As I was finishing up applying eyeliner (or guyliner) as an extra in the filming of the sequel to the movie “This Is Spinal Tap,” a man joked with another man at the table saying, “You’re next for eyeliner!” With that comment, the second man erupted into an intense and malicious attack on me. He was shouting “Real men don’t wear eyeliner! I was a Marine and I’m a Christian!” and pounding his hands on the table, he repeated “real men don’t wear eyeliner!” This sudden rant bashing me interrupted the conversational in the room and stunned everyone at the table.
“This Is Spinal Tap” was a mockumentary about an aging heavy metal rock band that had reached a tailspin in their highly successful career. There was a negative narrative and a wholesale denial of where the band was in their floundering career.
The concert scenes for the sequel were being filmed in New Orleans this past weekend and I was asked to be one of the many extras. Collectively, the extras represented every body type, age, race that one might see at a reunion concert of a heavy rock band returning to the stage. Among the types were wild punk and goth rockers with heavy face make-up, wild hair, tattoos, piercings, and fashion that included leather, mesh, and vinyl. Extreme was in vogue.
So, to fit the scene, I used products to puff out my hair and I added some guyliner to accent the androgyny of rock in the 70s and 80s. There was nothing extreme about doing this in that setting and there was certainly no suggestion of sexual orientation. It was the type of make-up that countless rockers have - and still - use on stage.
For this man, who was given props of a brown leather jacket with fringe and a faded brown leather cowboy hat, to have reacted the way he did to my guyliner was a reminder that there are a lot of Americans who feel the need to not only tell you what their political opinions are, but they go further and condemn you if you don’t share their views and try to make you feel stupid for not believing what they believe. I hear these angry Americans call and text my talk show on WWL with pure hate in their voices. What shocked me was that this bully chose the holding area for a group of extras in a movie to loudly promote, not just to me, but to the whole table, his specific views on a man wearing guyliner. That proved to me the nature of many Americans who totally define themselves by their political views.
As the people at the table looked on, one woman stood up for me by talking about her Christianity and that if this man were a true Christian he would not be so quick to judge me and that incited the man to then began promoting his Chrisitan beliefs as the righteous beliefs and her beliefs were not Christian. It was an ugly scene.
But the takeaway from that incident was that there are Americans who define themselves by their politics and their support of certain candidates. I have also talked about this often on my show. The sad truth appears to be that some Americans are insecure and lack any sense of significance in their lives and the way they find meaning and a sense of importance is to define themselves by their politics and promote their views as an extension of who they are.
It is good that Americans take their politics seriously, but the extent to which some Americans are equating their specific political views with their very existence in life is a disturbing trend. Another factor may be that for many Americans, the most interesting or exciting thing about them is their political affiliation, and the hate they have for people different from them - and without that they do not feel as important. I’m sure this exists on a subconscious level and these people do not think they need their politics to feel significant, but the way some Americans lash out at differing opinions or any criticism of a candidate they support, it is obvious that many Americans cannot separate their sense of self from their political views.