Читать книгу Fame - Justine Bateman - Страница 9

2000

I noticed around 2000, there was this seismic shift in the focus on Fame. There were, by then, many more print outlets, TV outlets, cable outlets that needed entertainment-based material. They’d painted themselves into a corner even, maybe, with the volume of material they needed. Pages and pages and hours and hours of material. The paparazzi population exploded. They were everywhere and they were anyone. Anyone could be in on it.

Actor and “forever brother” Michael J. Fox aptly puts it this way: “It’s like your neighbor down the street runs a media empire now.” Everybody is generating “content,” and much of it is focused on celebrities. They have their “media channels”: their Twitter, Facebook, Snapchat accounts with the “potential to reach outside your sphere.” That used to be almost nonexistent. There used to be just a few media outlets and just a few paparazzi. Ron Galella once asked, on the slopes of Aspen, years ago, if he could take my picture. I said no and he didn’t. Respect. And Roger (how do I not know your last name?), who was at every publicity event in his large, square glasses, low on his nose, with his multitude of cameras slung around his neck, over his shoulder, across his chest. Always there, early at those fake birthday parties Teen Beat and Tiger Beat magazines used to put together with all the teen stars at the time. Later, at premieres, at openings. Roger, so sweet, who used to bring me slides. No Internet, no WireImage.com to later look up the photos, to feverishly look up photos of yourself a few hours after the event. Roger used to bring slides to events, photos he took of me at the previous event. Roger, who I last saw in a booth at the Silver Spoon coffee shop on Santa Monica Boulevard, hunkered down in a semicircle with a gaggle of other old-school paparazzi. Roger. So sweet.

Pages and pages and hours and hours need to be filled. Many more paparazzi needed. Not just event photos now, but photos of celebrities everywhere, doing anything. And more celebrities. The reality show contestants. Sure, call them “celebrities.” Andy Warhol moments. We need them for the pages and the hours. Mike Fox told me that “the biggest prima donnas, the biggest pricks” he’d encountered at any red carpet event were always the reality show contestants. The conclusion being that when you have no discernable skills, you will have cultivated none of the tools you need to handle a public position. That there will have been no means by which you have paid your dues and worked your way—with your artistic craft—up through the ranks to a particular level in your profession, where perhaps Fame is bestowed upon you. If you are absent the work it takes to peck your way out of the eggshell, you will be absent the strength it takes to live outside of that eggshell.

So, yeah. Those who have had Fame placed on them because of skills and talents have a dismissive disdain for those who chased Fame through sensationalism and/or reality-show-contestant debauchery. It’s true. Honestly, reality shows are the cancer of America. Look at the current presidency. Oh fuck, I don’t want to argue over politics right now. We can get on Twitter for that. Find me at @JustineBateman and we’ll take it on. But truly, reality show mentality has diseased this country. Being paid for breathing, bringing nothing to the table, exerting minimum effort at hard work or skill development. Yeah, that’s what reality programming gave to our country. Living shit. We had that perfect storm around 2000. Reality shows were gaining traction around the same time that all these entertainment outlets needed more material. Match made in heaven. You also had society wanting to increase the odds of becoming famous, to make new opportunities. Hence, the increased popularity of reality shows. More “celebrities” means more material for the outlets. So, Heidi Montag, The Situation, and so on. I’m sure they’re fine people, but who are they?

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An 18th-century satirist named Hugh Henry Brackenridge had a great take on why people without discernable skills and talents are raised up in society and given Fame. In Modern Chivalry, he talked about politicians and why some of the unqualified ones are lifted up by the voters. He mentioned this “power of creation” feeling that courses through people. That they can feel like God, even, if they lift someone up and make them famous. Look, what kind of “creating power” do we have if we merely notice that someone talented should have attention, should attain Fame? All we’re doing is noticing that. We are not then rewarded for having a general observation of the obvious. But if we lift someone up to the heights of Fame, someone who really wasn’t that good, wasn’t that talented, wasn’t that skilled, well, that’s all US; we did that. Not that person’s talent, not their skill, not some manifest destiny of Fame that some person’s skills makes obvious. No ma’am, that was all us. We can point to that famous person and say, “WE DID THAT.” In that sense, Brackenridge reasoned, in that sense, we can feel like God.

It’s like a Chutes and Ladders board game of Fame. That’s what we’ve set up in our society. Land on the right square, make the right move, walk the right amount of steps, and you will climb the ladder to a higher position, to Fame. Make the wrong move, step on the wrong square, and you take the slide way, way down, away from Fame. We set that up, as a society. We set that up and we built that scaffolding that sits underneath, those pylons and wood beams in the ocean, under the pier. We built that, together. We watch the 24 hours of “entertainment programming” on E! We buy InStyle and Entertainment Weekly and Premiere and US and People and OK! and In Touch Weekly and Life & Style. We watch Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood and talk shows in the night and in the day. We read gossip blogs and pass around TMZ videos. We stuff our faces with paparazzi photos of the famous, in line at the grocery store, consuming it, can’t get enough of it. Every day.

Now, what’s that about? Why is that structure, that support mechanism for Fame, kept so healthy, strong, and robust? We keep it healthy and strong and fed so we can maybe use it someday. “Me!” If you let it die, this support under Fame, you stop feeding it and it will no longer be there for you. If you don’t attend to the nail-in-the-wood maintenance of it, of the beams in the water under the pier, it will collapse, and that option for you will utterly disappear. So, we keep it healthy. We read the magazines and watch the shows, and buy the clothes and cars that the famous wear and drive. We create reality programming, even, to make this Chutes and Ladders board even wider. Bigger! More squares! More ladders! Hell, more slides! EVERYBODY CAN BE FAMOUS. More ladders = more lottery ticket buyers. More chances to WIN! We keep it healthy, this machine, because someday, just maybe (we hold the hope), someday we might step on that square that holds the bottom of that Fame ladder and we will fly up it to another plane, another life, a way out of this one, and we will be hovering above, with a bundle of nice stuff.

Prior to the late 1990s, there was no frenzy to be famous. There were those who were tremendously famous, sure, but as huge as the Fame was, it was not coveted by everyone you met. What I mean is, it was compartmentalized, it was thought of with a proper kind of perspective. People were amazed when they saw the famous, but they didn’t then immediately after start thinking about how they, too, could attain some Fame. People didn’t really think that way back then. You were an actor and you were very famous, but these other people, they had their own lives and their professions and there was a self-respect in that. People seemed to take pride in whatever they were good at, whatever profession they had tackled. A dentist, a publicist, a finance executive, a stationery store owner, whatever. There was not this obsession we have now with becoming famous. There was not this shame that people seem to absorb now, that they or their business isn’t “famous.” “Gotta make my mark,” and not by being a good stationery store owner or a pet store manager, but by getting followers, fans, viewers.

That pride from before faded away for many, and instead having a camera follow someone around on a reality show started to become a baseline of “approval” and professional self-respect. If a camera was following you around, recording your every banal move, well then, you must really be something. So, around 2000, we had a perfect storm of entertainment-focused shows and magazines needing material, and reality programming making it possible for those lacking entertaining talents to become famous. When social media dropped in, around 2006, then everybody could join in on trying to have a semblance of Fame, depending on how many “followers” you had. How many people would be alerted as to where you ate lunch or would see pictures of your dog, wet and shriveled in your sink, while you gave him a bath? How many people? It was at that moment that the dormant human trait of “lack-of-followers paranoia” was awakened.

“I have 315 Facebook followers. Pretty nice. Look at that. Dum-da-dum-dum-dum. What’s Dave been up to? Let’s see. His account . . . Got it . . . What the fuck? 1,245 followers. What? How . . . How does he know that many . . . That can’t be real. How does he have that many followers? What the fuck? I gotta . . . Hey, everyone! I’m going for the big 2,000! Will you help me get there?! Tell your friends to give me a follow. Get me to 2,000!” And that’s the way that went. You got those posts, right? Those messages? Your friends trying to “break” 500? Trying to get to 1,000? Something like that? Sure. Kinda made you sick, right? I mean, here’s this beautiful tool to stay in touch with your people (or this perfectly evil way to market to you, whichever), and they have to go and pollute it with their lack-of-followers paranoia. That sucks.

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OK, I can hear someone: “Who the fuck do you think you are, Bateman? You think, you assume, that everyone was just happy as pie in the ’80s and ’90s while you rolled around on your haystack of Fame and money and privilege and limousines and helicopters to the Super Bowl? FUCK YOU! You think we were just all happy back then, without all that? And how dare you put down our attempts at grabbing a little bit of that with our Twitter followers and our Facebook friends and our YouTube vlogs. You’re not the only one, you know. WE WANT ALL OF THAT TOO.” I can hear that. But it’s proving my point for me. Everyone deserves respect for what they do, and to be fairly compensated for what they’re good at, but for 99 percent of the population, it’s not for being an actor or a world-famous rock star. And that’s OK. That’s what I’m saying.