When I was young, going to the movies was an adventure. I think cinema has always been in 4D, you're physically sitting in a theatre, but in your dreams you're somewhere else. And I remember how it was sensory: the buttery haze of popcorn, the taste of sugary and insanely expensive choc tops and the sticky spot on the carpet you quietly hoped was just lemonade. It would even be a thrill to watch the ham-fisted advertising before the main event, with low res slideshows and cheesy voiceovers for local businesses. The slides would crackle and pop onto the screen and you'd sit there thinking, I walked past that wallpaper emporium a few minutes ago! And then the curtains would move farther apart and the stars on that big screen seemed larger than life. I just realised that's because of the big screen. But it was mostly because they had that appealing mystique. They weren't plagued by the concerns of the common man, they were too busy flying around in jets and driving Lambos on Lake Como, or being interesting and cool on those TV interview shows. Movie stars were magnificent representations of atypical desires amidst the ordinary lives of us. They were there to give you a boost over the razor wire when you needed to escape the prison of reality. It was a dream, a brisk fantasy that someday you might have a life similar, where money wouldn't be a problem, where you were cool and desirable and could date those who were 'hot' instead of those who were 'not', even though you were 'not'. I mean, just look at Fred Flintstone and Barney Rubble, those guys have been an unceasing source of hope for the average dude since the 1960s.
So, at the very least, going to the movies was just under two hours of not having to think about the mundane concerns of us mere mortals. This includes things like, you know, people not using towels at the gym, people who dump shopping carts outside their apartment buildings, ingrown toenails, or those drivers who speed up to close the gap when they see you've just put your blinker on to change lanes, or people who open boxes in department stores to look at the item inside and then decide not to buy it and put it back, but it doesn't fit anymore because the box is misshapen and ripped and then the product in question is no longer considered viable by the store and has to be written off and this forces up prices so we all have to pay more for toasters and footspas. You know, stuff like that. If you were a movie star you'd have your own gym and Argyle, your limo driver, would deal with the bad drivers (except for driving around Lake Como in your Lambo of course).
That escape hinged on this mystique, right up until the stars decided we needed to know them more and dream them less. They just thought it would be a good idea to make themselves more relatable. But I maintain that before they were relatable, they were magical and we'd fill in the gaps, with the Lambos and Limos and the jet-setting life. Now we know everything about them. Once upon a time, you'd sit back and drift into a dream: I wonder what Arnie is up to right now? ahhh, he's probably in his submarine in Seychelles with a couple of supermodels keeping things pressurized. But these days, it's more likely you'll jump up and find your phone, I wonder what Megan Fox is up to at the moment? I'll have a look on the internet, oh, here's something: "If you eat Chinese food, your farts come out like Chinese food. If you eat Mexican food, your farts come out like Mexican food." Thanks Meg. Actors who are meant to be on the big screen creating mystique, now spend more time on small screens talking about stuff we'd really prefer not to know. Movie stars used to give us an escape from reality, but now we need to escape from them. This is especially true when they go on social media and sing Imagine during a pandemic, or to tell us they just took a dump, or to complain about their noisy Beverly Hills neighbour who's building a pool house. That mystique—think Greta Garbo’s aloofness or Humphry Bogart’s enigmatic cool—was Hollywood’s secret sauce. Now, with stars live-tweeting their breakfast and TikToking their gym routines, it’s all laid bare. There's no room for gap-filling imagination, no larger-than-life aura. The big screen used to make them gods; now the small screen shrinks them to just another pipsqueak influencer. That constant oversharing kills the distance that made them special. We're not projecting dreams onto them anymore, just yawnscrolling through their mundane updates. They're no longer larger than life in the big screen sense, because their movies share the same small screen as that guy on tiktok who 'unboxes' things.
"As far as I’m concerned, you should step away from saying anything so that you can still be seen by the audience in any character."
Kurt Russell
Maybe the movie stars who come down to our level do so because they've realised how vacuous and brain dead their lives really are. If that's so, then some of them clearly decide to go the extra mile and become leading experts in geopolitical machinations and inégalités sociales. Maybe, as it slowly emerges they're nothing more than carnies with better teeth and clothes, they start thinking they've got something to offer in terms of real insight into complex issues. In most cases, this is laughable. Sean Penn, has been acting since childhood and is an excellent performer and director, but off screen, Sean is to geopolitical analysis what Steven Seagal is to martial arts. His take on world affairs is ever so serious and his 'position' as an actor, apparently makes him a crucial piece on the chessboard of world affairs. In 2005, he was in New Orleans with a shotgun and a film crew, then he was in Cuba, Haiti and now Ukraine, convinced he could be part of the solution to each crisis. He's become one of those people I like to call, Geolocationally Ordained and Derived Subject Matter Experts or GODSME. Reading isn't required to be a GODSME, you just have to use this phrase as a talisman: 'Well, I've beeeen to...' If you can say you've been there, then naturally you must insist that you know what you're talking about. No college degree for Sean, he didn't even finish high school and we know why and fair enough—he was busy acting, honing his craft to become Sean Penn. But just like playing an instrument, you need to do it to get better at it. If you want to hone your craft and grow your profile you must commit. And you just can't be in two places at the same time, even if you're famous. So for Sean, with education swapped for movies, it meant hard work, street smarts and hustle, but with an often eye-rolling side hustle for making off screen crises into opportunities for close-ups.
There’s an interesting compare and contrast between Sean Penn and Jaden Smith, whose famous dad has his own role in Hollywood’s decline, (I’ll 'slap' that saga onto this piece later). Sean and Jayden share similarities, both are child stars helped through family connections. Leo Penn, actor-turned-director, for Sean and A-lister Will Smith for Jaden. If Leo taught his son to fish for his career, Will didn't even give so much as a handheld reel to Jaden, who prefers putting his feet up on the cooler while his dad angles for roles. Penn’s hustle soared with Taps (1981), then his legendary stoner Jeff Spicoli in Fast Times at Ridgemont High (1982). But Jaden misfired. The one standout is his first film, co-starring with his dad and playing the son of Will's character Chris Gardner in The Pursuit of Happyness (2006), a thoughtful film based on a true story. The unnecessary (when are they not?) and confusing remake of The Karate Kid (2010) mostly fizzed and he again co-starred with his dad in the now forgotten After Earth (2013) which was a hot mess and not helped by its association with Scientology.
With no resilience, little evidence of a work ethic and no street smarts, it seems Jaden couldn’t hustle his way out of a wet paper bag. His career is a non-starter. Way back in 2005, Penn rowed into Hurricane Katrina with a shotgun and film crew, saving a few folks despite the absurdity of the optics. Jaden crashed Kanye West's nuptials dressed in a white Batman costume and wore a castle on his head to the Grammys, both a 'hold my beer' as far as absurd optics go. I’d take Penn’s delusions—he’s Batman sans costume—over Jaden’s style flops any day. If Penn is to geopolitics what Seagal is to martial arts, then Jaden is to fashion, what Steven Seagal is to blues guitar. Sean Penn has heart and even a common touch; his merits as an artist almost outweigh his misguided conviction. Sure he's loud and angry, but you can't deny he's occasionally effective. But here's the biggest point of departure: one of them is a two-time Oscar winner, the other is apparently X’s court intellectual. And he even has his own castle. I'll allow him to enlighten you: “If newborn babies could speak, they’d be the most intelligent beings on earth.” Thanks Jaden.
There’s a quiet resentment about formal education in Hollywood. Martin Sheen once reflected that his career obsession might’ve left his sons, Emilio, Ramon, and Charlie, (who are all pals with Sean Penn) without the schooling he’d hoped for, their paths veering early to acting. Cue the refrain: You just can’t be two places at once, even if you're famous. Jaden's X posts seem to draw from the same well. But in his case, it's not because he's swapping education for acting, he's just swapping it for public displays of lunacy. Unlike Martin Sheen, he's not career obsessed—he's self-obsessed. This kid just might be the first person who can be in two places at the same time because he's out of his mind. Here's another gem from X: "If Everybody In The World Dropped Out Of School We Would Have A Much More Intelligent Society." Good point Jayden and can I add that we'd have more people using capital letters for every word in every sentence—even for all the articles and prepositions. Then there’s Cate Blanchett, who gives astonishing speeches that don't make much in the way of sense. In 2010, she dressed up like a university lecturer and delivered the keynote at the Australian Performing Arts Market in Adelaide. It was a speech so stuffed with pretentious diction it became accidental comedy, which as you no doubt know, is the second best kind of comedy. (In case you don't know, the best kind of comedy is the Mel Brooks kind of comedy.) Here's a couple of gems from that speech, delivered with Cate's fierce and ever-so-serious gaze over some black rimmed glasses she picked up from wardrobe:
"The arts operate at the core of human identity and existence. They operate at the cutting edge of a science that is now trying to unravel the puzzle of consciousness and identity. 'Our experience, for all that we are the subject of it, is a mystery to us': Emerson's wonderful hymn to the mystery of experience is not a piece of whimsy. It touches on the enduring source of cultural power in human life. How did we come to know, to understand, to grow? When did the pieces fall into place? Not on some graph. The graph is proof and proof comes afterwards. Proof is important to science because scientists start with speculation and conjecture to arrive at reality. Our job is to change reality, to challenge it, not prove it and explain it."
But there is more (and it starts with 'but there is more...'
"But there is more. We do more than all that. We must remember the arts do more than just that. We process experience and make experience available and understandable. We change people's lives, at the risk of our own. We change countries, governments, history, gravity. After gravity, culture is the thing that holds humanity in place, in an otherwise constantly shifting and, let's face it, tiny outcrop in the middle of an infinity of nowhere."
Likewise, her UN refugee talks or climate rants sound profound before you realise it's utter bosh in about the time it takes for your teenage son to find your stash of Oreos. These 'speeches' are just vapor, with a costume change for a character shaped by an algorithm that loves a 'deep thinker.' These are the new Hollywood stars: overexposed, overconfident and in this particular case, kind of hilarious. This dross is absurdly transparent, it's nothing but clumsy and pretentious elite overreach. Get on with the real acting, you're very good at that. Also, I don't know if you remember me Cate, but I was an extra in a terrible, ironically-named film of yours called Truth (2015). Anyway, I was making a coffee in the foyer of the studio at Fox Sydney and an AD kicked me off the espresso machine because you 'were arriving'. I had to shuffle outside so you could saunter in. What the hell is even that? You do realise you're not actually royalty right? My dear Cate, you just played a queen (quite well I might add and everything you said from both those scripts actually made sense—unlike your speeches).
I didn't end up making that coffee, because I was called in to pretend to be sleeping on a pretend airplane.
It seems like Kurt Russell is the gold standard. He shuns the king’s crown, tosses aside the court intellectual’s robe (and nose glasses), and dons a fool’s cap—bells and all—as a self-declared jester. That choice gives his take on the movie game an ironic depth and wisdom his Hollywood peers scramble to fake. They strain for profundity, but this guy just gets it:
“I’ve always been someone who felt we are court jesters. That’s what we do. As far as I’m concerned, you should step away from saying anything so that you can still be seen by the audience in any character. There’s no reason entertainers can’t learn just as much as anybody else about a subject, whatever it is. But I think that what’s sad about it is that they lose their status as a court jester. And I’m a court jester. That’s what I was born to do.”
But there's more...
“A court jester isn’t always funny. A court jester is the only one who can walk into the castle and put the king down as long as he doesn’t hit too close to home. I think that’s been a big, important part of all cultures throughout history, and I’d like to see it stay in ours.”
Court jester, Ricky Gervais, pointed out Hollywood's formal education deficit as host of the Golden Globes:
"So if you do win an award tonight, don’t use it as a platform to make a political speech. You’re in no position to lecture the public about anything. You know nothing about the real world. Most of you spent less time in school than Greta Thunberg."
That most of them are barely educated is out of necessity because film and television production takes time. Russell's point that 'entertainers can learn just as much as anybody' is true, but in reality, there's just no room for school. I used to work in the industry when I was in my late teens, because I didn't want to work at a fast food joint and TV work paid more. I remember seeing child stars on set with their tutors and they'd do nothing. I was an extra on Australian soap operas in the 1980s and nobody was checking any of the child stars' homework. So 'Kate had class today' meant she sat and read her lines for a while between takes with her token tutor. Most successful actors have been honed to perfection in their craft from childhood, but that often means missing out on the kind of broad education that’d give them real depth on politics or society. Court jester Kurt Russell made his first film when he was eleven years old, it was called It Happened at the World's Fair (1963) where his character kicks Elvis in the shin. Kurt took a well worn path through the Hollywood system, the Disney phase as a teen and then leading roles in Escape from New York (1981) and The Thing (1982). Apparently, he's easy to work with and a hard worker. Russell took over directing Tombstone (1993) because the original director was fired a third of the way into production. Kurt didn't want any credit for it, he was literally the showrunner, but he insisted they bring in another director to take the credit for his hard work. Kurt's a devoted jester.
“Public dreaming’s fading—screens shrank, attention split. We used to dream big, together.”
George Miller
Can you feel the tension? a system that builds stars doesn’t always build thinkers. I keep saying you can't be in two places at the same time, but I should also add that you can't be two (or three, or four?) different people at the same time either. Sure, on screen, depending on opportunity and skill, you can be as many people as you want to be. But you can't be a court jester and a court intellectual at the same time, you have to be one or the other. So when they grandstand, they’re trying be too many things at once. It fails, because consumers can tell it’s not backed by much beyond a scriptwriter’s talking points, or it's just another moonshot for social desirability. I get that social desirability angle, the acting game is tough, you get rejected so much it starts to hurt. I've been rejected scores of times for adverts. It's not pleasant and I'm not even an actor, it's not my job. I can understand the half-baked rants about the latest fashionable cause driven by social desirability, but it shatters the mystique even more. Wouldn't it be crazy if a Hollywood veteran, leading man and acting legend, said something in his role as a court jester, that made it possible for him to be those two things at the same time—a court jester and a court intellectual? It's ironic that Kurt Russell, a guy who knows his job is to entertain, not enlighten, has somehow from that perspective, wound up enlightening us more than anybody. Russell, who just wants to be himself off screen, is the accidental court intellectual and jester at the same time. Like with Tombstone, he's playing the two most important roles perfectly and that's precisely because he doesn't want to. His insight is a multi-layered, 'irony lasagna'—minus the cheese. Kurt Russell's statement resonates with the rest of us like subwoofers on a Miami party cruiser. He's the Cincinnatus of cinema. Is it any wonder he's so liked?
Hollywood’s losing the magic because its stars are overreaching. Audiences tune out when they find the hypocrisy and the elitism unbearable. The studio system, the Academy and the creatives have all pushed woke crusades so hard that studios are finding it harder to make money in an industry where it's already difficult to make money. They're banking on these niche causes driven by people who are too elite to enjoy popular movies in the first place. It's madness. Cinema goers don't need a lecture, just a good story to get lost in will do just fine. A good cinematic narrative demands a sonic punch and a visual sweep with the timing of a Rolex, not an offscreen rant that makes it hard to see the character. Disney's Snow White (2025) released this week, but the anti-woke backlash has been building in place of the usual 'buzz' and anticipation for two years. Why? Because its star, Rachel Zegler, fell out of the fashionable cause tree and hit every branch on the way down. She's an industry novice, with no substantial body of work and yet she uses her biggest film as an expensive contrivance for desirability-seeking rants. Much like Blanchett, Rachel doesn't know what she's talking about. And that's just off-screen, the film itself is yet another tired and unnecessary remake forced into a progressive shape by too many voices and algorithms. People hate this, they just want an authentic connection to a good tale. They want to invest in the characters, which is hard to do when you loathe the actors.
Films should be beautiful, thoughtful, confronting, memorable. Take Peter Weir's Master and Commander:The Far Side of the World (2003), Quentin Tarantino's Jackie Brown (1997) or Kevin Costner's Dances with Wolves (1990), where Dean Semler’s Oscar-winning cinematography turns prairies into poetry, synced gloriously with John Barry’s epic score to draw you in. Films like these grab you and don't let go. You go in, sit down, smell the popcorn, the lights go down and before you know it, you're in two places at the same time. When the Oscars meant something, films were 'public dreaming,' as George Miller calls it, where cinema is a collective gasp in the dark. Miller says films like these are our 'campfire', but now they're just a bonfire of vanity. Hollywood was hit by the pandemic and when Will Smith hit Chris Rock, he slapped us awake too—and out of our dreams. The timing was anything but cinematic and the hits just keep on coming for the studios and I'm not talking about the box office kind. Post-Pandemic and post #metoo the shine was really coming off. Now the Academy Awards have become a woke joke and after seeing clips of the last few, I'm starting to think Will Smith's ten-year ban is more of a favor than a punishment. Other scandals since have just amplified the feedback: Leonardo DiCaprio and Ashton Kutcher (who had just apologized for defending convicted rapist Danny Masterson) were caught red faced because of P.Diddy's 'White Parties'. DiCaprio meanwhile still blazes on about climate change, all while flying around in his private jet. More than a few times, he's flown to Sydney for new year's eve, then flown back to the US immediately after midnight so he can experience it twice. Audiences are turning away, cinemas are closing and that screen just keeps getting smaller while the losses get bigger. The Hollywood mystique has been replaced by mystified audiences. What happened? As George Miller told Variety, “Public dreaming’s fading—screens shrank, attention split. We used to dream big, together.” Yes and now we get to watch movies formed artificially into the oddest narratives squished between soulless algorithms and senseless virtue-signalling. The result is sheer humbug; it's become the performance art everybody praises but nobody cares to watch.
Sources:
- Megan Fox, X, October 2021.
- Kurt Russell, The New York Times, December 10, 2020.
- Jaden Smith, X, November 17, 2018; September 13, 2013.
- Cate Blanchett, Australian Performing Arts Market keynote, February 22, 2010.
- Ricky Gervais, Golden Globes monologue, January 5, 2020.
- George Miller, Variety, May 20, 2022.
