NPO #24: The Celebrity Name Game
Article by Sean Wilkinson,
A Name On the Internet.
Welcome back to New Piece Offerings, Ticketholders!
This is a piece that has been rattling around in my mind for years. I've relayed it to a few people verbally, but hearing it out loud, even from my own mouth, hasn't done much to keep it from rattling.
But that's only one thing that led me to put fingers to keys about it.
One is my standing as a Marketing student, and the others involve stars of recent and upcoming DC films, those being Shazam! Fury Of the Gods' Zachary Levi (born Zachary Pugh) and Michael Keaton (born Michael Douglas, but not that one, and no relation), who is reprising his Batman '89 role in The Flash later this year.
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So, yeah, this has to do with celebrity names (it's in the title!). Aside from his controversial tweets about race and gender conversations, and Pfizer, the most..."interesting" thing about Zachary Levi is his choice to use his middle name as a stage name because he was afraid that Pugh (a Welsh surname with zero Semitic influence) would sound too Jewish to the average Hollywood ear. Never mind the heavily Semitic origins of Hollywood culture or that Levi's breakout character, the eponymous Chuck had the surname of Bartowski (which is a Croatian name, but "sounds" far more Jewish than Pugh, I guess). Yes, co-opting sociocultural conversations as a "knowledgeable outsider" and pushing anti-vaccination views are definitely problematic behaviors. Just because a relative minority are experiencing problems does not mean that all vaccines are dangerous to all people. We live in an era where our global population is nigh unsustainable and quickly approaching genetic singularity. Basically, we're inbred as a population, and we don't even know it, or are afraid to admit it might be a problem because then we'll have to do something about it that we aren't "morally comfortable" with. Is it so far-fetched to think that vaccine-sourced autism might be an unforeseen birth defect that came about from our macro-scale inbreeding?
I don't think so.
I also don't think that labeling someone a piece of shit for their off-hand expressions of fringe ideas--except for Kanye "I am Jesus" "I LUUUUUV HITLERRRRR" West and his AI-vomit Croc knockoff shoes; seriously fuck that guy...or don't because only the real Jesus knows what you'd catch if you did--is the other side of the kind of reflexive hate we don't need right now.
Okay, I lied. There is one other celebrity who deserves the "fuck them with a sociopolitical, metaphorical condom" treatment that comes to mind, and that is social terrorist, aspiring cult leader, domestic abuser, gender-fluidity coward (to put that into context, I use it to mean he is hiding his terrible behavior behind his declaration of gender-fluidity and label-neutrality, and not to say that gender-fluidity in any way implies cowardice or a predisposition to deviance), and multi-time kidnapper and pedophile, Ezra Miller. Which is a long-winded way of saying that I don't endorse Miller, nor do I plan on contributing to his bank account by seeing The Flash.
It is good to see Michael Keaton still active in the acting world, though. Speaking of Michael Keaton and celebrity names (as I am supposed to be doing, but I got sidetracked by write-ranting), he obviously chose to change his name to avoid confusion with the already successful and established Michael Douglas. He could have gone with Michael J. Douglas or Michael John Douglas (the initial thing proved to work later as a differentiator with Michael B. Jordan), but then there would have been confusion with Michael J. Fox, and Hollywood beat millennials to "brevity is king" by about a century, so we got Michael Keaton instead (even though, in Family Ties, Michael J. Fox played a character with the last name of Keaton, but you can't win them all...). Ultimately, he flourished in the late 80s and into the 90s, so it worked out pretty well for him. He even got a bit of Marvel money out of it.
Of course, this "don't get confused with another celebrity because of your name" thing is bullshit because at one point, those who paid attention to the names of actors had to sort through the following collections of names:
- David Keith and Keith David, (never mind that I used to get Ernie Hudson and Keith David confused because of their deep, similar-sounding voices, and I was a dumb kid who thought the guy from Men At Work was in Ghostbusters).
- Dylan McDermott, Dean McDermott, Dylan Mulvaney, and Dermot Mulroney.
- Glen Scott, Scott Glenn, Glen Campbell, Campbell Scott, and Scott Campbell.
Differentiation is great, but Hollywood is trying to be more inclusive now on many fronts, so don't think you have to make a product of yourself at the expense of your authenticity. Sometimes, and especially in Hollywood, being yourself and using the name you were born with can be different enough; even if you have to share that difference with someone else.
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Sean Wilkinson,
Out.
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