A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations. Cintra Wilson
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year after year without losing a millisecond of love from the world armies of not-just-homosexual fans she has racked up over the years. Why? She’s Barbra, and she is the prototype for that rare breed of totally irony-free diva, women who are so shimmeringly dead serious about the importance of their talents that they need to keep enlarging themselves with white weddings and entire clothing lines and personal scents named after themselves, every few years. The divas must expand like devil-yeasts or perish: they must dominate all spheres of attention and create others in their image and likeness to thrive and dominate after their own multiple diva-teats have withered. Divadom demands your cash, your love, your fealty. You’re not laughing at them. They are Classy, and possessed of diamond-spangled talents, and you snickering little bastard-people are not. Even Jewel, the little hippy girl who, at one time, it was easy to imagine running around a public park with bare feet and a dirty mouth, seems to be photographically going the direction of Celine/Barbra; falling out of an otherwise respectable pullover, hair daintily and angelically swirling in a religiously hued background, ablaze with ruthless cashmere superiority.
All the Top 40 divas-in-training share Barbra’s tragic flaw. Sure they can all belt the scuff marks off a stadium floor with their laser-punishing vocal instruments, but they all have the Kernel of Streisand inside that marks them like an uncorrected harelip: they all have incredibly bad taste. It must be the Faustian exchange they all made with Beelzebub to give them those spastically gymnastic voices. They all gleefully choose only the most palsied, pink-faced, shameful material for themselves, again and again.
Who can forget the softcore ego travesty of A Star is Born, when the afroed Barbra turned her honey-pipes all husky and did an unspeakable chicken-dance for the hard-rock finale, a disgracing of the rock ethos unsurpassed in appalling hubris until the Pat Boone album In a Metal Mood well over a decade later?
Who can forgive the squalling nasal arpeggios of “Guilty,” her duet with eunuch Barry Gibb? Or the whining dirge-like complaint of “You Don't Bring Me Flowers,” her duet with the spinnaker-sleeved Neil Diamond? Or “Lost Inside of You,” her puzzling duet with Kris Kristofferson (which brings to mind that old Tallulah Bankhead joke: Rogue gentleman in elevator mentions to Bankhead that he'd “like a little pussy.” She replies, “Oh darling, so would I—mine's as big as my handbag!” Could this be what Barbra meant?)? Or her tooth-peeling duet with eyeliner-pop-dreg Bryan Adams. Or her duet with (gasp) Don Johnson?
Yentl? Have the other Jews called off the fatwa yet?
Nevertheless: It is precisely the brazen obviousness and painful cloying of these aesthetic choices that bring Barbra and all Divas into the unshakable love of billions of music listeners; they are as tasteless and cloying as aerosol potpourri, and no greater challenge to any décor, especially if you love beige.
It appears that the Streisand throne is being usurped by the morbidly shriveled and schoolmarmish likes of Celine Dion, who, despite her sexual handicap of being the most wholly repellant woman ever to sing songs of love, totally capsized the vocal world by trembling with pain over the eye-bleeding Titanic ballad, at one point the number one favorite song of weepy teenagers and pan-flautists al over the world. Celine is constantly surrounded by candlelight and weepy symphonics, and regularly engages in unctuous meowling with Blind Italian Opera Guys in loud emotional primary coloring guaranteed to choke up even the least sensitive or discriminating music listener. (Christ, that was so bee-yoo-tee-full! Get me a lotion-flavored Kleenex! My angina!)
Celine Dion is one of the most freakishly mutated creatures the Streisand Machine has ever coughed out onto society. The stretched-out hair, the terrible bones under the angora, the black-buttered eyelids. The insane plucking and starving and discipline-greedy self-abnegation that she represents. I think most people would rather be processed through the digestive tract of an anaconda than be Celine Dion for a day, once e they realized what a brutally unpleasant wasteland her interior universe needed to be in order to host such a deadly amount of the Fame virus. Quentin Crisp said of Joan Crawford that at a certain point in her later career, you could just see all of the raw terror and ambition starving through her big raccoon eyes. She looked like “a hungry insect magnified a million times – a praying mantis that had forgotten how to pray.” Celine is even creepier than Crawford, somehow; Joan Crawford at least looked kind of terrified and in pain by the contortions of fame she imposed on herself. Celine Dion is apparently calcified into a form of orthodox masochism so devout that she finally had to marry the frightening Svengali that was chain-whipping her into über-celebritude all these years, and she smiles the placid, tranquil smile of a woman whose every soft inch has some spiky metal clamp teething down on it; a woman like the protagonist of The Story of O, who at the end of the book, is so totally, unbearably uncomfortable, that she can finally sort of relax.
Since Celine is the new Streisand, she will at some point have to channel all of her massive selfness into film heroism; perhaps after her mini-retirement, after she's birthed something and found actual motherhood wanting in terms of attention paid to her. HBO will have her do some kind of incredibly moving portrait as the brave Mom of the fatally ill adorable child whom nobody understands. She’ll have to clutch the blanket over the child’s head while shouting into the schoolyard, “Can’t you see he’s hungry for knowledge?!” And everyone will think she’s an incredible actress because she can make her big glassy squirrel eyes shed liquid on cue. It will be a big, big, deal for everyone when she and the kindly doctor Make Love, and her exhaustively squeezed hair falls down and everyone gets a real good look at her naked, whippet-like spine. It will be a thrill that rivals when we finally saw Streisand’s boobies in Yentl. Naturally, she’ll have to sing a little. Maybe she can sing a Celine Dion song at a karaoke bar, which would be some kind of unforeseen postmodern coup of I’m not sure what proportions.
When she accepts the Emmy award, her aged unsmiling dungeonmaster of a husband will be remote-controlling her arm movements from the audience with a small steering wheel. When she gets back home to Canada, he’ll reward her by letting her jump for a nice three-pack of fresh nylons. Then she’ll retreat to her little haystack in the parking lot for her five-hour rest. I can see her later, on Xmas, her favorite holiday, at the golf course she bought for her Master, secretly running away, away from the family and friends and snowmobiles, to go to a secluded section of her expansive estate among the trees, to shriek and growl and bare her razor-sharp teeth and ravenously eat bark and rub up against things. Once a year she is free as a chinchilla, away from all the horrible responsibilities of being ubiquitous, of being Mommy. Then her husband’s henchmen will find her and drag her on luggage hooks behind the sled, back to the recording studio. And she will be glad – so, so, glad.
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