The Presidential Campaign Has Been Resurrected. Now Let's Do Showbiz
The Presidential Campaign Has Been Resurrected. Now Let's Do ShowbizIt's time for Hollywood to say, 'We're not going back' — and dare to dream big again
I had the crazy experience of leaving Hollywood for the past couple weeks and getting a little distance from it all. Not something I’d recommend for the faint of heart, but now and then, into the “real world” we must go. From a distance, a lot of things that occupy our days — quarterly earnings, basketball rights, botched trailers — fall into certain patterns. They can also end up in sync with what’s happening in the rest of the culture. Comparing politics and entertainment is a fool’s errand. Here in Hollywood, we are concerned with building dreams and shaping humanity’s fundamental perception of existence. Politics is just people in suits reading speeches and yelling at each other on cable news. But nonetheless, all God’s creatures do exist in one culture here . . . and are influenced by the same trends to greater or lesser degrees. Watching the events of the past few weeks in our political realm, my most palpable sense is one of relief that . . . things can happen in the world again; that we don’t have to limit ourselves and our hopes to these narrow, constricted little lanes. Looking back on the era just behind us (hopefully), it’s like we’ve escaped a straitjacket — of cynicism and smallness of spirit. I recall when Ukraine fought the Russians out of Kyiv, and the heroic emergence of Volodymyr Zelenskyy. The shocking thing was that it was possible for good things to happen, that the worst wasn’t preordained to prevail. “Defenceless under the night, Our world in stupor lies,” the poet Auden wrote of another bleak moment. We certainly know in politics and world affairs how all this has played out, but more importantly, here in Hollywood, it’s remarkable how the similar smallness of spirit in imagination has defined us through these last years; how a place whose very raison d'être is to inspire the world, to dream big, to awe humanity with our boldness of vision, has become so uninspired and uninspiring. Defenseless, our little world in stupor has lain. Subscribe to The Ankler. to unlock the rest.Become a paying subscriber of The Ankler. to get access to this post and other subscriber-only content. A subscription gets you:
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