Reaction Shots: Escape From Seth Rogen's LA
Plus a review of No Time To Die and The Paul Schrader Award for Weirdly Wholesome Take
Separating the Seth From The Rogen
Let me get this out of the way. I do not care about celebrities mouthing objectionable opinions. They are, like most of us, naive individuals who see their virtues as above all others, whether or not they are integrated through their art. That’s certainly not unique. But if they ever caught my attention for all the wrong reasons, it’s because these people act like they are above everyone else at the expense of people they claim to care about, or they have proven to do something truly heinous.
That is where separating the art from the artist comes into question. There have always been subjective answers to this inquiry and it remains complicated because it means that you are challenging your morals face to face against someone you wouldn’t want to invite at your family dinner. Sometimes I would have no issue. But upon hitting play, I tremble to know what my viewing experiences are when it features someone so objectionable. Roman Polanski will always be, in my view, a pedophile who directed great movies, one of which I rank as one of my all-time favorites. Alec Baldwin, a man with a habit of running his mouth against his friends and colleagues, will always be an actor who cares passionately about his profession. Every time I watch Jack Donaghy on 30 Rock, I keep forgetting that he’s accommodated by a man who shot and killed a crew member in a movie he produced. Once I’ve heard about the news, I was almost done watching 30 Rock, and was afraid that this has hurt the way I watch it. Thankfully, it remained uproariously funny and Donaghy, a hyper-capitalist NBC executive, remains in good hands under its creator, who has canceled part of her own work, to capitalize on an anti-racist reckoning in 2020.
Enter Seth Rogen, an actor who has shown to be capable of making me laugh. But as of late, he has shown to be the curmudgeon on Twitter, carving out a knife that is nothing more than latent moralizing. As crime is rising in California, due to laws that relaxed shoplifting under $1000 to a mere misdemeanor, Casey Nessiat, who is a YouTuber, tweeted that his car was robbed and thanked the police for catching the thief and getting his goods back. Rogen took offense over the fact that he called Los Angeles a shithole, and says that it’s OK cos he didn’t have an issue over his car being broken in fifteen times. There’s something demented about this sentiment, which is shared by a complacent and loud minority of progressives on Twitter. Imagine that insufferable Matt Bors comic of ‘improving society’ came to life. Except Rogen would be the irritable guy in the well saying ‘and yet you live in Los Angeles’ to Nessiat’s serf saying “we should improve Los Angeles”.
Why I raise this up is because there were two movies that capture the current Seth Rogen as a person. The first was Steve Jobs, where he played the title character’s sidekick Steve Wozniak. He plays him, like the most open-minded and patient sidekick to Steve Jobs, who is burdened with a large ego. For what it’s worth, his performance is above average, a career-best for an actor well known for playing stoned characters. The second is a forgettable rom-com called Long Shot, where he is a journalist who became a speechwriter for a Democratic candidate running for President, played by Charlize Theron. The climax there is that after Rogen and Theron parted ways, it’s revealed by his African-American best friend that he has been a Republican. That scene at least winked to the surface of political unity and the rom-com trope that has the lover ask ‘am I the bad guy?’ But both movies presume that Seth Rogen is the proprietor of good and it’s a delusion that translates into the actual person.
So far, Seth Rogen hasn’t been accused of sexual misdemeanors, nor did he use his privileges to take advantage of someone on set. But an argument that it doesn’t matter whether the goods you have bought were stolen because only in a city like Los Angeles can stealing be tolerable is bizarre and heartless enough for me to dismiss his worth as a human being. He threw his friends under the bus as soon as it becomes convenient to fit in with fashionable trends. Add to that, he makes the common myth that cancels culture doesn’t exist because it means someone has to face up the consequences. All to the celebration of the new puritans everywhere.
In Steve Jobs, there’s a memorable line uttered by Wozniak. “It’s not binary,” he tells Jobs. “You can be decent and gifted at the same time.” Wise words were uttered by an otherwise witless actor.