World views aren’t always for sharing

THE morning after the Golden Globe Awards, I only heard radio snippets of Meryl Streep’s speech; mornings generally don’t afford me more involvement with the radio than that. When I eventually got to hear it in full, I was surprised at how it irritated me.

I have no issue with what she said and I have no beef with her views as stated. In fact I agreed with much of it. I guess I just resented being ‘tutored’ by an actor, albeit an actor of the highest order. She was at the ceremony to receive the Cecile B. DeMille Lifetime Achievement Award – a worthy honour but one given for acting as opposed to fighting in the trenches. There is no question but that she has provided us with topclass movies and top-class performances, and fair play to her. But here’s the thing: when I go to a really nice restaurant and get really nice food, I am grateful and I am glad but I don’t expect to be in receipt of the restauranteur’s world views, elevated-reputation notwithstanding.

It seems to me that modern culture equates celebrities with wisdom and that to be famous implies to be worldly; this combined and married to an actor’s commitment to drama, well the results can be… dramatic.

At the end of the day, these people are actors; they learn their lines, place themselves in other people’s shoes and act. Some are better than others hence the awards ceremonies and the accompanying glitz and glamour. Yet for all the glory and adulation, these people are not gods, they are not sages and they are not prophets.

She spoke of “one performance” that “stunned” her and what she painted was not nice or acceptable. Still it made me think of that word “performance” and the simple truth is that everyone performs and everyone acts. You don’t need to be an actor to do either. How many of us act indifferent when really we are hurt? How many of us act away our shock until we learn how to live with it, and how many of us act over our heartbreak in the hopeless hope that the pain will go away?

These are everyday performances requiring everyday efforts; there is no provision of scripts, no solutions to cruel twists and no happy endings guaranteed. Yet in hardship there is tenderness, in toil there is peace and in adversity there are triumphs. One of these triumphs is when one of these stories gets told and without doubt a further triumph would be to have Meryl Streep as lead to tell it because unquestionably and invariably she will do it justice.

Of course Meryl Streep has every right to stand at a podium in front of a world audience and dole out her sentiments on world affairs. She has that privilege, that status and that enormous opportunity. I am simply saying I would rather she didn’t.