The Ghosts of Hollywood

I may be a little late getting into the game, but I would like to try to get my head around why it felt like the Brad Pitt-Jennifer Aniston-Angelina Jolie love triangle was happening in my own family, and why most everyone else I talk to felt this way too. God forbid my sister ever divorce her eminently likable husband for an irresistibly hunky fellow grad student down at the local coffee shop, but if she did I would at least feel like I have an emotional map to follow thanks to the roller coaster of feelings I’ve been through with Brad, Jen, and Angelina.

So, why do we all care so much? They are all three pleasing to look at on-screen, Jen with a remarkable freshness, and Brad and Angelina with Hall-Of-Fame caliber bone structure, and that certainly does not hurt. But the most important trait they share, and what everything else I am about to say rests on, is that they are good but not great actors. They are good actors, but they are great stars, and that is exactly how Hollywood wants it.

When was the last time you saw a stunning Hollywood movie (for me, The Matrix in 1999 I believe it was), or watched a truly original network television show (whenever they ended Seinfeld). Exceptions pop up periodically to prove the rule, but we get a seemingly endless stream of film and television entertainment that runs the gamut from mediocre to pretty good. I submit that the two dominant media of popular art, mainstream film and television, have slumped into their current doldrums by an accident of history, and that it has been the best thing to happen to Hollywood’s hold on America since the talkie.

Our intimacy with Brad, Jen, and Angelina has its roots in the emergence of the multiplex cinema and cable television, but if you had to finger a precise moment of conception it came on the day that Al Gore invented the internet. Multiplexes and cable TV radically increased the amount of space that Hollywood (which should be read as shorthand for the entertainment industry) had to fill with creative product. But the birth of the internet was truly like the Big Bang of a new universe, with the creation of literally infinite space for entertainment content. Hollywood has just as many talented people as it ever had, if not more. It is just that before multiplexes, DVD’s, cable, and the internet, the amount of space that entertainment media was expected to fill matched up roughly with the amount of talent necessary to fill the limited media outlets with quality product.

I bet if I was a fly on the wall in a Hollywood executive’s office in the early 1990’s, when the first eruptions of the “Age of Information” were about to transform the industry, I would have seen not a few 3-Xanax panic attacks as the reality hit that all of this space would have to be filled with content. How could any producer be expected to fill that much space with content that people would actually be willing to pay for? Hollywood spreads, and there was no way to stop it from filling the virgin media. Kudos to any producer who managed not to jump off the pier in Santa Monica, for within a few short years one single concept would hook Americans into their media like crack cocaine hooked our cities in the 1980’s. That concept: reality.

The concept may have been born by MTV’s “Real World”, blossomed with CBS’ “Survivor”, and now dominates the prime-time landscape. But I am talking about much more than that phenomenon known as “reality TV”. All of mainstream film and television has become window dressing, just entertaining enough to grab our attention to facilitate the real show in Hollywood, which is the reality show of celebrities’ “real” lives. Hollywood will never be able to fill an infinite media space with compelling entertainment, but Hollywood has solved that problem by creating an assembly-line approach to the creative process; Each of our entertainments is at its core the same Model T, if you will. Hollywood does not want or need to produce original or creative dramas, because the play is no longer the thing. The play is now just a cheap come-on line, but Americans have turned out to be suckers for a cheap come-on line. Perhaps all we ever wanted was to be voyeurs. But like locking your car helps keep an honest man honest, quality mainstream entertainment helped keep the American conversation relatively interesting for decades.

In America there is only one conversation, and it is about Hollywood. This is not so because we are shallow, but because we are too heterogeneous in our makeup to talk to each other about much else. We need to talk to each other about Hollywood if we are to connect. Without it, three questions into any conversation (How was your weekend?, How’s the family?, and How ‘bout this weather?) and we’re done. I don’t want to hear about your religion, I really don’t want to hear about your politics, and don’t start with the wooden duck decoy collection.

So, we talk about Hollywood, and Brad, Angelina, and Jen in particular, because not to talk about them would leave us all collectively mute (if you don’t believe me try a little experiment: go to a workplace lunchroom, where people talk to each other who would not be hanging out together if they didn’t share an employer- I guarantee you that if they are not complaining about their bosses they will be talking about Hollywood). But, much like its predecessor God, Hollywood is dead, struck down by the information superhighway that paved into our lives these past fifteen years. The Hollywood we now consume, the celebrity reality show, is roadkill.

But if the image of Americans as vultures pecking at a squished jack rabbit on an empty road in the Mojave Dessert between LA and Vegas is too grim, there is a perhaps more comfortable imagery ready at hand. My fellow Americans, we care so much about Brad, Angelina, and Jen because they are ghosts, and as ghosts must, they haunt us. Brad, Angelina, and Jen are the ghosts of the dead American (pop) culture (they are also the ghosts of Jack, Jackie, and Marilyn). They, and their lesser cousins (does anyone else gag when they are spooked by Kenny Chesney and Renee Zelwegger?) will continue to haunt us, and we will be stuck talking to each other about them, until a new, living culture, whether recognizably American or not, rises up to re-animate this big ghost town called America.

Until I catch wind of it, though, I will continue hiding from reality in my chosen sub-category of Hollywood, sports entertainment (what could be more haunting than watching my beloved Washington Redskins miss the playoffs year after year-perhaps they are haunted by their own racist mascot?). At least that way I have something to talk to my countrymen about.