New Article: George Clooney and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Study in Contrasts

[David Shasha]

"RBG" will be re-broadcast on CNN Sunday, September 9th at 8 and 10:00 PM

George Clooney and Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg: A Study in Contrasts

 

On Labor Day I watched the AFI tribute to Clooney which was broadcast that night on Turner Classic Movies:

 

https://www.afi.com/laa/laa18.aspx

 

Right afterwards I watched CNN’s broadcast of the documentary “RBG”:

 

https://www.cnn.com/shows/rbg-ruth-bader-ginsburg-film

 

The two programs provided a fascinating study in socio-political contrasts.

 

Clooney is a very affable and engaging celebrity whose reputation as a serious artist is highly overinflated.  As an actor he remains well beneath Golden Age Hollywood icons like Cary Grant and Humphrey Bogart.

 

His role as a very showy public activist is just a cut above Limousine Liberal, marking him as part of the current crop of the insufferable Hollywood power-player mafia.

 

Reviewing his career, I found one true masterpiece, “Good Night, and Good Luck”:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Good_Night,_and_Good_Luck

 

Like his closest Hollywood model Robert Redford – another actor with pretensions of nobility and matinee idol looks who has less talent than he thinks – Clooney did a better job behind the camera than in front of it.

 

Of course, we will recall Redford’s one true masterpiece “Quiz Show”; the story of a flawed and confused son of a very accomplished man who struggles mightily to define his own identity:

 

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quiz_Show_(film)

 

Just as Redford produced a movie about what he understood best, the WASP experience and its pressures, so too did the political activist Clooney use his directorial power in “Good Night, and Good Luck” to lionize the figure of the great muckraking journalist Edward R. Murrow, a man whose clarity in a time of political crisis in America was exemplary.

 

Sadly, both Redford and Clooney have proven to be straw men Liberals whose very showy partisan advocacy has been submerged in the Rightward turn in American politics.  Both men were and are immensely popular actors whose politics do not reflect the American mass audience that they serve.

 

So, if nothing else, watching the ill-advised AFI lifetime tribute – Clooney is only 56 years old – we saw what the FOX News wackos call the Hollywood Left Wing Conspiracy; a group of influential fast-lane types who vainly fight the war of ideology and indoctrination as they watch the country elect Trump and go to the dogs.

 

While Clooney has made a few very good movies – the biting Gulf War indictment “Three Kings,” the Coen Brothers’ eccentric re-telling of Homer’s Odyssey “O Brother, Where Art Thou?”, and Steven Soderbergh’s solid Romantic Crime Drama “Out of Sight” – his career has been spectacularly uneven; his likeability more often than not being unable to compensate for his overreach as an actor with very limited skills.

 

Clooney represents a lot of what is wrong with Hollywood, his political advocacy ineffective, while his vulgar 1% lifestyle and its ties to the Obamas and Hollywood royalty is stifling in a sociological sense.

 

No matter what he thinks, he will always be more TMZ than Tom Joad.

 

He is an appropriate bookend to that other empty suit, Brad Pitt.

 

On the other hand, the documentary “RBG” provides us with a view – albeit a sometimes very superficial and glossy view – of a very important American jurist who should be known as something more than a celebrity t-shirt icon.

 

The documentary touches on important cases that Justice Ginsburg argued before the Supreme Court when she was a lawyer working in the Women’s Rights movement in the 1970s.

 

It vigorously makes the argument that she was as important for Feminism as Thurgood Marshall was for Civil Rights.

 

Sadly, the movie is too much slanted to the stultifying “Notorious R.B.G.” cult, and too little a serious examination of the intellectual history and social context of its protagonist.  There is too much novelty and ephemera and too little serious discourse on the doggedly wonky RBG legal process.

 

Much wasted time is devoted to her surprising friendship with Right Wing nut-job Antonin Scalia and their mutual love of the Opera, but not much time is devoted to the current dynamic of the Court as it applies to the vile Clarence Thomas, who has been joined by John Roberts, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch to effectively move the Court to the extreme Right as RBG is more and more left to writing dissents instead of majority opinions.

 

We crucially do not hear anything about her female colleagues on the Court, from Sandra Day O’Connor to Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.  It would have been extremely useful to better understand that important dynamic and how it functions.

 

Though the documentary touches on the current Court’s lack of bipartisanship and increasing divisiveness, it spends altogether too much time on presenting what has become the “Notorious R.B.G.” cult and its annoyingly cloying obsequiousness.

 

While the Republicans have used the Federalist Society and gerrymandering to swindle the country, young Americans are increasingly unable or unwilling to do the work of patient incrementalism and bipartisan consensus-building that the brilliant Ginsburg has excelled in.

 

The movie does effectively show her as a pragmatic moderate rather than a radical ideologue.  But in the end, it succumbs to the Clooney-fication of the Liberal elites and their tacit inability to close out elections and maintain solid Congressional majorities.

 

This situation became dire for Ginsburg in the summer of 2016, as she lashed out at candidate Trump prior to election – something that was inappropriate for a Supreme Court Justice and which she properly apologized for.

 

Perhaps she was flush with the “success” of her cult and its promotion of her iconic celebrity.

 

But it has become clear that such celebrity has often outweighed substance, and the RBG cult has forgotten the basic values of persistence and hard work – very RBG values – in the protection of American Democracy.

 

After watching the two programs in sequence it occurred to me that the painful sobriety of the sharply ascetic RBG has ultimately been trumped by Clooney’s political superficiality and his lack of gravitas as an artist.

 

The RBG cult wants her to be the legal equivalent of Clooney-style TMZ celebrity, rather than a diligent and boring egghead whose intellectual values are far more important than all the glitz and popularity.

 

While we look to see what will happen to the Supreme Court as Trump gets his second chance to destroy our system of Checks and Balances and the Rule of Law, the RBG cult and the Hollywood Liberal mafia led by Clooney and his pals signify the deterioration of serious discourse and incrementalism among the Millennials who do not seem to understand what it takes to get things done in the real world.

 

 

David Shasha