Pop Culture
The Sean Penn cult won’t get much of a kick out of this review of a toadying biography of their hero. The reviewer is blessedly immune to Penn’s affectations, seeing clearly through Penn’s pretensions but acknowledging Penn’s real talent as an actor.
… [This] very long book reads like a celebrity roast, minus the roasting. It has a claustrophobically clubby vibe.
Penn wrote an incoherent, illegible (the typeface and font size making it appear greeked text), run-on “letter” to Bush published in the New York Times among other venues, protesting the Iraq war. It was equivalent to a schizophrenic wandering the streets muttering to himself. I think the ad cost him $100,000 — for the Times ad alone.
Penn gets no accurate feedback about himself — none of Penn’s sycophants mentioned to him that the piece was unreadable and incoherent (giving the sycophants a credit they may not be due); none of them mentioned the bloated self-indulgence of the “statement” — it speaks reams about Penn as an individual. It’s no mistake that the French, who love Woody Allen because Allen’s nebbishy Jewish portrayals feeds endemic French anti-Semitism, and love Jerry Lewis because he confirms their view of Americans as crude jerks, and love Michael Moore because he, as well, confirms their toneless anti-Americanism, also love Sean Penn with his signature confused thought processes and tiresome shy-boy grandiosity. Penn is so like them.
The reviewer points to this observation:
…As his former girlfriend Elizabeth McGovern notes, in the single most trenchant comment in the book, ”Sean is brilliant, brilliant, at being the kind of reluctant celebrity.”
