Glenn Beck is a character being played by Paul Giamatti in the greatest prank movie ever mounted, right?
I'm not sure how many of you caught Glenn Beck's Fox News special on Friday night, "You Are Not Alone." I certainly didn't. I caught up with clips from it over the weekend, and needed some time to PROCESS what I had seen.
When you first see this clip, you can't help but be distracted by the fact that Beck is a bad actor and an utter fraud. He's not feeling the emotions he play-acts here, and he's not even doing a halfway-decent job of feigning them. I seriously think I could do a better job of pretending to be worked up over my love for America. (Maybe I'll try it on This Week in YouTube...hmm...) That's somehow even more insulting.
It's only after seeing it a few times that I realized how CREEPY the whole thing is, and how unsettling it makes life in modern-day America that this vapid blubbering actually RESONATES with some of my fellow citizens.
Yes, I watched it a few times. I've found Beck a loathsome little man for a while now, but I found this clip particularly disturbing. It's like watching an image beamed down from an alien planet, or some wretched dystopian future. If you were making an Orwellian satire of this moment in history, you could not render our media in a more over-the-top fashion. This is it. Beck here makes the propaganda guy from "V for Vendetta" look like Edward R. freaking Murrow.
At one point, Beck pretends (badly) to have the spontaneously realization that he sounds like a televangelist. It's an odd moment, because that's obviously the sort of pose he's trying to adopt (though most televangelists go about it in a more natural, charismatic fashion). You're wondering why someone who even pretends to have informed opinions about world events would want to invite comparison to charlatans like Benny Hinn, who yell at strangers and hit them with sport coats for a living. I guess that's what passes for austere sagacity in Beck's mind. Frightening.
2 comments:
i'm glad i'm not the only one who thinks glenn beck is like paul giamatti acting badly! i'm english and some one like this wouid never get away with it in the uk, we would see right through the pretence. but at least you americans give a sh##t . most of the people here couldn't care less about anything unfortunately
No doubt, the writer is completely right.
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