Displaced Shame of the Entertainment Industry

Neurotic Hollywood flogs the public for its own sins.

This morning I saw a report in Blaze Media about Dana Carvey apologizing for an SNL skit he did in 1992. I was a junior in college that year and I still vividly remember the skit in which Carvey plays a subcontinental Indian working in JFK Airport security. As Sharon Stone tries to go through the metal detector to get on her flight, Carvey and his two colleagues repeatedly ask her to remove successive layers of clothing—not for security reasons, but because they are titillated by the spectacle of her removing her clothes.

Okay, okay, so the skit is vulgar and lewd, but most of our popular culture is vulgar and lewd—now more than ever. The 1992 SNL skit redeemed vulgarity and lewdness by making fun of it in an effective way. Why apologize for it now?

Since Harvey Weinstein was indicted in 2018, I have suspected that the denizens of Hollywood are suffering from shame. As I previously noted in a post titled Willful Blindness, Harvey’s depredations were universally known in Hollywood since at least 2000, when they were satirized in a Fox dark comedy series called Action.

Now the denizens of Hollywood are displacing their shame by constantly flogging the general public with Woke virtue signaling about race and gender. I propose that these people confess their sins to a priest or rabbi or therapist and quit punishing the rest of the country for their own unresolved shame.

The bright exception to this self-indulgent tedium is Sharon Stone, who is apparently a model of honest self-evaluation and mental health. As she noted in the same podcast in which Dana Carvey made his mea culpa:

I know the difference between a misdemeanor and a felony. And I think that we were all committing misdemeanors [back then] because we didn’t think there was something wrong then. We didn’t have this sense. I had much bigger problems than that, you know what I mean? That was funny to me. I didn't care. I was fine being the butt of the joke.

We're in such a weird and precious time where because people have spent too much time alone. People don't know how to be funny and intimate and/or any of these things with each other. Everybody's so afraid that they're putting up such barriers around everything that people can't be normal with each other anymore. It's lost all sense of reason.

Brava, Sharon! If only you were the president of a major studio, maybe we’d start seeing good movies again instead of the relentless train of unwatchable twaddle that has been inflicted on us for the last ten years.