REPORT: Movie Stars Are Relearning The Fine Art Of Shutting The Hell Up About Politics
Ladies and gentlemen, they CAN be taught
In the latest example of the culture trending away from the woke era of intentionally divisive discussion, “multiple high-profile actors and jury members have avoided questions about domestic and international political crises” at the Berlin Film Festival this year, Deadline reports. “That despite the best efforts of journalists to engage actors and filmmakers on subjects of a political nature.”
Put another way, the actors have gotten wise to the game that reporters play by prompting opinions that have nothing to do with their art. Controversy translates to attention, which is another word for ‘revenue’ in the media ecosystem. “I think we live in a strangely algorithmic and divided world right now”, Neal Patrick Harris said in response to a loaded question. “And so as artists, I’m always interested in doing things that are apolitical, because we’re all as humans wanting to connect in some way. That’s why we experience things together.” Which is true of art, but not politics.
“I don’t think I am in the position to really talk about the political situation in the U.S., and also I cannot presume to say I understand how it is”, Michelle Yeoh said in response to another loaded question. “So, best not to talk about something I don’t know about.” Again, this is true of art, but not politics. In politics, people pretend to know a lot about everything and know very little once in power. Yeoh gets plenty of work because she has actual talent, and refrains from career suicide though public expression of uninformed, divisive opinions, which keeps her popular.
German reporters were determined to get answers to the questions that matter at a cinema festival, such as free health insurance. “It’s embarrassing to say the film isn’t political”, the ARD journalist is quoted. “Without proper health insurance, I wouldn’t be here. I had cancer myself. So the film is political, and this festival must be political.” Cancer is not supposed to be political, and his free health insurance is a happy accident of the United States taxpayer spending trillions of dollars on the security of Europe over decades, so I would tell him to stuff it, and my movie would instantly lose half its potential audience.
Herein lies the genius of a Neal Patrick Harris or a Michelle Yeoh: they avoid the loaded question altogether because they want their films to succeed. Rachel Zegler, by contrast, could not shut up about her divisive political opinions, and tanked the live action Snow White film to the tune of $170 million. After a long drought of work, Zegler is now slated to shoot She Gets It From Me, an independent film “that tests the definition of the word ‘family’”, according to Variety. Zegler plays an adoptee bride who insists on meeting her birth mother before the wedding. The movie reportedly still has no distributor, a Hollywood orphan.
As recently noted, Pedro Pascal is also disappearing from the blockbuster roles, instead taking on the most experimental, boundary-breaking parts available, in films that independent auteurs make on smaller budgets. The outspoken political line-readers are migrating one way while the verbally continent movie stars go the other way. Sensationalism always sells, but the only beneficiaries of sensational Hollywood opinion journalism are the opinion journalists, and nobody cares what they think anymore.
The Kamala Harris campaign shelled out many millions for movie star endorsements that did not move the needle on Election Day. Americans do not care what actors think about American politics, or any other country’s politics, for that matter. Europeans pretend that they care about the art more than Americans, but this is false. What the European auteur values most is art that changes the world. American cinema consumers just want art that entertains them. They don’t want lectures, and unless it is a gospel film, they do not enjoy altar calls.
The era of big blockbusters may be over, indeed the cinema itself may be a lost art form already. There is still big money to be made, however, and it will be made by the actors who learn the fine art of shutting the hell up about their political opinions. The reader may object to this ‘new rule’, but it is important to recognize that it has always applied to conservatives in Hollywood, especially in the last decade, the lost decade of woke.
Just ask Gina Carano, or better yet, just watch the box office performance of The Mandalorian & Grogu this May with Pedro, but without Carano. The ‘delta’ between expenditures and box office performance on that one will be informative. Whatever the polls say about electoral politics, the cultural vibe shift is accelerating at a constant rate of budgetary gravity.