Ryan's Journal

This upcoming film's a documentary about one professional entertainer's quest to both gain insight about the heckled on heckling and take it back to those who heckle.

I can't say for certain how the documentary shakes out since, in the few venues I've checked, it doesn't seem anybody has seen enough of it to post a synopsis. In all respects, from the R-rated trailer, it appears to be more of the media staring into the mirror and falling in love with what it sees. Remember Narcissus? He wasted away to death doing that.

That we have a society where celebrity exists is a shame. Mr. Kennedy has made a movie about hecklers, the very act of which proves the producers do not understand their own monster. Modern society elevates its celebrities to a non-human state. There's a gulf between the public and the spotlight precisely because that's how the media wants it to work. And it wouldn't work if the spotlight were anything other than omnipresent and completely inaccessible to "the rest of us." To expect to be a celebrity and to be afforded the respect due a normal person seems an irrational expectation. Complaining about the engine that drives your livelihood ignores that you would have no livelihood if the engine were shut off.

Hecklers highlights the sad state of our society's consciousness by emphasizing that people have time to waste on critiquing entertainers and entertainment who don't and won't ever listen, except those who are spoiling for a fight. I don't care what people think of Jamie Kennedy, and I don't care what he, Carrot Top, and George Lucas think of their more voluble critics because I care nothing for them as celebrities. This is a meaningless and wholly artificial conflict: celebrities should not matter by virtue of being celebrities. You might be able to make a good film out of that ball of wax; the material is still trivial and irrelevant, only worth pointing out as something that should henceforth be avoided.

The social conscious should be a mess, not a uniform mass.