Continuing some musings on how we writers and commentators can prostitute ourselves and our positions in search for fame or attention....
Howard Stern's defenders always countered charges that he was a stripper-spanking pig by pointing out that he was merely acting out a piggish persona before going home to his wife of 17 years and his beloved children. Eventually, the persona took over, led to a divorce, and created for him the very ungrounded reality that previously was just supposed to be an act.
It can be that way for many such media and political celebrities. They have to exaggerate some tendencies in order to get attention, and eventually incarnate the exaggeration. (What was that old story about the hideous guy who wore the beautiful mask that eventually made him beautiful in fact? The principle of the mask works both to make us more radiant or more awful.)
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A movie idol must be a tortured soul.
Humans have always worshipped images. That's why graven images were forbidden -- we naturally idolize such images. The most powerful, and "worshippable" image of all, is the 30-foot-high human face on a screen, god-sized in its scope, illuminating a dark room full of awestruck beings.
It is a great thing to be such an idol. But to become such an icon, you must abandon who you truly are and become a professional chameleon, a zelig. Once you have staked (um, stook?) your claim to fortune and papparazzi, you now feel you should have a power, a voice, an influence. And it is at that point that Hollywood's famous people realize that audiences don't actually want to listen to their opinion about who to elect or which species to save; audiences only want to gawk at their idol's outward elegance, with little real regard for the idol's inner being, which they rightly suspect is mere silly putty anyway.
Indeed, the masses recognize more fully than the celebrities do that fame is an ongoing fire that titillates audiences, and the celebs are mainly the firewood, soon to be burned up and superceded by other celebrity firewood.
That is the dilemma: Actors and artists set out to be famous because they want to be cherished on a global scale, for who they really are at their core. But you will usually have to become someone other than yourself to maximize your celebrity, in which case the conundrum is the famous part of you is not really you. In a sense, you can never hope to be famous for who you really are. You can only hope to be firewood for the perpetual human spectacle.
The other option is to be authentic, without regard for fame or even attention.
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