A Cinecle View – Dear Mary Louise
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Dear Mary Louise,
Hi, my name is Tony. I work primarily in what may be the second lowest rung of the film business, right below student shorts, but right above cellphone snuff selfies – corporate video.
I know that while what I do and what you do are in the same industry, they could not be further apart in terms of stratospheres; essentially, me offering you any sort of advice is roughly equivalent to my neighbor’s 12 and 9 year old sons kid’splaining to Tom Brady and Bill Belichick how to up their game. By the way, that was a football metaphor.
Anyway, you’re the G.O.A.T. at making believe. No gender qualifiers are necessary because you are simply “the best ever.”
But before you dismiss me out of hand because of the disparity of our stations in life, please consider this: My career position – equidistant from the six figure per year decision makers and the low five figure per year blue color laborers on the factory floor, gives me a unique perspective with which you could not possibly identify.
That viewpoint, coupled with my ability to hold on to and champion my own politically diverse beliefs while walking a tightrope between some very conservative, VERY devout Christian relatives and some very liberal relatives that I adore equally, makes me more than qualified to tell you this:
Your speech was, without a doubt, nothing to blue collar, Christian, white, straight people but indisputable evidence that everything that they believe and are so fed up with that they put a fucking crazy person in the most powerful office in the world, is absolutely, 100 percent true.
You see, while many who supported the other candidate don’t want to believe it, polling, studies and research from a diverse collection of sources proves that most of the people that voted for that mad man didn’t do it because they hate foreigners …
… or people of different religions or colors, or think women are property, or want to vanquish the LGBTQ community. For sure some of them are xenophobic, homophobic, racist pieces of shit; but the overwhelming majority of them voted for him because:
- They’re tired of politicians lying to them,
- They lost blue collar jobs and they think that he can and will bring them back,
- They’ve lost patience with being told that they are evil just because they are Christian, white, straight, (mostly) male and that their opinion, and there lives, no longer matter … by wealthy, privileged hypocrites.
So, when you stood in front of a room full of your colleagues to accept a well-deserved honor (seriously, it should have said “duh” after your name on the trophy) for being the bestest ever, and, in not so many words, called all of the people that voted for that crass lunatic stupid, hateful and no class, you proved every single one of them right.
When you claimed victimhood for a ballroom full of people that arrived in chauffeur-driven limos with assistants in toe, wearing clothing that easily cost between 1/3 and all of the average blue-collar worker’s yearly salary, you showed that while you are what the ancient Greeks would have called the perfect form for actors, you are completely out of touch with what is going on in their world.
And when you said that sports are not the arts and implied that only subhuman monsters that voted for the orange douche nozzle could be low enough to enjoy them, you outed yourself as the kind of bubble bound snob that doesn’t realize that most football and MMA fans love movies. All kinds of movies. From Marvel’s flying and punching fare to deep, weighty, Weinstein art pictures. They also buy tickets to all three.
Maybe you should think about that the next time that you call one half of your potential audience awful. And maybe you should consider who would end up worse off: THEM if you followed through on your threat and took everyone in that room that night and moved out of the country – except Mel Gibson and Vince Vaughn, cause, let’s be honest, they’re not going anywhere, and if these facial expressions are indicative of their moods during your speech …
… they’d probably help a lot of you pack.
Or would it be YOU if all of the people that you so cavalierly insulted stopped buying movie tickets, blu-ray discs, and digital downloads?
While I agree with you that Trump is an ass clown and his lack of filter has the potential to make his presidency a nightmare more fucked up than Bruce’s fever dream in Batman V Superman: Dawn of Justice, you holding court with a herd of pampered, wealthy megastars and trashing an electorate that already feels that the rich and truly privileged have nothing but disdain for them is only validating their feelings. And their votes.
I have a host of doubts about him, including his ability to be their economic savior, but I have no doubt that in their eyes, everything that you said that night has proven to them that they were right about people like you HATING people like them.
You’re still the greatest EVER at your craft, but you’ve got a lot to learn about many other things.
Tony
P.S. Also, it takes a special kind of arrogance to imply that your “craft” is somehow more valuable than football or MMA; it’s all just entertainment that the rest of of us live through vicariously. And your counterparts in those worlds – the best ever in those sports – are just as dedicated and disciplined in their training as you are with yours. Only they have much shorter and more dangerous careers because they put more than their emotions on the line. So maybe you stop shitting in their cereal, too, ‘kay?
Tony Marion is a writer and filmmaker who splits time between Lancaster, PA and Baltimore, MD. He lives for the work of Descendents (the band), Chuck Palahniuk and Rian Johnson. Check out the digital embodiment of procrastination he calls his website here.