Interpreting Robert Downey Jr.
Robert Downey Jr. is my favorite actor, and so I was intrigued when I read the following in his interview with David Carr:
“I have a really interesting political point of view, and it’s not always something I say too loud at dinner tables here, but you can’t go from a $2,000-a-night suite at La Mirage to a penitentiary and really understand it and come out a liberal. You can’t. I wouldn’t wish that experience on anyone else, but it was very, very, very educational for me and has informed my proclivities and politics every since.”
(Suffice it to say he is not one of the Hollywood types who weeps over innocents trapped behind bars.)
Can you figure out exactly what he means? I’m not sure I can. I do suspect, however, that Robert Downey Jr. is some kind of genius. He’s certainly very thoughtful.
Redemption for me and not for thee….
— Freddie · Apr 22, 09:06 PM · #
Think about the jokes the hip detectives make to the white criminals in TV shows and movies about what’s going to happen to them when they get to prison.
They aren’t, actually, funny.
— Steve Sailer · Apr 22, 09:34 PM · #
As if Downey’s comments are not enough, I believe I have read that several surveys of the prison population have indicated that something on the order of 80+% of them would vote Democrat if they could vote.
— Hayekian · Apr 23, 12:36 AM · #
I think he’s channeling Dr. Johnson: the value of traveling, in his case an immersion in the criminal underclass, is that it regulates imagination with reality.
When I was younger I lived on the less-fortunate margins of society — not in prison or anything but certainly down and out — and the first thing you lose in such places is your reflex of excuse and pity. Things that happen down there are maddening precisely because they are so freely and guiltlessly willed into existence by those around you.
What you tend to learn at the bottom is very different from what you learn at the top (been there too). One thing that immediately pops out? The very real, very objective malignancies of unenlightened culture.
— JA · Apr 23, 01:13 AM · #
Freddie, whatever else he’s saying, it’s not “redemption for me and not for thee.” Redemption requires acknowledging that one has committed a wrong — that one is not an innocent trapped behind bars.
— Llegar Tarde · Apr 23, 01:37 AM · #
How good was RDJ in Zodiac? Somewhere between astounding and absolutely phenomenal. Maybe better.
— Peter Suderman · Apr 23, 01:52 AM · #
Reminds me of Sullivan’s Travels and the butler’s brutal rejoinder to his naif boss:
“You see, sir, rich people and theorists – who are usually rich people – think of poverty in the negative, as the lack of riches – as disease might be called the lack of health. But it isn’t, sir. Poverty is not the lack of anything, but a positive plague, virulent in itself, contagious as cholera, with filth, criminality, vice and despair as only a few of its symptoms. It is to be stayed away from, even for purposes of study. It is to be shunned.”
— rd · Apr 23, 03:40 AM · #
Someone who has been given more chances than any of us would ever receive, who has been caught time and again with drugs and guns, who has broken into a neighbors house and passed out there, and then turns around and says that others do not deserve second chances— that is a hypocrisy so despicable that I can’t even wrap my head around it.
By the way, I feel privileged to read a comments thread where Republicans have the guts to drop the empty pretense that they give a shit about poor people.
— Freddie · Apr 23, 04:16 AM · #
>caught time and again with drugs and guns
Quel horreur! Your automatic 1-to-1 mapping from criminals to all poor people is similarly illuminating.
— CTD · Apr 23, 04:34 AM · #
Those hip detectives with their complicated shoes!
— Dave Hunter · Apr 23, 04:39 AM · #
Oh Freddie. Freddie, Freddie, Freddie. Keep spewing the idiocy, you’re always good for it. If he isn’t whining about Ross Douthat’s movie reviews, he’s making some fallacious argument about conservatism. Downey, Jr’s comments are pretty cryptic; I don’t see how anyone could honestly read them and say “…then turns around and says that others do not deserve second chances…” without being a liberal hack of the highest order.
— Philip Marlowe · Apr 23, 09:45 AM · #
PM:
Don’t be an ass.
The Management
— Matt Frost · Apr 23, 01:19 PM · #
Freddie:
I’m inclined to agree with you about the likely meaning of the RDJ quote. But not for the reasons you suggest. And I don’t think you’re being fair to the commenters here, particularly JA and rd.
RDJ might have meant something like this:
Prison absolutely scared the living daylights out of me. I never want to go through that again, but I probably needed a scare of just that sort to set me straight. And what scared me more than anything was realizing who my new associates were: criminals. And criminals turned out to be, mostly, horrible people, people who I feared would harm me in a serious and permanent way – and I knew that was a realistic fear, not an idle one.
That’s a conservative lesson in two ways.
First, that what he (RDJ) needed was not pity or understanding but a powerful dose of fear of consequences to go straight. Second, that there is nothing romantic about criminality or criminals. In cinematic terms: he went in more Shawshank Redemption (one of the worst movies of all time) and came out more Sullivan’s Travels (one of the best).
Does that mean “redemption for me but not for thee?” I don’t see it. I see it as meaning: redemption is hard for me and for thee – it may be harder for thee or harder for me, but regardless, it’s hard, and pretending it isn’t hard or granting it before it’s earned does nobody any favors.
Does it mean dropping “the empty pretense that they give a shit about poor people?” I don’t see that either; presumably, poor people who are not criminals have the most to fear from the people RDJ was locked up with.
I happen to think that both of those conservative lessons are correct. That doesn’t detract from liberal points about our criminal justice system that I also think are correct: that the drug war has ruined the lives of many who could have been saved from a life of criminality; that there are a variety of perverse incentives operating within the criminal justice system that produce travesties of justice more often than we’d like (sometimes ludicrous acquittals, sometimes absurd sentences); and that while aggressive policing does indeed protect the law-abiding poor, the situation is complicated by the fact that more often than we’d like the thugs are brothers, cousins, boyfriends and fathers of the law-abiding. But neither does my recognition of the validity of these liberal points invalidate the conservative points above.
Why do I agree with you that RDJ probably didn’t mean any of the above? This paragraph from the interview sums it up:
I’m sorry, but RDJ sounds like a typical Hollywood jerk here, completely self-absorbed, completely without the humility that I would hope to see from somebody who had, in fact, turned his life decisively around. Elsewhere in the interview, he attributes his success in turning his life around to his ambition. All-in-all, this does not suggest a character who has reached especially deeply into himself, or with an especially deep connection to others.
I agree: RDJ is a genius. But so was Orson Wells. Artistic geniuses can be political idiots. They can even be political idiots when they come to defensible or even correct conclusions – because they can get there via a uniquely idiotic route through Hollywood narcissism. That sounds like the case here to me.
— Noah Millman · Apr 23, 01:27 PM · #
Matt,
I apologize. And I appreciate be calling the ass, and yet Freddie “Republicans don’t give a shit about poor people” is just making arguments in good faith.
Phil
— Philip Marlowe · Apr 23, 01:48 PM · #
Phil:
I don’t mean to be selective -I’m just slow to get caught up. Thanks for understanding.
Matt
— Matt Frost · Apr 23, 02:25 PM · #
I’m with Noah on this one. Downey doesn’t seem very “thoughtful” in any worthwhile sense.
He’s a spoiled Hollywood jerk who has passed through the fire, emerging as a spoiled Hollywood jerk with better impulse control and Übermensch affectations.
— Matt Frost · Apr 23, 03:10 PM · #
I think many actors feel pressure to say deep, significant things in interviews. Then really smart, deep thinkers come along and read more wisdom into the actors’ statements than are actually there.
— Joules · Apr 23, 09:03 PM · #
I enjoyed reading all your comments on this post, but I especially appreciate JA’s thoughts.
— Joules · Apr 23, 09:49 PM · #