Sanitizing the Spectacle and the End of Celebrity
In the early 1960‘s news, entertainment and advertising images were already loaded with emotional and social importance. An ad for cognac featuring a group of well dressed young men gathering around a tufted leather sofa is not just and advertisement for cognac, but a symbol of fulfillment, an image of success.
Today we receive much of our emotional information, our social barometer, from the spectacle.
In the 1960‘s war was brought into living rooms around the industrialized world with an immediacy and drama that had never been seen before. What was once reported on in newsreels, safely removed in both time and space from the actual events, became a daily representation of acts that increasingly took on familiar faces. The spectacle of war was, at first, shocking, but was quickly commoditized, packaged and put in context. Riots, demonstrations, assassinations, million man marches, all became part of the grand spectacle that civilization was manufacturing at an ever increasing pace and with ever increasing intimacy. In the Vietnam era, journalists were not embedded with troops, essentially limiting their access to anything other than one side of the conflict. Journalists were loose and in the middle of the conflict, often covering both sides of the war and frequently being excoriated by those wishing to limit coverage to stories that either justified or romanticized the conflict. Just five years ago, a single suicide bombing would capture the world’s attention for days, becoming the leading headline of the day in all media. Today, a suicide bombing barely makes the news at all, frequently being relegated to a “crawl” along the bottom part of a television screen, receiving cursory notice at best. The act becomes just another part of the spectacle, so similar to so many others that it does not warrant the turning of heads or the billion blinks per second of the global media audience. The portrayal of carnage is given a more visceral and engaging treatment in films and video games than it is in news reports, further distancing society from its most horrific acts, while simultaneously desensitizing its reaction to them and even eroticizing violence.
A curious phenomenon is the transformation of the most spectacular of all of the creations of the spectacle – the celebrity. Movie stars, rock stars and sports stars lived their lives in the spectacle. That was, in part, their purpose, to be spectacular, to embody the excesses of their age and do so for the rest of society to consume from a safe, middle class distance. Doctors, lawyers, bankers, the gatekeepers of the middle class worldview, cannot behave like rock stars or movie stars. They cannot be seen in those clothes, they cannot jet to the Riviera, overdose on drugs, have wild orgies or, in short, live spectacular lives. So it is left to a select group of individuals to do it for us and present themselves to us as spectacle, for consumption as spectacle; for us to admire, censure and ridicule. In their lives we see the extreme consumption of the products of civilization. The excesses that the rest of us cannot permit ourselves, either because of the decorum imposed on us by the rigid morality of the middle class, or because we simply cannot afford it. In this, too, the spectacle has closed the gap between the observer and the observed. Articles written recently about the demise of the movie star coincide with the emergence of the proletarian star.
We have all become protagonists in the spectacle. So called reality television shows show us ourselves, but presented in the formats required for spectacular consumption. Thus, the glamour of celebrities of the past has receded and been overtaken by the working class interpretation of celebrity today. As the distance between spectacle and audience has been closed, so too has the social imperative for comportment. Decorum is now the purview of the upper middle class alone. The image of Elizabeth Taylor, Cary Grant or Audrey Hepburn is no longer possible today as a commodity, having been replaced by thousands of programs about celebrity chefs; ice road truckers; crab fishermen; poorly educated, poorly behaved and not even very attractive people that have captured the attention of a society which no longer views the spectacle as something at a remove, but something in which they participate.
This is also true of plastic surgery. Once an exclusive luxury commodity, available only to movie stars and individuals whose lives were, by definition, lives of spectacle, plastic surgery has also been democratized and is now available to the society at large. This is in no small part due to the increasingly spectacular nature of what were once ordinary lives – average citizens now feel a cultural imperative to have botox treatments, breast implants, face lifts and to inject thousands of pounds of collagen into their lips, all in an effort to both match the images presented to them as desirable in the spectacle, and to demonstrate their acquisitive ability to afford such commodities.
Thus, the glamorous images of the spectacle of the past have been replaced with the working class images of the spectacle of today. Now it is possible for a banker, a lawyer or a doctor to have visible tattoos, huge puffy lips, wear outrageous clothing or engage in behaviour previously limited to only a select few individuals living on the edges of society. It’s okay now. We have become a society of rock stars and movie stars, and so our rock stars and movie stars have become simply part of our society, blended together with celebrity chefs and celebrity party animals. There is no longer a distinction between the movie star and the average citizen – or at least the average citizen with a reality show. The truly spectacular has been reserved for royal weddings and, to a lesser extent, the Academy Awards.
This principle has been extended to include politicians and world leaders, who are now selected as much for their resemblance to the so-called “common man” as they once were for their spectacular and elite nature, a trend a hundred years in the making. Presidents wish to be seen as “somebody you can have a beer with” today, whereas this concept would have been completely alien just 75 years ago.
When fashion icon Cristobal Balenciaga announced the closure of his boutique in 1968, the reason he gave was “there is no one left worth dressing.” He was right.
Today Balenciaga is worn by the sixteen year old daughters of investment bankers and Dior can be bought at any department store.
This is the essence of the tautological character of the spectacle. There is no political point of view or direction, there is no single hand at its controls.
The spectacle aims at nothing other than itself.