Oprah is problematic on the screen. It is impossible for Oprah to not be Oprah. This is one reason great actors are often, more or less, great recluses. The less we know them, the more we believe them. I was writing about this in regards to THE BUTLER, but it never took off so I never posted it, but it sorta went like this: ACTOR ACTRESS ACTIVIST What American audiences rightfully resent is not the particular cause per se, but rather the casting equivalent of an authorial trespass; the linkage of so many loudmouth luminaries—none of whom need to tell us how they vote, we know, thanks—getting together to ruin a potentially good story with the impossible to ignore political baggage of their mere presence. What’s annoying about the liberally tendentious Hollywood movie with ensemble activist cast, is the same thing which everyday Americans mildly resent about celebrity activism in general: the illegitimate exchange rate of cultural currency occurring between Celebrity As Entertainer and Celebrity As Advocate. The subtext of the cynical sneers and eye-rolls is at the implication: “I’ve been in your homes entertaining you for years now, don’t you think you owe it to me to pay attention to my politics?” While the rest of the population has to make up their individual patchwork politics out of the rag ends of average experience, the celebrity merely has to make a career choice of what film to do next . . . When Oprah Winfrey slaps her Black Panther son across the face for talking back to his father who is a butler in the Johnson White House, we are decidedly through the looking glass of all objective interpretation. It is impossible for America to interpret this cinematic moment objectively: we, helplessly, unconsciously recall everything Oprah has ever said to us on her talk show, everything that ever happened to us during her talk show, all the milestones in our own lives which Oprah has been a peripheral part of thanks to her talk show, and so on . . . You can imagine certain audiences cheering this moment, and other ones sneering at it, and the line between those two audiences is where sentimentality becomes propaganda, and sincerity becomes camp. As a result, every such moment in The Butler feels overburdened with its own self-conscious understanding that the narrative it’s a part of is not just a story but also the cultural exchange equivalent of a “teachable moment, which is, either way you lean politically, essentially condescending.
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 04:41:58 +0000
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