Kevin Costner’s Career Politics

Kevin Costner is the latest movie star to negate his own prestige by making a careless political statement. He posed for a photograph wearing a cowboy hat, boots, sunglasses, and a T-shirt emblazoned with “I’m for Liz Cheney.” If this was just a role, it’s his riskiest one yet.

The Costner image was taken on the Montana set of his Western TV series Yellowstone. He’s not a voting resident of Cheney’s congressional district in Wyoming, so the bumper-sticker phrase expressed generalized political support. Timed to complement the televised J6 show trials, where Cheney is vice chairman, the T-shirt stunt recalls the partisan hysteria of those 2016 Hillary Clinton T-shirts that read “I’m with her.” But Costner’s endorsement of Cheney, a Republican-identified turncoat, merely contradicts the actor’s famous liberalism.

Cheney promoted the Costner photo in a desperate campaign fundraising tweet: “Real men put country over party.” Playing off the connotations of Costner’s many western portrayals, Cheney co-opted the actor’s renown and put his reputation in jeopardy. Who knows what’s “real” or manly about wearing a T-shirt (unless it’s Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire), but assigning virtue to secondary sex traits that progressives call “gendering” is merely pouty and childish.

Costner should be the last person to adopt the Hollywood practice of bringing political tension to what ought to be a nondenominational film stage, pretending national loyalty while inflicting workplace division. A country-music site recently quoted Costner: “I’m an independent. I vote for who I think has the best interests of the country and how we sit in the world.”

But Costner divides his fans unnecessarily. “I really go back and forth on my votes. The Democratic Party doesn’t represent everything that I think, and neither does the Republican Party right now — at all. So, I find it too limiting.”

Costner followers squirm in an uncomfortable position, unique to the millennium, of having to weigh moviegoer affection against the outrage and insult felt as a citizen. Costner’s betrayal doesn’t hurt as much as when greater figures — Streisand, De Niro, Zack Snyder — commit irrational political affronts owing to TDS. Their willingness to see the country fractured and destroyed through political pique goes to the heart of celebrity distrust and disrespect.

We should not endow performers of the obnoxious profession with so much faith, but Costner’s disappointment (disloyalty?) slides off our backs. He has advocated bleeding-heart humanism throughout his career, from the pandering Dances with Wolves, to that Green-movement boondoggle Waterworld, to producing the ludicrous proto-hippie, indigenous-people’s epic Rapa Nui.

Any account of Costner’s career politics — more good films than bad — must balance debits and credits.

*His breakthrough movie, De Palma’s grandiose The Untouchables, is now an antediluvian fantasy of a bygone America and FBI.

* Costner’s career was defined by Field of Dreams, a favorite of baseball fanatics who don’t mind its pea-brained sentimentality consecrating sports and Sixties liberalism.

*His Oscar-winning Dances with Wolves shamelessly pandered to the American Indian Wars with a hoary brotherhood theme.

*Oliver Stone’s JFK sensationalized conspiracy-theory tabloid rhetoric, with Costner as its voice-of-reason anchor: “We’re through the looking glass now” predicted the present. But today, we fear that the exhortation “Let justice be done though the heavens fall” excuses modern tyranny.

*Prison whites sexualized Costner in Clint Eastwood’s ambivalent convict drama A Perfect Day.

*The War went beyond social ambivalence to express openhearted, cross-cultural humanism.

*In Thirteen Days, Costner finally made it to portraying one of JFK’s White House aides, in a rare, adult political drama/history/fantasy about the Cuban missile crisis.

*The Elvis tribute 3000 Miles to Graceland suggested that Costner understood our culture’s deeply embedded class aspirations.

*Open Range was the best of the revisionist westerns that structured his career toward mythological Americana, but its implicit political conservatism is, perhaps, less reliable than Redford or Beatty’s occasional nonpartisan turns.

*And it was in Swing Vote (2008) that Costner dared test political partisanship with its astonishing line “l can’t be racist, I voted for Obama!” — credit eventually stolen by Get Out because Costner’s Capraesque leanings were mistimed.

*Let Him Go, anticipating the modern western Yellowstone, was a poisonous, ludicrous fantasy about Midwestern class divisions.

There was fascinating moral quandary in Mr. Brooks, Rumor Has It . . . , 3 Days to Kill, Black or White, and Hidden Figures, but all that in itself was probably the start of Costner’s weakening toward Liz Cheney self-importance. His movie record intimates that he’s dangerously naïve about deceptive power struggles like Cheney’s.

This career arc demonstrates how a political mindset can curdle and — through sanctimony — turn toward promoting that authoritarianism that liberals now embrace. Costner has the right to stupid opinion, just like his obnoxious-profession peers, but we still want right, justice, truth, and beauty from cultural figures — whether the movie stars fall.

Costner has not explained his Cheney advertisement, letting the photo speak for itself as if it was one of his movies. Actors get accustomed to being manipulated, and Cheney’s exploitation of Costner uses him no differently than a hack filmmaker would. His political thinking is so small-minded that whenever he makes art, it’s a happy accident.