Sam Elliott the Meme, the Man and then the Meme Again
#Owned
Sam Elliott was, at one point, just another actor. He was a popular and accomplished actor, best known for his bold mustache and gruff baritone, but he was fundamentally just somebody who was good at pretending to be other people.
Then came memes. Conservative smart-asses transformed Elliott into a living meme. He became a hokey internet icon, the grinning, sardonic personification of folksy, homespun wisdom.
To people who see androgyny and social progress as scary and wrong Elliott is the reassuring voice of our country’s storied past, an exemplar of rugged, retro masculinity perpetually clad in jeans.
In a typical meme, an image of a droopily mustached Elliott is juxtaposed with the words, “Listen up snowflake and let this sink in. I never owned any slaves and you never picked any cotten. BLM, KKK, Antifa and Communists are all cut from the same cloth. Here ends the lesson. I don’t owe you shit.”
It did not matter to memesters that this generic conservative sentiment did not come from Elliott.
In a pre-internet, pre-meme era, when you saw someone’s face accompanied by words or a strong opinion you could assume that the words and the ideas belonged to the person next to them.
The internet changed all that. For some inexplicable reason, meme-makers felt that ideas are most forceful and effective when accompanied by an image of Heath Ledger or Joaquin Phoenix’s Joker or Sam Elliott.
Through no fault of his own, Elliott became the handsomely weathered face of cranky, reactionary Conservative “wisdom”, forever willing to zing butt-hurt snowflakes with their crazed demands to be treated with dignity.
The Sam Elliott of the Conservative imagination is a died in the wool Republican who would rather cut off his dick than abide by the fascist demands of Joe “Let’s Go Brandon” Biden.
In the real world Elliott narrated a four million dollar campaign ad for Biden, which is probably not something he would do if he abhorred Biden as a politician or leader.
As a Progressive, I derive some small measure of satisfaction out of the knowledge that despite what these ubiquitous, idiotic memes might suggest, Elliott is not a staunch Conservative or proud Trump supporter.
The reasons these memes are so popular and widespread isn’t because Elliott is an arch-Conservative but rather because his persona as the ultimate cowboy tough guy makes it seem like he would be someone with nothing but disdain for young people on the left.
Recently, however, something unfortunate but not terribly surprising happened. Sam Elliott the man began to overlap unbecomingly with Sam Elliott the Alt-Right meme.
The seventy-seven year old character actor with the legendary ‘stache was asked about Jane Campion’s acclaimed western The Power of the Dog and ripped into it on the supremely dubious basis that New Zealander Jane Campion had no right to make a movie about the American West and also that the movie was too gay, and consequently an affront to the Western genre.
Can anything really be too gay? I don’t think so. My problem with most westerns is that they’re not gay enough.
Based on those strongly held if ignorant opinions, I have some VERY bad, surprising news for Elliott about Brokeback Mountain and Sergio Leone’s heritage.
I cannot say I am terribly surprised that a 77 year old who apparently considers himself the gate-keeper for westerns the world over had a cranky old man reaction to a western that offends his rugged sensibility.
To be honest, Elliott is acting more than a little like a butt-hurt snowflake who can’t handle homoeroticism and also homosexuality. That’s too bad but it’s also not shocking.
You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover but hot damn if those covers don’t provide an awful lot of useful information when it comes to figuring out what’s inside.
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