An Odd Kind of Revenge

All right, today let’s indulge ourselves in a culture quiz. I’m going to describe a scene from modern Hollywood, and then we will test your response. No jumping ahead, now. We must take this step by step. Here’s the scene:

A warm night in Culver City. A line of limos rolls up to Sony Pictures Studios, nee Columbia, and deposits its passengers. There is some heavy freight inside the limos. Daryl Hannah, Dustin Hoffman, Mel Gibson, et cetera. They have come to strike a blow for hunger.

Everyone disembarks and proceeds to a sound stage. The floor has been covered in straw mats and otherwise decorated to resemble the Sahara. Hoffman, Hannah and Gibson, along with a couple hundred others, plop themselves down on the straw mats.

Waiters bring them plates of boiled rice. They eat the rice. Television cameras record them eating the rice. The meal is described as the same as that offered to the starving masses of Ethiopia. Hoffman, Hannah and Gibson are demonstrating their understanding of, and unity with, the starving masses.

Speeches are made. Some large checks are written. Then the limos return to curbside and everyone fades to black for the night.

This event is no fantasy, by the way. It will take place Thursday night, more or less as described. So onward to the quiz. How do you respond to this event? Let’s try a multiple choice:

(a) I believe Hoffman, Hannah and Gibson are showing moral purpose and civic leadership. I now realize they are serious people.

(b) The “hunger” meal demonstrates the sincerity of Hollywood in dealing with problems like world starvation.

(c) I want to know more so I can laugh harder at these fools.

Alas, my quiz will produce few A’s and Bs. Not, that is, if you judge by the hefty ridicule already doled out by my brothers in the press, both electronic and otherwise. The Hollywood Hunger Banquet--yes, that is the title--probably will be remembered alongside the Hollywood rain forest gala of 1990, where a videotape was played showing a rain forest native, complete with a plate in his lower lip, thanking the sponsors for saving his jungle home.

Yes, the hunger banquet is one of those.

But now let me add a messy complication. Hollywood did not invent the hunger banquet. In fact, hunger banquets are old stuff. They have been employed as a fund-raising device for 18 years by Oxfam America, a group that specializes in producing a high return on the donated dollar.

Oxfam has held hunger banquets for church leaders in Iowa City, for Rotarians in Atlanta, for college kids in Portland. These people all sat on the floor to eat their rice meal and nowhere have the participants been subjected to ridicule.

So that gets us to the most intriguing question. Namely, if the civic leadership of Atlanta can participate in a hunger banquet and preserve its dignity, why can’t Hollywood? What is the source of the ridicule that we reserve for these people when they try to be taken seriously? Why do we need to laugh?

Think back, for example, to the last time you watched Meryl Streep scrub her apples under the kitchen faucet, giving the government all kinds of hell for its pesticide rules. As you watched that ad, were you thinking about pesticides? Or were you studying Meryl, wondering whether, in fact, an actress who makes $3 million per picture ever scrubs her own apples with her own hands?

Somehow, see, we don’t give Meryl the room to commit that small fraud. We make her pay by discounting the message. Just like we discount famine when Mel sits on the floor and eats rice. Once that image is formed of Mel on the floor, it becomes difficult to think of famine in the same way.

There are some obvious answers to the ridicule question. Egregious excess might be mentioned. Or self-promotion. There is always the sly question, in a Hollywood charity gala that resembles a duke’s ball in pre-revolutionary France, about just whose purpose is being served, who is getting what.

But there is something else, more interesting. And that is our need for revenge. Do you feel it, that small revenge, in the ridicule of these people when they try so hard to be taken seriously?

And it feels good, right? Yes. Exactly why is not so clear. Maybe they simply have too much. Or maybe it’s because they tantalize us with their lives, they make us want what they have, and we hate them for it.

In any case, from time to time, we seem to need that small revenge.

And knowing them, knowing their unerring taste for hunger banquets and rain forest galas, they will--from time to time--give us what we need.