MOG

BORN FOR PORN

The tawdry death of Anna Nicole Smith at age 39, from a reputed drug overdose in a South Florida hotel room right above a casino, is perhaps the last word in modern celebrity. To be honest Smith seemed older to me than that, a mutton-dressed-as-lamb, plastic surgery nightmare blaring back at any sign of graceful aging, let alone graceful living.

I wish I could fully explain why her death makes me feel so horribly sad now. I never cared about her before - and it is unlikely I will care much about her tomorrow. And yet of course the sadness is there and surprisingly universal.

It’s hard to pin point where a train wreck like hers even begins. The suspicious death of Smith’s 20-year-old son Daniel from a drug overdose in his mother’s hospital room in the Bahamas, a few days after she gave birth to Dannielynn Hope (her now five month old baby daughter whose paternity is being contested by no less than three different men), is perhaps a good enough place to serve some public notice here.

And yes, it did put Smith back in the headlines where she had spent so much of her time already - and has now completely expired.

The history of a topless dancer, Playboy playmate, reality TV star and renowned gold digger – you’ll recall she married an aging oil tycoon who died soon after, and that Smith was still contesting her rights to his fortune at the time her own death (rights that could make Dannielynn and whoever her father is multimillionaires many times over) – is a case study in how to grab attention on any terms.

That Smith also catered to our insatiable need for fat people who lose extreme amounts of weight, then stack it back on again, just made her the ultimate trash celebrity of our time. She really had it all, including large breasts. As she put it at the 2004 American Music Awards “Like my body?” Most of the time truth is she probably didn’t and we enjoyed that too. She was, like her heroine Marilyn Monroe, a tortured American blonde.

Her Pamela Anderson meets Courtney Love appeals have therefore sustained the greasy pages of magazine racks at endless supermarket checkout lines for years. We all know her. We all laughed at her. She’s one of the many Celebrity Grotesques that now enrapture the public imagination, from Paris Hilton and her porn video and herpes prescriptions to Britney Spears’ threesomes and drinking problems and how it affects her ability to put on underwear as well be a mother and make hit records.

Love herself is meanwhile on the come-back trail with a second solo album due out soon called How Dirty Girls Get Clean. Paving the rehab regenerated way is a book, Dirty Blonde, a diary of course. It features email exchanges with Lindsay Lohan on how to handle negative publicity. Love refers to the Vanity Fair article that caused her and partner Kurt Cobain to have their daughter Frances Bean briefly taken from them after their drug habits became a little too clear. “I realise now,” Love tells Lohan, “that as hardcore as it was, it made me a lot more interesting and somehow employable.”

In a similar vein to Cobain and Love, there is Britain’s Pete Doherty and Kate Moss - the UK thinking person’s version of ‘Becks and Posh’, or Peter Andre and Jordan (a couple who actually seem rather happy) - for those who like their gossip with a bit of ‘street cred’ and rock ‘n’ roll and some remote inkling of intelligence.

Thus far supermodel Kate Moss has been lucky with her own drug story. She was barely out of police clutches and away from tabloid snaps of her cocaine binging before I could see her in skin-tight black leathers, riding a motorbike into advertising spreads in every glossy magazine I picked up, as well as pole dancing in a video for the White Stripes’ ‘I Just Don’t Know What To Do With Myself’.

Yes, ‘Cocaine Kate’, as the UK Daily Mirror dubbed her, was back - bigger and badder than ever – and all I wanted to do was snort up every detail.

Seeing the latest images of Moss’ on-again off-again lover, musician Pete Doherty, shooting up in a backpacker’s hotel room in Thailand was less appealing. I felt the inexpressibly heavy availability of pornography in everything about the scene he was in: from Doherty’s strangely twisted posture, his head kinked into a pale shoulder as he talks to Moss on a borrowed cell phone, hands and eyes totally focused on the needle he is using; to the grainy texture of the cell phone video; to the act of me looking at it and its wide spread visibility across the media and internet.

It made me think there is no privacy in failing anymore - if such a thing might exist. Certainly not for celebrities - if ever there was. The opportunities for surveillance are just too rich these days, too varied, as everyone from Australian cricketer Shane Warne to more refined presences like Kylie Minogue and Nicole Kidman will tell you.

And so it’s another hotel room, another good time for a ‘star’ on the slide with temporary friends, made available for a price to us all. At least Doherty had the wit – I hope - to tell The Sun a while back that the real reason for one of his breakups with Moss was “I can’t buy her diamonds and my dick is too small.”

Amid this welter of too-much-information it is hard to remember a concept of fame that once involved discretion, restraint, aloofness. These days we want it all and get it all, from camera angles up starlet’s skirts seeking out their cellulite, to an endless array of third class ‘celebrities’ in reality TV shows who have parlayed their way into seasonal fame only to slide out the back door a few years later – to take the recent UK Big Brother example - mouthing racist slurs and then dribbling to be forgiven, to let them back in that door, oh please, please, please.

Achievements of a substantial kind are generally not needed or even desirable in this world. Wear a scandalous dress, bend over for the camera, sleep with someone, behave like a yob, get on TV, blow whatever talent you may have on drink and drugs and weight reducing pills, wait for the paparazzi to hound you into your grave. Hey presto, you’ve made it in the mainstream.

It’s becoming increasingly hard to understand the appeals of such low grade celebrity, beyond a ghoulish interest in human misery and idiocy - and increasingly hard to accept it. If I don’t want to jack off, vomit or laugh in the ugliest fashion at them, it’s quite reasonable to say these people are of no use to me and most of ‘their fans’ at all.

Of course there are plenty of people who love these soap-by-numbers, real-life horror stories for more overtly caring reasons than I can discern. Who seem to feel some obscure connection to their celebrities’ moneyed and deluded troubles. Perhaps it’s just the reassuring blast of mutual loneliness and inability to cope that makes the common man or woman feel they are not so alone and miserable themselves. This kind of mutual victim sympathy nonetheless strikes me as similarly self interested and self pleasing and, I suspect, creepily isolating for everyone involved.

As I’ve hinted at already, I would argue the appeal of modern celebrity is almost entirely pornographic these days - in the true sense of that term, which is derived from Greek word pornographos: a construct that basically equals ‘prostitute’ + ‘write’. So if these fucked-up stars are whores for our attention and pleasure (whether they care to admit it or not) then lets be completely honest and admit our position as ‘johns’ or clients in the bargain. And let the media, most particularly the ‘celeb watchers’ and definitely the paparazzi, admit they’re pimping and running the brothel.

So yeah, I take a look at what appears to be the red velvet cast over Anna Nicole Smith’s body as she is being carried on a stretcher from her Florida motel. Then I read a quote from her former publicist David Granoff, on MSNBC. How he was “shocked but not surprised” by her death. But it’s his next quote that is devastating to me. He says there was “just no spark in her anymore”.

It’s then I picture the horrible vacancy of her smile as I read those words. It’s then I think suddenly of Pete Doherty and how he was depicted shooting up in that backpacker’s hotel room. That I recall an image of Posh Spice looking torturously groomed and tight faced like a gasping fish on the cover of a magazine. Remember shots of Britney Spears, all overweight and cheap and trashed, spilling out of a nightclub like there’s no tomorrow. That I have a vision of Paris Hilton with her sunglasses on, pouting like she is ready for an act of fellatio…Of course, when this is all over, I feel very depressed afterwards.

Then I read yet more breaking news, how efforts to revive Anna Nicole Smith were filmed and sold by a paparazzi agency to a media outlet for US$500,000. She died as she lived, and that’s the tragedy. Or as Chris Spinder, a producer for the Fox News Channel who viewed the final footage said, “You cannot see her face, you cannot see hair flowing out from underneath the [oxygen] mask... if someone didn’t tell me this was Anna Nicole Smith, I totally would not have known it. You can’t even tell it’s a woman.”

Mark Mordue