However you describe Colbert’s role, the show has been more vital than the one before. Maybe that’s because he has more fully realized its mandate. Colbert recalls a talk he had with director Spike Jonze in 2015, when Jonze asked him what he wanted the show to be about. After thinking about it, Colbert remembered a line from e.e. cummings: “What is more important than love, which is ‘the only god who spoke this earth so glad and big’? And I haven’t the slightest fucking idea how to do that, okay?” he says. “How can you make it about love? For the life of me, I did not know how to do it. I just kept on doing it and doing it. What has occurred to me since Trump became president is that what the show is about is loss. And you feel it with such clarity, because you’re losing something you love, which is—however illusory or real, because I’m not going to judge either way—America’s moral authority in the world, that shining city on the hill.”
“Our own national image gets lost,” Colbert continues. “Our own sense of the purpose of America gets lost. And then there’s economic hegemony, then there’s a loss by white Americans thinking that they are the default culture of America. There’s all the loss that the people who’ve been denied their position or their rights in America have always dealt with, that then we have to deal with, which is also another sense of loss and innocence. There’s all this loss going on in America. And on a nightly basis, because there’s no audience, I can talk about loss, but what I’m really talking about is, ‘Look at what we love. It’s on fire.’ ”
by Joe Hagan, Vanity Fair | Read more:
Images: Annie Leibovitz
