Sen. Bob Dole’s recent attacks on the cultural influence of Hollywood didn’t go far enough.
Action-adventure films and gangster-rap lyrics are kids’ stuff. Dole should go snatch the baseball caps off the likes of Steven Spielberg, David Geffen and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
They’re adults among the Hollywood elite who revert to the status of kids, showing disrespect for institutions and ideas by wearing caps inside.
You see this gaffe at the highest reaches in Hollywood. Some of the most influential people there are professionally locked into one or another aspect of childhood and, perhaps not surprisingly, adopt parts of the dress of their audience.
This isn’t an affectation like Erich Von Stroheim’s knee-high boots or Cecil B. DeMille’s jodhpurs. It’s a cuddly way of regressing to an age that everyone exempts from having to show signs of respect. And, let’s face it, if you were a balding former child star like Ron Howard, wouldn’t you cover the pate with a cap that more mannerly people accept only because of your money and power?
Nobody should get exercised over a breach of etiquette; rules are broken all the time. The problem lies in not knowing what the rules stand for. Then you miss nuances of thought and feeling that actually indicate humankind has evolved.
The big boys in Hollywood, being art collectors familiar with how the buying of work implies the paying of tribute, should know that to bare the head is to make a respectful gesture. Appearing hat–or cap–in hand shows humility in the face of something larger than oneself, say, values or creative achievements. And this modesty, this respect, acknowledges a kind of standard that’s there for society to aspire to, like a plant working itself toward the light.
Not long ago you could go into any museum, library or concert hall in the United States and find male visitors looking much as they did in the ’60s. Not anymore. Ignore the ’50s goatees and ’70s hairstyles (plus assorted tattoos and earrings) and you see the Hollywood plague of the ’90s: men in baseball caps.
(Occasionally you’ll also see Garth Brooks Stetsons and Crocodile Dundee Outbacks. But those hats are like accessories of flamboyant costumes; the baseball cap is preferred headgear of people who consider themselves–and want to be considered–“just folks.”)
Letitia Baldrige, America’s reigning counselor on manners, explains: “In the Age of Chivalry, nobles always removed hats in the presence of the king and extended the gesture to ladies as a sign of deference. Nowadays, we are such a happy democracy that we don’t show deference to anybody.”
The elite in Hollywood always have been, however, the closest people America has to royalty, exerting tremendous influence. Adolescents who see “Natural Born Killers” will not act upon it; more likely, they’ll store the experience until they can use it in corporate life. But adults react to Hollywood more immediately by imitating fads and fashions. The distinction is between teens of the ’30s posing like a Marlene Dietrich character and their mothers adopting the style of pants Dietrich wore offscreen. It’s always through adults that California’s eternal children give their image to middle America.
Hollywood films show deference to exalted achievements in many countries, over many time periods. And because they do, their creators may assume that’s the end of their responsibility. Yet as long as we imitate entertainers more often than spiritual leaders, private acts in the film community will continue to have an impact on cultural behavior.
Any mogul from Hollywood who sports a cap inside gives every off-duty account executive, psychotherapist and lawyer the arrogance to think: What I wear is at least as important as the place I happen to wear it.
How nice if politicians could change this. But it’s unlikely Republican or Democrat can change the times.
We are at a moment culturally when to say “Hats off” to anything has little actual meaning.
