MOG

6. Entertain Cruelty

In his books Lunar Park, Glamorama, American Psycho, The Informers and Less Than Zero, the American writer Bret Easton Ellis defines a materialistic universe where people and things float together in a coldly undifferentiated manner. It’s as if a business card, a major celebrity, a dead tramp, a nightclub, a social climber and a designer suit all have the same value. All things ‘cool’ are up for purchase. Everybody, everything, is objectified, flattened out.

Ellis understands how nightmarishly right Andy Warhol was: in the future almost everyone is getting to be famous for fifteen minutes. In this way personality and celebrity have become something very cheap indeed. We’re brutally entertained by this fact. By the crass instantaneous of this week’s low rent reality TV ‘superstar’; by the likes of Michael Jackson and Britney Spears and Puff Daddy and J. Lo; by the pure comic book puke of their outlines across our lives.

But sometimes, truth is, I do feel sorry for these ‘people’ and the way they are so trashed by their own need to be in front of us. What is interesting about that is the possibility they can still transcend their own dire situation: Robert Downey Jnr and Pamela Anderson, I think, are rather loved, because they have taken so much crap and survived it. The cult of personality around them has turned itself inside out, to the point where we do, finally, see beyond the drugs and plastic surgery and crazy behaviour, and recognise something human about them all over again. Maybe we just love fallen angels too.

This sense, nonetheless, of devalued celebrity means people are no longer pursuing it in the way they once might have. There’s a feeling that one can stay mysterious rather than be hollowed out by popular attention; that evasiveness is as good a form of stardom as attention seeking. Musicians like M Ward and Will Oldham seem representative of this withdrawn stardom - though their impulse away from the mainstream and towards the shadows is not necessarily a reaction to modern fame and its crassness, so much as a recognition that one can exist in a smaller community globally and not have to compromise one’s work or, more importantly, one’s life. It’s fame on a human level, fame as something that is still, almost, a private thing between them and us.