LOLing to the Death of Conversation

One of my hobbies is to watch movie documentaries explaining the rationale for selecting actors and scenes and all sorts of fascinating details. The latest one I saw was from my beloved “Amadeus Mozart;” a movie that moves me in so many ways. I have probably seen it at least five times over the last twenty years. I have never forgotten Tom Hulce’s performance as Mozart with his contagious and maniacal laughter. F. Abraham Murray as Salieri brought out the sin of covetousness and anger in a more concrete way than I have ever seen performed.

I was reminded also recently of the art of story-telling by sages like Orson Welles who hypnotized me in an interview with Dick Cavett where Welles tells the story of his brief encounter with Adolf Hitler before the Nazi party became prominent. He said in that masterful voice filled with compelling mannerisms that Hitler “made so little an impression on me that I can’t remember a second of it. He had no personality. He was invisible…. I think there was nothing there.” Perhaps only a party of idiots led by a highly uninteresting person can seduce the masses to kill millions. Boredom is a gift of tyrants.

Perhaps the entire ethos of modern-day poetry, and film-making, and the story-telling motif is gone. I am a lover of all things old, not because “old” is somehow more holy or more glorious, but generally because old preserves some sense of decency; it seeks to keep the gift of language at the center without feeling compelled to entertain at every five second interval.

Go ahead. Watch 10 minutes of Jimmy Fallon and suddenly you realize that you learned nothing from a guest actor/actress, except what he ate at midnight on Christmas Eve of 1998 with his second wife. Then, anytime the guest begins to opine about something significant, a game ensues and more entertainment. Of course, the Jimmy fella is hilarious and I find him rather gifted musically, but overall, the audience and its demands create the talk-show host. Fallon is not who we should have, but it’s who we deserve.

Then, head over to YouTube and listen to Dick Cavett (my favorite of all time) and hear him talk to the celebrities of the time and before us, behold, a genuine conversation about life and its inherent hilarities. Cavett can have one of the most charming disagreements with Marlon Brando on the proper definition of acting; the whole thing is civil while Cavett let’s Brando opine on and on without one.single.interruption. Today, Brando would have said five words and been compelled to play a singing game with tarot cards. The long-form conversations are largely gone from mainstream, and have now been absorbed by the podcasting world where there you can hear actors and politicians and religious figures speak frankly without the need to perform but simply be themselves at their best or worst. Jordan Peterson, Bret Weinstein and others have convinced us that people still want to have long conversations about serious things in our day. Not all hope is lost.

I suspect “Babette’s Feast” directed Gabriel Axel in 1987 (on my best movies of all time) would flop today. Charlie Chaplin’s genius adapted to a 21st century audience would be too nebulous. His comedy would be considered too imaginative. Andy Griffith would be too naive. Opie would seem too concretely situated in a patriarchal paradigm. I suspect Postman was right. If we are not entertained too quickly, we’d lose ourselves, amuse ourselves to death, because, after all, we have trained ourselves for quick doses of entertainment. And we need our fill now. So, adieu to creativity and imagination. LOL…nay, ROTFL.