The Unbearable Weight of Massive Arrogance and Narcissism

No, not the 44th President of the United States, but close – Hollywood’s “royalty” and its commoners

Is it too much to hope for Hollywood to remove itself from existence in a figurative self-immolation that leaves only ashes where it once stood? I think not, especially after this article managed to find its way into one of my “news” feeds:

For quite some time, I have regarded Hollywood in the same way George Bailey regarded Potter:

at the 00:01:50 mark

This from SAG-AFTRA President Fran “Is There Anyone More Annoying in Hollywood or Anywhere Else?” Drescher in a video message this week with an update on the negotiations telling members:

‘We are having an [sic] extremely productive negotiations that are laser focused on all of the crucial issues you told us are most important to you. We’re standing strong and we are going to achieve a seminal deal.’

Let’s not forget the brave and fearless allies of all of those in the support positions struggling to make a living in Fantasyland:

The message was signed by hundreds of members, including Hollywood stars like Meryl Streep, Jennifer Lawrence, Rami Malek, Quinta Brunson, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Ben Stiller, Neil Patrick Harris, Amy Schumer, and Amy Poehler.

Just for some perspective, here is the net worth (financially speaking, only) – of each one of these actors and actresses:

Meryl Streep – $160,000,000

Jennifer Lawrence – $175,000,000 – $15,000,000+ per film

Rami Malek – $20,000,000 – his inclusion in this gallery of the rich and infamous is relatively more honest, given his net worth is a fraction of everyone else on the list.

Quinta Brunson – $3,000,000 – like Rami Malek, her inclusion is relatively even more honest, but her measly $3M (when the other two white women’s are in the nine-digit territory) must be the result of systemic racism in Tinsel Town.

Julia Louis-Dreyfus – $250,000,000 – a hard $500,000 per episode of any TV show in which she is cast – talk about nice work if you can get it. Note that this is only from her acting work – let’s not forget that she is an heiress to the Louis Dreyfus Group (a French multinational corporation in the businesses of commodities trading, shipping, and real estate, and is due to receive an inheritance from her father’s hefty $4 billion estate*.

Ben Stiller – $200,000,000 – a Nepo baby – his dad was Jerry Stiller, and his mom was Anne Meara. He was funny in his own right at one time, and to his credit, seemed to be making his own way and not intentionally trading on his famous surname, but when bullied by the woke mob, he surrendered faster than French Marshal Henri Petain did to the Nazis.

Neil (Kneel) Patrick Harris – $50,000,000 – $225,000 per episode of any TV show in which he is cast.

Amy Schumer – $25,000,000 – another Nepo baby, of sorts – her uncle is Senator Charles “Chuck” Schumer (D-Sodom).

Amy Poehler – $25,000,000 – $200,000 per episode of any TV show in which she is cast.

The lack of self-awareness is breathtaking, even by Hollywood “standards.” Every single one of these signatories does so knowing that if push came to shove, none of them would ever have to work another day in their lives, so their ‘solidarity’ with the working stiffs is the ultimate empty gesture, borne of the height of arrogance.

I found this to be particularly rich:

‘We hope you’ve heard the message from us: This is an unprecedented inflection point in our industry, and what might be considered a good deal in any other years is simply not enough,’ the letter, obtained by Rolling Stone, says. ‘We feel that our wages, our craft, our creative freedom, and the power of our union have all been undermined in the last decade.’

Their craft, and their creative freedom? Seriously?

Good Lord, where to start?

‘Craft’

Hollywood’s “craft” is cheap, shallow, convenient entertainment available from any number of streaming services – the key words being, ‘cheap,’ and ‘shallow.’ Humourless sit-coms; vapid, self-absorbed dramas (both with the requisite homosexual characters and story lines); and talent/game/contest shows with utterly pointless competition among attention-starved contestants and hosts with personalities and character traits such that one would give almost anything to avoid ever having to encounter them in real life.

‘Creative freedom’

Just where the hell do these narcissists think they’re living, and working? Try getting homosexual-centric tripe like, “Bros”, “The Birdcage”, “Torch Song Trilogy”, or “The New Normal” screened and/or broadcast in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, or the UAE. The only market for such crude, offensive, degrading content is morally bankrupt societies like the one here in the US (and maybe Canada) where the cultural landscape has become as Times Beach, Missouri, after the demolition.

Then, just when I was sure it couldn’t have gotten any more unrealistic, this:

...everyone who signed the letter says they’re 'prepared to strike if it comes to that,' even though it’s not preferable because it 'brings incredible hardships to so many, and no one wants it.'

Hardships, huh? Like, having to cut back on things such as:

Your therapy for some issue from which you will never move on because to do so would take the attention and focus off of you?

The people you pay to take care of your pets that make for great props in images?

Your personal shoppers because playing, ‘let’s pretend’ for a living is just too demanding for you to have to make a trip to Ralph’s to purchase groceries for your dietician and/or chef to prepare the meal that you won’t eat because earlier in the day you learned that the corn in the cornmeal used to make the polenta was traumatized because it was harvested violently by machines and not humanely by human hands? 

The $20.00+ lattés from the local (kudos for supporting a local, small business) coffee shop that markets itself as a fair-trade only establishment doing business with only indigenous peoples in the most remote reaches of central America, or southeast Asia while in reality, it’s purchasing its beans from the same roasters as Starbucks, Caribou, and Seattle’s Best?

Dining at the most expensive and trendy restaurants in Los Angeles?

Landscapers, swimming-pool maintenance, undocumented domestics, et al.?

Those kinds of hardships? Yeah? Well, plenty of the folks who will still pay to see your films have had to endure the loss of their jobs. In some cases, many of the still-working poor are having to choose between being able to pay for an automotive repair, or new shoes for their kids; eating (after the kids and the dog have been fed) or gas in the car.

Here is some perspective: as of May 2023, there were a total of 6,097,000 people unemployed.

To provide some almost irrelevant context, the unemployment rate in April of 2023 was 3.4% – not bad, huh? Well, as one who has been unemployed far too frequently than I would care to admit, the rate couldn’t matter any less. When you are out of a job, regaining employment is all that matters.

So, to all who would point to that 3.4% as not being so bad, I would point out that in his nomination acceptance speech at the Democratic convention in New York City in 1992, when Governor of Arkansas Bill Clinton said that just one more person needed to lose his job for conditions to improve for the rest of America, and that person was George HW Bush, he was right.

Well, now only a few more people need to lose their jobs so that conditions can improve for the rest of America, and those people are everyone in Hollywood.

Some have lost their homes, and are scrambling to pay rent on a grossly over-priced apartment.

Year-End 2022 U.S. Foreclosure Market Report, which shows foreclosure activity — default notices, scheduled auctions and bank repossessions — were reported on 324,237 U.S. properties in 2022, up 115 percent from 2021 but down 34 percent from 2019, before the pandemic shook up the market. Foreclosure filings in 2022 were also down 89 percent from a peak of nearly 2.9 million in 2010.

Just a gentle reminder, these are the very same people you look down your nose at and mercilessly mock for their positive outlook (an absolute necessity for survival); for their politics; for their simple, unsophisticated tastes; and for their Judeo-Christian ethics that compel them to act graciously and compassionately toward others, including you.

How is it that no one in Hollywood understands that the rest of the nation does not need any of what its entities produce? This is probably the best opportunity we have had to show them just how unnecessary they are.

Manifestations of the epitome of that which is utterly and completely useless, worthless, and unnecessary.

An entertainment “industry” like Hollywood is a luxury only economically developed nations (with the exception of India), choose to afford. The only reason Soviet Russia had a film industry is because propaganda makes it a necessity.

Hollywood isn’t about saving lives, curing diseases, preserving life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, improving the standard of living, or even lifting people up. At the risk of intruding on Sasha Stone’s territory here, it isn’t even telling the stories that need to be told, anymore – at least, not in the way it once did.

The Fall of Hollywood's Empire

Now, it’s part of a much larger Democrat Party propaganda machine – an entire industry in and of itself.

There is other entertainment that is equally, if not more, convenient. Books, for example. Many people (myself included) can re-read books and get something new out of them every time. Classics are like that – The Old Man and the Sea (Hemingway), Moby Dick (Melville), Paradise Lost (Milton), The Grapes of Wrath (Steinbeck), The Count of Monte Cristo (Dumas), Watership Down (Adams), and, Lord Jim (Conrad), to name a few.

I have an entire library of music including classical, jazz, R&B, rock n’ roll, American Songbook standards and American pop music when it was actually good – real talent, meaningful lyrics (not, “Yummy, yummy, yummy, I’ve got love in my tummy…” by Ohio Express), and no hip-hop/rap.

I’m also building a physical library (DVDs, Blu-ray) of worthwhile titles from when Hollywood produced films that most everyone could enjoy without the stories being told appealing to the lowest common denominator, or for a specific, narrowly defined demographic acceptable only to a cultural elite. That’s the purpose independent, art-house films serve.

Oh, how I wish those courageous souls in Hollywood had the spine to follow through.

Please, join the others already on strike - and stay there. Justice – poetic and otherwise – would be for your strike to be resolved, only to have your “industry” meet the same fate as Bud Light, except with no chance for, and no possibility of, recovery.

This is where there is hope, however, albeit faint – that economic conditions force the studios, production companies, and financiers to find solutions that don’t involve the high priced, big-ticket celebrities, and we don’t have to see them on the screen, or hear them lecture us about how our we are racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, transphobic, or phobic in any number of ways because of the values we hold.

We don’t have to see or hear from them at all, if we simply seek our entertainment elsewhere.

Thank you, dear reader, for taking the time to read my rant.

Typically, my preference is to be a little more thoughtful and well-reasoned in my arguments, but in the immortal words of that most misunderstood mariner, Popeye the Sailor, “I’ve had all I can stands ‘til I can’t stands no more!”

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*Poor Julia – she’ll have to share it with two other siblings, leaving her with only a little more than $1.3B. Let’s pray for her.