John Mulaney said something true on stage at the Emmys. Mulaney is not a man of the right. He’s not hard left either, and he’s a genuinely smart (and hilarious) guy. I probably disagree with him politically on most things but while presenting an award to a room full of actors, he did something rare in Hollywood. He told the truth to their faces. And their laughter proved what he said was true.
He praised the Emmy nominees for knowing all their lines and implied that really all they do. He remarked on the fact that the actors at the Emmys likely started looking at their sides on set that very morning. (“Sides,” for the uninitiated, is industry talk for the script pages you need that day.) He sarcastically saluted their commitment in every single take… unless the camera was on the other actor, in which case they might head home early. And he celebrated their wide acting range. They can play a doctor. Or a cop. Or an FBI agent. Or a secret agent. And that’s it.
The room laughed. Warmly. Because his jokes weren’t really jokes, they were unspoken truths about the “artform” everyone was there to celebrate.
Even though modern Hollywood is generally lazy, it runs on a simple bit of egotistical logic: I’m on a TV show, people recognize me from the TV show, therefore my opinion matters more than yours. Mulaney’s quips pulled the rug out. You memorized a few lines over breakfast. That’s a job. It’s not a doctorate. It doesn’t make your opinions and often incredibly skewed views of the world more valid than someone else who also doesn’t talk about politics for a living. But it’s no secret that actors and those in Hollywood have a massively inflated sense of self importance, and they aren’t shy about it. And they think they’re important solely because they have a job that people see… despite the fact they don’t even try that hard at it.
To be fair, not all actors. Some take the craft seriously. They study the character, the motivation, what the story is actually saying. And storytelling matters. Good stories point at something true about people, about beauty, about God. I’d like to see a lot more conservatives devote their lives to that art.
But there’s a difference between a storyteller and an actor. I’ve made a couple of short films that may or may not have won a couple of awards (they did… humble brag). And what I learned is that in many cases, actors are like furniture. You place them. You move them. The director doesn’t like the read, so they say it a different way. Repeat until lunch.
So here’s my question. Should furniture have an opinion on foreign policy? And should you adopt that opinion because the furniture was on television?
Not that anyone needed more convincing, but a room full of Hollywood’s finest laughing along at their own lazy hollowness should settle it.
