There is always hubris in the celebrity. We envy it; it is impressive. She is like us, the celebrity, only with hubris. At first, it seems to be only a kind of luck. She was picked out of the crowd to which the rest of us belong. Like us, she is a person of mediocre talent. But luck becomes ambition. She finds an agent, signs a contract; an autobiography is ghostwritten. She finds romance with another celebrity and is pictured in Heat. Now she is an invitee to the opening of new films and to awards ceremonies. Who blames her?
But then her ambition becomes overreaching; she drinks too much, perhaps, falling out of too many limousines; an ex-lover publishes a kiss and tell; she retires to a rehab clinic; or her love-rat celebrity husband, whom ev’ryone warned her about, goes out to the newsagent and never comes back. Ah, she drinks for us, laughs for us, enjoying ev’rything in our place. How wonderful it is to have a delegate in that world!
But who is happier than us when a celebrity crashes out of her world? Such only confirms to us the wisdom of the quotidian, a kind of fate that await those who overreach. It is magnificent: she was unable to profit from the randomness which lifted her from our world, and now she is returned to us. She is not one of the gods; she never was. But does she show us, then, that all gods are sham gods? Or does she, rather, confirm them in their godliness?
We can admire celebrities for their power of endurance. Ev’ry storm has been weathered and they sail magnificently, again and again into port. What have they endured? The indignity that would have floored us. How did X. survive it being claimed that her child was not that of her husband? How did Y. survive accusations of infidelity? But they endured and that is wonderful. It is as though a kind of wisdom shines through them. Yes, they are wiser for what they have endured.
Think of the interview is the one where the celebrity speaks to us of what she has learnt. At one stroke, she is one of us – she is as vulnerable as we are – and she escapes us, with that magnificent power of endurance which will allow her to remain in the firmament of celebrity. What matters, her publicists know, and those who coach her for interviews, is that she circumvent those feelings of resentment in her audience. For that is what we feel when the celebrity is too superb or too invulnerable.
Some claim a kind of banalisation of celebrity has occurred. Shane Richie says when he is recognised in the streets, it is as the actor he is, rather than the character he plays in Eastenders; twenty years ago, this never happened, he comments. It is necessary to understand the ordinariness of the celebrity, one might conclude. There is a decline of aura. But that is not quite true. The ordinariness is now part of the dynamic of celebrity, existing in tension with that magical power of endurance which has allowed them to survive. It is what is pushed forward by the celebrity even as her magic is set back into a deeper mystery.
What is the source of this mystery? It is easy enough: the power of the media, the great diversion of attention from what matters. No doubt, too, the power of ideology, the great duping of the world which cannot be placed on this or that media mogul but rather upon capitalism itself, the streaming of capital from which we are born and into which we return. The myth of the celebrity has been purified. To be famous for being famous all the while being quite ordinary is to confirm, ultimately, the power of capital as it might lift any of us, each of us, from our obscurity. As it might lift us onto its waters and then dash against itself, smashing us. And to survive – what does it mean to survive?
Think of the celebrity who has been with us for many years. Of the ups and downs of his career. What he has endured! And all for that he was known for nothing in particular: he is agreeably handsome, but not especially so, agreeably entertaining, but not a wit, untalented, it is true, but his mediocrity does not offend us…. Who is he? At once no-one in particular and a god. In truth, he is an avatar, a part-god, a god reborn to reach us in his ordinary body, to pass among us in his happy mediocrity. But of whom was he reborn? Which god, in the sky of gods, took his body? In the end it is none of them. Just as the puranas were claimed by the Hindus to operate as colourful tales for those whose minds were too unsubtle to grasp the pure abstraction of the one god, the life of the celebrity without talent is a cover for the operation of capital.
To what P.R. machine does the celebrity belong? To what advertising campaign? To none in particular – not to this or that media agency, but to one embedded in what is taken to be the real. It is not a question, here, of opposing reality to appearance once again, of speaking of the veil of maya which capital lays over a world which was once real. The word simulation or simulacra echo in a direction they cannot reach. Rather, the world is a series of public relations exercises for capital; advertising advertises capitalism and nothing else. A campaign which involves ev’ry flower and the whole sky, work time and leisure time. Which does not press reality into service, but is reality, the whole weight of the real.
When can it be caught out, this work which is the work of ev’rything? When does it reveal itself, the glitch in the matrix? When the untalented celebrity who was no one in particular falls from the firmament of celebrity. But, too, when he was first lifted there. There is a moment when the body of the celebrity is as yet unknown – who is he? – before the great rush of information fills in the void. And there is a moment when, returning to us, to the quotidian, the celebrity’s body becomes unknown again, secret, and a source of magic is revealed in its monstrous banality.
[A glitch in Typepad prevents me using the word e-v-e-r-y]
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