Field Notes

Editors weigh in on hot topics

Perhaps Kevin Spacey doesn’t think his lawyers have a challenging enough case in court next week when he is arraigned on a charge of sexual assault. Otherwise it’s difficult to comprehend why else he might have been motivated to release a Youtube video of himself on Christmas Eve that easily qualifies as the dumbest move a celebrity has ever made in the annals of public-image rehabilitation.

As if there weren’t going to be a big enough media circus surrounding his legal woes, he seems to have deliberately brought more negative attention to himself with a cheeky monologue delivered in character as Frank Underwood, his Emmy-winning role from the Netflix series “House of Cards.” Cleverly drawing on the parallels between his own life and that of his fictional alter ego, Spacey displays a spectacularly tone-deaf commingling of the two that seems to serve no purpose beyond conveying he doesn’t understand the gravity of the appalling allegations he’s facing.

Does he think that offering his audience a reminder of what a great actor he was could somehow excuse any misdeeds he might have committed?

If anything, the “Let Me Be Frank” video practically incriminates him. In its own bizarrely unintentional way, it addresses the mystery that is Spacey: Can someone with such intelligence as a performer, who has so much at stake given his success, still be capable of reckless cruelty? This video screams the affirmative to that question by revealing a man who must be wildly out of touch with reality.

Perhaps we’ve got it all wrong in presuming Spacey’s video is even a bid to help himself. Maybe it’s more like a waving of the white flag, a surrender cloaked in humor. In lieu of an apology or an admission of guilt, Spacey has essentially handed us all a career-suicide note. Rather than bother to address the allegations head on, the curious choice of doing so as Frank Underwood makes the nutty argument: It doesn’t matter what I did; just remember the man I was before all this.

But that will never happen.

Does Spacey think that offering his audience a reminder of what a great actor he was could somehow excuse any misdeeds he might have committed?”