Hollywood’s a place where they’ll pay you a thousand dollars for kiss, and fifty cents for your soul.
– Marilyn Monroe, American actress
I was never really enamoured with celebrities. Be they singers, actors, directors, I was never a fan. I enjoyed watching the movies – well, sometimes. Hollywood has been generating comatose non-imaginative, repetitive trash for the last few years. It’s almost like they have stopped trying to be smart. I enjoy the music. I like reading about how a movie was made. I am thrilled by the cinematographic beauty by some really creative people in the movies, but that’s as far as it went.
While I enjoyed discussing the movies or the lyrics of the songs, I was never into hero-worshipping of the actors or the singers. Even as a teenager. Well admittedly I had a crush on Sting, the lead singer of The Police, but that was because he was so handsome. And so smart in his poetry in his lyrics. And he sang so well. If the boy next door had all three characteristics, I would have had a crush on him too.
I was not in love with their fame. Their fame, their riches meant nothing to me. I was more interested in the product of their creativity than in them. Especially actors. After all, they were just actors playing out the role – they were not the role itself. I fell in love with the concept of Drogo in Game of Thrones because of what that character symbolised – raw power, animalistic sex appeal, tenderness for the woman he loved, a real man’s man. Not the sissies the world through political correctness is trying really hard to create these days. But I was never excited about Jason Momoa, especially after seeing him in Aquaman – where he was really rather ridiculous.
I think Hollywood is dangerous in another way. Besides killing your brain cells with repetitive drivel, and three hundred remakes of the same old same old, they seem to be some kind of programming propaganda that makes heroes out of anti-heroes. Especially the ‘heroes’ and agendas they want to promote.
Since they permeate ever so pervasively into homes and lives via ‘movies’ and kids can stream them through handphones and laptops, we are actually cancelling what we teach our kids as parents and our children grow up learning a controlled narrative through what the movies and social media teach them. A slow and constant bombardment into getting them to re-think and re-learn good values that our Asian culture teaches.
You see, Hollywood is not just the movies and TV series. Hollywood is the propaganda machine that is behind almost everything staged for public consumption. It is all connected.
Do you think that all professional content creation for Instagram, Facebook and TikTok is random and only created by random people? Of course not, there is a constant agenda by those paid to promote a certain stereotype. It is classic Hollywood in action.
Connect the dots. You make someone very popular by having him act again and again and again in movies. He then has a huge following. You then get him on Instagram and create a whole new set of content with him. He gets a huge following there too. In millions. Then these same actors become very political during election campaigns. They are still doing their jobs – being paid to entertain. But now they are persuading die-hard fans to choose a candidate based on what they say, and not to use their heads and think.
The creeping all-encompassing media propaganda of newspapers and radio controlled by the powerful also extends to Hollywood, and its reach into social media. We just don’t see it. But we must. Because it affects our children.
Take the very Western concept of being rude to your parents and screaming bloody murder if the parent takes the cane to you. In Hollywood, it’s the norm. And so, our kids start talking to their parents as if they own them. They say stuff like “I never asked to be born.” “You have to do this and that for me.” We never had that sense of entitlement because we were not exposed to so much indoctrination through movies and TV as our young generations are.
Hollywood and its supporting cast of Instagram, TikTok and Facebook have become a primary parent, secondary parents are schools and universities.
Parents have now been relegated to being just a provider. To pay for the state and Hollywood to raise the exact kind of child that feeds well into a system that is being created. Think of the runaway agenda of unnecessary gender pronouns, sex change surgeries in kids and men becoming women and vice versa that seems to be on the top of the list, in such urgency and full force that people are confused on what is going on.
The wood of the Holly tree was used by magicians, occultists, satanists to make wands to weave their spells. Coincidence?
The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune. Feedback can reach the writer at beatrice@ibrasiagroup.com
