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Is it just us Americans? (CONTAINS SPOILERS!)

posted 14 years ago by vinidici
13 replies | jump to latest

Maybe it all got started with Erich von Stroheim, "The Man You Love to Hate," who's best remembered today for his supporting role as the chauffer/ex-husband of the Gloria Swanson character in "Sunset Boulevard" but who had played villainous "Hun" German officers in the silent era. It was said that, whenever von Stroheim made promotional appearances at the theatres, the film-goers booed and pelted him with their popcorn!

Many years later, Bruce Dern makes his mark in cinema villainy by shooting an unarmed John Wayne in the back in "The Cowboys." Dern subsequently receives death threats by outraged Duke fans!

As a John Wayne fan myself, I have never understood that portion of the public who cannot separate fictional portrayals from reality. Are these people too stupid to be insane, or too insane to be stupid? Did they REALLY think that the REAL John Wayne had been murdered and that the ACTOR, Bruce Dern, was the LITERAL perpetrator? And that, if these things did happen (which, of course, they DIDN'T), law enforcement agencies did nothing to bring this "craven miscreant" to justice?

Is this only in America??? Or can someone provide me some degree of perverse consolation by citing examples of NON-American space cadets who have physically attacked (or at least threatened to do so) actors who've portrayed evil characters, such as Bruce Dern in his bit as "Longhair," who highjacks John Wayne's cattle and shoots him in the back?

I'd be interested in knowing another thing: Are there any IMDb users out there who can own up to having either threatened or actually assaulted any actor or actress known for onscreen (and fictional!) acts of villainy? If so, can you explain your patent inability, at the time, to distinguish between play-acting and real life? Because the instances of disgruntled/delusional fans who stalk, attack or intend to render bodily harm to ANY actor or actress with a villainous screen persona make about as much sense as one kid beating up another because he "shot" ("Bang! Bang! You're dead!") the former's buddy in the childrens' game of "cops and robbers!"

(I won't hold my breath that anyone to whom those last couple of questions are directed will actually have the gonads to make a candid response!)

[–] zziiyy 14 years ago

I can't believe someone is asking this. I'll answer! No, stupidity isn't just reserved for "us Americans." Are you 12?

[–] vinidici 14 years ago

Why the snarky response? I'm 50, if it's any of your damned business.

I put forth these questions because I'd like to know that the kind of public behavior I know to be engaged by celebrity-worshipping, reality TV-guzzling fellow Americans, which is a god-awful embarrassment to practically everyone else, isn't STRICTLY an American phenomonem.

[–] Captain_Augustus_McCrae 13 years ago

I've seen actors who played villains in pro-union plays performed on a flat-bed trucks in a fruit orchard get accosted by Mexican migrant fruit pickers after the play. No, it's not just Americans.

"It ain't dying I'm talking about, it's LIVING!"
Captain Augustus McCrae

[–] linop90 13 years ago

Americans do seem to live in some sort of an inmsular bubble though.

[–] porfle 13 years ago

You mean all of us, or just the ones who attack Bruce Dern?

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[–] vinidici 12 years ago

You mean all of us, or just the ones who attack Bruce Dern?

Okay, to re-phrase: Is it pretty much an American thing to actually physically assault or otherwise harm actors who portray villains? Dern is just a "f'rinstance" that makes me want to put a bag over my head when I think of the occasions in which he was made to feel very, very uncomfortable when threatened by outraged fans who watched him kill the Duke onscreen.

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[–] spookyrat1 12 years ago

Actually it's a pretty interesting question. Sorry you got some flack earlier for asking it.

I don't think it's just Americans. I think it's probably a world - wide phenomenon with people who get media saturated to the point where they have difficulty in separating factual and fictional worlds.

What's kind of ironic about this particular instance (and something I didn't know until recently) is that John Wayne apparently warned Dern if he took the part of Long Hair, it was likely to happen...and it did.

I guess you have to say that the Duke knew his audiences.

[–] mcgill_j 11 years ago

Well this would be the same phenomena of say soccer riots... I mean games are real but is torching cars and rioting necessary? And this is world wide.

And I can say my grandmother hated Dern and Andrew Robinson because of roles they played. My mother had a similar dislike for Ted Danson.

[–] ecarle 11 years ago

The entire issue of celebrity (across all nations, you could look it up) and our willingess to believe in movies and to worship movie stars is fascinating to me, because it tells us: (1) We're all mentally ill(just most of us not in a way where we would hurt anybody; and (2) the most primitive rites of tribal worship have come down in the human animal over centuries.

Take rock stars. Male ones get female groupies by the thousands, even in this "liberated age." And look at footage from 1964 and 1965 of young women going into hysteria over The Beatles even if they might never end up bedding a one of them.

People create photo shrines to their favorite star on their walls; people seek the signatures of stars not only for the money value but "to have a piece of Tom Cruise."

People create perfected visions of life in the stars they love; and those stars can indeed become "our friends." I can't say I've ever worshiped a star, but when moving to new cities as a kid, I took comfort in the fact that, while it might take months to make some good new friends -- there were my old friends John Wayne and Steve McQueen to watch, right there on the screen in the new theater in the new town.

They can also become most influential in our lives. I've read of thousands of people deciding to become lawyers after seeing Gregory Peck play one in "To Kill a Mockingbird." Clark Gable took off his dress shirt in "It Happened One Night" to reveal no undershirt -- and men across the world followed suit. Applications to Harvard shot up after "Love Story" was filmed there.

Which brings up another point -- millions of people travel the world to see "where their favorite movie stories took place." The story may have been fictional, but it was FILMED there, those stars STOOD there -- and so now it becomes a "place of memory worship." (The most ironic of these is the Mission San Juan Bautista from Hitchcock's Vertigo. Folks travel to the mission -- which DOES exist -- to look at the Bell Tower -- which DOESN'T exist. The tower was a matte painting.)

We can say all this behavior is stupid, but it isn't. Very intelligent people have taken on "deep fandom"(sometimes to our benefit -- think along the lines of the engineers who made so many "Star Trek" devices, like the cell phone, become real.) Its more along the lines of "irrational," but even that doesn't quite fit.

It is CEREMONIAL. We have taken on these celebrities as extensions of our own lives and hopes and dreams. They comfort us. They guide us(or at least they used to, before so many of them played jerks.)

And what's funny is how we simply accept this madness as a fact of everyday life.

[–] joekiddlouischama 10 years ago

Celebrities are the modern demigods ...

[–] biggiebaby 11 years ago

This big Bruce Dern abuse urban legend mostly come from that when time came for the fight scene. JW told Dern " they're gonna hate you for this..." Then BD was a legend in his own right.
Thing is JW beat the feathers outa BD. Broke some ribs....

[–] joeparkson 10 years ago

When an actor plays a heavy so well that he is physically attacked by a movie fan, that is the equivalent of an Oscar nomination.

Soy 'un hijo de la playa'

[–] CoriSCapnSkip (2756) 8 years ago

I've heard it claimed that if an actor in India plays a character who dies, they are considered dead for real and can't act again. I don't know whether or not this still is, or ever was, true. John Wayne's career would have been over pretty quickly if so, as one of his earliest roles was as a corpse!