Outrage is the lifeblood of the internet, and nothing fuels
online outrage quite like a celebrity going off-script and passionately challenging
the socially approved pieties of political correctness.
Actor Gary Oldman is not a movie star who keeps playing himself over and over again. He’s an
actual actor with a perfectionist’s
work ethic and incredible range, having played everyone from Beethoven, Sid
Vicious, and Lee Harvey Oswald to Dracula, George Smiley, and Sirius Black.
Oldman is the kind of professional who gets the work done rather than whip up
tabloid-worthy, offstage scandal.
Until last weekend, that is. He caused a perfect storm of
internet indignation when he held nothing back in a fiery, wide-ranging interview
with Playboy. In it Oldman verbally savaged everyone from Nancy Pelosi (a
“f***ing useless c**t”) to the Golden Globes’ Hollywood Foreign Press
Association (“90 nobodies having a wank”). He dismissed everything from his own
movies (“Most of my work I would just stomp into the ground and start over
again”) to reality TV (“the museum of social decay”).
But the primary target of his ire was the hypocrisy of
political correctness, the kneejerk condemnation of others for social
transgressions of which we’ve all been guilty. “I just think political
correctness is crap,” Oldman began when asked about Mel Gibson’s infamous,
career-wounding meltdown. “I don’t know about Mel. He got drunk and said a few
things, but we’ve all said those things. We’re all f***ing hypocrites. That’s
what I think about it. The policeman who arrested him has never used the
word ni**er or that f***ing Jew? I’m being brutally honest here.
It’s the hypocrisy of it that drives me crazy.”
He went on to sympathize with Alec Baldwin for hurling an
anti-gay slur at an annoying paparazzo: “I don’t blame him… We all hide and try
to be so politically correct. That’s what gets me. It’s just the sheer
hypocrisy of everyone, that we all stand on this thing going, ‘Isn’t that
shocking?’”
Ironically, that’s just the response his comments
engendered. As The Federalist’s Mollie Hemingway put
it, “People lost their everliving minds.” Virtually every entertainment and
pop culture website covered the interview, or at least highlighted selected
portions of it that were guaranteed to evoke the most outrage. Out-of-context
quotes and headlines like “Gary Oldman Sides with Homophobic Alec Baldwin and
Anti-Semitic Mel Gibson!” spread like hot Nutella.
It didn’t help that Oldman let slip hints of his political
conservatism, “views and opinions that most of [Hollywood] doesn’t share.” Recently
I wrote an article
for Acculturated in which I cautioned actors and actresses against allowing
their political activism to overshadow their art, lest they alienate viewers
who no longer might be able to separate the activists from their acting roles.
Oldman has expressed some conservative/libertarian leanings in the past but he certainly
never pushed them as far or as openly as, say, Matt Damon pushes his
progressive politics. As a Hollywood conservative, Oldman noted, “you don’t
come out and talk about these things, for obvious reasons.”
Sure enough, when he did, the internet lit up. Conservative
websites embraced Oldman’s progressive-bashing. Progressive websites bashed
Oldman’s anti-PC bashing. Jewish websites bashed Oldman’s apparent Gibson-defending.
Jezebel
irrelevantly bashed his age (56) and his foul language, which is rather
hypocritical considering their own unabashed swearing.
Regrettably, all this internet noise overshadowed some more interesting
and insightful bits from Oldman’s interview, such as his pessimist view that
culturally, politically, and every other way, “we’re up sh*t creek without a
paddle or a compass.” He is skeptical that we can rise above a culture ruled by
narcissism, artistic mediocrity, and political correctness.
But it was his assault on
the latter that struck a nerve, and regardless of how one may interpret some of
Gary Oldman’s freewheeling comments or his politics, his passionate honesty may
have sparked a necessary conversation. In crucial ways we are up sh*t creek without a compass – a moral compass. And perhaps throwing
off the chains of political correctness is the first step toward a more honest
cultural self-examination.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 6/26/14)
