Three rules for dealing with one's attitudes about any particular actor: (1) never idolize; (2) never idealize; (3) never mistake an actor's attitudes for those of the characters s/he portrays.
I was dismayed to read in Sunday's Parade that Mary Tyler Moore watches Fox News, likes Bill O'Reilly, and would have campaigned for John McCain had she been asked.
I am mystified as to how someone who built a career on playing smart, forward-thinking, independent-minded women could be so effective in such roles when her own beliefs are the antithesis to everything she has portrayed on the small screen in terms of both Laura Petrie and Mary Richards.
She must be an even better actress than I recognized. Or her attitudes have grown more conservative over time. Or she just doesn't think deeply about the contradictions between the implications of her stated political beliefs and the characters she so vividly inhabited in the 60s and 70s. Or all of the above. Or something completely different.
Help me out here! I feel I am truly floundering. The one thing I do know is that it's silly of me to expect everyone to behave rationally--history teaches us that most people do not--yet I cannot help but wish [and thus tend to expect--Ed.] they would.
I am therefore fighting my own internal demons: I want the world to be understandable, categorizable, orderly . . . yet I love the process of discovery, the messiness of reality, and the challenge of making sense of the non-sensible and nonsensical. It all comes down once again to my compulsion to repeal the Second Law of Thermodynamics. Entropy increases despite my efforts to make orderly interpretation of events and people. Yet without order, structure, some rational way to consider the world, there is no way to function within it. The chaos would drown out everything else.
Kurt Vonnegut knew this. "So it goes."
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