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The dearth of cool | page 1, 2
It's been a while since a young and dangerous white male actor has been seen in Hollywood, now that Leonardo DiCaprio, 25, seems to have left town. Vanity Fair may have been in a hurry to confer royal status on Matthew "Naked Bongo Man" McConaughey years ago, but he hasn't seemed cool since he played Wooderson, the high school graduate still making the old scene in "Dazed and Confused," in 1993. ("That's what I like about these high school girls," Wooderson boasts. "I keep getting older, they stay the same age.") Nicolas Cage, who wasn't even 20 when he played Randy in "Valley Girl," is threatening to turn into a Stallone-clone action hero before our very eyes. Johnny Depp (24 when he arrived at "21 Jump Street"), like Cage, is well into his 30s now. Sean Penn, who was 21 in "Taps," will be 40 next year. What about James Van Der Beek, whose head, up close, is said to resemble a breadbox? I suppose it could be generational snobbery, but to me celebrity cool was once exhibited by young princes, whereas Van Der Beek and other so-called Generation Next stars have more in common with the annoying college kids of MTV's "Real World." Sure, all the young white celebs display the cockiness and style that can be purchased with megastardom. But true cool is made the old-fashioned way: It's earned, usually with talent. Our dearth of cool might be a factor behind another recently spotted trend -- the so-called democratization of celebrity. Or it might be the subject of a sad, closing chapter in "The Lost Art of Immortality"
-- a sense of living large that the creative geniuses of this century inherited from the Romantics. A more optimistic viewpoint is that with all the cacophony (white noise?) built into the modern infotainment apparatus, it takes longer for the real stars -- the cool ones -- to emerge. With so many white males in the industry these days, maybe the young ones have to let their voices deepen before they can be heard above the din. Just look at Edward Norton, an Academy Award nominee who just turned 30. He's appeared in just a half-dozen films, and he has been a cool chameleon in almost all of them. And besides, Paul Newman didn't land his first big film role until he was 31, when he played boxer Rocky Graziano in "Somebody Up There Likes Me." By 42, he was "Cool Hand Luke."
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