A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations. Cintra Wilson
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feel your spirit reaching toward your own ultimate greatness, and the intrinsic undertow of millions of arms reaching out to embrace you, begging for you to come into their love. Weeping to clap and scream for you. You owe it to yourself, you think. You owe it to the world to be immortal. The sun feels right hitting your face in a certain heroic way. It is true that people in our world only grow to their seemingly correct tremendous size when constantly watered with compliments; souls become bright and shiny from an abundance of love and recognition. They unfold like golden flowers; they swell to pink enormity like jelly-fat queen bees.
Conversely, most non-famous people are in a frequent state of dull torture from the lack of such boundless international adoration in their lives, as if they lived with a constant low-grade toothache, which makes us all grouchy and unkind.
Your auto mechanic–who secretly hates you–is only partially aware that the reason he hates you is because he is working on your car instead of being a famous and enviable sex symbol. Your barely concealed disgust with the rude, illiterate teen cashier with the fat, oily head at Blockbuster Video is only amplified triply by the nearby Entertainment Weekly cover featuring the expensively unkempt cuteness of Meg Ryan, who never has to deal with such people. Thwarted dreams of rock-'n’-roll superpower and oral sex in private jets are at least partially responsible for that nagging conviction that the world has been shortchanging every anonymous human since birth. As if to mirror the inequities of our economy, wherein 5 percent of the nation owns 95 percent of everything that is ownable, the overwhelming majority of our collective happiness has been stolen so that some goddamned TV teenager with oversized teeth can have more than she can ever use or deserve.
If a person in this day and age has two cents' worth of talent, it is considered his sacred obligation to Go for the Gold, to try and grab the big brass monkey ring, and otherwise make six to ten demoralizing career-and-connection-oriented phone calls a day, perform painful Top 40 hits at all the high-school graduations and bar mitzvahs, pay hundreds of dollars for eight-by-ten photographs of themselves looking like sexually available newscasters, and audition with seething positive energy for every ExLax commercial that comes down the pike, until the day that the opportunity for Fame reveals itself like a pinpoint of light down the throat of a large python. When the fame begins to look graspable, when the hem of the glittering Elvis robe is visible through the thick red haze, the righteously downtrodden Fame-seeker is suddenly licensed by history and common consent to achieve Fame by Any Means Necessary, and furiously lie, cheat, fuck and steal his/her way into various cocktail parties and hermetic inner sanctums until the photographers come and the magazines call and the beauties in the restaurants swivel and wink and shimmer.
If you have any potential at all, and you don’t pursue Fame, you are considered, by yourself and others, to be unambitious, self-sabotaging, or otherwise too fucked-up to do what the good Lord built you to do; you are pissing away your natural gifts if you don’t consider your POTENTIAL, which, translated into American, means vast, unrelenting MEDIA COVERAGE.
There is a little bit of talent in most famous people, even if they’re only good-looking–something for all the attention to stick to. Talent is not, however, the reason for fame anymore, nor is it the thing one really becomes famous for–one earns fame by notoriety, or one gets fame by having fame. The good old way of getting famous was to be very good at something artistic, and have everybody fall in love with you for it. That doesn't really work now, because, as many critics have pointed out, nobody is very interested in art for its own sake anymore; now one only does “art” as a necessary part of the equation, the means to the end of getting famous, so one can get plastic surgery and go to parties in order to lick and be licked upon by other famous people like puppies in a basket. Nobody wants to be a real artist nowadays, i.e., a reclusive, self-contained workaholic, because it's no fun—you don't get enough attention.
I was raised in an era when people believed that they should get instant gratification for any small blot of effort spat out into the world. Young “artists” today seem to expect they should be able to drool out a batch of sophomoric short stories or a notebook full of crude cartoon heads and insert them into a Versateller machine and get a tidy wad of laurels; and the problem is, many of them do. This creates false expectations, detrimental to the process of Creation. Our greatest artists throughout history have always had to wade through years of being broke, misunderstood and unpopular–spearheading the collective consciousness and having to wait in financial agony–while the rest of the world caught up to their fast and advanced way of thinking. Nobody raised with MTV has any interest in this process at all. They want to skip all the difficult athletic parts and go straight to having their heads on the Wheaties box.
Just because it is considered retardataire to trash celebrity culture does not mean it doesn't need to happen a whole lot. I realize that in the immediate climate, it is considered passé to bark out from a position of loathing for Hollywood and its monstrous by-products. The best and brightest pundits seem to imply that it is hipper to simply embrace Pop Life, even if one must bracket it in quotations and smirk at it through the lens of post-modern irony, and amusedly accept its rampant faults and perversities. Those concerned with “spiritual growth” seem to think critical flame throwing is merely “negative.” I have been accused of being addicted to the use of “attack words” to champion questionable ideas in this regard. I think that it is the perversion of this turn of the century that everything cutting or nastily true is repressed in the name of some form of quasi-Buddhist, ethical and/or politically fearful good taste. In this New Age, Politically Correct fin de siècle, the implication seems to be that if you have any kind of audience at all, you’re an unevolved creep if you don’t use your God-given talents to promote Universal compliments and worldwide Love, and speak out in courage and compassion on behalf of endangered species and people who are stomped on and diseased and forgotten. (Yawn.)
I am as liberal as they come. I stand and vote for every gay, Green, peace-loving hippie minority cause there is. I think that everyone should practice being as kind as the Dalai Lama, and align their lives with a path of righteous example for the sake of all sentient beings. We should all hold hands and sing Bob Marley songs in Spanish and recycle for the sake of our seventh future generation and that of the animals, and these ideas should be promoted in all that we do. However, unless you’re Jalal al-Din Rumi, these sentiments make for pretty fucking hopeless entertainment reading.
As far as this book goes toward being a way of helping the world instead of hindering it further, I can only state that here you will find, for the most part, feverishly lambasting criticism of our moronic culture today, which can act as a kind of stringently abrasive cleanser on your soul if you really have an open mind about it.
The slandering of iconage is a sport—not an act of aggression or bitterness, but an exercise. Why should these people not get taunted and roasted? We treat our celebrities, regardless of artistic merit, like an untouchable royal family, which causes most of us to act like dribbling serfs despite the value of our individual lives. We regard ourselves as slow-minded, vermin-infested bed-wetters when presented with the gold-plated auras of media success in others. The implication of Fame, in this value-warped society, is: You’ve made it. You and your grand talents are so bright, you are somehow, both physically and spiritually, light-years beyond all us bone-sucking hacks. I yowl in disgust at this bias.
Fame is a perverse deformity, an ego-swelling as ludicrous as an extra sex organ, and the people that have it, for a huge part, are willfully and deliberately fucked-up past the point of ever having anything sweet or human or normal about themselves ever again. It isn’t necessarily personal; it is generally not the icons themselves that I jolly and assail, it’s the huge tumescent aura of Otherness, the grandiose Largitude and super magnified glamour of these deranged old musicians and dumb pretty kids and Sacred Cow Ornamental Personages that I attack. These people lead lives of fantastic abundance, a parade of constant fluffing and stroking and free stuff, and beautiful portraits and rare bouquets and plush red carpet and the adoration of brilliant, comely people they’ve never met at all the best parties. This isn’t anybody’s real Life. Life is everybody’s personal untrained hammerhead shark, full of thwacking emotional whiplash and spinal emergency, full of weighty grace and random threat.
I attack the maddening blizzard of tinsel scattered in the icon’s wake, the tidal waves