Goodbye Jessica Lange
I trot this piece out every time I get pissed at Hollywood. I kind of hope the arrogant bitch it’s addressed to is haughty enough to Google her name. She’ll spit at this old girl’s lamentations, but, I got to spit first.
What prompted this particular resurrection was news of Jessica Lange’s latest round of bleating, bewailing the horrible America she has made her fortune in.
As I read this over again, I see that when I wrote it, I was still naive enough to believe that Americans would rally around the troops and Hollywood would be shamed into elevating their sights slightly higher than the groins that they usually focus on. I was damnably foolish to think so. Hollywood is a whore better pimped to the global market where Ameri-phobes relish images of America’s demise.
At the time, I felt saddened by Lange’s comportment. Now I simply think the aging bitch just needs to shut up. I’ve gotten over Hollywood’s betrayal, though I haven’t seen a new movie since 2001 and will likely not see one again before I die. I am an unforgiving woman. Plus I am damn sick of groins.
From 2004 …..
Goodbye Miss Lange
You live in a reality very different from mine. You speak from a place I have never journeyed to, nor hope to. It is a place, it seems, where, for periods of time, you have the experience of constructing a world absolutely obedient to your dictates. It is peopled with the characters you want, to move the story you have scripted, to a conclusion you desire. You are a type of god, for a while, when making a movie. You commute to another dimension when you leave for work in the morning. And like a god, when you decide that the story is over, it’s over. Scratch that creation, dismiss the cast, end that world. Think it, desire it, and it will be. The magic of movies.
At one time in our mutual lives we were similar. Young women growing up in comfort during a tumultuous time in a huge country named America. We were raised on the same newscasts, personalities, advertisements, and booby sock culture. And all of us have had some kind of dreams about Hollywood.
Hollywood, in the American mind, was as indelible as apple pie, blue-sky canopied 4th of July picnics, hot, squirmy Sunday school mornings, lawn mowers buzzing through our windows, the latest song coming from our dashboard radios as we drove to the same silver screens twinkling across the land of America. And there, under star bedazzled skies, convertible tops down, nestled in the arm of our nervous dates, we lifted our face to the silver screen and allowed you to take us into your magic.
We trusted Hollywood with the transport of our hearts and desires, we permitted you the use of our sacred thoughts and our most eviscerating pains, we trusted you to pretend to be us, up there on that screen. We trusted you to safeguard the holy drama of the human condition, and to speak the stories of our lives well, with eloquence and passion, dignity and grace.
We trusted you to know us, bec
ause you were messengers from our finer selves, to the lands that our dreams would never, ever quite take us . So, you were our emissaries and you, for a very long time, honored yourselves, and us, by seeking the highest and best there is to being human and saying. “Hey guys…..you can be all that you dream. The human condition is sublime and we are so much a graced and wonderful people. We will share with you how to dream your highest dreams.” The American dreams.
And we believed, and we never, ever thought to guard against you. You see, I think we started to think you were gods too, and if you were - well, then - you wouldn’t lead us wrong. Because you, Miss Lange, were in that convertible, at the drive-in the same as I was. And, unlike most of us, you answered the Hollywood magic with a magnificent infusion of your own. You traveled West, to the land that called to us all, and you took our stories, your story, with you. I have always held you to be among the best. I have loved your work. I just had no idea that you had gone so far away from the drive-in.
You have broken my heart. You have broken all of our hearts. That is what you don’t understand. When Hollywood started experimenting with those darker strains of our nature, we were all fascinated. It was so taboo, so seemingly sophisticated to keep nudging these darker things into the light of day. After all, we are a superior breed, us Americans, we are a sophisticated people, and surely, we can shed light on all this darkness, but…. first let us examine, in minute and grisly detail, all that is scum in the human condition. And let us be so enlightened as to elevate what is base and undeniably ugly, into what is sublime and desirable. Yes, we are a new age. We are Aquarius, navigators of the awakening.
And you lied. For awhile, so, so many of us followed. Loved it. Cherished it. There is no denying self-gratification is a blast, especially if it is instant -as you convinced us for so long that it was our right to expect. Nothing any more had consequences and if it did, we would find reasons to justify it. Hey, we, too, can do the Hollywood Magical Moment.
We can script our own realities and the opposition be damned. We are gods and we will tell the world how they ought to be arranging the human soul and the consciousness of mankind. Now sign on or we will erase you. We will sneer at you. We will call you knee jerk reactionaries, country bumpkins, the uneducated the unsophisticated. And we will demonstrate our contempt with flagrant abandon and we will mesmerize you with utter trash.
And you have. Everyone is hooked on Survivor. How ironic. Because we believed you, and we followed your many Pied Pipers, survival might just very well be the main theme for all of us Americans for the next 100 years. And none of it will play well on the silver screen. Maybe that is why you hate this war so much. It is the final red stamp on your production. It is the loudest scream for CUT that you will ever hear. It is the end of the road.
Do you imagine that if you do not speak for 70% of us, that your stories do? Do you, like Osama bin Laden, assume your flabby public, the enshrined couch potato millions, have not the will to fight back? Guess what. You are wrong. Remember, all of those years when you told the real story about us Americans, when you said we were the finest and the bravest and the best? Well, Hollywood, you can’t take it back now. Because it was true then and it is true now.
It is you who have walked far away from it. The rest of us, all the other millions who shared the backseat of convertibles with you? Well, we have turned back. Look at us, millions of us. See us, we are walking away from this land of babble and lies that we let you lead us to. 
Back to the land of the America that birthed us and nurtured us and kept us safe on those blue sky canopied 4th of July days, squirmy, hot Sunday School mornings, moonlit, star tossed drive-in nights. We are returning to America, because after all this long, hard road, we find that we are Americans. I just want to invite you back with us Miss Lang. At least to visit. Have you talked to us lately? Oh, you have been talking down to us, but…. I have an idea. Why don’t you pretend that you are doing research into who Americans are because you have to portray us in a new movie. Lots of new movies. If you want authentic dialogue, you better learn to hear our voices. And maybe, just maybe, you will come home, once again, to your own. Until then, I sadly, turn away.
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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 24th, 2008 at 10:30 pm and is filed under America, Culture and Family, Golden Oldies, Hollywood, Liberals Suck. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
"Conjure magic for them and they'll be distracted. Take away their freedom, and still they'll roar. The beating heart of Rome is not the marble of the Senate. It's the sand of the Coliseum. He'll bring them death... and they will love him for it."
