Category: Celebrity

Ryan’s Brother

My happiest days this summer were steered by the O.C.; it was the O.C., on every morning at 9.00, that gathered the day and I to ourselves. Watching the O.C., the day and I were on equal terms, equally fascinated. I like the theme tune very much, I like the characters, I like that Julie didn’t give her husband the poison she prepared, that there is a kindness in her as there would not be in other, similar characters in other soap operas. I like confused and angry Marissa, and I like Summer and her love triangles. But when they brought in Ryan’s brother, when he was introduced to the show, I thought: now the day and I must separate; we’ve caught out the O.C.; it’s secret is up; at its heart is a non-event it has tried to hide; the O.C. is a cover for what does not happen and cannot complete itself.

Ryan’s brother is from the wrong side of the tracks, like him; he is brutishly good looking, like him; he takes up with Marissa – or rather, Marissa takes him up, coming to his door with gifts, driving him from here to there; they are to be friends. Only Ryan’s brother abuses this friendship; unlike Ryan he has not been redeemed. So, according to the law, must he disappear from the O.C. But not before his doubling of Ryan, the guy-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks all over again, has exposed the first Ryan for what he is: no different from the one who doubles him, caught in this play of mirrors in which, now, the whole of the O.C. is implicated. What is real? I cannot trust this programme and its makers. They are throwing events at me, replaying Ryan’s story, playing it again in a kind of desperation. For they know there are no events and the O.C. is empty, that in the O.C. emptiness knows itself and speaks of itself.

So does the O.C., which carried me in strong and generous arms, let me fall. Gradually, the series winds to an end, but my faith was already lost. Now 9.00 is to be confronted without the strong arm of a soap opera. The day and I part, no longer reconciled, no longer gathered together at the head of the day as the puppy lies with puppy. Now the day and I fall back from one another; I am the earth and the day is the sky, and we are turned from one another. So is the cosmos set apart and the great dualism returns. There is no dwelling place; the O.C. is not as Holderlin’s The Ister is for Heidegger, it is not the river which bears us all in its streaming and I am sad as though I had lived my whole life and were at its end. Premature death! I do not want to die because I’ve never lived!

The Red Carpet

9.00, the beginning of the day, the head of all waters. Without the O.C. there must be new albums, perpetually new sounds to listen to; and then there are the celebrity blogs, then the events with I will hold the eventless everyday at bay. These events – Renee Zellweger’s marriage, its breakdown, the sting that caught Kate Moss snorting cocaine – are my sheld. I am afraid of time, which is to say, afraid for myself in time. Events are my sustenance; I write here only to mark the day. What seems occasional (it is the 19th September; I see the plant outside my window whose roots drown in overflowing drain water, and beyond the plan, the bins, then the wall) is in fact a plate of the armour I need to construct.

Happily, the celebrities live for me. There is always a premiere, always new dresses to admire. There are celebrities in dresses, the trial of the red carpet, the judgement of fashion successes and fashion disasters. Happily, there are celebrity blogs and celebrity magazines. Their very proliferation is a sign of a great need for myths that would allow us to cross the day. New myths, the new sustaining puranas with speak of our crossing life, which accumulate the wisdom that would help us to cross.

We knew Renee Zellweger’s marriage would end; we knew, and the marriage played out as we knew it would. We knew, we looked on, but with infinite compassion, with infinite wisdom. So we can turn back to our own lives and those around us with the same wisdom and the same compassion. Reassurance – we all want the same things, we need the same things, the celebrities are like us, only larger than us and more beautiful than we are. They are gods, or the avatars of gods; they live and die before us in order that we learn of ourselves and our world. They instruct; we learn from their failures and their glories.

They are gods and goddesses, that is not in doubt. This is why we resist the elevation of reality TV stars to the status of celebrity. Oh, some of them are admitted into the pages of the celebrity magazine; where would be without Jade, magnificent Jade? But the others … how can they but fail? How can they cross from our world to theirs, the world of celebrities? But there is glory in their hubris, and Big Brother is tragic to the extent that the freedom granted to those in the house runs up against necessity, that is, the failure of their bid for fame, its great withering. But there is Jade! Jade who is set against the other celebrities in the magazine, who is the night to their day, the backdrop that would allow them to shine more brightly.

The Gods

I have said it before, and it is worth saying again: celebrities, television are the dreams of the sleeping body of Capital. Dreams of Capital, which can never wake up. Capital which only slumbers, which will never rise from itself because there is no ‘itself’; Capital that dissolves all forms and releases them to their streaming, Capital that is fate and necessity.

For Capital is time and Capital is ruin. I saw you, Capital, on Kate Moss’s face. Cruel Capital that would ruin Renee Zellweger’s marriage (or would have allowed to think that it might work)! Ah, but that cruelty is what we call fate, what we live as fate and know as fate. The gods are watching, but the gods are blind, the sky is blind and indifferent to us and to all but the streaming of money and its equipollences. Capital time, myths of Capital, this is our wisdom.

Nihilism: the introduction of Ryan’s brother into the O.C., the breakdown of a marriage we would know would break down. It breaks in, then, a kind of nonsense that sets us apart from the day we traverse. The gods are leaving, having never arrived. Celebrities are leaving, having never come to us. Jade, concilator of the terrestial and the heavenly is leaving us. And who are we who are left, bereft of myths, of heroes, of heroines?

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]

It seems there really are stars and celebrities really do occupy another realm. The everyday lies beneath the communication networks which wrap themselves around the planet. It abides; meanwhile, there is a celebrity cosmology, a collective dream (or is it an advertising campaign?) alive above us like the aurora borealis. Sometimes a few of us are allowed into the celebrity cosmos; sometimes, a few of us return.

Take X., with her ample bust, an attractive face and stardom was hers almost instanteously. She accepted an agent’s offer; she became uniquitous, earning thousands of pounds an hour for public appearances and hundreds of thousands a year writing columns for men’s magazines. She appeared on the front of dozens of red top newspapers earning money from the photos used to illustrate the latest scandal in which she had been involved.

Terror as you hear the words, who blames her? She knows it won’t last; she works hard. Men like her, it is said, because they feel they have a chance with her; she is not a goddess. Women like her apparently because she should would be like them, admitting to sexual fantasies (she is launching a series of women’s erotica) – a liberator of sorts.

Meanwhile at work there is some crazy new initative. What can you do? Nothing at all, you tell yourself. The ride is prepared, ready, the tracks will run from here to perdition. The seat warmed for you which is the correlate of the place X. keeps for you in the world of celebrity. There is heaven of celebrities and there is earth; the one only mimics the other. Who blames you? You know it won’t last. Redundancies loom. Your contract will come to an end. And in the meantime …

But the meantime is all time. You’re a placeholder for any other employee. Anyone could take you place and anyone would do exactly the same as what you’ll do. ‘If you don’t want to do it, we’ll find someone else …’

There is a pragmatism operative which takes no heed of you. A strategy which works through you and everyone. This is capitalism cyncism, as Sloterdijk calls enlightened false conscousness. We know what we’re doing, but we’re doing it anyway. After all, anyone would do the same in our place.

Who is X.? Each of us, any of us. For a moment, a glorious moment – you’ve been following the story from the start – she was the no one in particular in whose place we could all imagine ourselves or a version of ourselves. If she is admired, it is because she has achieved what each of us would want. If she is despised, it is for the same reason.

It is not that the dream machine of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment supplant what used to be called real engagement with the world. There was no such engagement, the great bedrock of certainty and security is another myth.

What was there, then, that is vanishing now? Time, perhaps? The time of strikes and power cuts – the marvel of a few hours escape from time the dispenser. The time, too, of the great slackening of activity when computers crashed or, before mobile phones, the few hours you could spend outside contact as you travelled from one company site to another.

But now the slack has been taken up. The world advertises its efficiency to itself. But what is being sold as X.? The servo-mechanisms of publicity sell the one who is along for the ride back to herself. Yes, you know everything, you know what matters most – the ecological catastrophe, suffering allowed to become invisible – but you also know – although this is only the phantom of knowledge, it’s ideological substitute – that you can do nothing.

They are among us, the gods, you think to yourself, much in the same way as D.H. Lawrence, dying in the South of France, imagined the old gods of the sea were alive for ancient peoples. There were gods ev’rywhere, he thought. And men went slimly like fishes and didn’t care. And how do we go through the quotidian? Like slim fishes? Either way, the gods accompany us, and we know they are close. There they are, the gods, on magazine covers.

We read of the doings of the gods, of the young ones, Girls Aloud, and the older ones. We read and imagine it is they who are active, truly active, somewhere in the sky, while we are passive. But in truth, they are also alive in us, Aniston and Pitt, Jolie and Thornton. It is said young women like to read about celebrities who’ve had babies. It is necessary to follow their lives, these celebrities, to compare one’s life to theirs.

Are celebrities are part of the spectacle, that great evil? Are they woven from ideology, from the dreams that capital wants us to bear. Perhaps they are not unreal for all that, and besides, we, too are dreams of the great streaming of capital. The old division of orders of being was correct: capital is realer than us, and so too celebrities. The rest of us, barely individuated, live because they are already alive and live for us.

Some tell you that you should turn from the heaven of celebrities to more serious things. But you’ve seen them reading Heat, oh yes, reading it as it lies among other things in the office. Yes, you leave it there in my office and it calls out to them. It calls them and they pick it up, attracted by its brightness. And you think to yourself: what they despise is what is greater than them. They’re full of resentment and what they resent, first of all, is their own desire for bright things.

Heat is a flower than blossoms in the office. It flashes around the office. How happy it makes you! There is something to talk about. Your attention has been seized; it turns you from what matters, but what can you do about what matters? Politicans lie; ecological catastrophe looms, but meanwhile there is the long afternoon of office life. Meanwhile, there are celebrities, the bright world of celebrities.

‘Meanwhile’, yes, but do not think Heat is a distraction. Celebrities are real, you think, and realer than us. Do you love them? Do you love them with all of your heart? How upset you were to miss the documentary on Agnetha from Abba who fell in love with her stalker. Truly she was a fallen god and more glorious for that! How well you remember Margot Kidder’s breakdown. She passed, it was said, through backyards and swimming pools. She went among us, mad, among the lawn sprinklers and wendy houses. Marvellous that she came to us, you thought! Marvellous that confused, dazzled, her great wings hidden, she passed like a fallen angel through our world!

You would like to write the words Mariah Carey, but it is unbearable. Will your heart explode if you write of her struggles, her unconfidence which led her from the toughest of upbringings to the house of Tommy Liotta? You have not seen her film, Rainbow, but you know you must. you’ve failed her, this woman who was always on MTV when you turned it on (the video for ‘Honey’). You will not think of her breakdown, or that of Stephen Fry who, decamped like Oscar Wilde to the continent, admitted ‘I am a silly old thing’. You were relieved; the director of the play he fled forgave him. You would have forgiven him, have him kneel and then place a crown of laurels on his forehead.

Britney Spears passes among us, too, disguised as a mortal. She has allowed herself to be reborn as a young, pregnant woman. Will her rough husband mistreat her? Will he lead her to damage? Vishnu and the other gods once gathered to accuse Shiva of being unworldly. You are always meditating, they said., what do you know of life? Shiva opened his eyes and interrupted his meditations and caused himself straightaway to be born into the body of a householder who was then at the point of death. He rose, the Shiva-householder, lived a life and then died. All this happened, for the gods before him, in an instant. Shiva spoke of his death and his rebirth. He smiled. The gods went away and left him in peace. So too with Britney Spears. Do not fear for her, you think to yourself. A god inhabits her.

Meanwhile, capital is streaming. Pythagoras told us that if we had ears to hear it we could hear the celestial spheres grinding against one another as they turned. It made a great and beautiful music. Capital streams, but there is no music. A kind of humming, a rustling without rhythm or regularity. The air says: I am not capital. The sky and the trees say the same thing. But what can you hear beneath them, above them, permeating them and the whole universe? The great rumbling of capital.

Capital is the oldest god, the god before the gods. He is Chronos, the oldest one, the one whose name is a name for time. Understand that he is the dealer of time, and controls the fates. They answer to him. But understand, too, that he has no plan for us nor for himself. He is the god unaware of himself. Scarcely a god, he is an event, time’s division, the apportioning of time into the time of capital.

Choose your tee-shirt: Team Aniston or Team Jolie. Which side are you on? Aniston is troubled: estranged from her mother and long estranged from her father, undesirous of children, keen for her film career to develop; on the other, Jolie is likewise estranged from her father (you are not sure about her mother) and is likewise ambitious for her films. Of course, she has a child, who she had intended to adopt with Billy Bob Thornton, the actor-singer-writer who preferred to tour the UK singing songs called ‘Angelina’ than be with his wife.

She left him, who blames her, and then what? She speaks of liaisons in hotel rooms. And then there was Brad Pitt, a simple lad, pilloried in Living in Oblivion, intimate of George Clooney and a kind of replica of Jennifer Aniston. You’ve seen the pictures of Pitt and Jolie holding hands, of course. And the new movie posters for Mr and Mrs Smith. A beautiful couple more so for their dissimilarity. They complement one another rather than resemble one another.

Team Jolie, Team Aniston. Pitt wants children, it is said, and Jolie has one. Courtney Cox blanked him the other day. How upset he would have been! Did he really want a reconciliation with Aniston in the wake of the divorce?

Sometimes you dream of them, the celebrities. This morning, you dreamt Brad Pitt suddenly sat beside you to read your newspaper. You wanted to turn a page to the editorials; he was keen to remain on the pages that report international news. He spoke. He was tender. He went away. You thought, in your dream: he was tender with me. He is famous and I am unknown. He is realer than I am but he speaks with infinite solicitude.

A story you remember from a childhood friend: Prince Philip’s car breaks down near the house of his grandfather. So his grandfather mends Prince Philip’s car and sends him on his way. How marvellous! you used to think, hoping that Prince Philip, or the Queen might visit our school. You always loved the Queen, you loved the colour of her outfits. You are sure you will dream of her again, remembering perhaps the programme Paul Burrell made about her, where he imitated her voice. The Queen was infinitely tender, according to Paul Burrell. She spoke with patience and solicitude. He was amazed that she could deign to speak with him thus.

Team Aniston, Team Jolie.  If you met Brad Pitt in real life, you would be sure to call him Mr Pitt, thinking that by so doing you would avoid that overfamiliarity which must plague him. You know he would say immediately ‘Brad, Brad’, and you would be able to call him Brad. Ah, but you would have earnt that right! And if you met the Queen?

Team Aniston, Team Jolie.  No, you can’t decide. These people are gods, and the gods really do walk among us. We resent them, these gods, which is why we like seeing them on bad hair days. But this resentment is part of the awe we feel for them. Awe! You can imagine Jolie would be smaller than she appears on movie posters and in films. How tall is Brad Pitt? Quite tall, you think to yourself. It’s his proportions, you can tell. And you remember, all of a sudden, the picture of Johnny Depp, drunken, dissolute, with the British policeman who arrested him. He was tiny, birdlike. He was a drunken bird loose in London. You thought: his small stature betokens a god. He is a god and so too Vanessa Paradis.

Now you imagine the god-celebrities gathered outside my flat. They are large and small, larger and smaller than human beings and they are gazing through your window. They have golden yellow faces and speak in a language you cannot understand. Jolie and Aniston are there, reconciled, at one with one another, as they always were. Why did they allow themselves to appear in discord, you wondered. Truly the gods are strange!

It seems there really are stars and celebrities really do occupy another realm. The everyday lies beneath the communication networks which wrap themselves around the planet. It abides; meanwhile, there is a celebrity cosmology, a collective dream (or is it an advertising campaign?) alive above us like the aurora borealis. Sometimes a few of us are allowed into the celebrity cosmos; sometimes, a few of us return.

I enjoyed the documentary on Abi Titmuss because I’d known nothing of her origins; she had seemed to appear from nowhere. In fact, this good natured woman was the girlfriend of a disgraced television presenter. She had supported him through his trial for indecently assaulting another television presenter. Titmuss had been a nurse earning the small sum nurses earn. When the trial was over, according to one of the talking heads, Titmuss allowed herself to appear in more revealing clothing. She had an ample bust, an attractive face and stardom was hers almost instanteously. She accepted an agent’s offer; she became uniquitous, earning thousands of pounds an hour for public appearances and hundreds of thousands a year writing columns for men’s magazines. She appeared on the front of dozens of red top newspapers earning money from the photos used to illustrate the latest scandal in which she had been involved.

Who blames her for launching her own career? She is clever enough to know it won’t last; she works hard. Men like her, according to a talking head, because they feel they have a chance with her; she is not a goddess. Titmuss suggests women like her because she is like them, admitting to sexual fantasies (she is launching a series of women’s erotica). Who is she? Each of us, any of us. For a moment, a glorious moment – how I wished I had followed the story from the start – she was no one in particular. Titmuss was no one and nobody but she was everywhere. But then, because a vacuum is intolerable, we needed to know everything about her.

But isn’t Abi Titmuss a media creation? Wasn’t she born from the pages of the same tabloids who, before and after her, will find other young women who will play her role? Isn’t she a placeholder for a privilege each of us would like to grasp for ourselves? If she is admired, it is because she has achieved what each of us would want. If she is despised, it is for the same reason.

True, almost anyone could have taken her role. But it is because she was anyone at all that she became famous. Now she is like any other celebrity: remote from us, separated by limousines and bodyguards, and by the velvet rope which keeps us from spilling onto the red carpet but close to us too, as we become more familiar with her body than our own.

In one sense, the media defines the tastes to which we must conform. Abi Titmuss is part of the vast entertainment empire and celebrity culture risks vanquishing any other claim on people’s attention and imaginations. She is part of that great dream machine of advertising and publicity, news and entertainment which has supplanted any real engagement with the world. Isn’t celebrity culture part of the huge advertising campaign that has replaced reality?

Who is Abi Titmuss? The one the media would want us to want to be. The servo-mechanisms of publicity sell an image of the public back to itself. But what is the image that is being sold to us as Abi Titmuss? Isn’t she as ordinary as we are? Titmuss participated in a celebrity cookery programme to show us she was a nice person, she said. Cue footage of Titmuss being dealt verbal abuse by a cross celebrity chef. Yes, she is likeable, ordinary. But isn’t her ordinariness part of a great sustaining myth of the ordinary which is maintained by celebrity culture?

It is in the name of the ordinary that Heat will picture a celebrity having what it calls a bad hair day, or being issued a parking ticket. Readers send in sightings of celebrities shopping or dining out in the world: they are real, like us, they pass through real streets, like us. Heat even prints photos which bear traces of their passing. Yes, they pass through our world, our everyday; it is glorious. But funny, too – and Heat is good at this – because of the incongruity. How funny it is to see film actor X at Blockbusters!

The celebrity passes through our world. But what happens when one of us without talent, without special merit passes into the realm of celebrities?

Abi Titmuss fascinates not because she has been lifted from the everyday, but because she performs what Husserl would call a reduction of that same everyday as it lays claim to us. What does she reveal? The vacuum that the media rush to fill in almost immediately: a void in the shape of a young woman. Who is she? Each of us, any of us in the interval between the ones we experience ourselves to be and the other who appears on a television screen or on the magazine cover.

Some argue 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; this, he comments, is a real change. There is a change in the nature of the transaction between the everyday and the media sphere. Yes, a real change has occurred: it is now necessary to understand the ordinariness of the celebrity. They are just like us. Last night, it was as though Abi Titmuss was an exploratory shapeship sent into the strange cosmos of celebrity: she came, she saw, she reported back. But then each of them, all of them are made to become vessels of this kind when interviewed in a magazine like Heat as it demands we learn something about their ordinary life.

It is that peculiar yoyoing between the everyday and the realm of red carpets that we now require of our celebrities. One which pushes both realms back into themselves, rendering them purer and almost infinitely separated from one another. Earth and heaven, and the celebrity the brave adventurer who can cross that distance. This is why celebrities, now, have to come from the ordinary. To come from there, and to carry our dreams across the great distance. The celebrity does not belong to the spectacle, but is our avatar there. She travels and returns to share her wisdom. She comes back to us, infinitely more glamorous for where she has been. But if she is so, it is only because of the one we knew her to be before her ascent.