Liberalism & The Arts

February 24, 2007

We hear a lot about the “Liberal Media” and Hollywood, “The Left Coast”, like it’s a bad thing. While it’s usually best to resist blanket statements and generalizations – because it’s just not possible to paint any group of people with a single brush stroke – this is delicious food for thought.

According to The Oxford English Dictionary, the liberal attitude is defined as “Favorable to or respectful of individual rights and freedoms; spec. (in politics) favoring free trade and gradual political and social reform that tends towards individual freedom or democracy”. A generic definition of liberal is “generous”.

There is a common denominator between the media and the entertainment industry, and that is the writer. What a writer must do, to do the job well, is to get to the heart of the subject at hand, and at the heart of any subject are human beings – complex human beings with a vast range of sometimes conflicting experiences and emotions. As challenging as it may be at times, journalists work hard to present both sides of a story; anything less would be propaganda. To tell a story comprehensively, or even interestingly, writers must suspend judgment in the interest of presenting real people (or characters) whose background, thoughts and feelings have motivated them to act or react as they have to the situation at hand.

This is also true for actors, whose job it is to “become” multi-dimensional flesh and blood characters. Like the writer, a good actor can’t afford the luxury of judging of a character to be portrayed but must instead do everything possible to understand and embody the totality of that character and, in essence, what makes him or her “tick”. Meryl Streep comes to mind, and her remarkable ability to “channel” a character.

Actors, directors, and writers have the advantage of being exposed to a variety of people on a regular basis, whether working in communities of the hundreds of diverse personalities employed on each movie or filming on location in other countries for months at a time. When they don’t have the opportunity to meet the character they’re portraying, they try to meet similar people and otherwise delve into their imaginations to draw on their own intricate psyches.

After all, ain’t none of us as simple as we might like to think we are. We are each the sum total of our experiences and our behavior follows logical patterns. We have the potential for all good and all bad in us, including character traits and abilities that range from thoughtful and kind to thoughtless and cruel. We make constant choices as to which facet of our personality we’ll draw upon in our daily interactions with others. Hopefully we choose to let our higher natures influence our behavior but often it’s an unconscious combination of our experiences and resulting emotions that dictate our reactions. An actor knows all of this; these are the tools that s/he draws upon in the course of his or her work. While most of us are busy living our single lives, an actor will live several lives in one, inhabiting numerous “bodies” and embracing various life experiences. Actor Peter O’ Toole commented recently that “actors are people, only more so”, a thought echoed by Jim Carrey who said, “we all walk around with a lot of people in our heads”. An actor has, you might say, “walked in another man’s moccasins” and knows that, in many cases, “there but for fortune go I”.

In his best selling book, The Power of Now, Eckhart Tolle emphasizes the importance of living in the present moment. Actors have always been keenly aware of the necessity of “being in the moment” in order to be fully present and spontaneous in a scene. When we’re in the moment, we cease to be judgmental about how life – or other people – should be. We accept things as they are.

Once we understand that each person on earth feels pain, and bleeds, and has hopes, dreams, and a simple desire to live in peace, as do we, compassion and acceptance follow naturally. We care what happens to others because, beneath superficial differences like “color”, “race” and “religion”, we know that our similarities far outweigh our differences. It’s no longer easy to make judgments of “good” or “bad, “right” or “wrong”. This was well expressed by Oscar winner Helen Mirren, who grew up with a disdain for the monarchy but “fell in love” with Queen Elizabeth II while portraying her.

Ultimately, in this increasingly globalized world, we’re all beneficiaries of the work done by actors, writers and directors, who give us an understanding of countries we’ll never see and people we may never have the opportunity to meet.

Maybe we should each try walking in someone else’s moccasins for awhile. It might just save a lot of lives.

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