New York Magazine: Speaking Truth To Vacuity

The Distraction Industry

New York Magazine

The last movie I wanted to see was The King's Speech primarily because Geoffrey Rush is amazing and it was well reviewed. Apart from Rush's animatedly wooden performance, the entire production struct me as nothing more than propaganda for the crumbling House of Windsor and royalty-porn for the juvenile American fascination with all things superfluously British. The Alex Borestein production is far more entertaining, historically acute and self-aware. Also, besides being hilarious, it didn't cost anything nor waste the better part of an afternoon.

This cover story in New York Magazine is fairly straight up, which is surprising given how much revenue is derived from said industry by almost every photo-slick newstand publication. Mark Harris does a fine job, covering the cultural/socio-economic ground honestly and without invective. The snark comes almost entirely from the subject itself.

America has it's own cloying royalty* and the price of admission is a simple willingness to discard all shame and modesty in the pursuit of self aggrandizement. Lovely.

In celebrity life, there have always been more runners-up than winners, so in an age in which nobody can quite believe that fame is fleeting, it’s no surprise that the only things many of the also-rans have left to sell are their disgruntlement, their desperation, and their decompensation. The reality-TV boom of the last decade created an entire subclass of people who misunderstood their fifteen minutes as a stepping-stone to a more permanent level of renown. They won’t step out of the spotlight without a fight, and it didn’t take them long to figure out that self-mortification can be a viable economic model. If InStyle was the celeb-lifestyle bible of the nineties, the Zeitgeist mag of the aughts was Us—reinvented in 2000 as a weekly horror show selling its audience of young, non-famous women on the lurid piety that young, transiently famous women are mostly trashy idiots. In the Lohan-Hilton-Hills epoch (Anni Celebutanti I to IV), an arrest, a public meltdown, a slap-fight, a dognapping, an eating disorder, and a trip to rehab were no longer scandals that could tarnish a celebrity’s brand: They could be the brand. Anything could be the brand.

The Celebrity Economy: It pays. But it costs a fortune.

*Brad Pitt and Matt Damon seem to be generally decent and talented cats. I happened upon this article in a doctors office, which is what most doctors are really good for: catching up on all the glossy mags I refuse to buy.

Emphasis in the quote is mine, because it's not the kind of thing anyone should focus on.