5. Novalis said that God was a problem whose solution was another problem.
The same can be said for the celebrity - not the flash in the pan, but the super celebrity, the one who transcends her epoch, the one whose enigma is always fresh - the one who can be found listed in People Magazine�s 100 most intriguing people of the century (Special Fall 1997 edition).
6. "Buckalo did let Reselli back out of the Copa deal. The terms of the split were that Roselli would honor his obligation to play the Copacabana each year for seven years, but in all other ways he was no longer under Buckalo�s control." - David Evanier, The Jimmy Rosselli Story.
An act of 1572, in England, proscribed "common players in interludes and minstrils." Players had to �belong� to a baron or an honorable personage - hence Shakespeare's membership in the "Queens men." The punishment for being a wandering player ranged from whipping, to having your ears lopped off, to being shipped out of the district.
Entertainers, like Jews and slaves, were outside the bounds of the Holy City - Augustine's City of God, Christian Europe�s millennial long dream. They were, one way or another, under the ban of social death. It wasn�t only the Puritans who objected to the actor. Here�s Bossuet, a French bishop, commenting about Moliere, who - according to legend - died right after acting in La Malade imaginaire: he "passed from the pleasantries of theater, among which he practically drew his last breath, to the judgment seat of him who said: cursed be those who laugh now, for you shall cry."
Another legend said that Moliere was denied burial in consecrated ground.
Consumer culture, which raised the entertainer to an industry, was formed, and is still being formed, by the overthrow of that old feudal master morality. This is one of those "long events" Nietzsche talks about which, over the centuries long arc of its happening, threads itself so closely and finely into the way things are that it is all but invisible.
So the contract is more than just money in the CB - it is a sign. A historically rich sign. Follow the performer, follow the contract.
7. Ariel: Is there more toil? Since thou dost give me pains
Let me remember thee what thou hast promised,
which is not yet performed me.
Prospero: What now? Moody?
What is�t thou canst demand?
Ariel: My liberty.
- William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I,ii
The primal scene in show biz is staged between stage mother or manager or agent or director or studio owner or mob boss - all Prospero surrogates - and the performer, always gaining his freedom with his pranks, his shows, his image. And the dialogue between them (Shakespeare�s such a prophet!) always oscillates between the rational register, in which everything is cashed out in unmistakable numbers, and the emotional register, where it is all a question of love: How now? Moody? The money made by entertainers, from football players to TV stars, evokes an emotional response that indicates some genealogically knotty issue, here. Perhaps this is why the numbers never seem to come out right. They are the least blur-able of symbols, but even as they are added up in the CB ("Jimmy was earning up to $5,000 per performance at major venues like Palumbo�s in Philadelphia..."), they don�t add up.
The grosses are, in the end, fetishes - libidinal detours.
Out of the pairing of Prospero and Ariel, we have endlessly repeated variants. The synth-pop trasmutation of it gives us the Human League�s "Don�t you want me." Invert the power structure and you have Judy Garland in A Star is Born (which, ironically, inverts the real structure of her life). Don�t forget, the political economy of love is still very much in question, with its pre-contractual substructure (absolute slavery) and its post-contractual longings (which would be - what? The brotherhood and sisterhood of man? Or ... depending on the kindness of strangers?)
The celebrity�s social function is to embody the history, here, in fear and trembling, through booze and percadan, car wreck and drug bust. The contract is the nexus of love and value, and thus the source of pain and sorrow. The CB of the future, the perfect CB (Mallarme�s Book, to which all things in the world ultimately tend) will track these paradoxes with an infinite understanding of their connotations.
8. "The brave dreams of an invert seldom can be transmuted into real events," Irving Shulman, Harlow: an intimate biography
Consumer culture is a scandal to the Marxists and a stumbling block to the Tories. The Marxists have long forgotten the punk Karl who wrote, "everything that is solid melts into air." The Marxists have seen fire, and they�ve seen fascism, and they�ve grown so old. The Tories are caught between the glorious theory of free enterprise, where every man�s a king, and the moral monopoly of Christianity, where Old Adam has to be knocked on the head with a billyclub if he gets too happy.
Every contradiction evolves a storyline. The storyline on celebrity is put in classical form in Daniel Boorstin�s book, The Image: A guide to pseudo events in America.
The storyline is of a G�tterdammerung.
Boorstin lays it out. Once there were heros. The hero is a "human figure - real or imaginary or both - who has shown greatness in some achievement. He is a man or woman of great deeds."
And then, suddenly, there came a time when the hero was replaced. His replacement was also a mockery - the celebrity. The celebrity, according to Boorstin, is a person who is known for his well-knowness.
There�s no point in going into how a hero can be both real and imaginary, or how imaginary people perform great deeds. Boorstin�s book, which was published in 1961, is not the first to feature the rivalry between the celebrity and the hero. But certainly since the book appeared, the rivalry he describes, and the mournful moral consequence of a society that allows itself, somehow, to worship the idols of the marketplace, has become a structural constant of cultural criticism.
9. Susan Faludi, interviewing Sylvester Stallone for Esquire, writes about the way one of Stallone�s paintings symbolized "the fleeting quality of modern fame, the way celebrity has corrupted, and caused the death of, the classical hero." The painting depicts Hercules as a Christlike figure, bleeding from a bullet wound, with a clock near him. The clock symbolized time. As in, the fleeting quality of time. The image, silk-screened onto T-shirts, was retailed by Planet Hollywood in its Celebrities Limited Edition.
The bitter sense that somehow, in the past, the heroes were rampant, is scrolled around the pages of Nick Tosches Dino: "Like Dean and Jerry, most people would not even read. Ajax was no longer a Homeric hero; he was the Comedy Hour�s sponsor�s foaming cleanser, no longer a contender with Odysseus for the Arms of Achilles but the consort of Fab, which had itself transplanted Melville�s musings on "The Whiteness of the Whale" with the dictum "Whiter Whites without Bleaching."
10. The storyline insinuates itself in the CB. It produces a whole subclass of CBs in which the point is that the hero rivals some usurper, some Hamlet�s uncle, some fake - some supposedly bigger celebrity. Tosches is the master of this. In his three recent books - on Jerry Lee Lewis, Dean Martin, and Sonny Liston - he opposes authentic second tier celebrities against hollow first tier ones. Lewis is pitted against Elvis from the very introduction of the book, which shows Elvis wrapped in a prophetic slumber while Jerry Lee, armed, hammers at the gate of Graceland, demanding entrance. In the boxy Dino , it is Frank Sinatra who proves to be the hollow giant - a man whose heart follows his dick, a man who falls for the ersatz glamour of the Kennedy boys, while Dean lays back, his virtu protected by his disengagement. It is this image of Dean that moves Tosches to write lines like: �as the god-king of mob culture, he had blown aside the Beatles with the breath of his might." In the Devil and Sonny Liston, his most recent book, it�s Cassius Clay that is marked down as a motormouth and a gull, who never notices Liston is fixed - that Clay�s victories are bought.
If the values can be inverted like this, however - if we look back at the sixties and see the Beatles, if we forget where Sonny Liston is even fucking buried, if we ignore the Killer - there must be someone somewhere who is benefiting.
11. "The files of the Warren Commission show that he was one of the last people Jack Ruby called before the assassination of John F. Kennedy. Whoever, whatever, he really was, Barney Baker�s secrets dies with him, in March, 1974. - Nick Tosches, The Devil and Sonny Liston
In 1679, the French explorer Lasalle left a group of 15 men in the heart of the American wilderness, at a fortress on the Mississippi river named, appropriately, Fort Heartbreak (Crevecoeur). When he returned in 1680, he discovered his men had gotten tired of living at the end of Lonely Street. They had killed his second in command, burned the fort, and left a message in charcoal for their old commander on a punctured boat they�d leaned on a tree: "Nous sommes tous sauvages," it said. We are all savages.
This marauders� Declaration of Independence interpenetrates the more stately one Jefferson penned ninety years later to indicate a certain hidden system of paths through the continent�s dreamlife. Greil Marcus, in his book on Bob Dylan, calls this the Old, Weird America.
The Old Weird America is a sub-imperial braid woven out of New Orleans whorehouse slang, desperate coal miner winters, elevated Okies in L.A. bungalows and all the bandit chances of a casually amoral Volk. It�s art is linked, by ties of dread - the Wilderness keeps growing, the commander is probably dead - to its paranoia. Some of that feeling crops out in the CB - naturally. Because that is where the celebrities come from. It isn�t democracy, it is the Old, Weird America we are seeing up there, in lights. However it is genteelly bent to taste. The rivalry isn�t between the hero and the celebrity, but between the marauder and the image.
12. Errol Flynn: The Untold Story; The Secret Life of Tyrone Power; Peter Lawford: The Man who Kept the Secrets.
Leo Lowenthal, a Frankfurt School Marxist, once wrote, about "popular biographies": "Whatever the biographers proclaim about their heroes, they are heroes no longer. They have no fate, they are mere variables of the historic process."
Lowenthal had that old European idea about fate. For him, it was inextricable from the Hegelian program, Fate (God, this is so old!) is the confrontation of a great figure with the never completely unified moral universe, in which two contrary duties can be equally compelling.
Americans and the ancient Greeks have a more stripped down idea of fate. It is about hunting. It is about who is the hunter and who is the hunted.
A foot for flight he needs
Fleeter than storm-swift steeds,
For on his heels doth follow,
Armed with the lightnings of his Sire, Apollo.
Like sleuth-hounds too
The Fates pursue. - Sophocles, Oedipus the King
The hunt disrupts the usual order of things, the agricultural order, the lists, the official hierarchy, the difference between play and work. The American dream life returns to the archaic order. You have to merge with the flow of the hunt, you have to take secondary details, side-events, pseudo-events, seriously.
It is the private dick�s method. The paranoid method. The method by which great CBs are made. The biographer - the unauthorized biographer - wants a secret. So the biographer�s interests are not wholly consonant with his subjects. And yet the value of the secret depends on the value of the fame. Even killer biographers, like Kitty Kelly and Albert Goldmann, depend upon the fame of their victims (Nancy Reagan, Frank Sinatra, John Lennon) to preserve the interest in their stories.
That paranoid method has not yet been put to its maximum use. Mailer was always almost there - he was never able to quite write it down. But celebrity itself has now become a conspiracy, a constant flow, from radio, tv, movie screen, HTML, Java Script and out there, to the always stereotypically passive consumer, the one who "doesn't read." I think someday, though, the scream will come from the CB - the consumer will have absorbed too much, all the good objects and bad objects, will have felt inside himself some basic, cancerous transmutation, and will expell it - some consumer, some fan, some biographer - in the pentacostal tongue, the American glossalalia, that will penetrate to the heart of all conspiracies and explain, in paranoid metaphors and exaggerations, just what America means.
13. �That�s the great thing about living in Los Angeles. Anything that happens in the news - great tragedies, scandals - people just think: "what a great idea for a movie!"
Sissy Spacek, Interview Magazine, May, 1977
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