A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations. Cintra Wilson
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shiny suits. I swipe at the lurid neon head of the amplified celebrity wizard and not the frail, dumpy little nebbish behind the big screen of fire, because we’re all delicate and pitiable inside. I believe that deep down, everyone is fundamentally an OK Joe deserving of your civility and compassion, even the ones I really hate, like Richard Dreyfuss.
–C.W., 2000
CHAPTER 1
Cock Rock for the
Twelve-and-Under:
Little Girls and the
Unhealthy Way They Love
Mother Nature determines what is poisonous to the soul and body, and sometimes it is easy to avoid that which is baneful and unclean: e.g., we naturally have no desire to eat fetid corpses or drink motor oil. What nature does not provide–in the way of an instinctual deterrent, societal and karmic law– it handles by providing terrible disfiguring diseases, jail sentences, and vast financial punishments. Without these, we would all naturally swerve towards being illiterate and obese sex-crazed criminals, engaging in heroin-addled blood orgies from the time we turn six years old, chain-smoking and eating nothing but bacon and cans of whipped cream and Starburst fruit chews. Our knee-jerk tastes, as a species, tend to swing toward the disease causing, as opposed to the healthful.
In a similar way, the collective emotional palate of mankind at this phase of evolution is too skanky and immature to be able to readily recognize and avoid the fever-blistered hue of Unhealthy Love. When one is an infant, one can happily stick sand and garbage and house keys in one’s mouth and feel an enormous sense of loss when they are taken away and replaced by a nourishing biscuit. The unfortunate human animal continues to hysterically refuse to advance past the crack-and-glue-huffing exhilarations of Obsessive Lustful Desire and to replace them with more benign forms of realistic love and/or intimacy. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the unhealthy love of rock stars by little girls.
Aside from softcore romance novels and the emotional smut of movies like Titanic and My Best Friend's Wedding, nobody's ever been quite able to deliberately and successfully devise a hardcore pornography for women. Playgirl magazine attempted to invent it in the seventies, utilizing the primitive theory that women got as sweaty and overstimulated by brazen, naked pictures of the opposite sex as men, and introduced a magazine with a hairy, brick-jawed brute in the centerfold, earnestly displaying his semi-engorged “Hollywood Loaf.” Of course, the magazine was totally laughable and not particularly erotic to women, and Playgirl ended up being patronized more or less exclusively by gay men. The pop sensation machine has found the answer, however, to the age-old marketing conundrum of What Makes Girls Randy, and now all media outlets are saturated with bedroom-haired, cologne-marinated, undergraduate-age dancing boys.
Musician boys are invariably the first big crush of a preteen girl, her first big sloppy emotional response to the world. The creation of teen sensations is now a multi-national Moloch, and such phenomena as Menudo, New Kids on the Block, 'N-Sync, the Spice Girls, and the Back-street Boys represent a whole vital stage in the sexual/emotional development of the preteen, i.e., the kind of biological confusion and obsessive hysteria that causes little girls to wallpaper their rooms with gratuitous posters of dreamy, hard-nippled thugs and tarty kinder-whores and throw high-pitched grand mal tantrums until albums and T-shirts and concert tickets are bought.
Twenty thousand girls stood outside the MTV window at Times Square in New York City and screamed for teen-masturbation-focus the Backstreet Boys in the summer of '99, and a few days earlier, another twenty thousand girls stood outside the MTV window and wailed and wept and beat their breasts for multinational super-pasteurized Hispano-sensation Ricky Martin. America seemed slightly shocked, as if we expected all that screaming hysteria to have died along with the Beatles.
Pre-teen girls want two things: a crazed amount of unwarranted, worshipful attention, and something ridiculously exciting and magical to happen to them suddenly, which would enable them to turn sneering and tall toward their ignorant parents and various preteen enemies and have them all shudder with the recognition that they were critically, mortally wrong in underestimating the preteen girl, and that they will now Pay. The idea of this kind of powerful social revenge is so tantalizing, it is basically in itself a version of prepubescent sex. This fantasy usually extends itself into a whole obsessive scenario involving one or more of the members of a boy band, in which the following takes place:
1. First, the teen pop phenomenon receives the incredibly special fan letter from the preteen girl and immediately recognizes the special trueness of her love and her unique qualities. The icon falls in love with the girl from her amazing letter and school photo.
2. The icon writes the girl back and makes arrangements to visit on the sly, in his private plane. (It is amazing the way the plane shows up in almost every young girl's whack-off fantasy scenario. It's practically a Jungian archetypal phenomenon.)
3. The pop star then spirits the girl away from her horrible parents (who die, tragically and bizarrely, soon afterward, leaving the girl with no governing mechanism whatsoever) and establishes an indelible love-contract with her, which involves performing songs about her, songs from poems that she’s written, and even possibly discovering the girl’s uncanny singing and tambourine talents. The girl and boy star then live happily ever after, deeply in love, modeling together on the cover of all magazines, and they can buy everything they want, forever, and nobody can tell them what to do.
All little girls know they will be kind and magnanimous and well-loved when they are famous; all little girls are kind princesses and just queens. As it is with most celebrities, after the advent of their fame has camouflaged what an utterly unwholesome canker on the gums of existence they are and finally proven them Right in Every Way, they will gradually allow themselves to unbuckle their latent kindnesses and show the inferior people how a Truly Special Person behaves. There is a hidden assumption in all people, but little girls especially, that once all of their dreams come true, they won't need to improve their character or personality in any way—they will have been perfect all along, and everyone around them was too fucking dumb to have noticed it before.
When I was growing up and in the prepubescent emotional stage that is the primary feeding ground of rock-icon phenomena, we had the Monkees (despite the fact that the show had long been canceled and was already in syndicated reruns by the time I was hip to it). The Monkees were great; they were goofy and moronic and they wore ponchos, and they existed outside of worldly angst and the hazards of physical romance. A date with the Monkees would consist of jumping out of an oversized box of Fruit Loops and playing freeze tag with wigs in a penny arcade. My six-year-old friends and I kissed pillows named Davy and Mickey (Mike was too mature, Peter too doglike and retarded).
We just LOVED the Monkees. We never imagined them without pants, but if we did, they had the same hairless nether-mound GI Joe had in lieu of an actual unit. We talked about marrying a monkey vs. marrying Speed Race, or marrying half-Mickey-half-Davy—it was all the same. This amorphous non-sexuality was factory-built into the Monkees along with the string you pulled on their chests to hear “Last Train to Clarksville,” and is the crucial difference between prefab-musical-teen-crush-bands-assembled-by-teams-of-marketing-experts then and now. Now, instead of castrating the stars, like the TV spin surgeons did to the Monkees, band creators imbue these quasi-musical teens with frightening levels of artificially generated erotic power.
Children moaning in trained vibrato and writhing in sexual anguish have always been a big attention-getter for old talent-contest shows like Star Search and other questionable TV experiences. On The Mickey Mouse Club, back in the fifties, fresh-faced little teen vixens like Darlene and Annette once sang unabashedly doltish ballads about puppy love written by fifty- year-old men. The Little Rascals dressed as adult hipsters and sang each other speakeasy songs of cheap drunken courtship, winking and wiggling. Now children barely out of training pants are wearing asymmetrical Victor Costa ballgowns and belting out how “Their Man is Gone” in the smoky tones of world-weary, dope-sick B-girls who’ve been beaten like donkeys for loving too intensely. Naturally, most of this can be blamed on the parents; over-zealous soccer and ice-rink moms have nothing on the white-sweatered harridans who seek entertainment-industry success