Leftist actor and author Sean Penn was interviewed and honored by Ari Melber on Friday night on MSNBC's The Beat. The interview was carefully edited, perhaps to keep Penn's bizarre yammering to a minimum. But Melber also quoted selectively from a passage to a Trumpian president that ends "You are not simply a president of impeachment, you are a man in need of an intervention. We are not simply a people in need of an intervention, we are a nation in need of an assassin….Tweet me, bitch, I dare you." Melber never mentioned the title character of Bob Honey Who Just Do Stuff is a hired killer.
MELBER: You say "many wonderful American people in pain and rage elected you, addressing this person. Many Russians did, too. Though the office will remain real, you never were, nor will be."
PENN: I think when talking about, at large is where we've become a society so invested in branding that people themselves exist only as a brand.
MELBER: How do you as an artist approach that insight when you are also, to many people, Sean Penn, a brand, a figure, not just a human being?
PENN: Yes, I mean, I think there's two ways to live a life. One is to be in pursuit of being a brand and the other one is to fight and run as much as you can. You never going to win entirely because people are going to have their perceptions of you. You may also have, you know, in one way or another created a perception of one's self.
MELBER: Why did so many Americans then want to literally elect a brand?
PENN: Well, certainly we've come to a point where the -- those things once considered principles of integrity are considered a fool's game. And I think that the way in which the culture has become enamored with that celebrity, I often think about this President, the way that the audience, meaning the electorate, were it a Batman movie, this is them rooting for the Joker against their own interests and looking to beat Batman down. When they go in the movie theater and while they might enjoy the colorful quality of a performance of a Joker, they want Batman to win. And I think that the transfer from what we want in our real lives and what we want in our fantasy life has become a kind of poisonous counterpoint.
Melber wasn't alone. CNN's Jake Tapper also honored Penn on Thursday's The Lead. Tapper also failed to mention the assassination theme, and described Bob Honey as merely "an old-fashioned American man living in today's current political-cultural climate." Tapper praised the novel as "very enjoyable and very intriguing."
The MSNBC interview was surreal in how Melber read from a full-page newspaper ad quoting savage criticisms of Penn and his book -- which Penn loves!
MELBER: This is in The New York Times and other papers that your publisher is running. So this is pretty unusual. The first quote says from Marie Claire -- "Honestly, shut your face, Sean Penn."
Another says "Sean Penn the Novelist must be stopped."
"Is this book Bob Honey wildly offensive? It is."
And then some of them speak to the way art can be more than one thing. I'll keep reading this to you to prolong the awkwardness of this moment, Sean. "Entertaining and maddening in equal measure, perplexing and unquantifiable by design," and the Guardian says "repellent on one level, but stupid on so many others." Tell me about your reaction and why it's an ad in the Times?
PENN: I do like this a lot, and it kind of makes me feel like yes, I did it. The author Jane Smiley said something fantastic and it got me thinking. She said after reading the book, she thought that this was going to be about a 25-75, 25 percent of the people that read the book were going to love it and the other 75 were going to loathe it. And I thought, well, that's a much better ratio than I had in my personal relationships, so it's a victory for me.
