact, makes me want to muss up Georgie’s hair. I can’t comment on his latest offerring, didn’t see it. You?
No, I didn’t, but he is just so good looking!. . . .I mean, dang.
I agree that most entertainers feel that filling the seats is job one, but some like Clooney definately see themselves as messengers and stylists first, money men second.
I don’t think he had a message behind spy kids, confessions of a dangerous mind or ocean’s 11-13 other than some kick butt entertainment that makes you feel warm inside. The bulk of his work has been non-message oriented, non-thought provoking entertainment (ie the way it should be).
Of course, he has to make money. But he’s building his legend as a producer of provocative film too, no?
He’s the Jon Stewart of film–’courageous’ enough to broach the loaded topics of the day but afraid (or unable) to get too deep in the discussion. There’s just a little bit of shallowness to all this, no matter how serious he pretends to be.