The Game is Worth the Candle.
It is currently fashionable for celebrities to claim they are regular people and their success is due to hard work. Athletes claim they want to do their best and have fun. People like politicians they think would be fun to have a beer with. Musicians fill the liner notes of their albums with photos of themselves pouting for the cameras like so many teenage girls with iphoto and a myspace account. I declare unilaterally that people are plebian nincompoops. Why would I want to know that athletes and actors and politicians are normal people who are fun to hang out with? I am never going to hang out with them. Also, I know they are lying. Actors spend their lives whoring themselves in front of cameras to fool people into thinking they are important. Politicians do the same thing, and also promise their souls to other politicians. Athletes spend all waking hours sweating and bleeding and spending tons of money for a chance to prove they are better than everyone else at one thing. Musicians spend their lives practicing in order to produce something perfect. We are all humans who wish and hope and cry and yawn, but there are those who for whatever reason have reached a position in which they are worshipped, and they should present a facade of appropriate worthiness.
In the early days of moving pictures, film stars were shrouded in furs and glamourous auras. They were celebrities, and they were our gods. Celebrities are still our gods, but they have become vulgar and boring gods, and we discuss their child-rearing habits and sex lives rather than those things which made them celebrities. It doesn't help that they claim to be just like us, and let familiarity breed contempt. Also, their images are delivered to us in such glaring high definition that any small flaw in their veneer is instantly noticed and mocked.
On a side note, I also deplore the move toward ever higher definition. The world of theatre and film is always going to feel unreal because of the experience of looking in on a world from the outside, and the more lifelike it looks, the more jarring I find it. Yes, it can be very very pretty, and I like pretty films, but I have an easier time believing in things that are inescapably unreal: anime, old black and white films, and any stage production. These are also pretty, and I find them more emotionally demanding because I can believe in imperfections in a way I cannot believe in a perfect world in a box.
Those that seek recognition above that of the ordinary average person should do something to warrant that recognition, and that something should include not acting like the ordinary average person. If we, the ordinary people wish gods, we should revere them as such and not attempt to drag them back into ordinary vulgarity.
With that, I am going to opening night at the opera, and I am going to wear black gloves past my elbows, and wish I was a diva of the 1920's, when recording technologies were new and low-quality and ethereal. I would live a pretend life of glamour and romance. And I would dress for dinner.
In the early days of moving pictures, film stars were shrouded in furs and glamourous auras. They were celebrities, and they were our gods. Celebrities are still our gods, but they have become vulgar and boring gods, and we discuss their child-rearing habits and sex lives rather than those things which made them celebrities. It doesn't help that they claim to be just like us, and let familiarity breed contempt. Also, their images are delivered to us in such glaring high definition that any small flaw in their veneer is instantly noticed and mocked.
On a side note, I also deplore the move toward ever higher definition. The world of theatre and film is always going to feel unreal because of the experience of looking in on a world from the outside, and the more lifelike it looks, the more jarring I find it. Yes, it can be very very pretty, and I like pretty films, but I have an easier time believing in things that are inescapably unreal: anime, old black and white films, and any stage production. These are also pretty, and I find them more emotionally demanding because I can believe in imperfections in a way I cannot believe in a perfect world in a box.
Those that seek recognition above that of the ordinary average person should do something to warrant that recognition, and that something should include not acting like the ordinary average person. If we, the ordinary people wish gods, we should revere them as such and not attempt to drag them back into ordinary vulgarity.
With that, I am going to opening night at the opera, and I am going to wear black gloves past my elbows, and wish I was a diva of the 1920's, when recording technologies were new and low-quality and ethereal. I would live a pretend life of glamour and romance. And I would dress for dinner.