Table of Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Praise
I - The Illusion of Literacy
II - The Illusion of Love
III - The Illusion of Wisdom
IV - The Illusion of Happiness
V - The Illusion of America
Notes
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Copyright Page
2
For Eunice,
soles occidere et redire possvnt: nobis cvm semel occidit
brevis
lvx, nox est perpetva vna dormienda. da mi basia mille.
3
People who shut their eyes to reality simply invite their own
destruction, and anyone who insists on remaining in a state of
innocence long after that innocence is dead turns himself into a
monster.
—JAMES BALDWIN
4
I
The Illusion of Literacy
Now the death of God combined with the perfection of the image
has brought us to a whole new state of expectation. We are the image.
We are the viewer and the viewed. There is no other distracting
presence. And that image has all the Godly powers. It kills at will. Kills
effortlessly. Kills beautifully. It dispenses morality. Judges endlessly.
The electronic image is man as God and the ritual involved leads us not
to a mysterious Holy Trinity but back to ourselves. In the absence of a
clear understanding that we are now the only source, these images
cannot help but return to the expression of magic and fear proper to
idolatrous societies. This in turn facilitates the use of the electronic
image as propaganda by whoever can control some part of it.
—JOHN RALSTON SAUL, Voltaire’s Bastards1
We had fed the heart on fantasy,
The heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
—WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS, The Stare’s Nest By My Window
JOHN BRADSHAW LAYFIELD, tall, clean-cut, in a
collared shirt and white Stetson hat, stands in the center of
the ring holding a heavy black microphone. Layfield plays
wrestling tycoon JBL on the World Wrestling
Entertainment tour.2 The arena is filled with hooting and
jeering fans, including families with children. The crowd
yells and boos at JBL, who has had a long career as a
5
professional wrestler. Many chant, “You suck! You suck!
You suck!”
“Last week I made Shawn Michaels an offer, and I
have yet to hear back from the Heartbreak Kid,” drawls
Layfield. Michaels, another WWE wrestler, is a crowd
favorite. He is a self-professed born-again Christian with a
working-man persona. “So earlier today I made Shawn
Michaels an offer that was a lot easier to understand,”
Layfield continues. “I challenge Shawn Michaels to a
street fight tonight! So Shawn, I know you’re back there.
Now what’s your answer?”
“HBK, HBK, HBK!!!” the crowd intones. A pulsing
rock beat suddenly shakes the arena as action shots of the
Heartbreak Kid flash across the Titantron, the massive
screen suspended over the ring. The crowd cheers, leaping
up as Shawn Michaels, in jeans and an army-green shirt,
whirls onstage, his long, blond hair flying. Pyrotechnics
explode. The deafening sound system growls, “I know I’m
sexy . . . I got the looks . . . that drive the girls wild. . . .”
Michaels bursts into the ring, fists pumping, stalking
back and forth. The ref steps in to begin the match.
“HBK! HBK! HBK!” chants the crowd.
“Hold on, hold on, referee,” Layfield says, putting his
hand on the referee’s shoulder. People in the crowd begin
to heckle.
“Shawn,” he says, “you got a choice to make. You can
either fight me right now in this street fight, or you can do
6
the right thing for you, your family, and your extended
family, and take care of them in a financial crisis you
never dreamed would happen a year ago today.”
Michaels stands silently.
“You see, I know some things, Shawn,” continues
Layfield. “Rich people always do. Before this stock market
crashed, nobody saw it coming, except, of course, my
wife, but that didn’t help you, did it? See, I was hoarding
cash. I was putting money in gold. While most Americans
followed the leader—blindly, stupidly followed the leader
—I was making money. In fact, Shawn, I was prospering
while you were following the herd, losing almost
everything, right, Shawn?”
“Fight!! Fight!! Fight!! Fight!!” urges the crowd.
Michaels looks hesitantly back and forth between the
heaving crowd and Layfield.
“You lost your 401(k). You lost your retirement. You
lost your nest egg. You lost your children’s education
fund,” Layfield bellows into the mic, his face inches from
Michaels’s. “You got to support your extended family,
Shawn, and now you look around with all this
responsibility, and you look at your beautiful wife, she’s a
beautiful lady, you look at your two little wonderful kids,
and you wonder: ‘How in the world . . . am I going to send
them . . . to college?’ ”
Layfield pauses heavily. Michaels’ face is slack,
pained. Small, individual voices shout out from the crowd.
7
“Well, I’ve got an answer,” Layfield goes on. “I’m
offering you a job. I want you to come work—for me.”
“No! No! No!” yells the crowd. Michaels blinks
slowly, dazed, and lowers his eyes to the mat.
“See, there’s always alternatives, Shawn. There’s
alternatives to everything. You can always wrestle until
you’re fifty. You might even wrestle till you’re sixty. In
fact, you could be a lot like these has-beens who are
disgracing themselves in high school gyms all over the
country, bragging about their war stories of selling the
place out while they’re hawking their eight-by-tens and
selling Polaroids. Shawn, you could be that guy, or you
could take my offer, because I promise you this: All the
revenue that you’re goin’ to make off your DX T-shirts
will not compare to the offer that I . . . made . . . to you.”
He tells the Heartbreak Kid to look in the mirror,
adding, “The years haven’t been kind to you, have they,
Shawn?” He reminds him that one more bad fall, one more
injury, and “you’re done, you’re done.”
The crowd begins to rally their stunned hero, growing
louder and louder. “HBK! HBK! HBK!”
“What else can you really do besides this?” Layfield
asks. “You get a second chance in life.”
Layfield sweeps off his white Stetson. “Go ahead,” he
screams into Michaels’s face. “Ever since you walked out
here . . . people have been wantin’ you to kick me in the
face. So why don’t you do it? I’m gonna give you a free
8
shot, Shawn, right here.”
The crowd erupts, roaring for the Heartbreak Kid to
strike.
“HBK!! DO IT!! DO IT!! HBK!! HBK!!!”
“Listen to ’em. Everybody wants it. Shawn, it’s what
you want. You’re twitching. You’re begging to pull the
trigger, so I’m telling you right now, take a shot! Take it!”
The Heartbreak Kid takes one step back, his stubbled
face trembling, breathing rapidly like a rabbit. The crowd
is leaping out of their seats, thrusting their arms in the air,
holding up handmade banners.
“HBK!!! HBK!!! HBK!!!”
“Do it, Shawn,” Layfield hollers, “before it’s too late.
This is your second chance, but understand this,
understand this—”
“HBK!!! HBK!!! HBK!!!”
“—Listen to me and not them! If you take this shot . . .
then this offer is off the table . . . forever.”
The crowd stops chanting. Different cries are heard:
boos, shouts to attack, shouts to stop. There is no longer
unity in the auditorium.
Layfield holds his head outstretched until the
Heartbreak Kid slowly turns his back. Layfield leers.
Shawn Michaels climbs through the ropes out of the ring
9
and walks heavily back to the dressing room, his dull gaze
on the ground.
“Lookin’ forward to doin’ business with ya, Shawn,”
Layfield shouts after him.
The crowd screams.
Layfield, like most of the wrestlers, has a long,
complicated fictional backstory that includes a host of
highly publicized intrigues, fights, betrayals, infidelities,
abuse, and outrageous behavior—including goose-stepping
around the ring and giving the Nazi salute during a
wrestling bout in Germany. But tonight he has come in his
newest incarnation as the “self-made millionaire,” the
capitalist, the CEO who walked away with a pot of gold
while workers across the country lost their jobs, saw their
savings and retirement funds evaporate, and fought off
foreclosure.
As often happens in a celebrity culture, the line
between public and fictional personas blurs. Layfield
actually claims to have made a fortune as a stock market
investor and says he is married to the “richest woman on
Wall Street.” He is a regular panelist on Fox News
Channel’s The Cost of Freedom and previously appeared
on CNBC, not only as a celebrity wrestler but as a savvy
investor whose conservative political views are worth
airing. He also has written a best-selling book on financial
planning called Have More Money Now. He hosts a
weekend talk-radio program syndicated nationally by Talk
Radio Network, in which he discusses politics.
10
The interaction between the crowd and Layfield is
vintage professional wrestling. The twenty-minute bouts
employ the same tired gimmicks, the same choreographed
moves, the endless counts to two by the referee that never
seem to get to three without the pinned wrestler leaping up
from the mat to continue the fight. There is the desperate
struggle of a prostrate wrestler trying to reach the hand of
his or her partner to be relieved in the ring. This
pantomime, with his opponent on his back and his arm
outstretched, can go on for a couple of minutes. There are
a lot of dirty shots when the referee is distracted—which is
often.
The bouts are stylized rituals. They are public
expressions of pain and a fervent longing for revenge. The
lurid and detailed sagas behind each bout, rather than the
wrestling matches themselves, are what drive crowds to a
frenzy. These ritualized battles give those packed in the
arenas a temporary, heady release from mundane lives.
The burden of real problems is transformed into fodder for
a high-energy pantomime. And the most potent story
tonight, the most potent story across North America, is one
of financial ruin, desperation, and enslavement of a
frightened and abused working class to a heartless,
tyrannical, corporate employer. For most, it is only in the
illusion of the ring that they are able to rise above their
small stations in life and engage in a heroic battle to fight
back.
As the wrestlers appear and strut down the aisle, the
crowd, mostly young, working-class males, knows by
heart the long list of vendettas and betrayals being carried
into the ring. The matches are always acts of retribution for
11
a host of elaborate and fictional wrongs. The narratives of
emotional wreckage reflected in the wrestlers’ stage
biographies mirror the emotional wreckage of the fans.
This is the deep appeal of professional wrestling. It is the
appeal of much of popular culture, from Jerry Springer to
“reality” television to Oprah Winfrey. The narratives
expose the anxiety that we will die and never be
recognized or acclaimed, that we will never be wealthy,
that we are not among the chosen but remain part of the
vast, anonymous masses. The ringside sagas are designed
to reassure us. They hold out the hope that we, humble and
unsung as these celebrities once were, will eventually be
blessed with grace and fortune.
The success of professional wrestling, like most of the
entertainment that envelops our culture, lies not in fooling
us that these stories are real. Rather, it succeeds because
we ask to be fooled. We happily pay for the chance to
suspend reality. The wrestlers, like all celebrities, become
our vicarious selves. They do what we cannot. They rise
up from humble origins into a supernatural world of
tyrants, divas, and fierce opponents who are huge and
rippling with muscles—mythic in their size and power.
They face momentous battles and epic struggles. They win
great victories. They garner fame and vanquish their
anonymity. And they return to befriend and confer some of
their supernatural power on us. It is the stuff of classical
myths, including the narrative of Jesus Christ. It is the
yearning that life conform to a recognizable pattern and
provide ultimate fulfillment before death.
“For the truth is,” wrote José Ortega y Gasset, “that life
on the face of it is a chaos in which one finds oneself lost.
12
The individual suspects as much but is terrified to
encounter this frightening reality face to face, and so
attempts to conceal it by drawing a curtain of fantasy over
it, behind which he can make believe that everything is
clear.”3
Clashes in the professional wrestling ring from the
1950s to the 1980s hinged on a different narrative. The
battle against the evil of communism and crude, racial
stereotypes stoked the crowd. The bouts, which my
grandfather religiously watched on Saturday afternoons,
were raw, unvarnished expressions of the prejudices of the
white working class from which he came. They appealed
to nationalism and a dislike and distrust of all who were
racially, ethnically, or religiously different. During these
matches, some of which I watched as a boy, there was
usually some huge hulk of a man, known invariably as
“The Russian Bear,” who would say things like “Ve vill
bury you.” Nikolai Volkoff, who wrestled during these
years under the name Boris Breznikoff, used to sing the
Soviet National Anthem and wave the Soviet flag before
matches to bait the crowd. He eventually teamed up with
an Iranian-born wrestler, Hossein Khosrow Ali Vaziri,
known as The Iron Sheik. In the midst of the Iranian
hostage crisis, the Iron Sheik bragged in the ring about his
devotion and friendship with Ayatollah Khomeini. The
Iron Sheik was regularly pitted against a wrestler known as
Sergeant Slaughter, All-American G. I. During the first
Gulf War; the Iron Sheik reinvented himself, as often
happens with wrestlers who shed one persona and name
for another, as Colonel Mustafa, an Iraqi who was a close
confidant of Saddam Hussein. In wrestling, villains were
13
nearly always foreigners. They were people who wanted to
destroy “our way of life.” They hated America. They
spoke in strange accents and had swarthy skin.
But that hatred, once directed outward, has turned
inward. Wrestling fans, whose numbers have been swelled
by new immigrants and are no longer limited to the white
working class, began to come in too many colors. The
steady loss of manufacturing jobs and decline in social
services meant that blue-collar workers—people like my
grandparents—could no longer find jobs that provided a
living wage, jobs with benefits, jobs that could support a
family. The hulks of empty manufacturing centers began to
dot the landscape, including the abandoned mills in Maine,
where my family lived. The disparity between the elite, the
rich, and the rest of the country grew obscenely. The
growing class division and hopelessness triggered a
mounting rage toward the elite, as well as a sense of
powerlessness. Communities began to crumble. Downtown
stores went out of business and were boarded up. Domestic
abuse and drug and alcohol addiction began to plague
working-class neighborhoods and towns.
The story line in professional wrestling evolved to fit
the new era. It began to focus on the petty, cruel,
psychological dramas and family dysfunction that come
with social breakdown. The enemy became figures like
Layfield, those who had everything and lorded it over
those who did not. The anger unleashed by the crowd
became the anger of people who, like the Heartbreak Kid,
felt used, shamed, and trapped. It became the anger of
class warfare. Figures such as Layfield—who arrives at
professional matches in a giant white limousine with
14
Texan “hook ’em” horns on the hood—are created by
wrestling promoters to shove these social disparities in the
faces of the audience, just as the Iron Sheik mocked the
crowd with his hatred of America.
Wrestlers work in “stables,” or groups. These groups,
all of which have managers, are at war with the other
groups. This motif, too, is new. It represents a society that
has less and less national cohesion, a society that has
broken down into warlike and antagonistic tribes. The
stables cheat, lie, steal one another’s women, and ignore
all rules in the desperate scramble to win. Winning is all
that matters. Morality is irrelevant. These wrestling clans
have their own logos, uniforms, slogans, theme songs,
cheerleaders, and other badges of communal identity. They
do not, however, stay consistent in their “good guy” or
“bad guy” status. A clan, like an individual wrestler, can
be good one week and evil the next. All that matters is
their own advancement. Week after week, they act out
scenarios that are psychological windows into what has
happened to our culture.
Ray Traylor was a prison guard in Georgia before
debuting as a professional wrestler in 1985. Known on the
wrestling circuit as Big Boss Man, he was portrayed as a
brutal, sadistic wrestler devoid of human compassion.
Traylor showed up at the ring with a nightstick, a flak
jacket, handcuffs, and a ball and chain. During a match in
1992 a digitized voice came over the loudspeaker. It
warned the Boss Man that someone from his past was
coming to exact revenge. Sure enough, the Boss Man was
ambushed in the ring by Nailz, a wrestler who claimed to
be a former inmate brutalized by the Boss Man during his
15
time as a correctional officer. Nailz, a six-foot, eight-inch
brute with severe post-traumatic stress disorder, appeared
in the arena wearing an orange prison jumpsuit. The two
began a bitter, long feud. It was a feud many in the crowd
knew too well. It was the feud between prisoners and
guards. It was the feud between those who had once been
incarcerated and who wanted to do to their keepers what
had been done to them. Traylor later adopted a new
persona in the ring, also known as the Boss Man, but now
a hated security guard, dressed in a SWAT-like outfit, for
Vince McMahon’s Corporation, which owns the wrestling
franchise. McMahon, in tune with the passions of his
audience, is always trying to exploit, threaten, and cheat
the wrestlers who work for him.
The Boss Man’s most infamous stunt was publicly
taunting a wrestler named Big Show when it was
announced that Big Show’s father had cancer. The Boss
Man, at least in the scripted melodrama, hired a police
impersonator to go into Big Show’s locker room moments
before a match and tell him his father had died. Big Show,
shown weeping, withdrew from the match, and the Boss
Man won by forfeit. A grainy black-and-white video,
purportedly lifted from a surveillance camera in the Boss
Man’s locker room, showed Traylor asking the
impersonator for a detailed report on how Big Show
reacted.
“What he do, what he do?” the Boss Man asked,
eagerly shifting from side to side.
The police impersonator pinched the bridge of his nose
and bowed his head. “My daddy! My daddy!”
16
“My daddy! My daddy!” the Boss Man squealed.
“Waaaa! My daddy gone!”
In the ring he imitated Big Show and wailed to the
crowd, “My daddy! My daddy! Waaaa! Waaa!” Stalking
the ring in mirrored sunglasses, he read a ditty to the
booing, enraged crowd:
With the deepest regrets and tears that are soaked
I’m sorry to hear your dad finally croaked.
He lived a full life on his own terms,
Soon he’ll be buried and eaten by worms.
But if I could have a son as stupid as you
I’d wish for cancer so I could die too.
Boss Man then supposedly smashed Big Show’s family
heirloom, his grandfather’s gold pocket watch, with a
hammer and anvil. A video of the Boss Man was played to
the crowd, showing him at the graveside service of Big
Show’s father, in a Blues Brothers-inspired police car with
a huge loudspeaker on the roof. The Boss Man blared
through the speaker as he drove up the cemetery path,
“He’s dead as a doornail, and no matter how much you cry
and cry, nobody but nobody gonna bring him back. . . .
You’re nothin’ but a momma, and speakin’ of yo’ momma,
hey, Ms. Wight [Big Show’s mother], now that you’re a
single woman, how’d you like to go out with a man like
me?”
He then drove the car into Big Show, who weighed
close to 500 pounds. As the mourners huddled around the
17
fallen Big Show, the Boss Man hooked the coffin up to the
police car with a chain and dragged it away. Big Show got
up and ran after the casket, clinging to it until he fell off.
Boss Man then “secretly” taped a meeting with Big
Show’s weeping mother in her kitchen. He held up a
manila envelope and shook it in her face.
“If you don’t tell him what’s in this envelope, I will,”
he threatened.
“Let me tell him, it should come from me,” she sobbed.
She confessed that she had had an affair during her
marriage and that Big Show was the illegitimate result. Big
Show’s father was not his biological father.
“So what you’re saying is, your son is a bastard?” the
Boss Man asked the bawling widow.
“Yee-ess,” she whimpered between sobs.
“Hey, Paul Wight,” the Boss Man turned and yelled
into the hidden camera, using Big Show’s real name.
“You’re a nasty bastard and yo’ mama said so!”
“You know, I thought it was real funny when Big
Freak Show’s fake daddy died and went to hell,” the Boss
Man told the crowd afterward from the ring. “But you
know what’s ten times funnier than his fake daddy’s
dying? That’s Big Show walking around, ‘Waaa, waaa,
where’s my daddy? Who’s my daddy?’ Well, that’s the
million-dollar question. Your daddy could be any one of
these stinkin’ morons sittin’ in this arena tonight. But the
18
fact remains: After I get through kicking your ass, I will be
the World Wrestling Federation champion, and I guess that
makes me your daddy.”
City after city, night after night, packed arena after
packed arena, the wrestlers play out a new, broken social
narrative. No one has a fixed identify, not the way a
Russian communist or an evil Iranian or an American
patriot once had an intractable identity. Identities and
morality shift with the wind. Established truths, mores,
rules, and authenticity mean nothing. Good and evil mean
nothing. The idea of permanent personalities and
permanent values, as in the culture at large, has
evaporated. It is all about winning. It is all about personal
pain, vendettas, hedonism, and fantasies of revenge, while
inflicting pain on others. It is the cult of victimhood.
The wrestler known as the Undertaker frequently
battles a wrestler known as Kane. Kane is the supposed
result of an affair between the Undertaker’s mother and the
Undertaker’s manager, whose stage name is, appropriately,
Paul Bearer. Paul Bearer, fans were told, was at the time of
the affair an employee at the funeral home in Death Valley
owned by the Undertaker’s parents. Kane, in the story line,
“accidentally” burned down the funeral home as a child.
The parents died in the fire. Kane was hideously scarred.
The Undertaker and Kane each thought the other had been
lost in the conflagration.
Paul Bearer had, it turned out, hidden young Kane in a
mental asylum. It was when Paul Bearer had a falling out
with the Undertaker that he had Kane released and signed
Kane on as his agent of revenge. Kane and Paul Bearer,
19
during one event in Long Island, ostensibly exhumed the
parents’ bodies for the crowd. They carried the purported
remains into the arena. The younger brother had a series of
bouts against the older. Paul Bearer was finally kidnapped
and trapped in a concrete crypt. The Undertaker refused to
rescue his manager. He buried him alive. As Paul A.
Cantor notes in his essay on professional wrestling, “All
the elements are there: sibling rivalry, disputed parentage,
child neglect and abuse, domestic violence, family
revenge.”4
Those who were once born with the virus of inherent
evil, the Russian communist or the Iranian, now become
evil for a reason. It is not their fault. They are victims.
Self-pity is the driving motive in life. They were abused as
children or in prison or by friends or lovers or spouses or
employers. The new mantra says we all have a right to
seek emotional gratification if we have been abused, even
if it harms others. I am bad, the narratives say, because I
was neglected and poorly treated. I was forced to be bad. It
is not my fault. Pity me. If you do not pity me, screw you.
I pity myself. It is the undiluted narcissism of a society in
precipitous decline.
The referee, the only authority figure in the bouts, is
easily distracted and unable to administer justice. As soon
as the referee turns his back, which happens in nearly
every match, the second member of the opposing tag team,
who is not supposed to be in the ring at the same time as
his or her partner, leaps through the ropes. The two
wrestlers pummel an opponent lying helpless on the mat
behind the referee’s back. They often kick, or pretend to
20
kick, the downed wrestler in the gut. The referee,
preoccupied, never notices. The failure to enforce the
rules, which usually hurts the wrestler who needs the rules
the most, is vital to the story line. It reflects, in the eyes of
the fans, the greed, manipulation, and abuse wreaked by
the powerful and the rich. The world, as professional
wrestling knows, is always stacked against the little guy.
Cheating becomes a way to even the score. The system of
justice in the world of wrestling is always rigged. It
reflects, for many who watch, the tainted justice system
outside the ring. It promotes the morality of cheat or die.
I watch Irish-born wrestler Dave Finley, with a
shamrock on his costume and brandishing his signature
shillelagh, enter the ring in Madison Square Garden with a
four-foot, five-inch midget known as Hornswoggle, who is
dressed as a leprechaun. The two are battling a massive
African American wrestler known as Mark Henry. Henry
is bearded and grimacing and weighs 380 pounds. He
shouts insults at the crowd. When Hornswoggle enters the
ring in the middle of the match to assist a beleaguered
Finley, the referee tries to get Hornswoggle out. Finley,
now unobserved by the referee, grabs his shillelagh and
hits Mark Henry on the head. The referee, preoccupied
with Hornswoggle, sees nothing. Mark Henry holds his
head, spins around the ring, and collapses. Finley leaps on
Mark Henry’s bulk. He attracts the attention of the referee,
and with the count of three wins the match. The crowd
cheers in delight.
Wrestling operates from the popular (and often
inarguable) assumption that those in authority are sleazy.
Finley is a favorite with the crowd, although tonight he
21
cheats to win. If the world is rigged against you, if those in
power stifle your voice, outsource your job, and foreclose
your house, then cheat back. Corruption is part of life. The
most popular wrestlers always defy and taunt their
employers and promoters.
Women, although they enter the ring to fight other
women wrestlers, are almost always cast as temptresses.
They steal each other’s boyfriends. They are often prizes
to be won by competing wrestlers. These vixens,
supposedly in relationships with one wrestler, are often
caught on surveillance videos flirting with rival wrestlers.
This provokes matches between the jealous boyfriend and
the new love interest.
The plotlines around the women, or “divas,” are lurid,
bordering on soft porn. Torrie Wilson is a female wrestler
engaged in a long and popular feud with another female
wrestler named Dawn Marie. Dawn Marie, who was
originally called Dawn Marie Bytch, announced, on one
occasion, that she wanted to marry Torrie Wilson’s father,
Al Wilson. Torrie was appalled. Dawn, however, also
supposedly found Torrie attractive. Dawn told Torrie she
would cancel the wedding with Al if Torrie would spend
the night with her in a hotel. In a taped segment, the two
women met in a hotel room. They kissed and fondled in
their underwear. As they began to undress, screens in the
arena went black, leaving the rest to the imagination of the
fans. Dawn, despite the tryst, married Al anyway. The two
held their ceremony in the ring in their underwear. Al, fans
were told afterward, collapsed and died of a heart attack
after marathon sex sessions on their honeymoon. Torrie
Wilson then had numerous grudge matches with Dawn,
22
whom she blamed for killing her father. Sordid domestic
scenarios, which resonate in a world of broken and
troubled homes, are also staples of television talk and
reality shows.
The divas in the ring are there to fuel sexual fantasy.
They have no intrinsic worth beyond being objects of
sexual desire. It is all about their bodies. They engage in
sexually provocative “strap matches,” in which two
women are tied together with a long strap. During the bout,
combatants use the strap to whip each other, including
smacking exposed buttocks. They grab a short length of
the strap between their two hands and wrap it around the
neck of the opponent to simulate choking. In “evening
gown matches,” women wrestle in long evening gowns
ripped to expose lacy bras and thongs. Evening gown
matches, involving two and sometimes three women, have
also been filmed in swimming pools. Such matches
frequently result in “accidental” exposure of breasts, which
sets crowds roaring in lewd gratification.
Female wrestlers often try to sabotage matches or
seduce male wrestlers who oppose allies or members of
their clan. In one episode broadcast on the big screens in
the arena, a female wrestler named Melina enters the
locker room of a wrestler named Batista. The scene has the
brevity and stilted dialogue of a porn film. Melina, in a
sequined red tank top and micro-miniskirt, stands
awkwardly behind the brawny and tattooed Batista, who is
seated on the bench, dressed in a tiny bikini brief. Melina
self-consciously rubs her palms up and down his expansive
pecs. “My boys, Mercury and Nitro, have a match against
the Mexicools, and they could really use this time to
23
prepare. So if you could . . . withdraw yourself from the
match tonight?”
“Naw, I don’t think so,” rumbles Batista.
“I could really make it worth your while,” whines
Melina, straddling one of Batista’s massive thighs.
“How you gonna do that?” Batista mutters.
“Let me show you,” Melina pouts. She kisses him,
wriggling her shoulders in a caricature of passion. Batista
finally figures it out and yanks her down as they kiss,
spreading her legs open over his lap. The crowd is heard
whooping.
The video cuts to a close-up of Melina’s black bra
strap. She turns around, pulling her tank top down over her
bra.
“So we have a deal, right?” she simpers, blowing her
hair out of her face.
“A deal? No, no deal,” Batista chuckles. “Thanks for
the warm-up, though. I feel great.” He flexes his chest
muscles, making them jump. “I’m going to kill those
guys.” He cuffs her on the shoulder. “See you out there.”
“Oh, my God,” sniggers the announcer. “Did he say,
‘Thanks for the warm-up’? What a backfire!”
The camera zooms in on Melina’s humiliation. “No,
no, nooooo!” she shrieks, clapping her hands to her face,
24
squinting malevolently after Batista.
Fans chant, “Slut! Slut! Slut!” when Melina appears in
the arena. Melina, although the temptress in the story, later
announces she has filed a lawsuit for sexual harassment
against Batista.
In The Republic, Plato imagines human beings chained
for the duration of their lives in an underground cave,
knowing nothing but darkness. Their gaze is confined to
the cave wall, upon which shadows of the world above are
thrown. They believe these flickering shadows are reality.
If, Plato writes, one of these prisoners is freed and brought
into the sunlight, he will suffer great pain. Blinded by the
glare, he is unable to see anything and longs for the
familiar darkness. But eventually his eyes adjust to the
light. The illusion of the tiny shadows is obliterated. He
confronts the immensity, chaos, and confusion of reality.
The world is no longer drawn in simple silhouettes. But he
is despised when he returns to the cave. He is unable to see
in the dark as he used to. Those who never left the cave
ridicule him and swear never to go into the light lest they
be blinded as well.
Plato feared the power of entertainment, the power of
the senses to overthrow the mind, the power of emotion to
obliterate reason. No admirer of popular democracy, Plato
said that the enlightened or elite had a duty to educate
those bewitched by the shadows on the cave wall, a
position that led Socrates to quip: “As for the man who
tried to free them and lead them upward, if they could
25
somehow lay their hands on him and kill him, they would
do so.”
We are chained to the flickering shadows of celebrity
culture, the spectacle of the arena and the airwaves, the lies
of advertising, the endless personal dramas, many of them
completely fictional, that have become the staple of news,
celebrity gossip, New Age mysticism, and pop
psychology. In The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in
America, Daniel Boorstin writes that in contemporary
culture the fabricated, the inauthentic, and the theatrical
have displaced the natural, the genuine, and the
spontaneous, until reality itself has been converted into
stagecraft. Americans, he writes, increasingly live in a
“world where fantasy is more real than reality.” He warns:
We risk being the first people in history to have
been able to make their illusions so vivid, so
persuasive, so “realistic” that they can live in them.
We are the most illusioned people on earth. Yet we
dare not become disillusioned, because our illusions
are the very house in which we live; they are our
news, our heroes, our adventure, our forms of art, our
very experience.5
Boorstin goes on to caution that
an image is something we have a claim on. It must
serve our purposes. Images are means. If a
corporation’s image of itself or a man’s image of
26
himself is not useful, it is discarded. Another may fit
better. The image is made to order, tailored to us. An
ideal, on the other hand, has a claim on us. It does not
serve us; we serve it. If we have trouble striving
towards it, we assume the matter is with us, and not
with the ideal.6
Those who manipulate the shadows that dominate our
lives are the agents, publicists, marketing departments,
promoters, script writers, television and movie producers,
advertisers, video technicians, photographers, bodyguards,
wardrobe consultants, fitness trainers, pollsters, public
announcers, and television news personalities who create
the vast stage for illusion. They are the puppet masters. No
one achieves celebrity status, no cultural illusion is
swallowed as reality, without these armies of cultural
enablers and intermediaries. The sole object is to hold
attention and satisfy an audience. These techniques of
theater, as Boorstin notes, have leeched into politics,
religion, education, literature, news, commerce, warfare,
and crime. The squalid dramas played out for fans in the
wrestling ring mesh with the ongoing dramas on television,
in movies, and in the news, where “real-life” stories,
especially those involving celebrities, allow news reports
to become mini-dramas complete with a star, a villain, a
supporting cast, a good-looking host, and a neat, if often
unexpected, conclusion.
The nation can sit rapt at one of these real-life stories,
as happened when O. J. Simpson went on trial for the
murder of his estranged wife and her purported lover. A
carefully manipulated image of real life, which can be
27
based either on utter fiction or, as in Simpson’s case, real
tragedy, can serve as a myth on which millions can hang
their fears and hopes. The problems of existence are
domesticated and controlled. We measure our lives by
those we admire on the screen or in the ring. We seek to be
like them. We emulate their look and behavior. We escape
the chaos of real life through fantasy. We see ourselves as
stars of our own movies. And we are, as Neal Gabler
writes in Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered
Reality, “all becoming performance artists in and
audiences for a grand, ongoing show.”7
We try to see ourselves moving through our life as a
camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves,
how we dress, what we say. We invent movies that play
inside our heads. We imagine ourselves the main
characters. We imagine how an audience would react to
each event in the movie of our life. This, writes Gabler, is
the power and invasiveness of celebrity culture. Celebrity
culture has taught us to generate, almost unconsciously,
interior personal screenplays in the mold of Hollywood,
television, and even commercials. We have learned ways
of speaking and thinking that disfigure the way we relate
to the world. Gabler argues that celebrity culture is not a
convergence of consumer culture and religion, but rather a
hostile takeover of religion by consumer culture.
Commodities and celebrity culture define what it means to
belong, how we recognize our place in society, and how
we conduct our lives.
I visited the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los
Angeles. It is advertised as “the final resting place to more
28
of Hollywood’s founders and stars than anywhere else on
earth.” The sixty-acre cemetery holds the remains of 135
Hollywood luminaries, including Rudolph Valentino,
Tyrone Power, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks,
Nelson Eddy, Bugsy Siegel, Peter Lorre, Mel Blanc, and
John Huston, as well as many wealthy non-celebrities.
Celebrity culture is, at its core, the denial of death. It is the
illusion of immortality. The portal to Valhalla is through
the perfect, eternally beautiful celebrity. “There’s nothing
tragic about being fifty,” Joe Gillis says in the 1950 film
Sunset Boulevard , speaking of the faded movie star
Norma Desmond, who dreams of making a triumphant
return to the screen. “Not unless you’re trying to be
twenty-five.”
We all have gods, Martin Luther said, it is just a
question of which ones. And in American society our gods
are celebrities. Religious belief and practice are commonly
transferred to the adoration of celebrities. Our culture
builds temples to celebrities the way Romans did for
divine emperors, ancestors, and household gods. We are a
de facto polytheistic society. We engage in the same kind
of primitive beliefs as older polytheistic cultures. In
celebrity culture, the object is to get as close as possible to
the celebrity. Relics of celebrities are coveted as magical
talismans. Those who can touch the celebrity or own a
relic of the celebrity hope for a transference of celebrity
power. They hope for magic. The personal possessions of
celebrities, from John F. Kennedy’s gold golf clubs to
dresses worn by Princess Diana, to forty-dollar Swatch
watches once owned by Andy Warhol, are cherished like
relics of the dead among ancestor cults in Africa, Asia, or
29
the medieval Catholic Church. They hold, somehow, faint
traces of the celebrities themselves. And they are auctioned
off for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pilgrims travel to
celebrity shrines. Graceland receives 750,000 visitors a
year. Hard Rock Cafe has built its business around the
yearning for intimacy with the famous. It ships relics of
stars from one restaurant to another the way the medieval
Church used to ship the bones and remains of saints to its
various cathedrals.
Charlie Chaplin’s corpse, like that of Eva Perón, was
stolen and held for ransom. John Wayne’s family, fearing
grave robbers, did not mark his burial spot until twenty
years after his death. The headstones of James Dean,
Dylan Thomas, Sylvia Plath, Buddy Holly, and Jim
Morrison have all been uprooted and carted away. Those
who become obsessed with celebrities often profess a
personal relationship with them, not unlike the relationship
a born-again Christian professes to have with Jesus. The
hysteria thousands of mourners in London displayed for
Princess Diana in 1997 was real, even if the public persona
they were mourning was largely a creation of publicists
and the mass media.
Hollywood Forever is next to Paramount Studios. The
massive white HOLLYWOOD letters tower on the hillside
above the tombs and faux Italian Renaissance marble
buildings that contain rows of crypts. Maps with the
locations of stars’ graves, along with a glossy booklet of
brief star biographies, are handed out at the gate. Tourists
are promised “visits” with dead stars, who are referred to
as “residents.” The cemetery, which has huge marble
monuments to the wealthy and the powerful, many of them
30
non-celebrities, is divided into sections with names like
Garden of Eternal Love and Garden of Legends. It has two
massive marble mausoleums, including the Cathedral
Mausoleum, with six thousand crypts—the largest
mausoleum in the world when it was built in the 1930s.
Most of the celebrities, however, have plain bronze
plaques that seem to indicate a yearning for the simplicity
and anonymity denied to them in life.
The cemetery, established in 1899 and originally called
Hollywood Memorial Park, fell into disrepair and neglect
some eight or nine decades after it was opened. By the
1990s, families, including relatives of the makeup artist
Max Factor, paid to have their loved ones removed from
the grounds. By April 1996, the property was bankrupt.
The cemetery was only months away from being
condemned. It was bought by Tyler Cassidy and his
brother Brent, who renamed the cemetery Hollywood
Forever Cemetery and began a marketing campaign around
its celebrity residents. The brothers established the Forever
Network, where the non-celebrity departed could, at least
in death, be the stars of their own customized video
tributes. The cemetery Web site archives the tributes.
“Families, young and old, are starting their LifeStories
now, and adding to them as the years pass,” the cemetery’s
brochure states. “What this means—having our images,
voices, and videos available for future generations—has
deep importance, both sociologically and for fully
celebrating life.” At funerals, these carefully produced
movies, which often include highlights from home videos,
are shown on a screen next to the caskets of the deceased.
The cemetery’s business is booming.
31
It costs a lot to be buried near a celebrity. Hugh Hefner
reportedly paid $85,000 to reserve the crypt next to
Marilyn Monroe at Westwood Cemetery in Los Angeles.
The “prestige service” offered by Hollywood Forever runs
$5,400. Jay Boileau, the executive vice president of the
cemetery, conceded that a plot near Valentino would cost
even more, although he did not have the price list with
him. “We have sold most of them,” he said of those
spaces. “Visits to his crypt are unique. Every year we hold
a memorial service for him on the day he passed away. He
was the first true sex symbol. Ten thousand people came to
his funeral. He was the first Brad Pitt. He was the first true
superstar in film and the greatest screen lover.”
The most moving memorial in the cemetery is a small
glass case containing the cremated remains of the actor
David White and his son Jonathan White. White played
Larry Tate, the Machiavellian advertising executive, on the
television show Bewitched, and he had a long stage career.
He was married to the actress Mary Welch, who died
during a second childbirth in 1958. David was left to raise
Jonathan, his only child. Next to the urns are pictures of
the father and boy. There is one of Jonathan as a tall young
man in a graduation gown, the father’s eyes directed up
toward his son’s face. Jonathan died at the age of thirtythree, a victim of the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103
over Locker bie, Scotland. His father was devastated. He
entered into a long period of mourning and seclusion. He
died of a heart attack shortly before the two-year
anniversary of his son’s death. The modest memorial is a
simple and poignant veneration of the powerful bond
between a father and a son. It defies the celebrity culture
32
around it. It speaks to other values, to loss, to grief, to
mortality, and to the awful fragility of life. It is a reminder,
in a sea of kitsch, of the beauty of love.
Buses wind their way through the Hollywood hills so
tourists can gawk at the walls that barricade the homes of
the famous. The celebrity interview or profile, pioneered
on television by Barbara Walters and now a ubiquitous
part of the news and entertainment industry, gives us the
illusion that we have intimate relations with celebrities as
well as the characters they portray. Real life, our own life,
is viewed next to the lives of celebrities as inadequate and
inauthentic. Celebrities are portrayed as idealized forms of
ourselves. It is we, in perverse irony, who are never fully
actualized, never fully real in a celebrity culture.
Soldiers and marines speak of first entering combat as
if they are entering a movie, although if they try to engage
in Hollywood-inspired heroics they often are killed. The
chasm between movie exploits and the reality of war,
which takes less than a minute in a firefight to grasp, is
immense. The shock of reality brings with it the terrible
realization that we are not who we thought we were. Fear
controls us. We do not control it. The movie-inspired
images played out in our heads, the fantasies of racing
under a hail of bullets toward the enemy or of rescuing a
wounded comrade, vanish. Life, the movie, comes to an
abrupt halt. The houselights go on. The harsh glare of our
limitations, fear and frailty blinds and disorients us.
Wounded marines booed and hissed John Wayne when
he visited them in a hospital ward in Hawaii during the
Second World War. Wayne, who never served in the
33
military and for the visit wore a fancy cowboy outfit that
included spurs and pistols, would later star in the 1949
gung-ho war movie The Sands of Iwo Jima. The marines,
some of whom had fought at Iwo Jima, grasped the
manipulation and deceit of celebrity culture. They
understood that mass culture contributes to self-delusion
and social control and elicits behavior that is often selfdestructive.
Illusion, especially as presented in movies, can replace
reality. When Wayne made The Sands of Iwo Jima,
director Allan Dwan recreated the iconic image taken by
photographer Joe Rosenthal of five marines and a navy
corpsman raising the American flag on top of Mount
Suribachi during the battle at the end of the film. Dwan
coaxed Rene Gagnon, Ira Hayes, and John Bradley, the
three surviving soldiers from the flag-raising, to appear
briefly in the film to reenact the scene with Wayne, who
handed them the original flag, loaned to the moviemakers
by the Marine Corps.
The photo, later used by Felix de Weldon to sculpt the
massive United States Marine Corps War Memorial near
Arlington National Cemetery, had already made the three
veterans celebrities. It was widely reprinted. President
Franklin D. Roosevelt used the photo as the logo for the
Seventh War Loan Drive in 1945. The Pentagon brought
the three men back to the United States, where they toured
as part of the fund-raising effort. The veterans helped
raised $26.3 billion, twice the original goal. But the
publicity, along with the transformation from traumatized
veterans to poster children for the war, left the three
soldiers alienated, bitter, and depressed. They were
34
prisoners to the image and the patriotic myth built around
it. Hayes and Gagnon became alcoholics and died early—
Hayes at thirty-two and Gagnon at fifty-four. Bradley
rarely took part in ceremonies celebrating the flag-raising
and by the 1960s had stopped attending them. He was
plagued by nightmares. He discussed the war with his wife
Betty only once during his forty-seven-year marriage, and
that was on their first date. He gave one interview, in 1985,
at the urging of his wife, who told him to do it for the sake
of their grandchildren. He was haunted by the death of his
friend Iggy—Ralph Ignatowski, who had been captured,
tortured, and killed by Japanese soldiers. When he found
Iggy’s body a few days after he had disappeared, he saw
that the Japanese had ripped out Iggy’s toe-nails and
fingernails, fractured his arms, and bayonetted him
repeatedly. The back of his friend’s head had been
smashed in, and his penis had been cut off and stuffed in
his mouth.
“And then I visited his parents after the war and just
lied to them,” John Bradley told his son James, in one of
the very rare comments he made to his children about the
war. “‘He didn’t suffer at all,’ I told them. ‘He didn’t feel a
thing, didn’t know what hit him,’ I said. I just lied to
them.”8
Bradley’s family went to Suribachi in 1997 after his
death and placed a plaque on the spot where the flagraising took place. James Bradley investigated this buried
part of his father’s past and interviewed the families of all
the flag raisers. He published his account of the men’s
lives in his book Flags of Our Fathers.
35
The veterans saw their wartime experience transformed
into an illusion. It became part of the mythic narrative of
heroism and patriotic glory sold to the public by the
Pentagon’s public relations machine and Hollywood. The
reality of war could not compete against the power of the
illusion. The truth did not feed the fantasy of war as a
ticket to glory, honor, and manhood. The truth did not
promote collective self-exaltation. The illusion of war
peddled in The Sands of Iwo Jima, like hundreds of other
Hollywood war films, worked because it was what the
public wanted to believe about themselves. It was what the
government and the military wanted to promote. It worked
because it had the power to simulate experience for most
viewers who were never at Iwo Jima or in a war. But as
Hayes and the others knew, this illusion was a lie. Hayes,
arrested dozens of times for drunkenness, was discovered
dead, face-down in his own vomit and blood, near an
abandoned hut close to his home on the Gila River Indian
Reservation. The coroner ruled that Hayes died of
exposure and alcohol. It was left to the songwriter Peter
LaFarge and Johnny Cash to memorialize the tragic saga
of Hayes’ brief life. “The Ballad of Ira Hayes” told a tale
about war the producers of The Sands of Iwo Jima, who
made the movie not to tell a truth but to feed the public’s
appetite and make a profit, studiously ignored.9
Celebrity worship banishes reality. And this adulation
is pervasive. It is dressed up in the language of the
Christian Right, which builds around its leaders, people
like Pat Robertson or Joel Osteen, the aura of stardom,
fame, and celebrity power. These Christian celebrities
36
travel in private jets and limousines. They are surrounded
by retinues of bodyguards, have television programs where
they cultivate the same false intimacy with the audience,
and, like all successful celebrities, amass personal
fortunes. The frenzy around political messiahs, or the
devotion of millions of women to Oprah Winfrey, is all
part of the yearning to see ourselves in those we worship.
We seek to be like them. We seek to make them like us. If
Jesus and The Purpose Driven Life won’t make us a
celebrity, then Tony Robbins or positive psychologists or
reality television will. We are waiting for our cue to walk
onstage and be admired and envied, to become known and
celebrated.
“What does the contemporary self want?” asked critic
William Deresiewicz:
The camera has created a culture of celebrity; the
computer is creating a culture of connectivity. As the
two technologies converge—broadband tipping the
Web from text to image; social-networking sites
spreading the mesh of interconnection ever wider—
the two cultures betray a common impulse. Celebrity
and connectivity are both ways of becoming known.
This is what the contemporary self wants. It wants to
be recognized, wants to be connected: It wants to be
visible. If not to the millions, on Survivor or Oprah,
then to the hundreds, on Twitter or Facebook. This is
the quality that validates us, this is how we become
real to ourselves—by being seen by others. The great
contemporary terror is anonymity. If Lionel Trilling
was right, if the property that grounded the self in
Romanticism was sincerity, and in modernism was
37
authenticity, then in postmod ernism it is visibility.10
We pay a variety of lifestyle advisers—Gabler calls
them “essentially drama coaches”—to help us look and
feel like celebrities, to build around us the set for the
movie of our own life. Martha Stewart built her financial
empire, when she wasn’t insider trading, telling women
how to create and decorate a set design for the perfect
home. The realities within the home, the actual family
relationships, are never addressed. Appearances make
everything whole. Plastic surgeons, fitness gurus, diet
doctors, therapists, life coaches, interior designers, and
fashion consultants all, in essence, promise to make us
happy, to make us celebrities. And happiness comes, we
are assured, with how we look and how we present
ourselves to others. Glossy magazines like Town &
Country cater to the absurd pretensions of the very rich to
be celebrities. They are photographed in expensive
designer clothing inside the lavishly decorated set-pieces
that are their homes. The route to happiness is bound up in
how skillfully we show ourselves to the world. We not
only have to conform to the dictates of this manufactured
vision, but we also have to project an unrelenting optimism
and happiness.
The Swan was a Fox reality makeover show. The title
of the series referred to Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy
tale “The Ugly Duckling,” in which a bird thought to be
homely grew up and became a swan. “Unattractive”
women were chosen to undergo three months of extensive
plastic surgery, physical training, and therapy for a
38
“complete life transformation.” Each episode featured two
“ugly ducklings” who compete with each other to go on to
the beauty pageant. “I am going to be a new person,” said
one contestant in the opening credits.
In one episode, Cristina, twenty-seven, an Ecuadorborn office administrator from Rancho Cordova,
California, was chosen to be on the program.
“It’s not just the outside I want to change, but it’s the
inside, too,” Cristina told the camera mournfully. She had
long, black hair and light brown skin. She wore baggy,
gray sweatshirts and no makeup. Her hair was pulled back.
We discovered that she was devastatingly insecure about
being intimate with her husband because of her postpregnancy stretch marks. The couple considered divorce.
“I just want to be, not a completely different person,
but I want to be a better Cristina,” she said.
As a “dream team” of plastic surgeons discussed the
necessary corrections, viewers saw a still image of
Cristina, in a gray cotton bra and underwear, superimposed
on a glowing blue grid. Her small, drooping breasts,
wrinkled stomach, and fleshy thighs were apparent. A
schematic figure of an idealized female form revolved at
the left of the screen. Crosshairs targeted and zoomed in on
each flawed area of Cristina’s face and body. The surgical
procedures she would undergo were typed out beside each
body part. Brow lift, eye lift, nose job, liposuction of chin
and cheeks, dermatologist visits, collagen injections,
LASIK eye surgery, tummy tuck, breast augmentation,
liposuction of thighs, dental bleaching, full dental veneers,
39
gum tissue recontouring, a 1,200-calorie daily diet, 120
hours in the gym, weekly therapy, and coaching. The
effect was suggestive of a military operation. The image of
a blueprint and crosshairs was used repeatedly through the
program.
Cristina was shown writing in her diary: “I want a
divorce because I think that my husband can do better
without me. And it would be best for us to go in different
directions. I am not happy with myself at all, so I think,
why make this guy unhappy for the rest of his life?”
At the end of the three months, Cristina and her
opponent, Kristy, were finally allowed to look in a mirror
for “the final reveal.” They were brought separately to
what looked like a marble hotel foyer. Curving twin
staircases with ornate iron banisters framed the action. A
crystal chandelier glittered at the top of the stairs. Sconces
and oil paintings in gold frames hung on the cream-colored
walls.
The “dream team” was assembled in the marble lobby.
Massive peach curtains obscured one wall.
“I think Cristina has really grown into herself as a
woman, and she’s ready to go back home and start her
marriage all over again,” said the team therapist.
Two men in tuxedos opened a set of tall double doors.
Cristina entered in a tight, black evening gown and long
black gloves. She was meticulously made up, and her hair
had been carefully styled with extensions. The “dream
team” burst into applause and whoops.
40
“I’ve been waiting twenty-seven years for this day,”
Cristina tearfully told host Amanda Byram. “I came for a
dream, the American dream, like all the Latinas do, and I
got it!”
“You got it!” cheered Byram. “Yes, you did!”
Reverberating drumbeats were heard. “Behind that
curtain,” says Byram, “is a mirror. We will draw back the
curtain, the mirror will be revealed, and you will see
yourself for the first time in three months. Cristina, step up
to the curtain.”
Short, suspenseful cello strokes were heard. There was
a tumbling drumroll.
“I’m ready,” quavered Cristina.
The curtain parted slowly in the middle. An elaborate
full-length mirror reflected Cristina. The cello strokes
billowed into the Swan theme song.
“Oh, my God!” she gasped, covering her face. She
doubled over. Her knees buckled. She almost hit the floor.
“I am so beautiful!!!” she sobbed. “Thank you, oh, thank
you so much!! Thank you, God!! Thank you, thank you,
thank you so much for this!! Look at my arms, my figure .
. . I love the dress! Thank you, oh!! I’m in love with
myself!”
The “dream team” burst into applause again. “Well,
you owe this to yourself,” said Byram. “But you also owe
41
it to these fantastic experts. Guys, come on in.”
The crowd of smiling experts closed in on their
creation, clapping as they approached.
At the end of each episode, the two contestants were
called before Byram to hear who would advance to the
pageant. The winner often wept and was hugged by the
loser. Byram then pulled the loser aside for “one final
surprise.” The double doors opened once more, and her
family was invited onto the set for a joyful reunion. In
celebrity culture, family is the consolation prize for not
making it to the pageant.
The Swan’s transparent message is that once these
women have been surgically “corrected” to resemble
mainstream celebrity beauty as closely as possible, their
problems will be solved. “This is a positive show where
we want to see how these women can make their dreams
come true once they have what they want,” said Cecile
Frot-Coutaz, CEO of FremantleMedia North America,
producers of The Swan. Troubled marriages, abusive
relationships, unemployment, crushing self-esteem
problems—all will vanish along with the excess fat off
their thighs. They will be new. They will be flawless. They
will be celebrities.
In the Middle Ages, writes Alain de Botton in his book
Status Anxiety , stained glass windows and vivid paintings
of religious torment and salvation controlled and
influenced social behavior. Today we are ruled by icons of
gross riches and physical beauty that blare and flash from
television, cinema, and computer screens. People knelt
42
before God and the church in the Middle Ages. We flock
hungrily to the glamorous crumbs that fall to us from
glossy magazines, talk and entertainment shows, and
reality television. We fashion our lives as closely to these
lives of gratuitous consumption as we can. Only a life with
status, physical attributes, and affluence is worth pursuing.
Hedonism and wealth are openly worshipped on shows
such as The Hills, Gossip Girl, Sex and the City, My Super
Sweet 16, and The Real Housewives of. . . . The American
oligarchy, 1 percent of whom control more wealth than the
bottom 90 percent combined, are the characters we envy
and watch on television. They live and play in multimillion
dollar beach houses and expansive modern lofts. They
marry professional athletes and are chauffeured in stretch
limos to spa appointments. They rush from fashion shows
to movie premieres, flaunting their surgically enhanced,
perfect bodies in haute couture. Their teenagers throw
$200,000 parties and have $1 million dollar weddings.
This life is held before us like a beacon. This life, we are
told, is the most desirable, the most gratifying.
The working classes, comprising tens of millions of
struggling Americans, are shut out of television’s gated
community. They have become largely invisible. They are
mocked, even as they are tantalized, by the lives of excess
they watch on the screen in their living rooms. Almost
none of us will ever attain these lives of wealth and power.
Yet we are told that if we want it badly enough, if we
believe sufficiently in ourselves, we too can have
everything. We are left, when we cannot adopt these
impossible lifestyles as our own, with feelings of
inferiority and worthlessness. We have failed where others
43
have succeeded.
We consume countless lies daily, false promises that if
we spend more money, if we buy this brand or that
product, if we vote for this candidate, we will be respected,
envied, powerful, loved, and protected. The flamboyant
lives of celebrities and the outrageous characters on
television, movies, professional wrestling, and sensational
talk shows are peddled to us, promising to fill up the
emptiness in our own lives. Celebrity culture encourages
everyone to think of themselves as potential celebrities, as
possessing unique if unacknowledged gifts. It is, as
Christopher Lasch diagnosed, a culture of narcissism. Faith
in ourselves, in a world of make-believe, is more important
than reality. Reality, in fact, is dismissed and shunned as
an impediment to success, a form of negativity. The New
Age mysticism and pop psychology of television
personalities, evangelical pastors, along with the array of
self-help best-sellers penned by motivational speakers,
psychiatrists, and business tycoons, all peddle a fantasy.
Reality is condemned in these popular belief systems as
the work of Satan, as defeatist, as negativity, or as
inhibiting our inner essence and power. Those who
question, those who doubt, those who are critical, those
who are able to confront reality and who grasp the
hollowness of celebrity culture are shunned and
condemned for their pessimism. The illusionists who shape
our culture and who profit from our incredulity hold up the
gilded cult of Us. Popular expressions of religious belief,
personal
empowerment,
corporatism,
political
participation, and self-definition argue that all of us are
special, entitled, and unique. All of us, by tapping into our
44
inner reserves of personal will and undiscovered talent, by
visualizing what we want, can achieve, and deserve to
achieve, happiness, fame, and success. This relentless
message cuts across ideological lines. This mantra has
seeped into every aspect of our lives. We are all entitled to
everything.
American Idol, a talent-search reality show that airs on
Fox, is one of the most popular shows on American
television. The show travels to different American cities in
a “countrywide search” for the contestants who will
continue to the final competition in Hollywood. The
producers of the show introduced a new focus in the 20082009 season on the personal stories of the contestants.
During the Utah auditions, we met Megan Corkrey,
twenty-three, the single mother of a toddler. She has long
dirty-blonde hair, and a wholesome, pretty face. A tattoo
sleeve covers her right arm from the shoulder to below the
elbow. She wears a black, grey, and white dress
reminiscent of the 1950s, and ballet flats. She is a font
designer.
In an interview, Corkrey says, “I am a mother. He will
be two in December.” We see Corkrey with a little blond
boy, reading a book together on a beanbag chair. Breezy
guitar music plays. “His name is Ryder.” We see Corkrey
kissing Ryder and putting him to bed. “I recently decided
to get a divorce, which is new.” The guitar music turns
pensive. “The life I had planned for us, the life I’d
pictured, wasn’t going to happen. I cried a lot for a while. I
don’t think I stopped crying. And Ryder, of course, you
can be crying, and then he walks by, and does something
45
ridiculous, and you can’t help but smile and laugh.” We
see Corkrey laughing with her son on the floor. “And a
little piece kind of heals up a little bit.”
The montage of Corkrey’s life fills the screen as the
rock ballad swells. “I can laugh at myself, while the tears
roll down . . . ,” sings the band. We see Corkrey and her
son looking out a window. She holds her son up to a
basketball hoop as he clutches a blue ball.
“It was kind of crazy, I found out Idol was coming to
Salt Lake, and I’d just decided on the divorce, and for the
first time in my life it was a crossroads where anything can
happen!! So why not go for what I love to do?”
Corkrey enters the audition room. The judges—Simon
Cowell, Paula Abdul, Randy Jackson, and Kara DioGuardi
—are seated behind a long table in front of a window.
They each have large, red tumblers with “Coca-Cola”
printed on them. They seem charmed by her exuberant
presence. She sings “Can’t Help Lovin’ Dat Man” from
Show Boat. Her performance is charismatic and quirky.
She improvises freely and assuredly with the rhythms and
notes of the song, beaming the whole time.
“I really like you,” says Abdul. “I’m bordering on
loving you. I think I’m loving you. Yeah, I do. Simon?”
“One of my favorite auditions,” says Cowell in a
monotone.
“Yess!!” grins Corkrey.
46
“Because you’re different,” continues Cowell sternly.
“You are one of the few I’m going to remember. I like
you, I like your voice, I mean seriously good voice. I loved
it.”
“You’re an interesting girl. You have a glow about
you, you have an incredible face,” says DioGuardi.
The judges vote.
“Absolutely yes,” says Cowell.
“Love you,” says Abdul.
“Yes!” says DioGuardi.
“One hundred percent maybe,” smiles Jackson.
“You’re goin’ to Hollywood!” cheers DioGuardi as the
inspirational rock music swells.
“YESS!!! Thank you, guys!” Corkrey screams with
delight. She runs out of the audition room into a crowd of
her cheering friends. The music plays as she dances down
the street, waving her large yellow ticket, the symbol of
her success.
Celebrities, who often come from humble
backgrounds, are held up as proof that anyone, even we,
can be adored by the world. These celebrities, like saints,
are living proof that the impossible is always possible. Our
fantasies of belonging, of fame, of success, and of
fulfillment, are projected onto celebrities. These fantasies
47
are stoked by the legions of those who amplify the culture
of illusion, who persuade us that the shadows are real. The
juxtaposition of the impossible illusions inspired by
celebrity culture and our “insignificant” individual
achievements, however, eventually leads to frustration,
anger, insecurity, and invalidation. It results, ironically, in
a self-perpetuating cycle that drives the frustrated,
alienated individual with even greater desperation and
hunger away from reality, back toward the empty promises
of those who seduce us, who tell us what we want to hear.
We beg for more. We ingest these lies until our money
runs out. And when we fall into despair, we medicate
ourselves, as if the happiness we have failed to find in the
hollow game is our deficiency. And, of course, we are told
it is.
Human beings become a commodity in a celebrity
culture. They are objects, like consumer products. They
have no intrinsic value. They must look fabulous and live
on fabulous sets. Those who fail to meet the ideal are
belittled and mocked. Friends and allies are to be used and
betrayed during the climb to fame, power, and wealth. And
when they are no longer useful, they are to be discarded. In
Fahrenheit 451, Ray Bradbury’s novel about a future
dystopia, people spend most of the day watching giant
television screens that show endless scenes of police
chases and criminal apprehensions. Life, Bradbury
understood, once it was packaged and filmed, became the
most compelling form of entertainment.
The moral nihilism of celebrity culture is played out on
reality television shows, most of which encourage a dark
voyeurism into other people’s humiliation, pain, weakness,
48
and betrayal. Education, building community, honesty,
transparency, and sharing are qualities that will see you, in
a gross perversion of democracy and morality, voted off a
reality show. Fellow competitors for prize money and a
chance for fleeting fame elect to “disappear” the unwanted.
In the final credits of the reality show America’s Next Top
Model, a picture of the woman expelled during the episode
vanishes from the group portrait on the screen. Those cast
aside become, at least to the television audience, nonpersons. Life, these shows teach, is a brutal world of
unadulterated competition. Life is about the personal
humiliation of those who oppose us. Those who win are
the best. Those who lose deserve to be erased.
Compassion, competence, intelligence, and solidarity with
others are forms of weakness. And those who do not
achieve celebrity status, who do not win the prize money
or make millions in Wall Street firms, deserve to lose.
Those who are denigrated and ridiculed on reality
television, often as they sob in front of the camera, are
branded as failures. They are responsible for their
rejection. They are deficient.
In an episode from the second season of the CBS
reality game show Survivor, cast members talk about
exceptional friendships they have made within their
“tribe,” or team. Maralyn, also known as Mad Dog, is a
fifty-two-year-old retired police officer with a silver crew
cut and a tall, mannish build. She is sunning herself in a
shallow stream, singing “On the Street Where You Live.”
Tina, a personal nurse and mother, walks up the stream
toward her.
“Sing it, girl! I just followed your voice.”
49
“Is it that loud?”
“Maralyn, she’s kind of like our little songbird, and our
little cheerleader in our camp,” Tina says in an interview.
“Maralyn and I have bonded, more so than I have with any
of the other people. It might be our ages, it might just be
that we kind of took up for one another.”
We see Tina and Maralyn swimming and laughing
together in the river.
“Tina is a fabulous woman,” says Maralyn in an
interview. “She is a star. I trust Tina the most.”
Maralyn and Tina’s tribe, Ogakor, loses an obstacle
course challenge, in which all the tribe members are
tethered together. If one person falls, the entire team is
slowed. Mad Dog Maralyn falls several times and is
hauled back to her feet by Colby, the “cowboy” from
Texas.
Because they lost, the members of Ogakor must vote
off one of their tribe members. The camera shows small
groups of twos and threes in huddled, intense discussion.
“The mood in the camp is a very sad mood, but it’s
also a very strategic mood,” says Tina. “Everyone’s
thinking, ‘Who’s thinking what?’ ”
The vote is taken at dusk, in the “tribal council” area. It
resembles a set from Disney World’s Adventureland. A
ring of tall stone monoliths is stenciled with petroglyphs. It
50
is lit by torches. A campfire blazes in the center of the
ring. Primitive drums and flutes are heard.
The Ogakor team arrives at dusk, each holding a torch.
They sit before Survivor’s host, Jeff Probst.
“So I just want to talk about a couple of big topics,”
says Probst, who wears a safari outfit. “Trust. Colby, is
there anyone here that you don’t trust, wouldn’t trust?”
“Sure,” says Colby.
“Tell me about that.”
“Well, I think that’s part of the game,” says Colby.
“It’s way too early to tell exactly who you can trust, I
think.”
“What about you, Mitchell? Would you trust everyone
here for forty-two days?” asks Probst. “I think the motto is,
‘Trust no one,’” answers Mitchell. “I have a lot of faith in
a good number of these people, but I couldn’t give 100
percent of my trust.”
“What about you, Mad Dog?” asks Probst. “These all
your buddies?”
Maralyn looks around at her team members. “Yes,” she
says unequivocally. “Yes. And, Jeff, I trust with my heart.”
“I think friendship does enter into it at some point,”
says Jerri. “But I think it’s very important to keep that
separate from the game. It’s two totally different things.
51
And that’s where it gets tricky.” Jerri will say later, as she
casts her vote, “This is probably one of the most difficult
things for me to do right now. It’s purely strategic, it’s
nothing personal. I am going to miss you dearly.”
“Jeff,” Maralyn breaks in. “I’m conjoined with Tina.
She is a constellation. And, the cowboy [Colby]! The poor
cowboy has dragged me around so many times [during the
obstacle course challenge]. I appreciate it.”
“I’d do it again,” laughs Colby broadly.
“Hey, you hear that? He’d do it again!” says Maralyn.
It is time to vote. Each team member walks up a
narrow bridge lit by flaring torches, again looking like
something out of Disney’s Enchanted Tiki Room, made of
twisted logs lashed with vines, to a stone table. They write
the name of the person they want to eliminate and put it in
a cask with aboriginal carvings. Most of the votes are kept
anonymous, the camera panning away as each person
writes. But as Tina, Mad Dog Maralyn’s best friend and
“constellation,” casts her vote, she shows us her ballot:
Mad Dog. “Mad Dog, I love you,” she says to the camera,
“I value your friendship more than anything. This vote has
everything to do with a promise I made, it has nothing to
do with you. I hope you’ll understand.” She folds her vote
and puts it in the cask.
“Once the vote is tallied, the decision is final, and the
person will be asked to leave the tribal council area
immediately,” says Probst.
52
Five people of the seven voted to eliminate Maralyn.
“You need to bring me a torch, Mad Dog,” says Probst.
She does so, first taking off her green baseball cap and
putting it affectionately on Amber, who sits next to her and
gives her a hug. The camera shows Tina looking
impassive.
“Mad Dog,” says Probst, holding the flaming torch
Maralyn has brought him, “the tribe has spoken.” He takes
a large stone snuffer and extinguishes the torch. The
camera shows Marilynn’s rueful face behind the smoking,
blackened torch. “It’s time for you to go,” says Probst. She
leaves without speaking or looking at anyone, although
there are a few weak “bye” ’s from the tribe.
Before the final credits, we are shown who, besides her
friend Tina, voted to eliminate Maralyn. They are Amber,
who gave Maralyn a farewell hug, along with Mitchell,
Jerri, and Colby, Maralyn’s “cowboy.”
Celebrity culture plunges us into a moral void. No one
has any worth beyond his or her appearance, usefulness, or
ability to “succeed.” The highest achievements in a
celebrity culture are wealth, sexual conquest, and fame. It
does not matter how these are obtained. These values, as
Sigmund Freud understood, are illusory. They are hollow.
They leave us chasing vapors. They urge us toward a life
of narcissistic self-absorption. They tell us that existence is
to be centered on the practices and desires of the self rather
than the common good. The ability to lie and manipulate
others, the very ethic of capitalism, is held up as the
highest good. “I simply agreed to go along with [Jerri and
53
Amber] because I thought it would get me down the road a
little better,” says young, good-looking Colby in another
episode of Survivor. “I wanna win. And I don’t want to
talk to anybody else about loyalties—don’t give me that
crap. I haven’t trusted anyone since day one, and anyone
playing smart should have been the same way.”
The cult of self dominates our cultural landscape. This
cult has within it the classic traits of psychopaths:
superficial charm, grandios ity, and self-importance; a
need for constant stimulation, a penchant for lying,
deception, and manipulation, and the inability to feel
remorse or guilt. This is, of course, the ethic promoted by
corporations. It is the ethic of unfettered capitalism. It is
the misguided belief that personal style and personal
advancement, mistaken for individualism, are the same as
democratic equality. In fact, personal style, defined by the
commodities we buy or consume, has become a
compensation for our loss of democratic equality. We have
a right, in the cult of the self, to get whatever we desire.
We can do anything, even belittle and destroy those around
us, including our friends, to make money, to be happy, and
to become famous. Once fame and wealth are achieved,
they become their own justification, their own morality.
How one gets there is irrelevant. Once you get there, those
questions are no longer asked.
It is this perverted ethic that gave us Wall Street
bankers and investment houses that willfully trashed the
nation’s economy, stole money from tens of millions of
small shareholders who had bought stock in these
corporations for retirement or college. The heads of these
corporations, like the winners on a reality television
54
program who lied and manipulated others to succeed,
walked away with hundreds of millions of dollars in
bonuses and compensation. In his masterful essay “The
Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,”
Walter Benjamin wrote: “The cult of the movie star,
fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not
the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the
personality,’ the phony spell of a commodity.”11
“The professional celebrity, male and female, is the
crowning result of the star system of a society that makes a
fetish of competition,” wrote C. Wright Mills:
In America, this system is carried to the point
where a man who can knock a small, white ball into a
series of holes in the ground with more efficiency and
skill than anyone else thereby gains access to the
President of the United States. It is carried to the point
where a chattering radio and television entertainer
becomes the hunting chum of leading industrial
executives, cabinet members, and the higher military.
It does not seem to matter what the man is the very
best at; so long as he has won out in competition over
all others, he is celebrated. Then, a second feature of
the star system begins to work: all the stars of any
other sphere of endeavor or position are drawn toward
the new star and he toward them. The success, the
champion, accordingly, is one who mingles freely
with other champions to populate the world of the
celebrity.12
Degradation as entertainment is the squalid underside
55
to the glamour of celebrity culture. “If only that were me,”
we sigh as we gaze at the wealthy, glimmering stars on the
red carpet. But we are as transfixed by the inverse of
celebrity culture, by the spectacle of humiliation and
debasement that comprise tabloid television shows such as
The Jerry Springer Show and The Howard Stern Show. We
secretly exult: “At least that’s not me.” It is the glee of
cruelty with impunity, the same impulse that drove crowds
to the Roman Colosseum, to the pillory and the stocks, to
public hangings, and to traveling freak shows.
In one segment from Jerry Springer: Wild &
Outrageous, Volume 1, a man and his wife sit on the
Springer stage. They are obese, soft, and pale, with
mounds of fluffy, brown hair. Their bodies look like
uncooked dough. The man wears a blue polo shirt and
brown pants. The woman wears a dark pink shirt with long
sleeves and a long black skirt.
“I have a sex fantasy,” the man tells his wife solemnly.
His voice is quiet and nasal. She recoils with raised
eyebrows. “Do you remember that bachelor party I went to
three weeks ago? There was a stripper there. She was
dressed up as a cheerleader, and she just turned me on. I
mean, I got—I have this thing—I don’t know if it’s her or
the outfit, I think it’s the outfit. But, I’d really love for you
to dress up as a cheerleader. For me. And do a cheer that’s
especially for me, and. . . . You could be my cheerleader . .
. of my heart.”
The woman, still sitting in her chair, has her hands on
her hips and looks affronted. There are close-ups of the
Springer audience bursting into raucous laughter, hoots,
56
and applause.
“I brought her here to show you—” continues the man.
He is cut off by the whoops of the audience.
“Let’s bring her out!” says Jerry. The audience cheers.
Shaking yellow pom-poms, a skinny blonde girl in a
purple-and-yellow cheerleader outfit runs out onstage. Her
body is like a stick. She turns a cartwheel and moons the
audience, smacking her own bottom several times. Behind
her, the obese man is shown grinning. The obese woman is
waving in disgust at the cheerleader.
“Is everybody ready to do a cheer just for Jerry?!”
squeaks the cheerleader.
“YEAAAHHH!!!” hollers the audience.
“I can’t hear yoooouuuuuu . . .” pipes the cheerleader,
lifting her skirt up to her waist.
The audience goes crazy. She leads a cheer, spelling
out Jerry’s name.
“Now that you’ve seen these pom-poms, how’d you
like to see these pom-poms?” she squeaks, shaking her flat
chest. A rapid electronic beat fills the studio, and the lights
dim. She takes off her top, her bra, and, gyrating her hips,
slides off her skirt and underwear. Her bottom is about
three feet from the whooping men in the front row. The
obese man’s arms and legs are waving around in
excitement, as his grimacing wife shakes her head
57
repeatedly. The naked cheerleader leans back on the floor
and does the splits in the air. She then jumps into the fat
man’s lap and smothers his face in her tiny chest. She runs
into the audience and does the same to another man and a
gray-haired woman in a cardigan who looks like a
grandmother. The cameramen follow the cheerleader
closely, zooming in on her breasts and ass.
While the naked, ponytailed girl runs around leaping
into the laps of members of the audience, the crowd begins
chanting, under the deafening electronic music, “JER-RY!
JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!”
The girl finally runs back onstage. The music stops.
She collects her pom-poms and sits down naked, dressed
only in a pair of white tennis shoes and bobby socks.
“JER-RY! JER-RY! JER-RY!” chants the crowd.
In a later portion of the episode, Jerry says to the man,
“So this is really what you want your wife to be doing?”
The naked cheerleader is seated beside him, and his wife is
no longer onstage.
“Oh, yes!” he exclaims. The audience laughs at his
fervor. “It really excites me, Jerry. It really does.”
“All right,” says Jerry. “Well, are we ready to bring her
out?”
“YEESSSSS!!!” bellows the audience.
“Here she is!” announces Jerry. “Cheerleading
58
Kristen!”
The wife runs out onto the stage. She is in an identical
purple-and-yellow cheerleading outfit, with yellow pompoms. Her fluffy brown hair is tied into two bunches on
the sides of her head. She resembles a poodle. Her exposed
midriff is a thick, white roll of fat that hangs over her
short, purple skirt and shakes with every step.
She turns a clumsy somersault. She prances heavily
back and forth on the stage. She does cancan kicks. She
yells “WHOOOOOO!!!” Her husband is seen behind her,
yelling with the rest of the audience. She leads a cheer of
Jerry’s name, but forgets the Y. The audience laughs. She
finishes the cheer. There is a shot of Jerry watching quietly
at the back of the studio, leaning against the soundman’s
booth, his hand covering his mouth.
The wife continues to high-step back and forth. The
clapping and cheers subside. The audience has fallen
silent. “WHOOO!!” she yells again. She does, in complete
silence, a few more lumbering kicks. A few individuals
snicker in the crowd. Jerry is shown at the soundman’s
booth, doubled over in soundless laughter. The woman is
confused. She looks to the side of the stage, as though she
is being prompted. “Oh—OK,” she says.
She takes center stage again. “All right,” she says.
“You’ve seen these pom-poms.” Individual giggles are
heard from the audience. “Now what about THESE?” Her
husband watches eagerly. The naked stripper, sitting
behind her, laughs.
59
The stripping music comes on. The lights dim. The
wife does more cancan kicks. She trots back and forth. She
takes off all her clothes except her underpants. The
audience is clapping to the beat, whooping, and laughing.
Some of them are covering their eyes. Others are covering
their mouths. She continues prancing onstage, doing the
occasional kick, until the music stops.
“JER-RY!! JER-RY!! JER-RY!!” chants the crowd.
Her husband wraps his arms around her naked torso and
kisses her.
“You made my wildest dreams come true,” he tells her.
Individuals laugh in the audience.
“Aww,” says Jerry, shaking his head. “That is true
love.” The woman collects her scattered clothes. “That is
—that is—that is—true love.”
Celebrities are skillfully used by their handlers and the
media to compensate for the increasingly degraded and
regimented existences that most of us endure in a
commodity culture. Celebrities tell us we can have our
revenge. We can triumph. We can, one day, get back at the
world that has belittled and abused us. It happens in the
ring. It happens on television. It happens in the movies. It
happens in the narrative of the Christian Right. It happens
in pornography. It happens in the self-help manuals and on
reality television. But it almost never happens in reality.
Celebrity is the vehicle used by a corporate society to
sell us these branded commodities, most of which we do
60
not need. Celebrities humanize commercial commodities.
They present the familiar and comforting face of the
corporate state. Supermodel Paulina Porizkova, on an
episode of America’s Next Top Model, gushes to a group
of aspiring young models, “Our job as models is to sell.”
But they peddle a fake intimacy and a fantasy. The
commercial “personalizing” of the world involves
oversimplification, distraction, and gross distortion. “We
sink further into a dream of an unconsciously intimate
world in which not only may a cat look at a king but a king
is really a cat underneath, and all the great power-figures
Honest Joes at heart,”13 Richard Hoggart warned in The
Uses of Literacy. We do not learn more about Barack
Obama by knowing what dog he has brought home for his
daughters or if he still smokes. Such personalized trivia,
passed off as news, divert us from reality.
In his book Celebrity, Chris Rojek calls celebrity
culture “the cult of distraction that valorizes the
superficial, the gaudy, the domination of commodity
culture.” He goes further:
Capitalism originally sought to police play and
pleasure, because any attempt to replace work as the
central life interest threatened the economic survival
of the system. The family, the state, and religion
engendered a variety of patterns of moral regulation
to control desire and ensure compliance with the
system of production. However, as capitalism
developed, consumer culture and leisure time
expanded. The principles that operated to repress the
individual in the workplace and the home were
extended to the shopping mall and recreational
61
activity. The entertainment industry and consumer
culture produced what Herbert Marcuse called
“repressive desublima tion.” Through this process
individuals unwittingly subscribed to the degraded
version of humanity.14
This cult of distraction, as Rojek points out, masks the
real disintegration of culture. It conceals the
meaninglessness and emptiness of our own lives. It
seduces us to engage in imitative consumption. It deflects
the moral questions arising from mounting social injustice,
growing inequalities, costly imperial wars, economic
collapse, and political corruption. The wild pursuit of
status and wealth has destroyed our souls and our
economy. Families live in sprawling mansions financed
with mortgages they can no longer repay. Consumers
recklessly rang up Coach handbags and Manolo Blahnik
shoes on credit cards because they seemed to confer a
sense of identity and merit. Our favorite hobby, besides
television, used to be, until reality hit us like a tsunami,
shopping. Shopping used to be the compensation for
spending five days a week in tiny cubicles. American
workers are ground down by corporations that have
disempowered them, used them, and have now discarded
them.
Celebrities have fame free of responsibility. The fame
of celebrities, wrote Mills, disguises those who possess
true power: corporations and the oligarchic elite. Magical
thinking is the currency not only of celebrity culture, but
also of totalitarian culture. And as we sink into an
62
economic and political morass, we are still controlled,
manipulated and distracted by the celluloid shadows on the
dark wall of Plato’s cave. The fantasy of celebrity culture
is not designed simply to entertain. It is designed to keep
us from fighting back.
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban
books,” Neil Postman wrote:
What Huxley feared was that there would be no
reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who
wanted to read one. Orwell feared those who would
deprive us of information. Huxley feared those who
would give us so much that we would be reduced to
passivity and egoism. Orwell feared that the truth
would be concealed from us. Huxley feared the truth
would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. Orwell
feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley
feared we would become a trivial culture,
preoccupied with some equivalent of the feelies, the
orgy porgy, and the centrifugal bumble-puppy. As
Huxley remarked in Brave New World Revisited, the
civil libertarians and rationalists who are ever on the
alert to oppose tyranny “failed to take into account
man’s almost infinite appetite for distractions.” In
1984, Huxley added, people are controlled by
inflicting pain. In Brave New World, they are
controlled by inflicting pleasure. In short, Orwell
feared that what we hate will ruin us. Huxley feared
that what we love will ruin us.15
Mark Andrejevic, a professor of communication
63
studies at the University of Iowa at Iowa City, writes that
reality shows like Big Brother and Survivor glamorize the
intrusiveness of the surveillance state, presenting it as “one
of the hip attributes of the contemporary world,” “an
entrée into the world of wealth and celebrity,” and even a
moral good. In his book Reality TV: The Work of Being
Watched, he quotes veterans of The Real World, Road
Rules, and Temptation Island who speak about their on-air
personal growth and the therapeutic value of being
constantly watched. As Josh on Big Brother explains,
“Everyone should have an audience.” Big Brother, in
which ten cohabiting strangers willingly submit to roundthe-clock video monitoring, is a celebration of the
surveillance state. More than twice as many young people
apply to MTV’s Real World show than to Harvard, for a
chance to live under constant surveillance. But the use of
hidden cameras—part of professional wrestling’s attraction
as well as a staple on reality television—reinforces
celebrity culture’s frightening assumption that it is normal,
indeed enviable, to be constantly watched. For
corporations and a government that seeks to make
surveillance routine, whether to study our buying habits or
read our e-mails or make sure we do not organize social
protest, these shows normalize what was once considered a
flagrant violation of our Constitutional right to privacy.16
There is a rapacious appetite for new, “real-life” drama
and a desperate thirst for validation by the celebrity
culture. This yearning to be anointed worthy of celebrity
was captured in Dave Eggers’s book A Heartbreaking
Work of Staggering Genius. He writes a satirical transcript
of an interview/audition tape he purportedly made for The
64
Real World.
Eggers eagerly discloses to the interviewer the most
sensational episodes of his life, including his daily habit of
masturbating in the shower. His parents both died of
cancer thirty-two days apart, leaving him at twenty-two to
raise his eight-year-old brother Toph. Mr. T from the ATeam moved into the town he grew up in. His childhood
friend’s father doused himself in gasoline and set himself
on fire. He drew a picture of his mother on her deathbed.
His father was a devious alcoholic who drank vodka out of
tall soda glasses.
Eggers muses on the hunger for celebrity:
Because, see, I think what my town, and your
show, reflect so wonderfully is that the main byproduct of the comfort and prosperity that I’m
describing is a sort of pure, insinuating solipsism . . .
we’ve grown up thinking of ourselves in relation to
the political-media-entertainment ephemera, in our
safe and comfortable homes, given the time to think
about how we would fit into this or that band or TV
show or movie, and how we would look doing it.
These are people for whom the idea of anonymity is
existentially irrational, indefensible.17
“Why do you want to be on The Real World?” asks the
interviewer. “Because I want everyone to witness my
youth,” answers Eggers:
I just mean, that it’s in bloom. That’s what you’re
all about, right? The showing of raw fruit, correct?
65
Whether that’s in videos or on Spring Break,
whatever, the amplifying of youth, the editing and
volume magnifying what it means to be right there, at
the point when all is allowed and your body wants
everything for it, is hungry and taut, churning, an
energy vortex, sucking all toward it.18
Okay, you want to hear a sad story? Last night I
was home, listening to an album. A favorite song
came on, and I was singing aloud . . . and as I was
singing and doing the slo-mo hands-in-hair maneuver,
I messed up the words to the song I was singing, and
though it was two fifty-one in the morning, I became
quickly, deeply embarrassed about my singing gaffe,
convinced that there was a very good chance that
someone could see me—through the window, across
the dark, across the street. I was sure, saw vividly that
someone—or more likely a someone and his friends
—over there was having a hearty laugh at my
expense.19
At the end of the interview, Eggers says to the
interviewer, “Reward me for my suffering,”
“Have I given you enough? Reward me. Put me
on television. Let me share this with millions . . . I
know how this works. I give you these things, and
you give me a platform. So give me a platform. I am
owed . . . I can do it any way you want, too—I can do
it funny, or maudlin, or just straight, uninflected—
anything. You tell me. I can do it sad, or inspirational,
66
or angry. . . . All this did not happen to us for naught,
I can assure you—there is no logic to that, there is
logic only in assuming that we suffered for a reason.
Just give us our due. . . . I need community, I need
feedback, I need love, connection, give-and-take—
will bleed if they will love. . . . I will open a vein, an
artery. . . . Oh please let me show this to millions. . . .
Let me be the conduit. . . . Oh, I want to be the heart
pumping blood to everyone! . . . I want—”
“And that will heal you?”
“Yes! Yes! Yes! Yes!”20
We live in an age, Philip Roth wrote, in which the
imagination of the novelist lies helpless before what will
appear in the morning newspaper: “The actuality is
continually outdoing our talents, and the culture tosses up
figures daily that are the envy of any novelist.” Roth
observed that the reality of celebrity culture “stupefies, it
sickens, it infuriates, and finally it is even a kind of
embarrassment to one’s own meager imagination.”21
Philip Roth’s grasp of the unreality of reality is
exemplified in the British reality star Jade Goody.22 A
twenty-year-old dental technician who was the only child
of two drug addicts, Goody was in 2002 given a role as a
contestant in Big Brother 3. She got drunk on the first
night of the program. She waltzed around the set topless.
She asked what asparagus was and said, “Rio de Janeiro,
ain’t that a person?” She referred to East Anglia as “East
67
Angular,” thought Portugal was in Spain, and complained
that she was being made an “escape goat.” She thought
“pistachio” was a famous painter. She finished fourth in
the competition, but this did not, as it would for most
others, end her career as a celebrity. She released several
successful fitness DVDs and opened a beauty salon in
Hertford. She published an autobiography and marketed
her own fragrance in the weeks before Christmas 2006,
which generated huge sales. She appeared on other reality
shows including Celebrity Wife Swap, Celebrity Driving
School, Celebrity Weakest Link, and Celebrity Stars in
Their Eyes. She also hosted her own reality TV shows,
including What Jade Did Next, Jade’s Salon, and Jade’s
P.A.
Goody had the essential skill required of all who agree
to expose their lives and selves to constant surveillance:
She appeared to lack any degree of self-consciousness. She
came naturally to exhibitionism, even when she was
clearly a figure of ridicule. She opened her life to millions
of viewers, even when it involved seamy and messy
relationships and personal disasters, with a beguiling
innocence. This is a bizarre skill highly prized in celebrity
culture. Goody clearly craved the attention and sought to
perpetuate it, but she seemed slightly bored or at least
indifferent while doing it.
Her appearance, along with her mother Jackiey Budden
and model boyfriend Jack Tweed, in the Big Brother house
in January 2007, however, backfired. She bullied and
taunted Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty, and used crude,
racist remarks to describe Shetty, calling her “Shilpa
Poppadom.” The show received some 45,000 complaints
68
about her behavior and racist language. Her perfume was
yanked from shelves, and publishers dropped plans to
publish the paperback version of her autobiography. She
apologized abjectly to Indian viewers and appeared on the
Indian version of the show, called Bigg Boss. She might
have faded from view, like most reality show contestants,
but in 2007 she was diagnosed with cervical cancer,
learning of the disease while being filmed for the Indian
program. The new twist to the drama of her life propelled
her back into the spotlight and allowed her a final chance
to play a starring role in her life movie. The Living
Channel commissioned a three-part series that documented
her battle with cancer. The program drew an audience of
more than 900,000 viewers in Britain when it aired. She
milked her final days for money and celebrity, including
making about $1 million by selling exclusive rights to
cover her wedding. She died at the age of twenty-seven in
March 2009.
Goody told the News of the World when she learned
her cancer was probably terminal: “I’ve lived my whole
adult life talking about my life. The only difference is that
I’m ...
Purchase answer to see full
attachment