Why all Hollywood deserves a good hard slap

Another, closer look at the Academy Awards three weeks ago reveals the dark side of that self-obsessed "community," which did so much to push us toward the hole we're in today

Here it is, three weeks after the Slap Seen ’Round the World, and it’s still resonating (“Chris Rock’s Mom Talks Oscars Slap, Slams Will Smith for Not Personally Apologizing,” Rolling Stone has now “reported”). The persistence of that trifle is good news for Pfizer, and the other toxic giants with alopecia drugs prepared to loose on countless alopecia sufferers (and people who’ve been told they have it).

Since this hoo-ha shows no signs of ending soon (“Will Smith travels to India following Oscars slap controversy,” PageSix has now “reported”), I’m posting another piece about the Oscars, even though three weeks is like a decade, or an eon, in (what Gore Vidal called) the United States of Amnesia (where digital technology has made the mass amnesia even worse). Whereas my first piece dealt with this year’s “In Memoriam,” this one is about Coda winning the Oscar for Best Picture, and, more extensively, Jessica Chastain’s acceptance speech on winning the Best Actress Oscar for her turn as Tammy Faye Bakker in The Eyes of Tammy Faye. I hadn’t finished this piece, when I decided it was now passé; but, looking over it again, I find it worth your while, so have just finished it, and here it is.

It’s rather long, although I hope it doesn’t feel as long as The Eyes of Tammy Faye—or The Power of the Dog, or Dune, or most of the other movies spotlighted on Oscar Night.

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“The Academy does not condone violence of any form,” tweeted the AMPAA after the Oscars on Sunday night, March 27, in swift response to Will Smith’s seeming improv on Chris Rock’s face. That tweet was a whole lot funnier than any of the “comedy” on stage that night, and not because of its attempt at English. That “the Academy does not condone violence in any form” is a claim as laughable as that initial draft was incoherent, since Hollywood loves violence, and, therefore, so does the Academy, which made that crystal-clear on Sunday night, highlighting many clips of ultra-violent f/x and stunts from several bloated Marvel Comic adaptations, James Bond vehicles, and other multi-million-dollar stimulants ground out by the “entertainment” juggernaut (often with covert support by the Department of Defense and CIA). Thus whoever tweeted that preposterous assurance might just as well have claimed that “the Academy does not condone gratuitous sexual display,” despite the numerous bare boobs at the podium, upstaging everyone around them, including those to whom they were attached.

That tweet is only one example of the staggering bad faith projected at the 94th Academy Awards. Take Coda—which I readily admit I haven’t seen, and and will eventually; and yet I rather doubt it was last year’s best movie—better than, say, Licorice Pizza, or any other Oscar-nominated film with no deaf characters. The hoo-ha over Coda, both in the theater Sunday night and in the press coverage of the Oscars, suggests (at least to me) that Coda pulled that honor not for its cinematic excellence but as a statement as to just how deeply they all care, in Hollywood, about the deaf.

Okay. Since when? Was Hollywood so terribly concerned about the deaf throughout the last two years, when everybody in “the industry” was masked, and hating everyone who wasn’t? Though most (not all!) of those assembled in the Dolby Theater on that Sunday night did not have masks on (as Chris Rock marveled at the start of his now-legendary face-off with Will Smith), surely they remember when they did, since it wasn’t all that long ago; and I would challenge any one of them to tell us if s/he ever gave a single thought to what the deaf were going through, with every hearing person’s mouth concealed by those infernal muzzles, so that it was impossible to read their lips—a hardship for the deaf, and for deaf children in particular. The Hollywood “community” gave no more thought to them than to the sea-life choking on discarded masks, or to the diabetics, and asthmatics, and all others who could not wear masks for hours without becoming ill. And yet we’re now supposed to think that those celebrities care just as much about deaf people as they do about black (er, Black) people and (this year) Ukrainians, and any other group that can be used to show how good they all are in Hollywood.

In her acceptance speech (she won the Oscar for Best Actress, for her high-strung impersonation of Tammy Faye Messner in The Eyes of Tammy Faye), Jessica Chastain provided an especially rich example of Hollywood’s presumptive Goodness:

Right now we're coming out of some difficult times filled with a lot of trauma and isolation, and so many people out there feel hopelessness and they feel alone, and suicide is a leading cause of death in the United States.

It's touched many families, it's touched mine, especially members of the LGBTQ community who often feel out of place with their peers.

We're faced with discriminatory and bigoted legislation sweeping our country with the only goal of further dividing us.

There is violence and hate crimes being perpetuated [sic] on innocent civilians all over the world.

In times like this, I think of Tammy [Faye Bakker], and I'm inspired by her radical acts of love. I'm inspired by her compassion and I see it as a guiding principle that leads us forward, and it connects us all in the desire that we want to be accepted for who we are, for who we love, and to live a life without the fear or violence or terror.

For any of you out there who do in fact feel hopeless or alone, I just want you to know that you're unconditionally loved for the uniqueness that is you.

While that speech had them all wet-eyed in the Dolby Theater, and got a lot of rave reviews from “our free press,” I found it baffling, in part because I’d never heard that Tammy Faye had killed herself; so, in preparation for this post, I watched The Eyes of Tammy Faye, Chastain’s seemingly unlikely paean to the Christian diva—who did not kill herself; and so the only reason I can think of for Chastain’s sermonette on suicide is that it allowed her to wax “caring” and “compassionate” before her high-priced peers, who loved her for enabling them to feel all “caring” and “compassionate” right back at her. Making much of Tammy Faye’s anomalous gay-friendliness (which, in the movie, nettles Jerry Falwell, and the other icky Christian men surrounding her), The Eyes of Tammy Faye portrays its heroine as worthy of Chastain’s attention, and the audience’s love, since, underneath all that mascara, and those campy outfits, Tammy Faye Bakker was, at heart. a “liberal” trouper just like Jessica Chastain, and all those who awarded her that Oscar, and ate up her “compassionate” acceptance speech.

And where was that “compassion” during the lockdowns that Chastain now so feelingly invoked before that glittering assembly of the Good? Those “difficult times filled with a lot of trauma and isolation,” which plunged so many people into a pandemic “hopelessness” that all too often left them dead, were not so “difficult” for those celebrities, whose mansions and assistants eased the pain— and who whole-heartedly supported every stringent “COVID measure” that had pushed so many poorer people to the brink, or past the brink, of suicide. Instead of ever even questioning the wisdom of the lockdown policy (they did not know enough to question it, and, like so many other rapt Covidians, didn’t want to know), the stars encouraged all the rest of us to suck it up, by showering millions on non-profits dealing with “food insecurity,” and on the families of first responders, and by donating a lot of masks to those unable to afford them (and, of course, who didn’t need them, and would have been much better off without them). Whatever good it may have done for its recipients, all that charitable giving was a feel-good operation for the stars, making them look good in their own eyes, and in the eyes of “our free press,” though it served mainly to help keep everybody quiet under lockdown, by promoting the illusion that “we’re all in this together.”

There was, in short, no real compassion in those shows of generosity; for any real compassion would have had the stars not merely writing checks to keep the rest of us in line (and grateful for the help), but seriously asking whether lockdown was, in fact, a reasonable way to “keep us safe.” None of that ostentatious charity betrayed the least compassion for the tens of thousands of old people fatally cut off in nursing homes, a lot of them nearby (that toll was especially high in California and New York); nor were those stellar givers really doing anything that could have saved the countless youngsters who, shattered by the lockdowns ordered on the mere say-so of Dr. Fauci and the CDC (both entities adored in Hollywood), killed themselves in record numbers (while countless others were done in by such lockdown-related evils as drug overdose, domestic violence, medical neglect, binge-drinking, homicide and malnutrition). The idea that a mere financial contribution, however lavish, might somehow put a stop to such intense and widespread suffering was a narcissistic fantasy; whereas the only way to end that slo-mo slaughter would have been to end the lockdowns—as protesters started to demand in mid-2020, some as close to Hollywood as Sacramento; and if anyone in Hollywood supported them, and did not see them as a mob of rabid Trump supporters, I hope that he or she will let me know.

That we should end the lockdowns was apparently unthinkable to Samuel L. Jackson, who, in April of 2020, put out a video of himself coolly reading aloud a “children’s book for adults” entitled Stay the Fuck at Home (as he himself was “staying” at his 12,000-square-foot estate in Beverly Hills, complete with giant swimming pool). All that inexplicit carnage, coast to coast and all around the world, apparently meant nothing to Sean Penn—the same Sean Penn who went to New Orleans after Katrina, and set out in a rowboat (with a rifle) to save people from the flood, but who, evidently driven mad by COVID panic, showed no interest whatsoever even in protesting what the lockdowns were now doing to millions all around him, and worldwide (most of them “people of color”). (Penn has now diverged somewhat from COVID zealotry—forcing everybody working on his movie sets to get the jab—to doing propaganda for “Ukraine.”)* The global miseries of lockdown made no visible impression on “iconic” star-and-activist Jane Fonda, who, in October of 2020, grinningly called COVID-19 “God’s gift to the left.”

And therein lies the key to Hollywood’s ongoing complicity in crimes against humanity—the devastating lockdowns, and the democidal “vaccination” drive (how many stars have publicized their own injections?), and, no less, the eight-year effort by the Nazi forces in Ukraine to exterminate the people in the East: Hollywood’s elite has never bothered to look deeply into any of those horrors, to go beyond the New York Times and all the other “liberal” propaganda mills to figure out what’s really going on, because, as far as they’re concerned, it’s only the “far right” that questions the official story, whereas “the left,” including nearly all of Hollywood, has now come to define itself as those who never question anything that “our free press” relentlessly “reports”—a far cry from the left of yesteryear, who tended, wisely, to distrust the New York Times, and/or CBS News (though they, or we, had no idea, back then, how bad, in every sense, such outlets would eventually become).

It is impossible for Hollywood to question anything the media reports, because Hollywood and “our free press” are one—both owned by the same transnational cartel, which, moreover, is itself now even closer to the government than either “our free press” or Hollywood was, way back when the left did not believe in war (with Russia), segregation (whether based on CRT or “vaccination” status), and/or—above all—censorship. Since, with very few exceptions, both the news and entertainment sectors of this system now invariably push the same “woke” melodrama, Jessica Chastain et al. have all adapted to that system by urging our “compassion” only for the victims in that melodrama, and no “compassion” for those defined—or slandered—as the latter’s putative abusers, or anybody else.

Hollywood promotes that one-eyed view throughout its ever cruder content, presenting ever more cartoon-like characters arrayed as either “far right” meanies or “woke” victims. That’s essentially the vision of The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and, even more so, of The Power of the Dog, a demented anti-Western that may well be the worst movie ever nominated for an Oscar. (They gave Jane Campion an Oscar for directing it, perhaps because she’s not a man.) And that also was the vision pushed (unconsciously, no doubt) by Jessica Chastain in her acceptance speech, which, while calling for “compassion” above all, actually erased the suffering that most people have endured these past two years, reserving that “compassion” only for the few whom Hollywood’s “community” embraces as Good Victims.

At first observing, rightly (if over-hopefully), that “we’re coming out of difficult times filled with a lot of trauma and isolation,” with millions suffering “hopelessness,” and all too many giving in to suicide, Chastain immediately changed the subject, from the universal suffering caused by lockdowns to the suffering endured “especially by members of the LGBTQ community who often feel out of place with their peers.” Thus (again) Chastain erased what millions, representing every sexual “identity,” were put through by the masters of the WHO and CDC, with Hollywood’s collusion, and then, rhetorically, replaced that global suffering, which did indeed drive up the rates of suicide worldwide, with the familiar “woke” idea of suicide by “members of the LGBTQ community”—presumably because of homophobic, or transphobic, persecution; though all too many gay young people, and others, have committed suicide because of premature and ill-considered medical manipulations of their sexual development. But that, of course, is not what Chastain meant, since she apparently perceives the sufferings of gay youngsters only through the sturdy lens maintained by propaganda mills like GLAAD and Media Matters, and works like Boys Don’t Cry and The Laramie Project, all of which are dedicated to the proposition that the only problem facing gay young people is the homophobic malice of straight brutes.

Following that thought, Chastain then spoke of “discriminatory and bigoted legislation sweeping our country with the only goal of further dividing us”—another (let us call it) Democratic commonplace, whereby Chastain took her audience (both in the Dolby Theater and beyond) even further from the global suffering caused by the COVID crisis, and deeper still into the Land of “Woke,” where everyone is either Bad Abuser or Good Victim. I doubt Chastain has bothered reading any of the bills under consideration in some 20 states, or the text of the so-called “Don’t Say ‘Gay’” bill that Gov. DeSantis lately signed in Florida. Contrary to the tidal wave of propaganda generated by the Disney Corporation, Apple and the Democratic Party, among other “leftist” cells, the primary purpose of such legislation is to keep kindergarteners, and children in the first three grades of elementary school, innocent of sexual instruction, including “gender identity,” because (as I should not have to point out) such matters are completely inappropriate for little kids. It isn’t clear exactly how such bills, or laws, are “discriminatory,” or “bigoted,” or how their “only goal [is] further dividing us.” One also wonders why there’s no “compassion,” on “the left,” for five- and six-year-olds required to fret about their “gender identity,” when they have no idea what either of those two words means, and should be left alone to play, and learn to read.

From that specter of a national lynch mob looking for trans children to string up, Chastain moved on to deplore the “violence and hate crimes being perpetuated [sic] on innocent civilians all over the world”—a line that we could read (and one that I would like to read) as a lament over the hate crimes perpetrated by Ukraine’s Nazi military against the Russian-speaking people in the East (and Ukrainians accused of being pro-Russian), and the Saudi violence destroying Yemen, with full US support, and the US-backed violence still wracking Syria, Libya and Iraq, and the worldwide violence ongoing with the US “war of terror.” which (to quote Smithsonian Magazine) has “Americans actively engaged in countering terrorism in 80 nations on six continents.” Although I hope that she meant all of the above, I doubt she meant much more than just “Ukraine,” as the Academy invoked it that same night (with a moment of silence for “Ukraine”), and as Francis Ford Coppola gratuitously chimed in about “Ukraine” (at the end of his appearance marking the 50th anniversary of the release of The Godfather), and as everybody on “the left” ferociously imagines it, that melodrama having now completely crowded out all other state-backed “violence” worldwide. (If Jessica Chastain were all that critical of state-backed violence, she would probably have passed on Zero Dark Thirty.)

The actress then concluded with this evocation of her movie:

In times like this, I think of Tammy [Faye Bakker], and I'm inspired by her radical acts of love. I'm inspired by her compassion and I see it as a guiding principle that leads us forward, and it connects us all in the desire that we want to be accepted for who we are, for who we love, and to live a life without the fear or violence or terror.

Here again, Chastain lauds “Tammy” for her kindness toward gay people, and concern over the scourge of AIDS—an “act of love” that, though it seemed “radical” back in the Eighties, within the homogeneous community of Christian televangelists, is not the least bit “radical” in Hollywood; and that fact should remind us what “compassion”—especially radical compassion—really means.

For there is nothing radical, or, in fact, compassionate, about appealing to the bias of the tribe, which feels “compassion” only for itself, and “others” who resemble it. Thus, as played by Jessica Chastain, Tammy Faye Bakker could relate to gay AIDS sufferers, because they had been vilified and shunned by the same uptight, pompous Straight White Men who didn’t want her mouthing off among them; and that, in turn, explains why Chastain won that Oscar (for showing Tammy Faye as “one of us”), and why her acceptance speech was such a hit. The Eyes of Tammy Faye affirms, and Chastain’s speech re-affirmed, the goodness of the audience for which both works were made—and that feels no compassion for those marked off as The Enemy. On the contrary: This “good” tribe hates The Enemy just as intensely as it “loves” itself, and anyone whom it decides is also part of it. That’s not “compassion,” but only narcissism; nor is such feeling “radical,” unless by that we mean “totalitarian.”

And that’s exactly what we’ve seen from Hollywood, and all of what we call “the left,” since Trump became president, and especially since the rollout of “the virus” three years later. Just as Hollywood et al., as noted earlier, had no compassion for those traumatized or sickened by the masks (not even little deaf kids), and frankly hated “anti-maskers,” so have they hated “anti-vaxxers,” as they now hate not only Russians, but anyone who contradicts the all-pervasive story of “Ukraine”—whose people, they believe, are just like them, hence eminently worthy of “compassion” (unlike those Ukrainians bombarded by the Nazis in the East). From the routine abuse of “anti-maskers” in the streets, and their exclusion from society, to Jimmy Kimmel and Noam Chomsky calling publicly for “anti-vaxxers” to be rounded up and put away (with many on "the left” exulting when some “anti-vaxxer” died, reportedly, of COVID), to the hysterical denunciation of the protesters in Washington on January 6, and savage glee over the government’s arrest, and torturous imprisonment, of the “insurrectionists” that day, to the vituperative slander of the truckers up in Canada as “fascists” (“Get off my fucking bridge!” barked faux-working-class Oscar winner Michael Moore), to the Russian people now—which latest hatred has had “President Biden” calling his Russian counterpart a “pure thug,” “war criminal,” “murderous dictator” and a “butcher” (wild fighting words that likes of which were never uttered publicly by any prior US president, not even after the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, or Czechoslovakia in 1968); Lindsey Graham calling for Putin’s assassination, and Mitt Romney charging Tulsi Gabbard with “treason” just for noting, rightly, that NATO’s eastward spread has long been a casus belli for the Russians (Graham and Romney, like many others in their party, thereby dangerously tacking “left”); Facebook now approving “hate speech.” as long as it’s directed at Russians; and, throughout this festival of hate, and driving it along, “our free press” screaming one inflammatory Big Lie after another, undaunted by the overwhelming evidence that every one of them has proven to be false, and undeterred by what could be the apocalyptic consequences of their rabble-rousing.

All such open hatred is the obverse of that stifling “woke” self-love which Hollywood projects in movie after movie, TV show after TV show, and which it evinced throughout that Oscars ceremony. Once you pick up on the hatred simmering just below the surface of such “virtuous” display, you can’t not sense it. Thus, within the context of the propaganda blitzkrieg that’s been raging for the last two years, I found the 94th Academy Awards not just tedious but frightening, the audience’s frequent fierce applause at this or that “woke” gesture or display reminding me of Winston Smith’s account of the war movie he went to see (and very much enjoyed) the night before he starts to keep his journal; and that sanctimonious applause also reminded me of certain movies engineered (like the Two Minutes Hate) to rouse their viewers’ bloodlust, like The Deer Hunter (sadistic VC shot dead by a good GI), Fatal Attraction (demonic adulteress, and her unborn child, shot dead by the Angel of the House), and, especially, the climactic “woke” bloodbaths churned out by Quentin Tarantino, in Django Unchained, Inglourious Basterds and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood—sadistic slaughters “justified” by our righteous hatred of the victims, whether Nazis, Southern slave-owners or members of the Manson “family.”**

The pleasure that we take in such “good” massacres is, morally, no different from the pleasure taken by the Ku Klux Klan in their terrorism after the Civil War, and by the hundreds of lynch mobs that went after their black victims (and some few white victims) in the South (and not just there), and by the SS cleansing Europe of its Jews, and by the Manson “family” killing everybody in those houses targeted by their explosive leader—in short, by all the same horrendous perpetrators whose slaughter Tarantino gets us to applaud; for those who kill like that, whether as berserkers or with cool detachment, tend always to believe their victims have it coming. All such bloody work, whatever rationale we use for doing it, or merely for applauding it, partakes of the same evil that those movies flay with such inflammatory zeal—and that was winking at us from behind that labored show of Goodness at the 94th Academy Awards.

To cheer the slaughter of your enemies, or those whom you define as enemies—or just to hate them, merely wishing for their slaughter—is not a “radical act of love,” but only the indulgence of a narcissistic hatred of, and longing to annihilate, all others not like you. In Jessica Chastain’s world-view, shared (apparently) by all those marveling at her acceptance speech inside the Dolby Theater, it’s only “we” who merit Tammy Faye’s sort of “compassion,” which Chastain comfortably idealized as “a guiding principle that leads us forward, and connects us all in the desire […] to be accepted for who we are, for who we love, and to live a life without the fear of violence or terror.” Thus Chastain preached what we might call the Disney version of the Sermon on the Mount, urging “compassion” not for those attacking or opposing “us,” or even those who see things differently than “we” do, but only for “members of the LGBTQ community”—a “church” well-represented in the choir that Chastain was so piously congratulating. And having thereby supplanted Jesus’ radical demand that we all love our enemies with the far easier imperative that we “love” only our (LGBTQ) friends, Chastain assured those needy friends that they’re all (somehow) “unconditionally loved”:

For any of you out there who do in fact feel hopeless or alone, I just want you to know that you're unconditionally loved for the uniqueness that is you.

Offered, as it was, on that immense black stage, before the principalities and powers of Hollywood, that assurance was a tad ambiguous. Was Chastain actually telling all those (or some of those) who now feel “hopeless or alone” that Jesus loves them? No doubt that’s pretty much what Tammy would have said (although she probably would not have said that God loves each and every one of us for our “uniqueness”); but this wasn’t Tammy’s crowd, or Tammy’s night, gay-friendly though she was. This was the night for Hollywood to praise itself for its great goodness; and that would seem to be what Chastain meant—i.e., that those now feeling “hopeless or alone,” “especially members of the LGBTQ community,” are “unconditionally loved” by Jessica Chastain, and all the pretty people beaming at her in the Dolby Theater. Small wonder, then, that they, and “our free press,” were moved to tears by that acceptance speech.

In any case, I think it’s urgent to say, once again, that people everywhere, regardless of their sexual “identity,” would now be feeling far less “hopeless or alone” if society, and the economy, had not been variously shattered by the “COVID measures” that those stars all pushed in their relentless drive to celebrate themselves. Thus the world today would be a vastly better place, and all too many of its dead would be alive, if only there had been some way, when all those stars were telling us to “stay the fuck at home,” and wear our masks, and then “get vaccinated”—or even just these past few months, as they’ve gone on and on about “Ukraine” in celebration of themselves, despite the cataclysm it may bring about—to slap all Hollywood across the face, and snap them out of it, for their own good as well as ours.

*Just before the Oscars, Penn declared, on CNN, that he would melt down his two statuettes if the Academy refused to feature an address by Vlodomyr Zelensky.

**To the question “How would the Ukraine/Russia conflict end in the Tarantino universe,” posed on Reddit, two people thus replied:

“Hopefully with Putin & cronies locked inside a theater, you know what happens next.”

“The boiler room in Pulp Fiction would be too good for Putin.”

On the hardship faced by deaf people in a world of masking:

https://www.ndcs.org.uk/blog/face-masks-and-communication-coronavirus-info-for-families-of-deaf-children/

The challenges of facemasks for people with hearing loss
Lip Reading, Facial Expressions: How Masks Make Life Harder for People with Hearing Difficulties
Face masks and communication – coronavirus info for families of deaf children