Excess

Recently, a few friends of mine, both Los Angeles dwellers, hosted a joint birthday party at their shared complex in Studio City, right outside of Hollywood. They christened the party The Pool Party of the Year as it would celebrate both a golden birthday (when someone turns the same age as the day of the month that they were born) and a dirty thirty (when someone turns thirty but decides to act much younger for one more day). As these two Angelenos are two of my closest friends, I made sure to attend. However, I wasn’t entirely prepared for the debauchery that ensued.

Hollywood is a nexus for excess (and a popular vacation destination for young writers who get way too excited after rhyming nexus with excess). While Times Square may hold the record for most flashes per square inch, Los Angeles blows it out of the water with billboards, magazine stands, posters, and opulence that is just as widespread as the city. If New York City screams, “Look over here!” Hollywood¹ sits back in its chaise lounge and sighs, “You’ll have no choice but to look.” This is because the opulence isn’t contained in the billboards, but spreads to the attitudes of the people. As opposed to the stereotypical New Yorker - a blue-collar, no-nonsense fireman or Deli owner - the stereotypical Hollywood starlet struts through the city with perfectly manicured nails and styled hair that would look out of place if not for the intentionally styled-down and oversized graphic tee, all rounded out with a prescription-drug-filled designer bag that doesn’t call out for your attention, but rather assumes it. She makes sixteen thousand dollars a month “modeling.” She hasn’t spoken to her parents in three years. She is nineteen years old.

It was a trio of just this type of representative that I saw stumbling out of the Laurel Canyon brunch joint I was dining at on Sunday morning. As I sipped my very mediocre Irish coffee and poked at my criminally overpriced and under-portioned biscuits and gravy, these young girls poured out onto the patio as if they had just spent the entire night clubbing (and maybe they had). What struck me first was their intense beauty. At first glance, they were almost too attractive to look away from. However, my infatuation ended as soon as their delusions of grandeur began. These girls would have strutted down the street if the drugs hadn’t forced them to wobble; yet, they maintained their assumption of a runway. In the span of a few seconds, they went from goddesses to grotesque. It was like I was seeing sirens or succubi. I shivered for them and for the young men, emaciated and too stupefied by the same drugs to have any dignity, who would inevitably follow these girls off the cliff. I shivered again as one of the girls asked the others to cover her while she squatted down and attempted to urinate on the sidewalk.

Perhaps I am being too harsh on La La Land. After all, art (or truly marketing) isn’t the only profession that attracts excess. Finance, politics, and war have all produced the rich and gluttonous. However, I believe that the entertainment industry takes the cake because, while the other industries usually try to mask their excess in an effort to seem relatable to the masses they are intent on bleeding dry, those in the entertainment industry profit off of just the opposite. They flash their opulence so that the poor, average masses can use them as the images of their dreams, and pay them handsomely for it.

Unfortunately, too many times, the excess can overshadow the dream. The young painter whose dream it is to paint the next masterpiece can be too easily seduced by the glamor of the gallery parties. The young writer who sets out to pen the next best-seller can have his beautiful, hard-earned philosophies corrupted by the sparkling ideologies of the local zeitgeist. The young actor whose goal is to tell stories by observing and reflecting on culture can come to believe that excess isn’t the root of most cautionary tales but is rather the way of the tale-teller. It is all a part of the dream and then it becomes the dream itself.

Many have said that the root of all sin is pride. That is a very valuable and wise idea; however, my experience in the art world has shown me that, perhaps, the root of all sin is gluttony. It is the excess of something that makes it evil. Lust is the excess of sexuality outside of marriage and consent. Murder is the excess of force outside of justice or reason. Tyranny is the manipulation of excess importance placed on groups. Manipulation itself is a symptom of the excess of pride. Pride is the excess of one’s individualism.

At the end of the day, the Devil only has one trick. Thankfully for him, we are simple enough that he merely has to rebrand his trick to fit our different vices. If we were any smarter, the Devil would be out of luck because he cannot create anything new. Creation is a divine act; he can only corrupt and destroy. He is inept at invention, but he is great at rebranding and marketing². Thankfully for us, the first step in defeating him is realizing this. All of his temptations, despite seeming exciting, novel, and promising, will all lead to the same destruction and disappointment. Whether you pursue sexuality through fornication or pornography, you will be left with the same hollow feeling afterward. Conversely, he works tirelessly to make sure that the beauties and nuances and ever-changing, ever-increasing joys of a life with and through Christ seem mundane and stale. Through pornography and fornication, he will do his best to mask the fact that sexuality in marriage puts all of it to shame and will continue to in new and various ways throughout a marriage. God loves to create and to share the joy of creation with us. He will never rebrand an old creation, but, through His power and goodness, will recreate that good and create more goods to add to it. That is the beauty of having children. First comes the joy and unity of the procreative act, then comes the joy of pregnancy, followed by the joy of birth, and the infinite joys that follow through every stage of the child’s life. The devil, that damned thing³, will try to mask these wonders (and has very much succeeded throughout most of my generation) by redirecting our focus off of the joys of the family and onto the very temporary and fearful pains of parenthood, e.g., the pains of pregnancy and childbirth, physical changes in the mother’s body, and the daunting and inevitably difficult moments when children rebel from their parents. However, most any parent can tell you that all of these negatives, while being difficult, are totally bearable when compared to the joy of having children. To combat this, the devil has sewn brokenness into our families, which has only served to exacerbate these fears. It is much more difficult to bear the pains of childbirth without a loving husband to support you. Similarly, it is much more difficult to deal with the rebellion of children without a loving wife to help you. The Devil also appeals to the excess of a woman’s sense of beauty: her vanity, and the excess of a man’s self-determination: his selfishness. This has created a culture that distrusts the most trustworthy union ever created (for God’s triune unity wasn’t created, it merely always was, is, and will be), and puts in its place the excess of the sexual. For whatever is in excess is unbalanced, and the perfection of the sexuality of marriage is its balance between unity and procreation.

Despite all of this, God prevails in his joyful creations. It is merely our job to trust in Him. If we do, we can be assured of long-lasting and well-earned happiness. We must always be vigilant, for the devil will try to trick us into thinking that this nuanced and diverse string of joys will be fading and can’t hope to promise what he does, but if we only sit in the silence of our hearts, we will see that we don’t need his excess. God has already provided us with everything we need in Him. What is so beautiful about our paradoxical God is that the everything-that-we-need is not limited to only the minimum of what we need to survive. It is boundless, eternal, and ever-colored. His everything is not a minimum for our baseline happiness, but an unlimited wellspring for our everlasting joy and peace. It is this boundless act of creation and goodness that all art aspires to mimic. Ironically, it is this art that sits at the core of Hollywood. Underneath all of its grime and excess sits a golden core attempting to mimic the creator. Where it has been damned is in its attempt to supersede the original creator, but where it can be redeemed is in its cooperation and submission to the creator as a student. Like a child following his father, we too can create art that mirrors the Lord’s boundless creation. He put His beauty into the very mountains this wiley city sits on as a reminder. As artists who love or hate the city of angels, we would do well to remember this.

1 I make it a point here to say Hollywood and not Los Angeles. While I may have adopted a sense of disillusionment towards Tinsletown, I find Los Angeles as a whole to be too diverse to warrant any generalization. It has its rougher parts, but for every vagrant or pitiful influencer I’ve seen downtown, I’ve seen entire neighborhoods that are very lovely places, filled with kind-hearted and down-to-earth people. Hollywood isn’t just a location, but rather a culture. With culture comes ideals, traditions, and attitudes, all of which, unlike the diverse and nuanced populations of strictly geographical locations, are eligible for critique.

2 How many times do we hear the words rebranding and marketing across social media in reference to our identities? Marketing should be left to products, not personalities. Then again, what does the devil see us as but objects to be marketed, bought, and sold?

3 Much like C.S. Lewis, I am not simply adding an expletive to appeal to our base natures, but I am literally describing the eternal fate of the devil. Although, unlike the much more classy C.S. Lewis, I am still tempted to curse out the wretched thing.