Celebrities won’t save us. I say this with regret. Everything would be much simpler if they would. It would make “the resistance” much more straightforward. We could stop all the tedious work and coast to victory on pure star power. Think of the time we would not have to spend in organizing meetings.
Alas. A celebrity-studded 10-act, 18-actor live reading of a play based on the Mueller report will not be the vital spark to America’s soul, propelling an explosion of action resulting in a necessary reordering of society. Neither John Lithgow’s rarefied oration nor Justin Long’s, ah, less rarefied oration of reasons to suspect Donald Trump of obstruction of justice will do it. The handsome spectacle of Alfre Woodard and Zachary Quinto and Piper Perabo sitting at bunting-strewn tables on stage at Riverside church, intoning with great passion various excerpts of a lengthy document produced by the special counsel, will not, I’m afraid, be the first falling domino in a chain that leads inexorably to the downfall of Donald Trump.
But, you ask, what if they are joined by Kyra Sedgwick and Jason Alexander? Still no.
Perhaps I am being too breezy. The relevant thing about this twee stunt is not the staging of the stunt itself – the impact of which will amount to a night out in New York for a few people, and a dull night watching an online stream for a few more people – but rather the impulse behind it.
It is the impulse, deeply rooted in the American psyche, to search for a hero to rescue us from our misery. This impulse is nurtured by a lifetime of cultural reinforcement; by history books that leapfrog from leader to leader, and by a voracious pop culture machine geared to always, always find and inflate the next star. To sit back and passively absorb what America offers you is to live in an infinite river of manufactured heroes, parading past from the day you are born to the day you die, each rising to prominence for a few moments and then fading back into the crowd as a new star eclipses them. It is natural for us to apply this system to matters of great national import as well. When crises arise, we, the huddled masses, turn our gaze to the stars in search of a savior.
But that is not where saviors come from. Our current national crisis – which is the product of many decades of inequality and racism and cynical abuse of public institutions – will not be cured by Hollywood any more than it will be cured by a benevolent alien descending from heaven with a holy manual labeled “GOOD GOVERNMENT” (new Martian translation).
I’m sure that Michael Shannon and Annette Bening – those human fonts of charisma, who seem like very nice people that we would all love to be friends with – had noble motivations when they decided to spend an hour and fifteen minutes on stage with their fellow celebrities, trying and failing to infuse snippets of the Mueller report with dramatic tension. The problem is that as soon as we allow celebrities to command our attention and harness our hope, we find ourselves turned in the wrong direction. Salvation is not in the stars. It is right here on the dirty ground. We don’t need a leader. We need a movement.
Movements produce leaders. Not the other way around.
A candidate won’t save us. No matter who you like, you should go into this hellish campaign season well aware that no politician, no matter how righteous, will lead America out of our miasma of dysfunction. We must lead them. In a very real sense, the leader is unimportant. They are simply the one who happens to be walking at the front of an army of millions.
And an army of millions is what it will take to change things. Neither a celebrity reading of the Mueller report nor the Mueller report itself will solve our problems, because our problem is not just Donald Trump. Our problem is a well-established system that sucks up all of the capital produced by the vast majority of people and lavishes it on a small minority of people, and orders society as necessary to continue doing so.
To imagine that what will set things right is the pleasing timbre of Kevin Kline’s voice directing the public’s attention to a document detailing the petty outrages of our current ruling buffoon reveals a rather charming, childish understanding of what is happening here. The system that is designed to produce inequality is the same system that elevates celebrities to the status of demigods. Not all that surprising, if you think about it.
“The resistance” is a funny term. Though it conjures up visions of underground cells waging a shadowy war of revolution, in practice it amounts to a brand that can be profitably wielded by a lucky few, like everything else in capitalism.
I do not blame celebrities for wanting to do something. What they should do first, however, is step down from their pedestals. Work with their unions. Become a face in the mighty crowd, rather than the object of the crowd’s adulation. The first thing a celebrity must “resist” is his own ego. Then he must resist the pull of his own money. Then he can get down here with the rest of us and try to do something.
Your voice is truly wonderful, John Lithgow. But the clothes you’re wearing are far too nice. You might want to change into something a little more functional. Here on earth, things are about to get dirty.
Hamilton Nolan is a senior writer at Splinter. He lives in Brooklyn
