Dear 29-time Golden Globe and 20-time Academy Award nominee Meryl Streep,
Happy Super Bowl weekend, and congratulations on being named the 2017 Cecil B. deMille award recipient last month. It's well-deserved, probably overdue and a little surprising that you're the only the second female to give an acceptance speech for one of these since 2000.
Perhaps you could have received it sooner - there was no deMille winner in 2008 due to the Writers Guild of America strike of 2007. Coincidentally, that was the same year the National Football League had a strike. The absence of both created similar voids - wait, hold on; I'm getting ahead of myself.
Let's get right to the point. Out of respect for this web site's commenters - who are forbidden from discussing hot-button topics here - I'm whittling your Golden Globes speech where you accepted this high honor down to a single sentence fragment where you spoke of the dire consequences of life in America without the arts:
...you’ll have nothing to watch but football and mixed martial arts, which are not the arts.
I get it. It's an applause line in front of a friendly audience. A benign comment. A play on words. I love words. I love plays on them. But as I watched you speak those words, I immediately thought ohhhh noooooooooooo.
Football isn't the arts. But it is art.
You had to make it about football. If there's anything urban and rural Americans can come together and unite around it's that celebrities shouldn't force their radical, out-of-the-mainstream football opinions on them. We have pre-arranged sources for football takes: Internet geeks for analysis, grunting former players and their animated word salads on television, huffy Baby Boomers bemoaning the passage of time in magazines and Twitter egg gibberish on social media.
Hollywood actors are rarely accepted, and they require special circumstances. Former high school football cheerleader would normally pass, but 29 Golden Globe nominations sort of hampers the credibility. It's not your fault; it's your predecessors'.
After your speech a tidal wave of Well Actually responses was immediately triggered and they were all just terrible, especially the conscientious ones that earnestly Merylsplained exactly what you compromised when you chose to insert football and MMA into your prepared words. Your line made me cringe, but the aftershock cringes were worse.
That's because you don't Well Actually the greatest actress of all time for speaking her mind. The greatest actress of all time transforms herself into Miranda Priestly and Well Actuallys a plebe intern into oblivion with callous precision, because she had the audacity to make a benign comment in front of an unfriendly audience:
That's a hell of a scene. It was screaming across my frontal lobe while your friendly audience was still busy applauding your play on words. By the way, those belts are objectively identical and Cam Newton probably owns both of them.
I'm not here to tell you why you shouldn't have gone there. I'm only here to defend a subject I've spent half my life writing about every week. Football isn't the arts. But it is art.
And appreciating art requires imagination, the vision to recognize contrast, the discipline to not force symbolism where it doesn't exist or want to be and the ability to leave a little space for mystery in order to be appreciated.
Bernards (NJ) HS student Meryl Streep, 1966
You already know this. You're Meryl Streep. The part of the brain responsible for interpreting and appreciating art and making you tingle and cry while consuming it is the same chunk of frontal lobe that does all the heavy lifting while watching sports. The only thing that separates the two is that with sports nobody knows the ending:
Unlike (most) forms of art, though, a game has no foreordained plan or plot or intention. The rules of a game impose a certain kind of order, but it’s different from the order of an artwork. A movie knows where it wants to take you; no one can say in advance where a game will go.
All of its beauty, ugliness, boredom, and excitement, all of its rage and sadness emerge spontaneously out of the players’ competing desires to win. For however long the clock runs, your feelings are at the mercy of chance. This happens and then this happens and then this happens. You’re experiencing, in a contained and intensified way, something like the everyday movement of life.
I have friends who don't watch or understand football. The way I describe it to them is:
Football is a ghost story we just can't stop telling or listening to, which is why we should constantly try to get better at telling it.
It's storytelling, and people love good stories. This transcends football and encompasses all sports. They're all good - even the ones I don't personally enjoy.
There's also plenty of terrible football. The best players are often responsible for this unfortunate trash - it also happens with movies at an alarming rate. There have been miraculous and horrendous Super Bowls, all of which have been star-studded and deep with quality.
People want provocative art and exceptional football, and both are quite difficult to create. Sometimes the games get repetitive. I saw Mamma Mia! years before you made a movie version. Think of it like that.
In closing, here's a helpful visual illustrating what peak football artistry looks like:
Like any good piece of art you should examine the palette and try to find what your eyes cannot see: Evan Spencer didn't throw that ball. He unclenched his palm, God gently plucked it from him and painted a perfect arc into a four-inch space with it where only Michael Thomas could receive it.
After that He neatly tucked it into his hands, and then [Charleton Heston voice] where you see only one footprint in the endzone, it's where Thomas brought down the ball in-bounds. Shhhhhhhhhhh
This play was equally reckless and courageous, taking into consideration the timing and the stakes. It's the type of art that an amateur can make almost by accident, while a professional can spend an entire career trying and failing to create. America without the arts would nevertheless be left with endless football artistry possibilities.
And as an American, I'd prefer to enjoy both while diminishing the value of neither.
Enjoy the Super Bowl. If you're unsure, the Patriots are the bad guys and the Falcons are merely less bad.
Sincerely,
Ramzy
