Every good whore is an actor, and every actor is a whore.

It isn’t that actors lie by performing a character, and thus become offensive in the eyes of God, (which was the basis of most early Puritan criticism of theater) but that acting is a species of prostitution. One’s spiritual and emotional energies are a precious and private thing. In women, these energies are shallow and inexhaustible. For men, these energies are an intense but limited resource. A female artist can produce an endless amount of trivial nonsense, perhaps refined in form but ultimately meaningless. A male artist often only has a few works of profundity and greatness in him, and then he is exhausted.

Thus it is degenerate to summon these emotions only to piss them away into a crowd. Women cry easily and often, for good reasons and bad ones alike. When a man who is not a pussy (i.e. womanly) cries, you know he has been wounded by a deep grief. To summon one’s emotions and throw them into the public for a sum of money or the validation of one’s ego is akin to prostitution, and actual prostitution always dogs the heels of the theater and the troupe of actors.

Both historically and anecdotally, actresses are sluts and whores almost to a woman. The act of giving herself to the audience for fame and wealth unleashes her darker nature and primes her for a life spent on her back below a procession of different men. The danger of this was so evident to our ancestors that women were barred from appearing on stage. It was felt even more keenly by the Greeks, who made the theater and play a venue of solemn religious celebration, actors cloaked and masked; and even then, a religious ceremony in honor of the god of drunkenness, harlotry, and wild abandon.

The actor is also inherently and categorically a rootless being. In older days, the theater would literally migrate around the countryside, wearing out its welcome and the novelty of its plays, and then moving on. Only the large city can support a stationary theater; in this case, it is the audience as rootless migrant. The theater and the actor may stay in place, but the people he meets are always new and strange.

This is not to say that the art of theater has no place in our culture. I’m not a Puritan, I will point to their burning of theaters as evidence that they Didn’t Get It. Our forebears had the right of it when they made it a profession low and mean in status. The men of the stage are invariably buggers, or else hollow, damaged, womanish. Theater is entertaining, high art has come out of it, and broken, unmanly men need a place as well, but that place is low. The idolization of this trade is a principal marker of our degeneracy. The foul nature of Hollywood is a feature of the profession, not a bug. One should look upon the actor as a jester in motley, a silly, unserious man with bells tinkling on his hat, not as a demigod. That is his place, that is his nature, that is his inner worth as a man.

The number of writers who have produced written plays of serious literary merit in English can be counted on a single hand, and it would be charitable to use all of my fingers. Film experienced a brief golden age of serious artistry and withered faster than any other medium. And even then, my opinion is that film’s role as artistic medium is in the retelling of simple, timeless epics, with very little ‘acting’ involved. But that is the topic of another post.