Five Things Revisited
These five questions from cthonicmin :
1. Culture of Celebrity
Fame is an inevitable part of life. Human beings are aspirational creatures by dint of their imaginations: we can imagine being better, or better off, than we are, so we strive to become so. This is what drives all human endeavour. This behaviour (like so much of human thought) is recursive; our aspiration to be something more than we are leads us in turn to fantasize about being the people who have done so. And so we fuel those fantasies by watching and enquiring into the lives of those people, and we emulate their behaviour in the hopes of achieving the same things they have achieved. Hence role models and personal heroes. Growing communities and improved communication widens the pool of people we see and can aspire to become, so we get the famed; a select group within our society who have achieved more than most, that many people choose as their role models. “Celebrities” in that their lives are celebrated, their contributions to our lives gratefully cherished. This is all very healthy, and has driven a great deal of worthy accomplishment throughout history.
The culture of celebrity is another step yet. Once we take to watching the successful and the celebrated because we wish to be like them, being known and noted - being watched, in fact - itself becomes an aspiration, equal to or greater than the accomplishment that garners it. And people who have achieved notoriety in turn become role models, irrespective of how they achieved it; they become famous for being famous, and people watch them all the more because they represent a democratisation of success. Kids are interested in astronauts because they want to be astronauts when they grow up, but that’s a lot of work and a lot of luck; getting famous by bitching about people, or by having sex with someone famous, or just by making a spirited attempt to get famous? Now that’s something anyone can do! (here’s a chuckle: Google “become a celebrity”) And we egg them on, these budget heroes, because we identify more easily with them. Aspiring to the life a war hero or a great scientist is a stretch of the imagination, for a typical TV-watcher at home, but aspiring to be someone just like you - only famous - is no effort at all.
And they’re so accessible. Maybe you want to be like them, because you want to be famous and watched, and to get onto telly and in the magazines, and be paid lots of money by people wanting to photograph your wedding, or maybe you hate them instead, because you resent their mediocrity, or envy their success, or just want to be watched yourself, crowing about how much you hate the celebrities (Perez Hilton gets a special place by the flames; a celebrity famed for hating celebrities who are in turn famed only for being celebrities). Either way, these guys deliver! Their whole careers are about getting noticed and talked about; when they’re not famous any more, their careers are over. So they dress up glamorously and go to the right parties and appear on TV shows, and then they say stupid shit in public, get drunk and fight in front of cameramen; anything to get noticed, because it’s not about achievements any more, or not for them. Ever noticed how genuinely accomplished celebrities actually do less to pimp themselves to the public? No? Okay, do you remember that series of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! featuring Kofi Annan and Keanu Reeves? No, you’re right. They didn’t.
It’s logical. Every step makes sense. I understand the value of aspiration; I understand role models as an extension of aspiration; I understand fame as an extension of role models; I understand “celebrity” as an extension of fame. I can see why it happens, but it fills me with contempt. We push aside giants to throw laurels at dwarves. And a part of it is that the giants aren’t marching in triumph, because they don’t see the need; but a part of it is the meanness in ourselves. We can’t see ourselves as giants, so we refuse to honour them.
2. Why films made before 1976 aren’t rubbish
I’ll give you three reasons for starters, although they’re probably not to your taste: Murder My Sweet (1942), The Italian Job (1969), and Animal Crackers (1930).
There’s a lot to be said for modern cinema. I’m not a purist or a traditionalist, by any means; I fully appreciate that colour > black and white, gyro-mounted portable cameras > fixed or rail-mounted cameras, digital > analogue, CGI > hand-drawn cell animation, etc. Anything you might say about the soul of the art or whatever aside, the new technologies wouldn’t have been developed if there wasn’t a call for it, and it wouldn’t have displaced the old technology if it didn’t make better-looking films. But it doesn’t hold that a film that looks better is better in all ways.
Once upon a time, films were a little cheaper to make. Fewer films came out, so there was less competition. You could take risks from time to time, and know that you would still most likely make a little money on the film, or at least not lose too much. Hollywood wasn’t so obsessed with sure-fire formulas, and so more interesting and more dangerous films were made. Formulas existed then as now, of course, and some of the dangerous ideas of yesteryear are the formulas of today, but even so. Once upon a time, cameras weren’t so mobile, close-ups weren’t so easy to execute, and cameras were more forgiving. You could cast actors and actresses who weren’t quite so flawlessly beautiful (or at least decorously plain), but who were, perhaps, better at their craft. And, of course, actors as a whole have themselves grown no better at acting just because the technology that captures them has improved.
I’m not saying all old films are good, any more than I’m saying all modern films are bad. I’m just asking you to abandon your assumption that the reverse is true.
3. The truth about Ferrero Rocher
It’s fucking terrifying, man. Six-foot-high Rocher, as far as the eye could see, rolling down the street towards us like some luxuriously expensive avalanche. I don’t know how we got out alive. I still get flashbacks anytime I’m at an ambassadorial party.
4. Accents
I assume we’re talking about modes of speech and not hair colours?
George Bernard Shaw famously observed that accents are the last great barrier to true social equality; teach a member of the working classes to speak perfect English, he insisted, and he would be able to follow any path open to his social betters. He based his play, Pygmalion (on which Lerner and Loewe’s noted musical My Fair Lady was based) on this very premise. And, you know, on the myth of Pygmalion from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
More recently, The tables have turned. A formal RP accent is seen as effete, even false or hypocritical. In Hollywood, it was for years a sure indicator of evil; in Star Wars, Moff Tarkin and Emperor Palpatine both have RP accents, as do the villains in the first and third Die Hard movies. In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, in which all but one of the characters are English, only the villains speak with an RP; the eponymous hero’s actually played by a Yank! Even in its homeland, the RP accent is mistrusted. It’s associated with cleverness and wit, with fine manners and elegance; but to appear sincere or soulful, English art will assume a regional accent.
Perception and class aside, accent is about tribalism. Shaw rightly observed that posh kids will look down on you if you have a working class accent; but go into a pub in Cardiff, Glasgow or, you know, Mile End and see how far a perfect RP gets you before you agree with his slightly one-sided appraisal. An accent identifies you as belonging; it tells the listener that you were born and raised in the same community as him and can be trusted as a peer. It’s an old form of tribalism, from back when your tribe was also your family and neighbours; we’re starting to draw tribes in new ways that accents don’t reliably reveal, but these aren’t about to take over completely from the old tribal lines any time soon. What you think of accents, therefore, depends on what you think of tribalism. To some people, it seems to have become a vice by nature, an enemy of reason and the cause of all violence and injustice. To others, it’s the underpinning of a spiritual and ethical existence and the main structure on which morality and culture are built. I tend to the latter, but I recognise the evidence for the former.
Guv.
5. Body Modification
When do we first start to struggle to hold on to our ideological absolutes? The older I get, the more compromised and entangled my beliefs seem to become. Never mind. This is one of those areas.
I got my two tattoos in 1997 and 2001. Around then I spent a long time thinking about body art; not that the experience particularly shook any deeply-held views, but because I hadn’t had cause to think about it before. The conclusion I came to - after getting cut, to be fair - was that body modification is an artform, deserving of a place alongside other visual media, and a form of self-expression; that the ultimate form of self-invention is inventing your own flesh. That kind of thing.
It’s in this spirit that I think of my tattoos. The dragon on my right shoulder was of my own design, an image I’d been drawing for years anyway, one which makes me think of the younger, more soulful (and shamefully less original) man I was, and the experiences he had. The Tao on my left shoulder came when I finally decided I had found a set of beliefs, and a spirituality, that I could more or less stick to, and found that a lot of it was drawn from Taoism. It doesn’t mean that I’m a Taoist, per se, but that the Tao was an inspiration that I could see myself continuing to want to draw on. To this day one of my favourite pieces of jewellery is a stone Tao given to me by a friend of mine.
But...
There was a TV programme (on the BBC?) a while back on extreme modifications. And a lot of discussion was along the same lines as I myself used: bod-mod as art, as self-expression, control of yourself as self-invention, etc. But they were talking about people cutting their little toes off so that they could wear nice shoes. About severe anorexics in pro-ana support groups. They interviewed people who had tattoos and piercings to an extreme degree, who openly said that they hated their bodies and thought they were ugly, so mortified their flesh to try and escape it.
And I’m thinking, some of these people are mentally ill. Their behaviour, in many contexts, would mark them out as harmful to themselves and in need of restraint and control. Have we gone too far? Moved beyond an attitude of freedom of choice, and a culture of free self-expression, to a criminal negligence of our most vulnerable citizens? Should we be drawing a line somewhere? If so, where? Do I have that right? Maybe starving yourself to death, or permanently mutilating yourself, is simply a lifestyle choice and I shouldn’t impose my more mainstream ideas on them.
I don’t know. I still think it’s art, and it’s beautiful. Tell me “but you’ll still have them when you’re, like, sixty” and I’ll laugh in your face. I want to still have these tattoos when I'm sixty. Hell, when I'm a hundred. But I’m uncomfortable with some of the people on my side of the fence, and I haven’t completely made up my mind yet.
1. Culture of Celebrity
Fame is an inevitable part of life. Human beings are aspirational creatures by dint of their imaginations: we can imagine being better, or better off, than we are, so we strive to become so. This is what drives all human endeavour. This behaviour (like so much of human thought) is recursive; our aspiration to be something more than we are leads us in turn to fantasize about being the people who have done so. And so we fuel those fantasies by watching and enquiring into the lives of those people, and we emulate their behaviour in the hopes of achieving the same things they have achieved. Hence role models and personal heroes. Growing communities and improved communication widens the pool of people we see and can aspire to become, so we get the famed; a select group within our society who have achieved more than most, that many people choose as their role models. “Celebrities” in that their lives are celebrated, their contributions to our lives gratefully cherished. This is all very healthy, and has driven a great deal of worthy accomplishment throughout history.
The culture of celebrity is another step yet. Once we take to watching the successful and the celebrated because we wish to be like them, being known and noted - being watched, in fact - itself becomes an aspiration, equal to or greater than the accomplishment that garners it. And people who have achieved notoriety in turn become role models, irrespective of how they achieved it; they become famous for being famous, and people watch them all the more because they represent a democratisation of success. Kids are interested in astronauts because they want to be astronauts when they grow up, but that’s a lot of work and a lot of luck; getting famous by bitching about people, or by having sex with someone famous, or just by making a spirited attempt to get famous? Now that’s something anyone can do! (here’s a chuckle: Google “become a celebrity”) And we egg them on, these budget heroes, because we identify more easily with them. Aspiring to the life a war hero or a great scientist is a stretch of the imagination, for a typical TV-watcher at home, but aspiring to be someone just like you - only famous - is no effort at all.
And they’re so accessible. Maybe you want to be like them, because you want to be famous and watched, and to get onto telly and in the magazines, and be paid lots of money by people wanting to photograph your wedding, or maybe you hate them instead, because you resent their mediocrity, or envy their success, or just want to be watched yourself, crowing about how much you hate the celebrities (Perez Hilton gets a special place by the flames; a celebrity famed for hating celebrities who are in turn famed only for being celebrities). Either way, these guys deliver! Their whole careers are about getting noticed and talked about; when they’re not famous any more, their careers are over. So they dress up glamorously and go to the right parties and appear on TV shows, and then they say stupid shit in public, get drunk and fight in front of cameramen; anything to get noticed, because it’s not about achievements any more, or not for them. Ever noticed how genuinely accomplished celebrities actually do less to pimp themselves to the public? No? Okay, do you remember that series of I’m A Celebrity, Get Me Out Of Here! featuring Kofi Annan and Keanu Reeves? No, you’re right. They didn’t.
It’s logical. Every step makes sense. I understand the value of aspiration; I understand role models as an extension of aspiration; I understand fame as an extension of role models; I understand “celebrity” as an extension of fame. I can see why it happens, but it fills me with contempt. We push aside giants to throw laurels at dwarves. And a part of it is that the giants aren’t marching in triumph, because they don’t see the need; but a part of it is the meanness in ourselves. We can’t see ourselves as giants, so we refuse to honour them.
2. Why films made before 1976 aren’t rubbish
I’ll give you three reasons for starters, although they’re probably not to your taste: Murder My Sweet (1942), The Italian Job (1969), and Animal Crackers (1930).
There’s a lot to be said for modern cinema. I’m not a purist or a traditionalist, by any means; I fully appreciate that colour > black and white, gyro-mounted portable cameras > fixed or rail-mounted cameras, digital > analogue, CGI > hand-drawn cell animation, etc. Anything you might say about the soul of the art or whatever aside, the new technologies wouldn’t have been developed if there wasn’t a call for it, and it wouldn’t have displaced the old technology if it didn’t make better-looking films. But it doesn’t hold that a film that looks better is better in all ways.
Once upon a time, films were a little cheaper to make. Fewer films came out, so there was less competition. You could take risks from time to time, and know that you would still most likely make a little money on the film, or at least not lose too much. Hollywood wasn’t so obsessed with sure-fire formulas, and so more interesting and more dangerous films were made. Formulas existed then as now, of course, and some of the dangerous ideas of yesteryear are the formulas of today, but even so. Once upon a time, cameras weren’t so mobile, close-ups weren’t so easy to execute, and cameras were more forgiving. You could cast actors and actresses who weren’t quite so flawlessly beautiful (or at least decorously plain), but who were, perhaps, better at their craft. And, of course, actors as a whole have themselves grown no better at acting just because the technology that captures them has improved.
I’m not saying all old films are good, any more than I’m saying all modern films are bad. I’m just asking you to abandon your assumption that the reverse is true.
3. The truth about Ferrero Rocher
It’s fucking terrifying, man. Six-foot-high Rocher, as far as the eye could see, rolling down the street towards us like some luxuriously expensive avalanche. I don’t know how we got out alive. I still get flashbacks anytime I’m at an ambassadorial party.
4. Accents
I assume we’re talking about modes of speech and not hair colours?
George Bernard Shaw famously observed that accents are the last great barrier to true social equality; teach a member of the working classes to speak perfect English, he insisted, and he would be able to follow any path open to his social betters. He based his play, Pygmalion (on which Lerner and Loewe’s noted musical My Fair Lady was based) on this very premise. And, you know, on the myth of Pygmalion from Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
More recently, The tables have turned. A formal RP accent is seen as effete, even false or hypocritical. In Hollywood, it was for years a sure indicator of evil; in Star Wars, Moff Tarkin and Emperor Palpatine both have RP accents, as do the villains in the first and third Die Hard movies. In Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, in which all but one of the characters are English, only the villains speak with an RP; the eponymous hero’s actually played by a Yank! Even in its homeland, the RP accent is mistrusted. It’s associated with cleverness and wit, with fine manners and elegance; but to appear sincere or soulful, English art will assume a regional accent.
Perception and class aside, accent is about tribalism. Shaw rightly observed that posh kids will look down on you if you have a working class accent; but go into a pub in Cardiff, Glasgow or, you know, Mile End and see how far a perfect RP gets you before you agree with his slightly one-sided appraisal. An accent identifies you as belonging; it tells the listener that you were born and raised in the same community as him and can be trusted as a peer. It’s an old form of tribalism, from back when your tribe was also your family and neighbours; we’re starting to draw tribes in new ways that accents don’t reliably reveal, but these aren’t about to take over completely from the old tribal lines any time soon. What you think of accents, therefore, depends on what you think of tribalism. To some people, it seems to have become a vice by nature, an enemy of reason and the cause of all violence and injustice. To others, it’s the underpinning of a spiritual and ethical existence and the main structure on which morality and culture are built. I tend to the latter, but I recognise the evidence for the former.
Guv.
5. Body Modification
When do we first start to struggle to hold on to our ideological absolutes? The older I get, the more compromised and entangled my beliefs seem to become. Never mind. This is one of those areas.
I got my two tattoos in 1997 and 2001. Around then I spent a long time thinking about body art; not that the experience particularly shook any deeply-held views, but because I hadn’t had cause to think about it before. The conclusion I came to - after getting cut, to be fair - was that body modification is an artform, deserving of a place alongside other visual media, and a form of self-expression; that the ultimate form of self-invention is inventing your own flesh. That kind of thing.
It’s in this spirit that I think of my tattoos. The dragon on my right shoulder was of my own design, an image I’d been drawing for years anyway, one which makes me think of the younger, more soulful (and shamefully less original) man I was, and the experiences he had. The Tao on my left shoulder came when I finally decided I had found a set of beliefs, and a spirituality, that I could more or less stick to, and found that a lot of it was drawn from Taoism. It doesn’t mean that I’m a Taoist, per se, but that the Tao was an inspiration that I could see myself continuing to want to draw on. To this day one of my favourite pieces of jewellery is a stone Tao given to me by a friend of mine.
But...
There was a TV programme (on the BBC?) a while back on extreme modifications. And a lot of discussion was along the same lines as I myself used: bod-mod as art, as self-expression, control of yourself as self-invention, etc. But they were talking about people cutting their little toes off so that they could wear nice shoes. About severe anorexics in pro-ana support groups. They interviewed people who had tattoos and piercings to an extreme degree, who openly said that they hated their bodies and thought they were ugly, so mortified their flesh to try and escape it.
And I’m thinking, some of these people are mentally ill. Their behaviour, in many contexts, would mark them out as harmful to themselves and in need of restraint and control. Have we gone too far? Moved beyond an attitude of freedom of choice, and a culture of free self-expression, to a criminal negligence of our most vulnerable citizens? Should we be drawing a line somewhere? If so, where? Do I have that right? Maybe starving yourself to death, or permanently mutilating yourself, is simply a lifestyle choice and I shouldn’t impose my more mainstream ideas on them.
I don’t know. I still think it’s art, and it’s beautiful. Tell me “but you’ll still have them when you’re, like, sixty” and I’ll laugh in your face. I want to still have these tattoos when I'm sixty. Hell, when I'm a hundred. But I’m uncomfortable with some of the people on my side of the fence, and I haven’t completely made up my mind yet.