Gervais Acerbity Too Much for Hollywood

Ricky Gervais has caused outrage in the gossip community of LA’s finest with his no-holds-barred approach to hosting the 68th Golden Globe awards ceremony.

The outspoken Brit’s performance has divided Hollywood A-listers and celeb commentators alike. Robert De Niro and Alec Baldwin were on the verge of tears with laughter throughout Gervias’ routines, while Messers Downey Jr and Carell took a less appreciative stance, the latter pushing past Gervais’ attempted embrace to present one of the evenings awards.

The celeb columns of British and American papers seem equally split. The Los Angles Times claims Gervais invoked a ‘corrosive tone’ throughout the evening with the guardian and the telegraph seemingly supporting that view, while Entertainment Weekly said that Gervais’ performance is what makes live events like the Golden Globes so entertaining, and TV critic Mary McNamara said that Gervais “was making many audience members and presenters uncomfortable and even angry”.

Neither the Los Angles Times nor Entertainment Weekly actually hit upon the important point that emerged as a result of last nights film awards. The main point is how easily upset these multi-millionaire celebrity’s become when a few near-the-knuckle jokes are thrown their way.

The cut-and-dry of it, which emerged through the cracks of sincerity countenanced by the West’s greatest living actors, is the god-like status and impenetrable bubble that hollywood’s finest feel that have an essential right to. The expansive ego’s that pervade the atomic properties of the celeb’s protection-from-the-outside-world bubble is alas! sensitive, and pervious when any fun is being poked with a lewd stick at itself. And alack, therefore we cannot make fun out of these heralded heroes of today’s big screens.

The Mail online, endorsing the banal passivity of other online paper columns like the guardian and the telegraph, actually branded Gervais’ humour as ‘acerbic’.

Now the word acerbic is an adjective that has been used by philosophical commentators when discussing Friedrich Nietzsche’s controvertible idea that he deems “Christianity the one great curse, the enormous and innermost perversion, the one great instinct of revenge for which no means are too venomous, too underhand and too petty – I call it the immortal blemish of mankind”.

There is acerbity a-plenty in Nietzsche’s polemical poetics – there’s bound to be when you refer to Christian morality as ‘perfidious’. And I think most would agree that contextually, this was indeed an acerbic approach to moral philosophy. It upset many Christians; it ruptured their metaphysical perspective beyond repair; it overturned what was “good” and what was “evil”; it asserted that Christianity had created “good” and “evil” in order to manufacture their own “goodness” and thus preserve their right to power and oppression over the “badness” of society; it turned Western religion upside down and inside out.

Now, the label of acerbic on Nietzschean terms is understandable. But Gervais as an acerbic? This reactive hyperbole on behalf of writers, commentators, and particularly some actors is what confirms the utopian, self-aggrandizing unrealistic realm the acting world par excellence exists within.

In being confronted by viewpoints offered by Gervais – viewpoints that I dare-say many many people are likely to share – some just found it too overwhelming that their deity, their totem, their via regia to the divine life of cherubs who must be protected at all costs from the vulgar chaos of normal life would be emotionally destabilized after an empty joke was sent their way.

If there is anyone you should be able to poke fun at it should be the rich and famous. How many old men do you know that would be offended by a joke about their teeth falling out? How many alcoholics would take issue with their libidinal mishaps? The reason Philip Berk and Charlie Sheen (not sure of Sheen’s response – he is still incoherent) took issue with Gervais is because of their contorted misperception that they are untouchable, reified entities whom shouldn’t be openly mocked. Did they never go to school?

These people do not live in the real world. They pretend they do in many great films. But after filming is over and they receive their ridiculous sum of cash for well performed pretense, they resume their position of worshipped neo-Athenian. God help them if they were to be confronted with any real-life acerbity.

What I have emphasized is the disparity between the real lived world and the fake, pretentious world of celebritology and how one word can have such a different paradigm of essence in either. The fact that Nietzsche’s acerbity dealt with a morality that has subtended Western culture and society to its profound depths, and the fact that Gervais’ purported acerbity “with mildly sinister undertones” attacked a group of people who are so far removed from the profound realities of existence highlights something even more important.

That ‘something important’ also happens to be a Nietzschean concept. As highlighted in The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche says that art (extended to the realm of film for today’s subject, and for the purpose of my metaphor), although not truth is vital in creating a life-affirming duality. The fact that you have existence and art as opposites is important, not in their prospective alignments with truth, but in their interaction which may or may not be truth and which therefore does not resign the individual as subject to the morbid becoming of existence.

So yes, just as Richard Wagner was important for the fin de siècle, Hollywood is important as a life-divergence. But the difference is this: the rarefied personalities of Hollywood are in the position they are because of the working class folk who pay to support the entertainment industry – as Nietzsche said they need these interaction between life and art. But just because they are in this exalted position of being on the screen rather than watching it makes them no less important to society than the people watching rather than acting.

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Posted in: Blog, Celebrity, Christianity, Cinema, Culture, Golden Globes, Hollywood, Nietzsche, Ricky Gervais, Society