Hollywood

I am an unabashed admirer of Hollywood. What “grinds my gears” as the infamous Peter Griffin would say, is what that implies to others. When I say “I love Hollywood”, people tend to think of reality television, MTV, VH1, all the ABC Family and CW teen dramas, anything involving the lives of celebrities, Fox News, perhaps MSNBC, and media in general. Let’s get one thing, no, several things straight; President Obama, if we may call him a celebrity, is not an actor (okay, well, maybe an actor of a different sort); whether shake cams grasp the uninteresting lives of New Jersey and South Beach alcoholics or not does not interest me; when Republicans force the shutdown of the government and Fox News dubs it a “slimdown” to make it sound less ominous, I am not thinking about the BAFTA Awards or Los Angeles Film Festival; when Kate Gosselin announces her twenty-somethingth child, I am even less interested than when Gwyneth Paltrow announces her third. If you can see where I am going with this, then I need not continue with the examples.

     One thing that bears mentioning is that the aforementioned examples or scenarios do, in fact, concern me as a human being first and foremost, and as an American. What I do not appreciate is the fact that I must do more than just explain what it is, exactly, that I love about Hollywood, but that I must defend myself. No one has to muster a defense for loving literature or theatre (at least no one should have to), so why must I defend my love of Hollywood and film? The answer is unfortunately simple; today, film, media, and world affairs are all closely related, at best, if not completely intertwined. Film is as direct to the minds of the people as commercials and news and the politics of everyone’s respectful representatives. Film can be used as propaganda telling us what we need to stand for or against and it is just as prone to ignorance and distraction as the rest of media and its coverage.
     When film becomes unarguably artful, when it puts down the gavel to experiment with the intimacy of personal life and I must continue to defend my position on Hollywood, that’s where I really snap. I suppose I dig myself a shallow grave when I say I enjoy the films of Woody Allen and Roman Polanski. Yes, yes, we can argue that the former may or may not be guilty of being the worst of our society and, thus, his character remains ambiguous enough to admire, but we all know the latter is guilty of the crime considering, well, everything surrounding him. But their work deserves a different light. We wouldn’t say the same of Jack the Ripper and his “work”, and if we were to find an equivalent in film we could not find one; if we were to find out, one day, that Michael Bay was involved in snuff film, then maybe we would have a comparison to consider. When I cannot enjoy an art-house film because people want to play judge, jury, and executioner, I get a little upset. If Woody Allen can be brought up on charges, found guilty in a fair trial by an impartial jury, and serve jail time, if Roman Polanski can be extradited to the United States to face the full wrath of the American justice system, I have no complaints— justice is highly important. But I will not stand to see art put up on trial in a courtroom or in the media.
     In short and in general, I am speaking of the life form of film, Hollywood, and film as art and the writers, directors, actors, makeup and lighting artists, photographers, and set designers who collaborate to bring us art. I hope this explanation makes others think differently of the question, "What does it mean to be an admirer of Hollywood?" Is it really drama breaking the fourth wall or how that appeals to the idea that “this can be me one day”? Or is it the character or the actor? Is it the story or the writing? The special effects that can only exist on the screen? Is it simply and generally the awe of the power that it holds over people? It is truly a loaded question, a personal question, and there is just so much more to say about it than "I like that movie."