The People vs. Hollywood

...Last week the issue of celebrities and politics arose after Charlie Sheen offered his analysis of jetliner models and 9/11 conspiracies. Being that his area of expertise is reading scripts, a few of us wondered about Mr. Sheen’s knowledge of aviation and whether or not he was in a position to be an authority on the subject.

...Criticism for actors who offer their insight on current events and politics isn’t limited to just a few lowly bloggers, however, and this has producer Oliver Stone’s blood boiling. In an interview with Contact Music, Stone referred to media criticism of celebrities as “slander” and said that whenever actors speak about current events they’re told, “You’re an actor, a show-business director.” He called references to celebrities as “Hollywood whackos” an “easy and facile dismissal.”

...Aside from the humorous possibility that Stone is suggesting that calling someone an actor or director is slanderous—or is it?!—Mr. Stone seems to be validating one of the reasons that so many of us are critical of celebrity viewpoints in the first place: They assume that because they are the ones to say it that everyone must agree with them. If others don’t agree, those people are somehow preventing them from speaking or, in this case, engaging in slander.

...To be sure, many people give credence to everything and anything that celebrities say. Just a few days after the Charlie Sheen situation, a caller to C-Span’s Washington Journal used Sheen’s comments as some kind of “proof” that a conspiracy existed. The caller explained that since Charlie Sheen and other celebrities have expressed conspiracy theories, there must be something to it.

...Keeping this in mind, should we really be more skeptical of the people who worship the celebrities instead of the celebrities themselves? It’s a rather strange notion to suggest that because a person is a television or movie star that they’re experts in everything and have insight into things ranging from science to public policy. This “popularity-equals-enlightenment” idea doesn’t make any sense to those of us who lend credibility to extensive work in a given field. Questioning a celebrity’s credibility in a specific field—a field in which they might not have any expertise—seems to be far from slanderous, doesn’t it?

...The best way to put this situation into perspective would be to use the Charlie Sheen example—not to belabor the issue, but simply because it’s current. Those who view actors and actresses as superior in everything have routinely used the star’s celebrity status to justify the importance of that actor’s views. For example, the C-Span caller insisted that because Sheen was a star, he must know something that the rest of us don’t. On the other hand, when we look at people who view actors as nothing more than actors—not supreme gurus of everything—we find that they defend their views using information from people who are specialists of that particular field. Case in point: With respect to the 9/11 conspiracies, a magazine like Popular Mechanics, which specializes in science and more particularly physics, took each conspiracy and debunked it using data.

...Perhaps this is what Oliver Stone is failing to understand. Those of us who question the validity of things that celebrities say are not committing slander, and we’re certainly not preventing them from saying what they want to say. We’re asking how they came to their conclusions given their background as opposed to worshipping them for simply being famous.

Source: Contact Music