Susan Sarandon and Hannah Einbinder got themselves detained by the NYPD on Wednesday outside the United Nations, right before Benjamin Netanyahu took the stage at the General Assembly. Roughly a hundred protesters were scooped up altogether, according to Al Jazeera, with the group Jewish Voice for Peace calling the UN a host to a “war criminal.” And just like that, two more actresses have a brand new headshot for the cause.
Photos of Sarandon and Einbinder being led away in cuffs went viral before Netanyahu even opened his mouth. You could almost hear the publicists high-fiving each other. Variety couldn’t even confirm whether the two were formally arrested or just detained, but does it matter? The optics were the whole product. The cuffs, the scowls, the righteous perp walk. That is the currency Hollywood trades in now. Not policy. Not legislation. Headlines.
Einbinder said at Cannes that speaking out is “an obligation” and that her “one small career” could never measure up to “even one human life.” Noble stuff. She said it at Cannes. On the French Riviera. In a designer gown. You understand the sacrifice involved.
Sarandon has been working this angle for years. At Venice last month she said agencies are still telling people not to hire her and that movies have been taken away. Here is a woman with an Oscar, a net worth that would choke a horse, and a IMDB page longer than most people’s grocery lists, and she wants you to know she is being silenced. Silenced, she says, while giving interviews at film festivals to international press about how silenced she is. The silence is deafening.
Meanwhile, Netanyahu used his speech to take shots at New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and internet streamer Hasan Piker. So the Prime Minister of Israel is beefing with a Twitch guy and a mayor who has been in office for five minutes. That is where we are. The UN General Assembly, once a stage for the weightiest matters on earth, has become a content farm. Everybody performing for a feed. Everybody farming outrage. Nobody governing.
Here is what gets me. A hundred people got arrested outside that building. Most of them are nobodies. They will go through the system, pay fines, maybe spend a night in holding, and the machine will grind them up and spit them out. But Sarandon and Einbinder? They will have their reps sort it out, fly first class back to Los Angeles, and tell a panel moderator in six months that the experience was “transformative.” The little guys in those cuffs will be an afterthought. They always are.
The establishment loves this arrangement. The celebrities get their martyrdom reel. The UN gets to look like the sober adults. The NYPD gets overtime. And the people who actually live with the consequences of every policy these celebrities pretend to care about get nothing. No camera crews. No magazine profiles. No standing ovation at Cannes.
You want to know who benefits from all of this? Not the Palestinians. Not the Israelis. Not the Iranian civilians Netanyahu asked the walkout delegates about. The people who benefit are the ones whose faces you saw trending. The ones whose “courage” comes with a SAG pension and a team of lawyers on retainer. Real courage is the guy working two jobs who shows up to a protest knowing he cannot afford the bail. But nobody writes a Variety headline about him.
They never do.