George Santayana - The Life of Reason (1905-1906)
As many will know, Cate Blanchett was a Davos attendee
airing her concerns about the global refugee problem. Fair enough and she
may be a fine person for all I know, but her overall campaigning ethos comes across as little more than an off the shelf script. Refugees, climate change,
feminism and so on.
It feels inappropriate too – inviting a person who has
made a career of pretending to be someone else, but maybe there is no point
being snarky about that. It happens and it will happen again because this is
how things are done, how publicity is done.
A more sinister point stems from an extended version of Santayana’s
fascinatingly grim observation. Many may reject the observation as roles are so close to what we are and maybe what we admire. However, we do run a risk of being morally diminished by
the roles we play, particularly if playing the role is all there is to do.
However much we put into a role, we never own it and when we are gone it
remains for someone else to play. In Santayana’s terms - we are abolished by
our creations which nevertheless cannot survive us.
5 comments:
I've only known a couple of professional actors, and they did seem to be rather odd people, who didn't quite know who they were. An interest in the theatre is fine, and amateur dramatics seems like good fun - providing it's not taken too seriously.
This is one of those things you can legimately address from either end. Considering it from ’your' Santayana end sent me off into a mini-reverie about the shimmering nature of personality, the tension between the adopted 'public persona’ and the ‘real’, if there is such a thing, person behind the mask. How actors are maybe just the most extreme exemplars of something we all do in search of survival, praise and acceptance; maybe something we all need to do to feed our necessary self-esteem.
And then, from the other end, I thought: Bollocks. This mundanely so-so intelligent and moderately sort of talented woman is actually, objectively, an idiot. Harsh but true. She knows pretty much nothing of the subjects on which she platitudinously recycles others’ clichés. She has feelings, not thoughts. Devoid of responsibility, held outrageously harmless from the consequences of her vacuity and vanity. And people who we should hope truly ought to know better attend to this and encourage her delusion? In fairness, she’s clearly not the only craven idiot in town. Now that is concerning!
About the only thing I vaguely know about the woman is that she was highly praised for an imaginative impersonation in some movie a little while back of the frankly hard to love but definitely daunting Queen Elizabeth 1. What fun it would be to transpose the two and see how Davos Cate actually got on in what was most definitely real life, played for keeps…
All the world's a stage etc etc. Some of us are born into a role, some achieve a role and some have a role thrust upon us.
Which of us is 'real', not merely playing a role? A chap chucking coal into a boiler seems real whereas a spokesperson mouthing some script might seem less real. But why might we think that, the boiler will still be there after the coal chucker has gone and false words will continue to be uttered long after the spokesperson has gone.
In some sense a concrete, definite thing like coaling a boiler seems real and honest toil but mouthing a script seems less real, probably very close to a lie and not honest toil. Yet the pay rate for professional lying seems much higher than stoking coal. The world pays a goodly fee to a skilled liar, or the watered down version, an actor.
I am still puzzling over 'what was the point of Davos?'.
“inviting a person who has made a career of pretending to be someone else”
Like it.
Sam - I've never met a professional actor, although when interviewed many do seem rather odd. I'd expect an unusually deep understanding of human nature but often that doesn't seem to be the case at all.
Clacket - I don't know much about her but I'll take your word for it that she is pretty much an idiot. Celebrities rarely seem to grasp how unlikely it is that their one-dimensional script is an accurate reflection of reality. They seem unaware that the complexity they ignore is what makes their words facile and foolish.
Roger - the stoker's role seems to tie him to reality with physical stimulus and response which everyone else can see. Move away from that and we enter murky waters where reality has no immediate impact so feedback is muted or even absent altogether in a direct cause and effect sense.
I simply assume that Davos is all about networking for the benefit of attendees and their sponsors but nobody else.
James - not original unfortunately but I've no idea where it came from.
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