Roger knows these people better than any of us. But I’ve maintained an observation of these folks for a while (longer than the current world political situation) and I think it still holds.
These folks live in a fantasy land. They play characters and bring those characters to life. As a result, they believe in those characters and their stories, no matter that they are fictitious. Why, historically, have so many “fallen in love” with their co-stars? Whgen they’ve actually fallen for their co-stars’ characters.
Similary, they “fall in love” with the ideas and the stories that are portrayed in their movies. And all movies, with very few exceptions, project Western, industrial, capitalist society to be the villian and all non-western, dark-skinned societies to be the helpless, if not hapless, innocent victim. The film “makes real” to them incidents that, at best, are “based on” real events (e.g., Charlie Wilson’s War) and, at worst, are made up out of whole cloth (e.g., Apocalypse Now, any Michael Moore “documentary”).
And, just as in the Hollywood marriage where two co-stars marry, these people become wedded to the false reality represented in their films. The good news is, the couples can, and most often do, divorce when confronted with the reality of the person they married who was hidden inside their co-star. The bad news is that they are rarely, if ever, forced to confront the reality that is hidden behind the falsehoods of their storylines, and they see themselves as the real-life embodiment of the heroes of their stories who speak “truth to power” and stand up to the villain, typically a corrupt, middle-aged, white, Christian American.
