Tuesday, January 29, 2002

Remora

Fame and consequences

Limited Inc doesn't understand celebrity, but we suspect that celebrity culture and modern forms of tyranny -- the personality cult, the panopticon corporation, the junta with the franchise torture chambers -- are related to each other in numerous unmentionable ways, joined in dark hallways and needle strewn toilet stalls. Obviously, at this site we are doing our best to remain obscure, so that we don't have this problem.

The Observer, Sunday, had a series of articles about modern celebrity. Some were trite -- for instance, this idea that Lord Byron was the first modern celebrity, which gets bandied about like a truism, just doesn't seem to be true. Marie Antoinette, who figured as a woman of capacious orifices and voracious sexual appetite in innumerable little street pamphlets in the 1780s, was a celebrity of the Britney Spears type. And what about Werther? Although a fictional character, he was a celebrity of the Harry Potter type -- that is, becoming known for being known. I've never read, and will never read, a Harry Potter book, yet I recognize the little boy face and the glasses instantly.

But to get to the dirty, Stalinistic heart of the star maker machinery, read this piece in the Observer by Lynn Barber.


Here are a couple grafs:

"The commonest demand is for copy approval - which means they want to see the article before publication and delete anything they don't like. In other words, power of censorship. Then there is picture approval - same idea, where the celebs get to choose which photos can be published and which can't. Robert Redford's press office used to put out 'instructions to picture editors' about where his photographs should be retouched - 'the wrinkled area between his lower lip and chin', 'the veins on his nose', 'the area around the throat and neck'.

Then there is 'writer approval' - the chosen weapon of top Hollywood PR Pat Kingsley. She simply bans any writers who ever write anything nasty about one of her clients from ever interviewing any of her clients again. I got the black spot from Kingsley years ago when I interviewed Nick Nolte for Vanity Fair. He didn't like the tone of my questions and Kingsley pulled the plug, before I'd even written a word. Of course, Vanity Fair could have defied her and published my interview anyway - but then where would it have got its future cover stars? (Kingsley's power increased further still last year when her company PMK merged with Huvane Baum Halls, previously a rival outfit in entertainment publicity. The resulting merger now means that one firm controls access to many of the A-list in Hollywood and Britain, including Tom Cruise, Tom Hanks, Gwyneth Paltrow and Jude Law.)"

Of course, this is all silly, right, mein Herr? Except that if you look around you, you will find that newspapers and magazines are full of this stuff -- these celeb stories -- which are admittedly censored. And this censoring is one small part of the culture machinery. To find out why movies mostly stink, check out how they are publicized, and who owns the media of publicity. Check out how Time advertises -- by "reporting' -- entertainment that AOL-Time-Warner-Godzilla owns. Monopoly debases, PR cretinizes. The implication for the way we live our lives is dire. Every time Gwyneth Paltrow is interviewed in Vanity Fair, every time Tom Hanks pronounces mindlessly on World War II for an HBO behind the scenes special, a little part of all of us dies. Our only hope is in stalkers and madmen.

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