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VOLTAIRE'S BASTARDS -- THE DICTATORSHIP OF REASON IN THE WEST |
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20. The Stars Marie Antoinette was the first modern star. She was never really Queen of France. That was merely her role. She played queen. She never saw it as a position which, although held by right, involved responsibility or obligation. Such irresponsibility seems natural today and we tend to confuse her starlike grandeur with that of other kings or queens. Louis XIV, after all, played a role. Elizabeth I was perhaps the finest star who ever performed. But Louis XIV, a simple man, played grandeur in order to solidify his power and to weaken that of the threatening nobility. Elizabeth turned herself into an overdressed, overjewelled, overmade-up virgin in order to protect herself from the power of men and therefore to exercise power herself. Marie Antoinette was something quite new. Something revolutionary. There were hints of this in her miniature play farm, hidden out in the gardens of Versailles. The palace itself was a stage set, but her Fermette was more like the prototype for the movie star's Los Angeles estate or Michael Jackson's private zoo. Perfect little farm buildings. A few delightful animals of the finest breeding. Servants within hailing distance and the greatest palace in the world only a few hundred yards away. The Fermette was the original Disneyland: a place where the greatest queen in the world and her courtesans could dress up as milkmaids and farmers, then play at milking cows in a romantic idyll of simplicity. The birth of the modern star came late at night, on June 20, 1791, when Marie Antoinette, Louis XVI, their son and daughter, governess and two maids escaped from the Tuileries Palace in the centre of Paris. The Constituent Assembly, as it saw things, had been holding them for their own and the nation's good in this immense and gilded prison, like peacocks in a cage. The ensuing chase is now known as the escape to Varennes, a small town near the German border and scene of the dramatic climax. The Queen directed the whole escape and, of course, starred in it. The producer was a Swedish count, Axel de Fersen, who was Marie Antoinette's greatest admirer and probably her lover. His original plan had had the King fleeing alone and disguised as a woman. Louis felt this masquerade lacked dignity and the Queen rejected it, in large part because it involved leaving her behind. The second plan had the King being whisked away, again alone, in a fast coach to rejoin the rebel army of nobles in exile. The Queen objected again. Her script involved something much more grandiose -- the escape of the entire family in one fell swoop. The royal family plus governess could only fit into a large, slow, coach -- a berline -- which the Queen had piled high with luggage until it was capable of doing a mere ten kilometres per hour. A cabriolet followed at a respectful distance, carrying the minimum pair of maids. The governess was to play a Russian baroness called Madame de Korff; the royal children, her son and daughter; the Queen, their governess; and the King, the baroness's valet. Marie Antoinette drew upon the palace wardrobe to get herself up as a maid. She didn't actually disguise herself. She played a maid the way she played a milkmaid at the Fermette or the way Garbo later played a queen or Dietrich a whore. No one was meant to mistake them for their roles. They were themselves -- stars. Louis didn't even try to play the valet. He plunked a pink wig on his head and treated the whole thing as farce. His domineering Queen encouraged this approach. The escape began on schedule, thanks to Fersen, who got them secretly out of the palace in separate small coaches and personally drove the Queen to the outskirts of Paris, where they all climbed into the berline. There Fersen left them and Marie Antoinette took over. The coach soon slowed to a leisurely minimum speed. They began to fall behind schedule and thus missed the cavalry detachments which were to provide protection in each town. The Queen and King stuck their heads out the windows as they rolled through hamlets. They were recognized. They greeted their subjects with waves. The escape turned into a theatrical royal progress, while the day slipped by into darkness. Around midnight, as they rolled out of a small place called Sainte-Menehould, the local municipal council, controlled by radicals, called an emergency meeting and decided to send their postman, a Monsieur Drouet, on to the next town by fast horse. There he overtook the royal coach, stirred up some sleeping citizens to block the bridge leading out of Varennes, and forced the royal family to climb down from their berline. The border and freedom were only a few kilometres away. They were quickly surrounded by a growing crowd of ordinary citizens, hostile, admiring, curious. The mayor, a local tradesman, pushed through the melee and invited them to take refuge in his house. Having got them there, he was overwhelmed by the presence in his tiny living room of all four Bourbons. He didn't know whether to abase himself or arrest them. And so he did neither. Outside the confusion was growing. The postman was waking every radical in town and posting them around the berline or on the flimsy barricade blocking the bridge. Suddenly one of the lost cavalry escorts rode into town and forced its way through to the mayor's house. Their commanding officer informed the royal family that, provided they left immediately, it would be possible to fight their way out. It was clear that if they stayed, captivity would be the best they could hope for. Given the relationship between the weak King and his strong-willed wife, the decision was hers. In this astonishingly clear existential moment, Marie Antoinette found herself unable to tell the difference between reality and appearances. Rather than risk a real action which could save the lives of her family, she withdrew into her self-image of the divinely appointed monarch against whom no one could act. She chose to ignore reality and to continue her established role. Outside the radicals were fraternizing with the King's cavalry. Within the hour his soldiers had changed sides. All was lost. The Queen's farce was over. *** To understand how revolutionary an approach to power the Queen's had been, we need only look back a little over a century to the middle of the 1600s when the idea of a powerful woman was even less acceptable. Marie de Medicis, widow of Henri IV and Queen of France, had the same intellectual limitations as Marie Antoinette. Worse, she was highly emotional· and very fat. Twice she was imprisoned. Twice she escaped, but not by dressing herself up in a pretended disguise and parading in full daylight across France. Instead, she wore only essentials and scaled down palace walls from upper floors in the dark of night, hiked through forests and mud and waded across dangerous rivers. The difference between the two queens was that, although Marie de Medicis saw her position as a privilege, she understood that it was dependent on her ability to assume the attached responsibilities. Even those queens and kings who had no intention of doing good understood that they had a job which involved real activity. What made Marie Antoinette so modern was that she consecrated the division between power and fame. Until then the latter had been not so much wed to as bred from the former. Whoever had power, whether king or duke, pope or bishop, automatically had fame. At its worst this was the characteristic of a society in which the have-nots envy those who have. But it was also the manifestation of a general human need to imagine ourselves as taller, stronger, richer, better lovers or more important than we are. This has less to do with envy than with a need to dream. And that need must be focused on dreams which have been realized or at least appear to have been. Of course, kings were never as wise, strong, beautiful or potent as fame described them, but the mystery surrounding a monarch made up for most personal limitations. To the degree that popular illusions were actually betrayed by cruelty or poor leadership or degeneracy, these men of power simply became the dark shadows of the public's imagination. And if the king was uninspiring. they could always focus on the court. Life in the courts of Europe was. by all accounts. detestable. These were places filled with ,hypocrisy and ambition. Saint-Simon and Casanova chronicled the machinations in their diaries and memoirs. Swift railed against the cabals of Queen Anne's acolytes. Moliere ridiculed the courtier's life. In the shadows of monarchs. men whose talents lay in currying favour invariably rose. A royal court also included a full cast of mythological figures -- courageous knights. beautiful and pure virgin princesses, wise counsellors. poets. artists. the finest cooks. the finest horsemen and, of course. actresses. schemers, prelates. social climbers and reformers. There was something for the imagination of every citizen -- good roles and evil roles. Even the most banal orgasm could take on a certain importance. thanks to titles and reputations but. above all. because this celebrity grew out of legitimate power. Court gazettes were the People, Paris-Match, Der Spiegel of their day and they spread the details of court life throughout the population. By the second half of the eighteenth century, however, Thomas Jefferson, American ambassador in Paris, was able to look at Marie Antoinette with a clarity which would have been impossible only a few years before, when the vapours of royal mythology still clouded everyone's vision: "Some smartness of fancy, but no sound sense, was proud, disdainful of restraint, indignant at all obstacles to her will, eager in the pursuit of pleasure, and firm enough to hold to her desires, or perish in their wreck." [1] But surely this is the description of some Hollywood star, Faye Dunaway, for example." Beset by rumors of being impossible, she is sticking to her self-image of a star on a grand scale." [2] Or of Madonna, alternately swathed in silk or arching a bared mount of Venus towards the camera. Or of this century's greatest star, Wallis Simpson, Duchess of Windsor, who was able to take hold of the last important king in the West and turn him into something resembling Louis XVI in a pink wig, fleeing endlessly about the world as if In a lumbering berline with too much luggage. Mrs. Simpson confirmed that fame in the twentieth century had been surgically separated from responsibility. Between Marie Antoinette's innovation and Mrs. Simpson's demonstration of perfect modern stardom. there was a century and a half of confusion while the kings and their courts disintegrated. The new rational society abandoned fame as a social and human weakness unworthy of attention. But to abandon is to unleash and stardom immediately began to take on a momentum of its own. What had seemed at first to be a sensible division between responsibility and adulation was quickly deformed. Fame, by definition, occupies the public stage. It therefore could not help but come between the citizen and those who held public responsibilities. In the process it splintered into three broad categories. There was the Heroic, which at first seemed to be a natural descendant of the old royal stardom because it benefitted the new. breed of dictators, revolutionaries, soldiers and politicians. In reality this Napoleonic fame had to do with individualism gone wrong and it evolved quite naturally into a variety of modem Heroes from Hitler and tennis stars to terrorists and Olympic medallists. The second category involved the vulgar fame which had surrounded the demimondaines, actors, gamblers and other marginal courtiers of the old regimes. This has expanded effortlessly to produce our grab bag of contemporary celebrities, including again the sports stars, but also the actors, the aimless rich, the fashionable criminals, the money manipulators -- in fact anyone who can momentarily catch society's attention. Finally, the remaining segment of fame went to the philosophers, poets and the newly arrived novelists -- that is, to the messengers of reason who had effectively destroyed the power of God and his churches, along with that of the absolute monarchs and their aristocracies. The new breed of soldiers, dictators, revolutionaries and politicians benefitted from these deaths, but they did not themselves do the killing. The actual beheading of kings and restructuring of governments were secondary events in comparison to the undermining of the population's belief in and their acceptance of the rights of church and monarchy. The messengers of reason had devoted themselves throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries to questioning and attacking this power. More important still, they imagined the alternatives. From the early eighteenth century to the middle of the nineteenth, they were busy inventing the phrases, the arguments, the very words necessary to describe an alternate society. It is not surprising, therefore, that the single most famous man of his time was Voltaire. No king or queen or minister, let alone any soldier or actor, was as well known as this little man with a sharp tongue and no teeth. And with the sole exception of Napoleon, the most famous figures of the nineteenth century were men like Byron, Goethe, Tolstoy, Hugo and Balzac. Napoleon, the original Hero, dominated the Western imagination for the first twenty years of the century, and in the process seduced the two most famous writers of his time -- Byron indirectly and Goethe in a single conversation on October 2, 1808. The Emperor had just conquered Prussia and, in a world of romantic symbols, had carried off the sword of Frederick. the Great. Now, at the height of his glory, he had summoned the princes of Europe to Erfurt to witness his seduction of the Russian Czar. In the midst of it all, he invited Goethe to breakfast. Napoleon sat and ate. The writer, along with Talleyrand and various generals, stood. Later, outside, Goethe refused to discuss what had been said, as if to indicate that it would have been beneath either of them to repeat the contents of their conversation. In an atmosphere of rising German nationalism, Goethe's silence was taken as a consecration of the Heroic sword by the romantic pen. The two great men had had a private conversation. That fact alone constituted instant mythology. In any case, Talleyrand could be counted on to leak the useful phrases. For example, the Emperor had apparently stopped his military and political discussions with government leaders in order to insist that he had read Goethe's novel, The Sorrows of Young Werther, seven times. He then offered the author a detailed literary criticism of the book. This encounter seemed to reconfirm the importance of the word in a world in which a visitor from the moon would have guessed that the sword reigned supreme. In reality it was an early warning that the writer's use of fame to influence power was going to be reduced to mere notoriety. The new military and political Heroes were going to take over the job of feeding the citizen with dreams. From the Napoleonic era on, the structures of the new society began slowly to fence writers in. The experts were gaining power and they looked upon these messengers of reason with ambivalence. It was thanks to the writers, after all, that mere managers were now in charge. On the other hand, those managers could hardly forget that the written word had. destroyed their predecessors. The rising systems inevitably came between the writers' fame and their freedom to use it in the real world. By the end of the nineteenth century, that fame was being redefined as notoriety or celebrity and the writers were withdrawing to a marginal position as specialists themselves or as notoriously unbalanced outsiders with a faculty for criticism of the society in which they hardly participated. And so while Voltaire was the most famous man of the eighteenth century, the most famous of the twentieth is Mickey Mouse. Even in Shaoshan, Mao Tse-tung's hometown, souvenir stands sell Mao and Mickey buttons side by side. Fame, celebrity and stardom have become the daily bread of the late twentieth century. We dismiss them as sources of superficial distraction while courting them assiduously as the keys to success and power. This phenomenon has grown to the point at which it has now gone full circle -- back to the essential role which fame played in the era of absolute monarchs. The difference is that fame was then limited to functional categories. Today it is open ended and is used as much to shield the activities of the system as it is to subvert it. Perhaps most astonishing, in our vain search for rational alternatives to the rational impasse, it is the stars who are providing one of the few salable options. That in itself indicates just how badly the system has stumbled. *** Never have public power and fame been so officially divorced from each other as they are today. This separation was intended to be a healthy advance proper to democracies. It is hard not to agree that the wielders of political and economic power should be no more than that. They may have money, expertise or responsibilities, but they should have none of the old trappings and adulation which were once their unwarranted rewards. Anyway, they now tend to be narrow, boring people who don't deserve to be the focus of our fantasies and dreams. In the early 1950s, however, C. Wright Mills began writing about a new class which consisted entirely of famous people: "But what are the celebrities? The celebrities are the Names that need no further identification." [3] These people seemed to have fame without power. They certainly had it without responsibility. Mills had correctly identified the phenomenon, but he did not identify the role this class would soon play. All he noted was that the new fame of the celebrities served to disguise the new anonymity of those who held real power. Was this class a creation of the population at large and made necessary by boredom in the absence of a royal court? Did the populace want to be distracted from its frustration at no longer understanding the power systems over which it theoretically had greater control than ever before in history? Or was it those now holding power who encouraged the growth of the celebrity class as a sort of magician's trick, in which the public's eyes are held mesmerized by the flashing of silk handkerchiefs, while the white pigeon of real power is slipped on and off stage? Whatever the explanation, our rational, secular societies found it necessary to invent not only Heroes who undermine and destroy us, but celebrities and stars in such massive quantities that they obscure the meaning and purpose of everything we theoretically believe in. That the imaginary exploits of the stars should become our civilization's source of mythology is at first incomprehensible. That they should be seriously treated as offering social direction is a form of dark parody. And that they should become more popular than those who hold public responsibilities automatically changes the profile of those who will seek public office. Not since the emperor Nero wove acting, sports and political power into one disastrous formula by competing and winning at Olympus in both chariot racing and musical recital has the superficial been so profoundly confused with the public interest. The result has been the compounding of our civilization's confused sense of direction. Devotion to rational structures and to the conviction that they automatically contain a worthy direction has left us as incapacitated by the rise of the stars as we were by the rise of the Hero. In attempts to give some meaning to the stars and their fame, we have taken to celebrating competition as a self-evident value. Or we carefully attribute mythological values where none exist. Or we measure the popularity of individuals, as if measurement conveyed value and was somehow related to the democratic process. Most peculiar of all, we assign a complex, internal class rating to the world of the stars, thus conforming to the old belief that any group which has internal standards is by definition real. Finally, we attribute so many real characteristics to their perfectly imaginary world that we begin to believe they are themselves real. It is hardly surprising that those who seek political power imitate the stars. Either that, or the machinery of public notoriety will give power to the stars themselves. *** Among the first to point out the West's growing cult of competition was Learned Hand. In 1922 he warned the students of Bryn Mawr College:
Somehow, we have convinced ourselves that to be the best is to be something. The fastest runner. The greatest inventor. The best high C. The most beers in a half hour. The best chess player. The skater who turns the most times while in the air. The highest marks at school. At university. At dart throwing. The term excellence is used as if we were seeking content, when above all we seek a measurable result: a classification system or class system, with a king of the best at the top. How fast this phenomenon has been growing can be seen in C. Wright Mills's words, written thirty years after Hand's:
The theory is that competition draws each individual along, bringing out of him or her the best he or she has to offer. Competition and the resulting fame are thought to be among the great achievements of our rational meritocracy. They promise both self-improvement and participation. The reality is almost the opposite. In a world devoted to measuring the best, most of us aren't even in the competition. Human dignity being what it is, we eliminate ourselves from the competition in order to avoid giving other people the power to eliminate us. Not only does a society obsessed by competition not draw people out, it actually encourages them to hide what talents they have, by convincing them that they are insufficient. The common complaint that we have become spectator societies is the direct result of an overemphasis on competition. The whole area of amateur sports has become symptomatic of the competitive atmosphere. The athletes are subject to unbearable pressures and lead abnormal lives which require everything from shaved bodies and forced diets to steroids. The whole process is tarred by a nationalism so cheap that it should more accurately be called jingoism. As the runner Bruce Kidd pointed out at the inquiry into Ben Johnson's illegal use of steroids, the various government-financing programs for amateur athletes turn them into professionals and force them to resort to drugs in order to keep on the road to stardom. What follows, if they are successful, is the commercialization of that stardom through corporate endorsements. And yet the phenomenon still has more to do with jingoism than with money. After all, the Communist countries were the leaders in this process. What we have been witnessing is the growth of perfectly innocent, even banal, physical pastimes into something which makes governments, nations and international communications systems vibrate with excitement. Clearly what excites them is not sportsmanship, widely based participation or a profound or sustained interest in how many millimetres higher the high-jump bar has moved. These millimetres will be forgotten by most people within minutes of the end of the event. Few spectators will even register the figures when they are announced. Rather they are attracted by the event's ability to produce bevies of immediate stars who are tied to facile national emotions. These stars become not role models for the young -- few would pretend they could ever jump so high -- but dream models. They become the modern knights of the Round Table. The confusion in both the public's and the competitors' minds as to what is happening on the field can be seen in the gradual adoption by these stars of military and political mannerisms. Witness, for example, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, two black American medal winners in the 1968 Olympics. Up on the podium, with their national anthem playing and the crowd applauding, they suddenly raised their clenched, black-gloved fists on behalf of the militant Black Power movement in the United States. They were suspended from the games, but almost immediately this most aggressive of political and military gestures seemed completely at home on the sports field. Every overexcited tennis star was soon throwing up one or two clenched fists and emitting animallike shouts of victory whenever he or she hit the ball well. Witness also Sylvester Stallone playing the boxer Rocky Balboa for the first time in 1976 and mimicking this gesture to great commercial effect at the same time that it was catching on as a symbol of the antiapartheid movement. The raised arm with clenched fist has always been a symbol of violent combat. It carries a mixed meaning of victory and of defiance in defeat. It entered our conscious memory via two concurrent phenomena: the Roman legions whose raised open hand was later adopted by the Fascists and the Nazis; and the underclass of gladiators in the Circus addressing Caesar -- "Those who are about to die salute you." The first hint of how this salute would be transformed during the Age of Reason came in Michelangelo's Sistine Chapel. We see God creating the stars and the planets, his arm raised and an index finger pointed aggressively with terrifying power. The finger, the arm, God's face, all are charged with energy and a kind of anger, as if lightning is about to flash out from beneath his fingernail. Two frescoes down, God is busy creating man. Again, the arm is raised with enormous energy. His finger touches that of Adam, who 'is so passive and groggy that he has to support his own arm on his knee to keep his receiving linger in place. On the end wall Christ is dealing with the responsibilities of Judgment Day. The Saviour, who apparently had a weight-lifting background, has raised his arm above the saints and the assembled multitudes -- not in calm illumination or Solomonic wisdom -- but with threatening force, as if a single sweep of his hand will send everyone packing to hell. What makes these images so new is precisely this personalized energy and anger. The Holy Trinity is no longer raising its arm as an abstract symbol of authority. This is God as man- God the modern individual. And while such realism made him look terrifying, it also showed him in a fatally weakened form. If all God used to create man was physical energy, then man could have done it himself with the help of a few afternoons in the gym, an army to back him up, some ideology for comfort and a good PR campaign to drown out awkward questions. This same gesture of individual arm-raising superiority entered popular mythology with David's painting Le Serment des Horaces in 1785. He portrayed three muscular Roman boys with their arms raised in what would eventually become the Nazi salute. Four years later the French Revolution got seriously under way when the legislators revolted against their king. David immediately immortalized them in the Serment de Jeu de Paume and incorporated the Horatii boys' republican gesture. This monumental unfinished picture was much copied and spread the notion that men showed their freedom by standing together in groups with their arms raised in joy and rebellion. But these were not the gestures of individuals. Nor was individualism being celebrated in David's endless portraits of Napoleon, who apparently spent his waking hours with one arm in the air and the other in the breast of his jacket. The emergence of the ordinary citizen as an individual with his fist held up in defiance came in 1814, when Goya painted the massacre of simple Spanish nationalists by Napoleonic troops in Madrid in his May 3, 1808. This is not only the essential modern painting. It is the essential statement of modern man's view of himself. And it had the same electrifying effect on the Western imagination as Picasso's Guernica did more than a century later. On the right Goya placed the firing squad, rifles aimed, caught in the image a second before the triggers are pulled. On the left are the blood-soaked bodies of those already executed. In the centre, before the rifles, is a group of men, each trying to deal with the last second of his life. Four are painted in great detail. The dominant figure has both arms up in a gesture of acceptance and defiance. He is half a classical religious martyr and half the modern revolutionary individual. Most revolutionary, however, are the other three condemned men, pressed one behind the other. At the front there is a priest, bowed over, his hands clasped desperately in prayer. Behind and above him is a man staring straight out at the rifle barrels with his left arm in a tensed, upward motion, the fist clenched in fear and anger. Behind him is the third with his right hand clenched and raised in unambiguous defiance. This is the birth of the man-as-god image. [6] From that moment the individual increasingly assumed a triumphalist public attitude, which usually ran ahead of his real accomplishments. These images became weapons in the struggle for further advances against arbitrary authority. Delacroix seized the revolution of 1830 as inspiration for his Liberty Guiding the People. [7] There on the barricades, leading the citizenry, is an Heroic woman with the flag raised in one hand and a rifle in the other. By 1836 in La Marseillaise -- Rude's bas-relief on the Arc de Triomphe -- this same symbol of the individual's power had become more ferocious than Michelangelo's God would ever have dared to be. Her shout and her extended arms, one straight up and the other bent upwards with force, are filled with violence. Lenin was quite naturally portrayed in similar stances, although with the cooler, more abstract air of an intellectual in a middleclass suit. And then the Fascists and the Nazis officially adopted the gesture, throwing into doubt four centuries of the individual's iconography. It wasn't until 1937 and Picasso's Guernica that this doubt was clearly portrayed. There, on the right side of the catastrophic violence, is a woman raising both arms in imitation of the central figure in Goya's May 3, 1808. She is screaming. There is anger and defiance, but also fear and confusion. A great painter Just couldn't help noticing that the man-god wasn't doing quite as well as his triumphal imagery had promised, Out in the real world, savage Heroes were parading around with their arms held high, And the stars had already begun both their ascent and their coopting of the free man's imagery. Curiously enough, most people feigned surprise at the raised fists of the two black medal winners in the 1968 Olympics, And yet, the idea that a sports figure should raise an arm on behalf of a cause lasted scarcely a day, Soon everyone was doing it on behalf of themselves -- competitors, winners, Heroes, stars, War cries came next, Suddenly, the entire military and nationalist vocabulary was wide open for any use. Competition became a metaphor for violence and war. At Wimbledon in 1987 Jimmy Connors could be seen with one arm raised.straight up, holding the tennis racket like a rifle or a flag, and the other arm in a tensed upward motion with the fist clenched, He was shouting. The various, admiring newspaper headlines included "CONNORS IN FULL CRY BATTLES BACK TO VICTORY." [8] His attitude and position is an exact imitation of Rude's Marseillaise. Star tennis matches everywhere are now advertised as "a battle to the finish" or "a match of the titans," Even the most staid of sports have given in to military symbolism, At the end of the American PGA golf tournament in 1989, both the male winner -- Curtis Strange -- and the female -- Laura Davies -- had their clenched fists in the air." Guts, it's something you're born with," Mr. Strange declared to explain his success. [9] Tennis, however, is the most interesting of the competitive sports, first because it turns on the proverbial two-man "combat," and second, because it is a middle-class sport. The Orwellian prophesy of the lumpen proletariat in 1984 transferring their political frustrations to the football field comes to mind, But the stands at Flushing, Wimbledon and the Paris Open are filled with company presidents, politicians, the rich and the famous. Those not there in person are glued to their television sets. There is occasional light disapproval of a player's "bad behaviour," But in general this audience loves the raised fists, the war cries, the battle leaps. That is what they come for. Roland Barthes once wrote of the mythological role that professional wrestling plays for part of the population. Tennis has become the professional wrestling of the middle classes. It does not matter that unlike wrestling, the matches are not fixed. "Used well," Aldous Huxley wrote, "[sport] can teach endurance and courage, a sense of fair play and a respect for rules, coordinated effort and the subordination of personal interests to those of the group. Used badly, it can encourage personal vanity and group vanity, greedy desire for victory and hatred of rivals, an intolerant esprit de corps and contempt for people." [10] In other words, the line between physical exercise and war is erased. By 1974 the violence in Canadian hockey was so out of hand that Toronto lawyer William McMurtry was asked to head a governmental inquiry into its causes. During the hearings, e questioned Clarence Campbell, then president of the National Hockey League, which also controls the amateur leagues and, of course, has an enormous influence on the young, for this is the great national sport. When asked to define the purpose of the NHL, Mr. Campbell was remarkably honest; but then he belonged to an older generation, not trained in the technique of managing information. "It is the business of conducting the sport in a manner that will induce or be conducive to the support of it at the box office.... Show business, we are in the entertainment business and that can never be ignored. We must put on a spectacle that will attract people." [11] Hollywood has produced a constant flood of sports films illustrating the spirit of our times. They emphasize untrained, undersize, underprivileged Heroes who overcome all barriers to become champions. Inevitably, in their moment of triumph, they raise a clenched fist. The background music comes in the style that Beethoven created for Napoleon. The most surprising of these film Heroes is Sylvester Stallone. He alternates between portraying underdog sports figures and underdog military figures. From a dramatic point of view, there is no difference. By choosing sports with intense physical contact, such as boxing, Stallone further confuses the two areas. In fact, it is unlikely that Jimmy Connors or other sports stars have been consciously copying Goya or Rude. If there is any image locked in their imagination, it is probably that of Stallone as Rocky Balboa raising his arms in triumph. Rocky's movements are those of a High Renaissance figure -- God as portrayed by Michelangelo. Stallone has explained that he studies the paintings of the Renaissance in order to capture these movements. In other words, what began as the raised arm of God, then of kings, only to be stolen by the citizenry as a symbol of its freedom and individualism, from whom it was snatched by the usurping Heroes, has been stolen again, this time by the stars, who use it as a symbol of their Godlike role. What is it that links Sylvester Stallone, the Olympic movement, non-Olympic sports, the desperate need of everything second-rate to call itself world class, and the organization of most human activities into measurable races? Competition. What matters is the fact that we compete, not why we do so. The resulting champions will be our stars and give the impression that they are leading us somewhere. This allows the technocratic classes -- particularly in business -- to enshrine the act of competition as the religion of individualism, while avoiding more complicated questions - such as long-term commitments or social responsibility. Every MBA is able to see himself as a champion player in some Olympic sport or as a star who always comes through in his own movie. for example, the Lannick Group, an executive recruiting firm, runs a glossy ad headlined:
The ad is illustrated with a mass of suited businessmen, carrying briefcases, leaping like a school of salmon up a raging torrent. The recruiters at Lannick obviously don't fish or they would have realized that salmon fight their way up rivers because of unconscious genetic conformism. And they do so in order to lay their eggs. Most then die. *** In some ways we have been forced to believe that the stars represent something, because the rational structures, with their enormous accumulations of power, produce no mythology. It is left to the celebrities to provide the aura for our everyday life. This food for the imagination has to include grandeur, strength and success but also failure and suffering -- in other words, the properties of prerational royal leadership. Everything about the king was widely known. His mistresses, his sexual prowess or problems, his obsessions, his tastes, what he ate, how he spent his days -- all were discussed and debated. The king embodied power, but also suffering; an inevitable combination in a Christian society and one from which post-Christian societies have not escaped. At the heart of the star's reputation there is always, therefore, tragic weakness. When, in 1988, the details of John Lennon's life were revealed in a long biography, general delight could be felt throughout the West. His loneliness, drug problems and impotency were examined and debated, in search of the truth. [13] That he remained the most famous of the Beatles was partly due to his talent but largely to his fleeing from the public scene to hide himself. Eventually it was tied to his being assassinated. Late in his career he had laid out his Christ role with various gestures, including lyrics which declared that "they" were going to "crucify" him. Great flaws and suffering are essential to the ideal star, but the highest level is inevitably reserved for the martyrs. Monroe, Dean and Lennon are there by virtue of this ultimate act. Dalida, the French singer-star killed herself in 1987, after failing in an earlier attempt. She had already buried three husbands, each of whom had killed himself more or less for her. Her death came up first on all the news broadcasts and the leading politicians of the day went to her funeral. The citizen was therefore obliged to consider this event seriously. She had said, "I serve a minor art, but it is nevertheless a servitude which implies going to the end of oneself." Both the Socialist President of the Republic and the Conservative Prime Minister had been happy to be photographed with her on their arm. A friend of Dalida's was widely quoted after her death as saying: "Far into the night, she confided in me her fascination for the void of nothingness." [14] Not all the star mythology rises out of the martyred Christ tradition. Ralph Lauren, the fashion designer, has built a commercial empire on the premise that he sells class and leadership. His flagship shop in New York has been decorated to resemble the mansion of a rich man. A false family crest has been engraved on the street door. The clothes themselves neither shock nor offer beauty. They promise upper-middle-class respectability. The ads portray polo grounds, shooting parties and country weekends. This predictable marketing technique becomes interesting when third parties begin to treat it all as truth. In 1987, for example, Esquire magazine put Lauren on their cover. The theme was contemporary leadership. To help sell the issue they reproduced the cover in a full-page New York Times ad. The photograph shows Lauren in denim uniform, with semibomber jacket. One leg is raised up on an out-of-sight rock or chair. A thumb is hooked confidently in a pocket. The U.S. military cap on his head has gold braid. His eyes, behind dark glasses, stare straight at you and there is the cool smile of a commander on his face. The iconography is halfway between Douglas MacArthur and a navy fighter pilot. The headline is:
Beneath, they have reproduced his handwritten message:
Beneath that, the magazine has printed its own message: LEADERSHIP ATTRACTS LEADERSHIP. LEADERS ARE THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN SUCCESS AND MEDIOCRITY. WHERE DO YOU FIND THEM? IN THE ONE PLACE WHERE STYLE AND SUBSTANCE MEET. IN ESQUIRE. [15] The healthy reaction to this would be a knowing smile, accompanied by the reflection that Lauren does good PR. But in the back of one's mind is the real image of an American B- movie actor as president. The point is not that the stars might take power, but that there has been a divorce of real power from its presentation. If Lauren were any of the things he is dressed up to resemble, then his words would be real, whatever we thought of them. But he is not a leader. He does not, as far as we know, have vision or conviction. Nor does he inspire power and energy. What he does do is successfully sell clothes on the basis of false snobbery." So the world has come down to this," Joseph Roth wrote, "that it admired and reverenced a dressmaker!" [16] Such mythomania is by no means limited to fashion designers. Take the most popular American talk-show host, Oprah Winfrey. In a 1989 cover story in the New York Times Magazine, this young woman, who is watched every day by eleven to sixteen million people, was quoted as saying:
The journalist writing this profile does express incredulity as best she can, but the social circumstances don't really permit incredulity, any more than the French opponents of Napoleon were able to express clearly their reasons. Self-confidence and the winds of the time ride in Winfrey's favour. She and Lauren are insignificant in comparison to the celebrity martyrs who neither claim nor propose anything, but have simply been themselves. Elvis Presley has taken on a power of immortality which rivals that of stuffed Heroes like Lenin. The Presley house -- an imitation antebellum manor with columns, crystal chandeliers and gilded mirrors -- has assumed all the forms of a Christian place of pilgrimage. [18] Half a million people come every year to Graceland. More than visit Washington's Mount Vernon or Jefferson's Monticello. Like Saint Francis's cloak or Napoleon's hats, Elvis's jumpsuits are modeled on mannequins escalating in size to illustrate his tragic decline into obesity and despair. His wedding clothes are there, marking the moment when every adoring girl lost him, and conversely, the moment when his calvary began. His five-foot wedding cake sits like a monument to the death of several million romantic dreams. Behind the house, in Meditation Garden, there is his grave at which to worship. This disappearance of the body into the ground -- as opposed to being stuffed and on display -- has actually strengthened his myth. The supernatural sightings of Elvis, as if be bad risen from the dead, continue to increase. Not many stars can rise to the religious level of incarnating mythology. Most, like Lauren and Winfrey, must state their message, thus moving closer to the writers, philosophers and politicians. The singer David Bowie, for example, offered moral and philosophical direction in a 1987 interview:
Most of those who actually bold power have never read Nietzsche and have no idea bow to say anything sensible about drugs. But that merely accentuates bow divided power and fame have become. And most stars haven't read Nietzsche either. Their mythological messages are aimlessly created by the vagaries of personal taste and commercial opportunity. The rock star George Michael slips from music called "I Want Your Sex" to music called "Faith." Given time, be will probably work his way through every social and moral position, from human rights to reincarnation. One practical effect of a popular mythology dominated by stars is that civilization finds it increasingly difficult to express and maintain any prolonged moral judgment. Only short- lived moral impulses seem possible. They tend to appear suddenly, urgently, command our attention and then disappear just as suddenly. The result is not fewer but more moral convictions. They are well intentioned and rootless and so are washed away by the next wave of concern or indignation. The practical effect is to relativize all public events and questions of principle. In a single issue of a magazine, for example, it is possible to publicize, as if their fame alone made them compatible, any combination of real and star personalities. The June 3, 1988, issue of Paris-Match is not unusual. [20] It begins with a meeting between the Pope and a well-known writer, Maria-Antonietta Macciocchi, who had just given up Communism for the Church. She writes: "I had met Mao, De Gaulle, Ho Chi Minh, and once, deep inside Qum, the holy city of Iran, I was received by the terrible Khomeini. But I had never been so disturbed [as by the Pope)." This article was followed by a photo-interview with the latest sex starlet, Beatrice Dalle, who was shown both nude and half dressed, tucked into the corner of a room, mouth open and eyes orgasmic, as if waiting to be leapt upon. She is quoted saying such things as: "Me scandalous? Never'" Or, "They always offer me roles as a sex animal and yet I am the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary." This was followed by an interview with George Michael:
The family celebration of Jacqueline Kennedy's daughter's law degree was next, offering a brief glimpse of the mythological widow. After Jackie came Jean-Marie Le Pen, leader of the extreme right wing in France. He was then locked in a political battle for control of Marseille. His popularity, as always, was dependent on his ability to fan racist flames over the number of Third World immigrants in the city. But his large and engaging smile was indistinguishable from that of Mrs. Kennedy, George Michael, Beatrice Dalle or indeed the Pope, whose second appearance in that issue had to do with his trip to South America. *** Fame, not popularity, is central to the measurement of stardom. The famous belong together -- rock stars, popes, racists and saints. If their position cannot be measured by the disembodied means of competition, it can be gauged by weighing their emotional impact on the public. In that sense fame has become the ultimate competition. This does not resemble winning elections, because that would imply some sort of resulting responsibility. Notoriety must be supported by the bearer but does not of itself involve any obligation. The astonishing thing, indeed, is just how forgotten or ignored the individuals who wield real power, well or badly, now are. In the wake of the first Ethiopian famine, a national poll asked French teenagers to name the people who had done most to help those in the Third World. [21] Of the twelve names given, seven were stars. And more than 65 percent of those questioned volunteered a star's name. Four of the five most often cited were singers or comedians. The foremost choice, named by 27 percent, was the singer Daniel Balavoine, who had already been killed in a motorcycle accident. Their third choice, the comedian Coluche -- also dead in a motorcycle accident -- was named by 11 percent. The singers France Gall and Bob Geldof came next. The only nonstar at the top was Mother Teresa, named by 15 percent. She, who plays the role of a medieval saint, is a star in the old sense of the word; an accidental leftover from another period of history. Balavoine and Coluche had done more than their share of good works, but what earned them such high ratings was that their deaths made them martyrs of a sort. Martyrs to what? To fame? To youth? It isn't very clear. Meanwhile a mere 3 percent named the Red Cross. Taken all together the money raised by all eight stars, including Mother Teresa and Bob Geldof, does not add up to one day's worth of the help given by the Red Cross. That organization has its flaws, but its low public esteem is the result of being intentionally careful and modest. The Red Cross is not a celebrity. At least, however, it appeared on the list. The Western governments and their ministers, who do not spend nearly enough on aid programs, but who nevertheless spend more than anyone else, were not even mentioned. This deformed scale of fame is now reflected in the amount of money stars make. Forty years ago, the pyramid of high earners would have been little changed from a century before. The landowners and the businessmen -- capitalists, bankers, traders and property developers -- would have been at the top of the list. Today most of the remaining capitalists and the sea of corporate managers are well below the stars. Forbes magazine's study of the top forty earners in the American entertainment business shows that their incomes range from a low of two million dollars to a high of eighty. The top ten each earn more than twenty million dollars a year. Eighteen of the forty are singers, nine are actors, and only six come from television. (Television, being ritualistic, doesn't tend to create freestanding celebrities. Three of the six are talk-show hosts.) And while only one novelist and one director are on the list, there are two cartoonists, three boxers and two out of the nine actors -- Arnold Schwarzenegger and Sylvester Stallone -- made their money by pretending to be boxers or by exhibiting their muscles in one way or another. This is part of the confusion between stardom, competition and the myth of the knight-crusader or duellist. Almost no one in corporate America earns enough to make even the bottom of this list. Many company presidents earn $1 or $2 million. Oprah Winfrey earns $80. Madonna earns $63. With the exception of Chrysler's Lee Iacocca, also a celebrity, almost none makes above $10 million, let alone $20 or $50, in hard cash, although their incomes are heavily padded with such things as stock options. One of the cartoonists on the list is Charles Schultz, who draws Peanuts. His personal annual income is more than $30 million. His personal corporate sales in Japan alone are about $350 million. When in 1987 Frenchwomen were asked to choose three famous women who would make them turn about to stare with admiration if passed in the street, fifty of the sixty-one named were stars. Four were politicians. The Princess of Wales was the only representative of the royal families who once defined the meaning of fame. What's more, she and the politicians were down at the bottom of the list. The stars were all at the top. The actress Catherine Deneuve was mentioned by almost three times more people than the politician Simone Veil, who was then the most famous French female public figure. For the last decade Deneuve has been more convincing as a public role-model-cum-princess than any public figure who actually does something. Mother Teresa didn't make the list. *** The self-generation of internal class distinctions, containing protocol and etiquette, has always been a sign that a newly developed group is becoming part of organized society. The disordered but growing array of stars throughout the Western world were given their social foundation and structure in 1937 when Wallis Simpson, an American double- divorcee and the daughter of a superior boardinghouse keeper, married Edward VIII, the King-Emperor of England, Scotland, Wales, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, India, etc. The resulting and unprecedented scandal threatened the government, forced his abdication and has fed the creation of thousands of books, films, novels and plays. It was not simply that Mrs. Simpson linked America and Europe. Or that her simple family was joined to the best family in the world. Or even that, in popular mythology, this couple represented the victory of romance over rank and obligation. Above all, Mrs. Simpson's conquest abruptly demonstrated that the only thing holding the King back from complete fame was his attachment to the real world. Once that was done away with, he became an autonomous star. He became the man in the world most famous for simply existing as himself. The wanderings of this sad couple from continent to continent and party to party constituted a sort of royal progress of the King and Queen of Stardom. Everywhere they went, they conveyed legitimacy on actors, singers and the nouveaux riches by the simple act of greeting them and then dancing and dining with them -- sharing their lives, in fact. The nouveaux riches, for the first time in history, were seeking social advancement, not through traditional established society but through the new class of stars. It was a fresh direction for new money and one of the signs that the fading royal courts and the rather boring modern ruling class of technocrats had lost their public lustre. If the modern equivalent of a French Collector of Salt Taxes could no longer dream of becoming a duke, received in splendour at court, well then, he'd dream of becoming a star who entertained the Duke and Duchess of Windsor. The enduring impact of the Windsors on the star class and on public mythology was like that of Louis XIV and Queen Victoria on their respective aristocracies and societies. In 1987 the Duchess's jewels were sold at auction by Sotheby's, long after her husband's death and more than a decade after her own disappearance into senility. Bids came in from all the leading celebrities of our day, including Jacqueline Onassis, one of the two most famous women since the Duchess herself. The stars wanted to buy a bit of the legitimacy these pearls and diamonds carried. [22] Valued at $7 million, they sold for $50 million. Elizabeth Taylor bid $623,000 by telephone for a diamond clip of Prince of Wales feathers. The moment it reached her, she went off to Malcolm Forbes's party of the year, with the clip on for everyone to see. Fashion designer Calvin Klein paid $1.3 million for three pieces. He told the press he was going to give them immediately to his wife: "The best presents just happen." Joan Collins was rumoured to have bought a sapphire brooch for $374,000. The publicity-hungry divorce lawyer Marvin Mitchelson paid $605,000 for an amethyst-and-turquoise necklace. He announced this to the press and dedicated his purchase to the memory of his mother. And just in case there was any doubt about whether people were paying for jewels or for souvenirs of legitimacy, a pearl-and-diamond choker, which was announced as imitation jewelry and therefore had no value, sold for $51,000. As for the public - who once lived vicariously through the court gazettes and now followed the lives of the stars -- they were able to participate in the auction thanks to a well-known direct-mail firm, the Franklin Mint, which bid successfully for a bracelet. Its full-page advertisement for the unlimited number of copies they made of this object was dominated by a photo of Mrs. Simpson at her most catlike, along with a superimposed photo of the bracelet. The copy began as follows:
The price for this piece of the Duchess was $195 plus relevant state sales tax. Allowing for inflation, this was probably the price of a decent-size piece of the cross in the nineteenth century. As for the desire of the new rich to become stars rather than aristocrats, this has pushed them to behaviour more ridiculous than the sort of things Moliere and Shakespeare used to mock. The West is now filled with magazines whose only role is to play to their pretentions. Among the fattest, glossiest and most cynical is Town & Country, which feeds the ambitions of the moneyed by asking them to appear in the magazine. This in turn draws in local advertising. These relatively conventional people do not appear on horseback dressed for the hunt or in long dresses beneath their second-rate Monets just to show off their money. Town & Country permits them to appear as stars for whom 'posing in magazines is perfectly normal. The attraction of stardom is so great that the most established among the rich, who may actually belong to the old aristocracy or gentry, cannot resist its attractions. The ruler of the Fiat empire, Gianni Agnelli, as well as his friends, inexplicably seem to feel obliged to give long interviews in which his private life is discussed in detail -- his infidelities, his dreams and his problems with his son. [23] Even violence is not excluded from the celebrity class structure. The crowds applauding outside the courtrooms in which William Kennedy Smith, Michael Milken and Claus von Bulow were tried demonstrate that there is fashionable crime versus unfashionable crime. Fashionable murder versus unfashionable murder. The most interesting practitioner of real violence is the bullfighter. He is free from competition and receives the adulation of the crowd without in any way becoming a star. He fights not another man but an animal. And the purpose of that struggle is not that one will win and the other lose. Bullfighting is neither sport nor theatre. It is a public ceremony that the Aztecs would have understood or the Old Testament Jews or any Christian who can bring himself to admit that his religion is based upon the ritualistic celebration of human sacrifice. The bullfighter is the opposite of an individual, to say nothing of a star. People are interested in stars because on some level they would like to be one. People don't go to bullfights in order to dream of themselves as the conquering toreador. The bullfighter's greatness increases with the degree to which he risks his life while nevertheless mastering the bull. The extent of risk is the degree to which he offers himself in sacrifice on behalf of the crowd. The higher the risk, the finer the ritual he must use. And in surviving, as he usually but not always does, the matador nevertheless offers a blood sacrifice to the people. In almost every civilization the bull rises out of the deep caverns of man's unconscious as a symbol of physical, sexual power. So what the crowd shares, if deprived of the actual death of a man, is the interposed sacrifice of our vital strength, It is a religious ceremony caught in evolution exactly halfway between the original offering up of a man on the altar and the more recent compromise of settling for some bread and wine. At the Feria in Nimes in 1987, Paco Ojeda was given an ear for the particularly brilliant but dangerous way he had dealt with a bull. Ojeda is one of the great matadors of our time -- an emotional figure who can move a crowd in seconds with unexpected actions. A casual observer might think that the crowd was reacting to him as they would to a star. But when the fight in Nimes was over and he began his triumphant walk around the ring, with the ear held up in one hand, someone threw him, among the shower of bouquets, a tiny circle of violets wrapped up tight in two leaves. Ojeda handed the ear to someone else and instead grasped the violets in his hand and held up the delicate spot of blue as he finished his circle, with the crowd on its feet. We are now used to the sports figure throwing up his fist at the first opportunity in an overstated pretense of physical daring. Ojeda, having truly risked his life, withdrew immediately into understatement, almost as if to say that he had given enough. This withdrawal, this modesty, merely increased the passion of the crowd. Interestingly enough, despite their popularity and fame, most bullfighters remain on the edges of society. The common merchants of violence, on the other hand, are often true celebrities. Arms dealers, who used to be kept on the outside, with perhaps the exception of Basil Zaharoff, are now easily swept up by the world of stars. They bring with them a little air of mystery, of state secrets, of exciting corruption at the highest levels. Adnan Khashoggi, the Saudi Arabian dealer, moves from one celebrity party to another, giving interviews on his yacht, plane or in one of his houses. His daughter, Nabila, poses for fashion pictures standing on the wing of his jet. He throws bowling balls for the cameras in his private alley. His conversation slips from descriptions of his next yacht -- "If the Sultan of Brunei buys the Nabila I, ... I'll start building the Nabila II. It will be equipped with a submarine that can hold six people as well as a camera to film the sea bottom. Each cabin will have its own screen" - to future wars and economic' packages which combine schools with tanks - "If the moderates take power in Iran and the result is peace with Iraq, then both nations will need to rebuild. That is a market of 170 billion dollars. If I get a tenth of that market, it'll be 17 billion!" [24] Khashoggi illustrates how star societies remove moral judgment from more than just popular magazines. Even in the real world, all the famous are equal. The drawing cards at fashionable parties in London or New York may well be convicted criminals or people awaiting trial or acquitted. No tennis player, princess or movie star -- not even a boxer -- can rival the celebrity impact of a certain kind of murderer or fraud. Sydney Biddle Barrows, known as the Mayflower Madam, is an example. The product of a good family, she ran a brothel in New York until arrested and tried, with great publicity. Now she lives off her notoriety as a convicted criminal. Michele Sindona, the head of the Banco Ambrosiana, who died mysteriously in jail, was a favourite of Italian society after his bank collapsed and charges swirled around him. So is Licio Gelli, head of the influence-peddling masonic group P2, who escaped from a Swiss jail. The Kray brothers, a gang of professional thieves and killers, had a great vogue in London. In 1989, at the Royal Academy's monumental show celebrating the one-hundredth anniversary of the photograph, in a section called Figures of Style was the actor Michael Caine. Next to him was a portrait of the three Kray brothers. The fashion photographer David Bailey took both photos. The brothers were dressed in white shirts and ties with pocket handkerchiefs. They might have been a rock group were it not for the menacing air, which they consciously offered and Bailey consciously captured. Ronald Biggs, the "great train robber," has been a popular hero from the moment of his extravagant crime. Claus von Bulow, first convicted and then acquitted of attempting to murder his very rich wife, has been an increasingly sought-after guest ever since a warrant was issued for his arrest. Reinaldo Herrera, an editor at Vanity Fair, has said that he relies on von Bulow to create dinner-party chemistry. He dreams of having both Jean Harris and Ivan Boesky as his guests." They would add spice to the evening, because she was convicted of murder and he pleaded guilty to robbing nearly the world. But most normal houses don't have these great names at their fingertips." [25] Adnan Khashoggi's social star seemed to rise after he was arrested in Switzerland and extradited to the United States. He was freed on $10 million bail, obliged to wear an unremovable electronic monitoring bracelet on his wrist and limited to travel in the New York area, at the mercy of hostesses. While he sat in a Swiss jail, his daughter was at a ball given by Baron Hubert von Pantz in Paris. The other guests included the brother of President Mitterrand, the dress designer Enrico Coveri, the father and stepmother of the Princess of Wales, Henry Ford's widow, and Duke and Duchess de la Rochefoucauld and the Prince and Princess von Thurn und Taxis. It is easy to understand the shiver of delight that bored people gain from dining with a well- spoken, well-dressed murderer or thief, but what is the attraction of a miserable fraud artist like Ivan Boesky? Quite simply, stars carry the king's fame without his responsibility. As a result, they don't like authority. So what could be more attractive than someone who has been making a fool of the state structure? The message seems to be that Jean Genet was right -- the greatest good is a free-floating, completed act, unattached to the needs of the public weal. And the greatest act is to kill or rob someone or, failing that, to rob public institutions. This devotion to self-interest defines the modern celebrity. In one of those periodic epic events which mark their times, Princess Gloria von Thurn und Taxis threw a party in June 1986 at home in Bavaria, to celebrate her husband's sixtieth birthday. The Prince, who has since died, was one of the world's richest aristocrats. His party went on for three days of festivities, including a ball for 250. His house is larger than most palaces and is run by several hundred servants in uniforms whose style predates the French Revolution. Gloria, a young woman who loves being a star, chose the eighteenth century as the party's theme. The guest list featured the celebrities of the world, who flew in from all directions. Adnan Khashoggi came dressed as an Oriental prince, his wife as Madame de Pompadour; they were accompanied by a pair of bare-chested Nubian slaves. Malcolm Forbes flew in on his plane -- the Capitalist Tool -- wearing a kilt. Alfred Taubman, a real estate tycoon who, as the owner of Sotheby's, presides over a board of confidence-giving aristocrats, but who personally turned the sale of Wallis Simpson's jewels into a financial and publicity triumph, arrived as a French king. Enrico Coveri, the accessories designer, whom success has turned into a dress designer, came as Don Giovanni. The correspondent for Vanity Fair thought about coming as Voltaire, although he worried that it might be too pretentious. Princess Gloria reassured him: "But that's what the eighteenth century was all about -- pretentiousness." [26] The Princess came as none other than Marie Antoinette. Beyond and above her magnificent dress and two-foot-high pink wig, she wore a pearl tiara which had belonged to, indeed been worn by, Marie Antoinette. But why would one of the richest princesses of our day choose to identify herself with, of all queens, the one who was most hated by her subjects, disliked by most of the aristocracy and in a singularly incompetent manner managed to lose her crown? Princess Gloria had found a guiding light. The last Queen of France was indeed the first modern star. In a sense we have come full circle. The stars appear more real than those individuals who have real power. Those who have power increasingly feel obliged to imitate the stars. To be real is not enough. They must appear to be real. *** Signs of this confusion began in 1956 when a movie actress married a semibankrupt but reigning prince. Monaco could no more have been considered a real place then than now. It was not independent in any political sense except for its right to welcome tax avoiders. Grace Kelly quickly demonstrated that she could turn her husband's principality into a going concern if three aspects of the burgeoning Western star society were linked together: gambling, tax evasion and courtesanage -- which in this case meant that by associating with a famous celebrity you became a star yourself. Courtesanage was her personal contribution and she bolstered it by drawing her friends -- principally singers and actors -- into a revolving court of stars. Thirty years later her two daughters have become the perfect incarnations of second-generation celebrity. They are the combined reflection of an empty title, gambling, movie acting and international money. All four things were in themselves already reflections of a reality. And so the daughters are reflections of reflections. Stephanie, the second daughter, is a sometime swimsuit designer and singer of disco tunes. She paused in the midst ofa 1987 radio interview to reflect upon her duties "in my role as princess and rock star," as if they were one and the same thing. The first act of the stars' reign had begun with the Windsors in 1937. The second opened with the wedding of Grace, the princess-movie queen in 1956. Fifteen hundred journalists covered the event. Grace's wedding dress, with thousands of pearls sewn on the veil, was a creation of MGM Studios' most famous designer. The marriage attracted more international attention than Elizabeth II's coronation three years earlier. (On some level, conscious or nconscious, the tendency of the British royal family to convert themselves into twentieth- century stars probably dates from the Monaco wedding.) Grace and her wedding party sailed across the Atlantic to her wedding. As they steamed into Monaco's harbour, where her mythological prince and the court waited, Grace was placed on the bow of the liner. Then thousands of red and white carnations were showered upon her from the seaplane of Aristotle Onassis, who more or less controlled the local economy. [27] For the next two decades, Grace and Rainier were given more sustained international attention than the royalty of any real country. This attention reflected neither power, title nor blood. They were ideal stars, linking the mythology of the old courts with that of the modern studios. As for Aristotle Onassis, he more than any other illustrated the desire of crude money holders to become stars themselves by grabbing the coattails of those who were already. He was not out to buy respectability or titles or a place at court, but raw fame. He had begun by combining a mistress, Maria Callas, the most famous opera diva of her day, with control of Rainier's toy principality. He then dropped both and moved on to marry the widow of the most famous martyr of the second half of the twentieth century. The Kennedy family provided the third act in the confusing consecration of the star. The young president's term of office seemed to signal a return to the eighteenth-century court system in which power and glamour were combined. But his martyrdom consigned the imagery of Camelot to the domain of the imagination. When Onassis married Mrs. Kennedy, the moral was clear: fame, not power, was the source of modern myth. Twenty-five years after Kennedy was slain in Dallas, his niece, the host of a CBS Television news show, married Arnold Schwarzenegger. A former Mr. Universe and a B- movie star, he is one of the richest and most famous Americans of our time. The bride's maid of honour was King Arthur's daughter. The best man was a weight lifter. The guests, apart from the Kennedys, included NBC anchorman Tom Brokaw, tennis star Arthur Ashe, singer Andy Williams, TV news host-star Barbara Walters and Andy Warhol. That is far closer to the composition of a modern royal wedding than the depasse event organized around Prince Charles and Lady Diana. It was perfectly natural, a year later, that President Bush should summon the image of Conan the Barbarian and The Terminator to the White House in order to name him chairman of the President's Council on Physical Fitness. The screen killer commented: "President Bush is very much committed not only, to have this a kinder and gentler nation, but also a very fit nation." [28] Of course, Schwarzenegger had used steroids to build up his body. *** In such an atmosphere it is hardly surprising that politicians should have begun turning themselves into stars. C. Wright Mills caught the shift long before the trend was clear. He demonstrated the growing confusion between celebrity and image and image and reality by reproducing a 1954 New York Times description of President Eisenhower's weekly television appearance:
The General was on his way to becoming an actor. If this was necessary for the victorious ex-commander of the forces of freedom, then it was essential for an ordinary politician. For example, in 1954, the fixed movie-star smile was only a few years away from becoming the iconic symbol of success. One can easily trace the spread of this affectation from country to country. France, despite its well-established celebrity system, was one of the last to give in. The integrated, almost separate, political elite was partially responsible for the delay. In iconographic terms, the smile for the French was a symbol of intellectual deficiency and freedom from responsibility. Singers and actors smiled. But if a writer or a politician dared to show his teeth, he would not be taken seriously. Examine author photos from before the mid-seventies. In order to hold a pen, you had to keep your lips together. The same was true of election posters. Suddenly, in the late seventies, a few politicians began to clench their teeth in order to bare them by carefully drawing both upper and lower lips back into a fixed position, slightly curved upwards at each end. This awkward expression bore no relationship to personality or policy. But for the cameras it conveyed an image of the star. Overnight the smile became so important that Francois Mitterrand, who had already been in politics for forty years and was then a presidential candidate, had his incisors filed down, thus permitting him to flash his teeth without looking like a vampire. The spread of the smile throughout the democracies was an important sign. The aim of public figures holding power in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries had been to differentiate themselves from the preceding kings and their courts, who had gradually become identified more with their fame than with their power. Kings were glamorous; they smiled. The new rational democrats were sober and they did not smile. Clenched lips were a symbol of their devotion to public service, while the stars inherited the glamour and the public smile of kings. A century and a half later, the people's representatives suddenly seemed to tire of their sober, responsible appearance. And although they still held power, there can be no doubt who they were imitating. Public figures began to embrace all the characteristics of the star, most of which are by definition superficial, if not venal. A few months after the 1984 American presidential election, Geraldine Ferraro, the first and therefore historic woman vice presidential candidate, cashed in on her celebrity through Pepsi-Cola ads. And for the cover of a glossy magazine in 1989, Canadian Finance Minister Michael Wilson posed in a dinner jacket. He was being tickled under the chin by a television personality in a black strapless evening gown. She was lying on a high bench, almost at his shoulder level, with her cleavage aimed at the camera and her lips puckered, as if posing for a Playboy centrefold. This cover story was about what to give people for Christmas. Wilson wanted cognac, a cashmere coat, an expensive pen and a nine-thousand-dollar laptop computer. The article appeared just as he was introducing a new sales tax which would cut seriously into the finances of lower- income citizens. [30] Most Europeans would claim that these are signs of North American decay. In reality they are part of a general evolution which takes different forms in different countries. For example, there is the ascension of the pure star within the hierarchy of general news stories. No country could be more serious about its ideas and political analysis than France, but when four of its stars died in the mid-eighties, each death was treated as an event of primary importance. To be precise, each was the first item on all television and radio news broadcasts. And these were not simply announcements. The national evening news on each channel gave a lengthy analysis of their careers. These included personal statements from the President of the Republic, the Prime Minister and most of the major political leaders of the day. They commented on the national contributions made by the comedian, Coluche, killed on a motorbike in his forties; the impersonator Thierry Le Luron dead of AIDS in his thirties; the singer Dalida a suicide in her fifties; and the actress Simone Signoret dead of cancer after a long career. A decade earlier, the same deaths would have been mentioned last on the news broadcasts, as thirty-second kickers. All four were given privately organized quasi-state funerals. Great war leaders and ex-prime ministers had died during the seventies and eighties, but they were sent off with nothing to match the pomp given Thierry Le Luron at La Madeleine. In the front row were Prime Minister Jacques Chirac, with his wife; the wife of President Mitterrand, the Minister of Culture Francois Leotard and the ex-Prime Minister and party leader Raymond Barre, with his wife. Valery Giscard, the former President of the Republic, was not there, but he wrote a two-page essay on Le Luron for Paris-Match. When the most famous star of the century, Sarah Bernhardt, died in 1923, there had been some front-page articles in the serious press and reports on inside pages over a period of three days. The President of the Republic had his aide-de-camp present a calling card at. the undertakers. Otherwise she was celebrated by the world of actors and playwrights. When Gerard Philipe, perhaps the most important French actor of the forties and fifties, died tragically young, at thirty-seven, in 1959, there were boxes on page one of most papers, referring to articles inside. No elected official commented. When the great singer Edith Piaf died in 1963, the pattern was the same. When Yves Montand, actor and singer, died in 1991, French radio and television news broadcasts were given over in entirety or almost entirely to him. The President, the Prime Minister and all the leaders of the opposition made formal statements. Three of the serious national dailies gave him their entire front page. The other's gave half. Constitutional reform was squeezed to the inside pages. The bombardment of Dubrovnik was eliminated. All but one of the serious weeklies gave him their cover, often including special inserts of thirty to forty pages. [31] This same phenomenon can be seen in Britain through the gradual rise of the stars within the Queen's system of Honours. She distributes these upon the advice of her government. At first glance, this showering of medals and titles on singers, dressmakers and football players seems to show a welcome egalitarianism. But what is the actual purpose of honours? They were designed to reward services to the Crown and subsequently to the state and the public weal. In general this meant rewarding civil or military services. Of course, the rich have always been able to buy themselves some level of honour, either by filling the coffers of a political party or by financing some area of genuine public need, from poorhouses and training centres to concert halls and art galleries. But most stars don't even pretend to have served the public weal. And the responsibility for giving these honours lies with those who hold formal positions of power. They decorate the stars in order to be identified with people more famous and more popular than they themselves are. In that sense the system of honours has been completely deformed, because instead of rewarding services, the established authorities are exploiting the fame of the stars. *** This confusion between reality and fame can be seen in the way news is delivered to the public. The managers of the news distribution systems receive information which can be broken down into three categories. The first consists of the truth as presented by politicians, governments, government departments, private corporations and any other sort of organization or lobby group. Irrespective of their policies or interests, they all present their truth within the framework of contemporary argument. These announcements are constituted either in the context of emotion, because jingoism and motherhood are impervious to argument, or of information, because information consists of facts and facts are the irrefutable basis of truth. There is not much that journalists can do with this rhetoric except run excerpts back-to-back with the equally rhetorical criticisms produced by rival politicians, opposition parties and unions. Faced by such impenetrable informational onslaughts, the public tends to withdraw into the passivity of a receptacle, just as the journalists tend toward the passivity of a conduit. Both are endlessly waiting for practical opportunities to bring the manipulators to ground. Personal scandals are one of the few remaining areas in which this can be done. The journalists must catch the public figure on some minor moral point -- a cabinet minister gets his secretary pregnant, a president accepts diamonds from an emperor-dictator who may also be a cannibal, another president suggests that underlings break into the opposition's headquarters. The citizen can latch onto this concrete scandal in lieu of serious public debate over major issues. The politicians protest that these are minor offenses. But they avoid mentioning their own systematic intellectual dishonesty on what they would consider major matters. The second category of information consists of faits divers -- murders, rapes, assassinations, kidnappings, highjackings, flash floods and ,blizzards. There is no real difference between the old three-alarm-fire story and a coup d'etat. Both turn on immediate, concrete violence. Both make good news because they are easy to describe or show. The difficulty is that they come Without warning and don't last long. Finally, there is news of the celebrities. Celebrities must appear to do something on a regular basis or they may cease to be famous. They are reliable regular suppliers of information and thus of employment for journalists. This favours an increase in the coverage of pure stars, an encouragement for politicians to act like stars and an opening for stars into public life. After all, if appearances are what the news structure needs, the professional stars are professional appearers, while the politicians can never be more than talented amateurs. The combination of these three news categories further confuses the line between responsible public life and stardom. It also encourages politicians and businessmen to present the real world of real events by concentrating on its celebritylike edges. A minister takes a group of journalists off to a mine, for example. He puts on a miner's hat, goes below earth, is filmed and photographed, then reemerges to make a rhetorical statement on mining policy. In other words the minister combines category one -- rational propaganda -- with category three acting in a skit. A mining disaster would be even better for a minister who knows how to take advantage of a category-two faits divers. Flying over forest fires or earthquakes, visiting hospitals filled with victims, going to funerals after disasters -- these are all part of a parabolesque deformation of public affairs in which elected officials act out an imaginary leading role. *** It was only a matter of time before the journalists themselves became stars. For example, all electronic programming -- whether news, public affairs or cultural -- requires a host. The viewer or listener has access to public questions and to public figures only through this intermediary figure. The viewer's loyalty is therefore to the host, not his or her guests. The host was there last week as the people's intermediary. He or she will be there next week, while the interviewee is often limited to a thirty-second clip, Sometimes he has ten minutes. Occasionally fifteen. Exceptionally thirty. These time slots are, of course, gross, not net. They include the host's introduction, questions, comments and conclusion. The most important personality on any electronic media show is, therefore, not the president of the United States. Not the pope. Not even Jane Fonda or Michael Jackson. And if the viewer does not identify principally with that host, well then, he will shortly switch channels in search of another intermediary. The single most important television event of the Bush-Dukakis presidential campaign was not their two-part debate, but Bush's appearance on the CBS Evening News, hosted by Dan Rather. Rather challenged Bush over his involvement in the Iran-Contra affair. The then Vice President refused to deal with the questions. Instead, he attacked Rather, accusing him of dirty tactics. This confrontation revealed nothing about past policy; instead, it was Bush's ability to take on the host which surprised and impressed everyone. Bush managed to do the impossible: he threw doubt on the host's motives and competence. The ability to tarnish an established star proved that he had the makings of a star himself. Rather protested afterwards that the personality clash had been irrelevant; what mattered was the Vice President's refusal to answer his questions. But his protests rang hollow because he himself is one of the leading beneficiaries of a system that rewards celebrity over content. All the same, television public affairs programming does allow the public to see men of power, to hear them reply under questioning, to witness company presidents and politicians being investigated. But what. is the meaning of these questions and investigations if we have now come full circle, back to the eighteenth-century confusion of fame with power, so that all we can see is an illusion of reality? Most television examinations of public affairs, for example, are reduced to parables, in a curious continuation of the Christian tradition. The Christian parable, however, attempted to effect social change by questioning and disturbing. The television parable is self- fulfilling and reassuring. Television interviews of public persons are little different from those with Madonna or Catherine Deneuve. The politician is examined through personal strengths and flaws. Of course, serious problems such as the West Bank, Lebanon, acid rain or arms control are repeatedly invoked, but in an unsustained manner, as if names were being dropped. This is the natural product of a system which has no faculty for continuity beyond personality. As a result the celebrity, Dan Rather, failed in his attempt to sustain an argument on a concrete subject when the public person, George Bush, responded in the mode of a star by sticking to personality. Politicians often charge that the media refuse to deal with questions seriously. It is clear that the politicians have learned their lesson from the media. Now they themselves refuse. *** During the 1950s and 60s, years of relative optimism, there was a great movement of technocrats towards politics in the belief that society needed to unite administration and political leadership in rational hands. One after another, men and women like Wilson, Trudeau, Heath, Carter, Giscard, Schmidt, Chirac and Thatcher won power. This was apparently the apotheosis of rational man, who had ceased serving outmoded politicians and himself become the new leader. Within a few years most of them were considered failures. Some were defeated because they simply could not communicate. The few who survived did so on the strength of their personalities. The subsequent counterwave of politicians did not question or reject the complex rational structures. They simply tried to instill confidence by proposing painfully simple solutions. This rise of mediocrity to the level of a public virtue produced leaders who were not intelligent but who had a certain talent as performers. They knew how to appear decisive or knowledgeable or in command. Some, like Margaret Thatcher, were actually technocrats, though she disguised this by addressing the world in a strident and highly personal manner. With unmatched ferocity she attacked inflation for a full decade, at the end of which inflation was higher in England than in all those "soft on socialism" European countries who had hardly bothered to attack it. Her star qualities were so great that no one seemed to notice; any more than they noticed that her ferocity had not been matched by originality or ingenuity. Her anti-inflationary weapons had been limited to the standard methods which had already been used unsuccessfully by technocrats such as Valery Giscard, for whom she theoretically had contempt. But then, reality had not been at stake in her battle, only a theatrical version of it. In the United States the system turned to a B-movie actor. America's intelligentsia have attempted to treat this event as an accident. An oddity. But it was precisely his 'qualities as a mediocre star of limited intelligence which brought Ronald Reagan to power and kept him there. Before seeking the presidency, Reagan wrote his autobiography: Where's the Rest of Me? This is a line from King's Row, a film in which his character wakes up in hospital to discover that his legs have been amputated. Instead of being required reading in American universities, this book is out of print. And yet in it Reagan explains how, for the first time in the Age of Reason, a pure star was able to rise to the summit of power. One of his basic principles was that leadership in a confused era is primarily a matter of clear perspective. He seems to have understood this as early as his first public appearance, when he was scarcely twenty. He was calling a football game live for radio:
This is a principle which contradicts everything rational men believe and do. They provide answers and then prove them to the listener, who can not help but feel this is an aggression upon his dignity. Reagan may have insulted the intelligence of the people, but he did not question their dignity. He merely placed himself in a chosen position vis-a-vis reality, told people where he thought he was and then described in simple but mythological terms what he saw. If you accepted that he was where he said he was, it was difficult to reject the description that followed. He placed himself in such a manner that he spoke as if he were the people's eyes. Actors understand that what all of us want is to believe. The plausibility of drama has always turned on our willing suspension of disbelief. It is not the unwilling suspension. The individual wants to believe. We can hardly be blamed for that. The rational elites can deny this with answers and arguments, but the truth can be seen in the growing number of below-average politicians who occupy the positions of power from which clear descriptions can emanate. The illusion they create is double that of an actor like Reagan. In search of real power, they must pretend to be people who pretend to be real. They adjust their convictions with the arbitrariness of those who rely upon pollsters. They describe these temporary visions with memorized formulas. The stock phrases roll off their tongues. And they behave as much as possible like B-movie actors. In other words, after a period in which technocrats attempted to become stars and stars to become politicians, the political void has been occupied by the force of mediocrity, which can easily master enough of the star techniques to produce inoffensive personalities and enough of the rational vocabulary to create the sounds of competence. George Bush, a technocrat and a longtime insider, has honed his vocabulary to disguise most signs of intelligence by speaking mainly in simple, show-business-style phrases. Even Barbara Bush falls victim to this need. In June 1989 it was rumoured that she was displeased with Lee Atwater, then the Republican National Committee Chairman. Mrs. Bush is always described as an old-fashioned, Eastern Seaboard, family-oriented, no- nonsense person -- the very opposite of a star. And yet she had her press secretary inform the press that she had "telephoned [Mr. Atwater] to say, 'I love you.'" The first lady obviously has a better sense of the B-movie approach than Mrs. Reagan did. Not only does she resort easily to the sort of gushing celebrity overstatement which eliminates the possibility of a reply. She also finds it normal to intervene in a matter of national politics by simply evoking a hit song: "I Just Called to Say I Love You," by Stevie Wonder. It was an approach worthy of Ronald Reagan, who regularly used film scenarios and film dialogue in political speeches, as if they were real and in order to invoke. a sympathetic, unconscious memory. As with President Reagan, her celebrity approach worked. The rumours died. Mrs. Bush aside, the presence of such .people in positions of power raises the question of what power has become if they can hold it. Has power itself become an illusion in a world where Lee Iacocca is thought to be a capitalist, Brian Mulroney a head of government, Ralph Lauren a leader, David Bowie a moral beacon, Bob Geldof the saviour of Ethiopia and Catherine Deneuve the symbol of womanhood? This confusion is quite genuine. The actor Tom Cruise earned $16 million between 1986 and 1987; that is to say, more than all but one or two American corporate presidents in the same period. In 1986, when he was twenty-three, Cruise said of his film Top Gun, which was about fighter pilots: "A top gun instructor once told me that there are only four occupations worthy of a man: actor, rock star, jet fighter pilot or president of the United States." [33] He was already an actor and had just played a fighter pilot in a film seen by more people than vote for the president of the United States. They did more than go out to vote for him. They went out and paid to see him. Since playing the role of a fighter pilot seems to weigh as heavily in mythological terms as actually being one, and since he had already received adulation beyond that reserved for a president, it may be fair to say that at twenty-three Tom Cruise had already held two and a half of the four occupations worthy of a man and would soon be on the cover of Time magazine. Of course, this could all be dismissed as movie hype. What makes it real is that those who have power treat the stars seriously -- frequent them, laud them, imitate them. What is more, the technocrats and the modern stars resemble each other, perhaps not surprisingly since both are products of rational society. Neither one seeks conversation or is really capable of it. Both thrive on staged proceedings. The actor, like the modern man of reason, must have his place determined and his lines memorized before he goes on stage. Nothing is more terrifying to such people than someone who thinks in public -- that is, someone who questions himself openly. The public itself has been soothed to such an extent by scripted debates imbued with theoretically ''right'' answers that it no longer seems to respond positively to arguments which create doubt. Real doubt creates real fear. In the mid- I980s the heir to the British throne began to pose questions in public about social conditions, architecture and the lives people led. He also gave concrete demonstrations of open-ended thinking and self-doubt. He went away to an isolated Scottish island where he did menial farm chores in order to clear his mind and to contemplate. The public reaction ranged from the shrill to the silently embarrassed. What they were all thinking was: Can a man who acts in this way become our king? He is a "legitimate" star. Fame, after all, is what the royal family saved from its original power = fame equation. On the other hand, he and his family are the central working mythology of the nation. And mythology should not think. In fact, theoretically it cannot. What makes the Prince's admission of musing so interesting is that he represents a direct line back to the absolute monarchs. Not that he is refuting his constitutional position. But his comments are part of a long evolution, rather in the way that one monk during the Middle Ages might have written comments on a predecessor's manuscript. Here is the direct descendant of the original holders of both absolute power and absolute fame making a comment on the difficulties of public thought in the rational era. Willy Brandt attempted the same thing with limited success when he was in power, as did Olaf Palme of Sweden. When Pierre Mendes-France tried, he was shut out of office for the next quarter century. Pierre Trudeau mused several times in public about difficult problems and possible solutions. [34] He was attacked from all sides as irresponsible. De Gaulle found a sensible compromise, given the times. He reserved his public thinking for the printed page and on those pages he allowed himself to ask fundamental questions. But when he spoke, it was either with, reason or with emotion -- that is to say, with answers or with mythology. He divided himself between the man of letters, who knows how to live with doubt, and the man of state, who is the epitome of certainty. The brilliance of this approach could be seen in the frustration and sometimes fury of the opposing elites. The truism today is that mythological figures and men of power should not think in public. They should limit themselves to affirming truths. Stars, after all, are rarely equipped to engage in public debate. They would abhor the idea that the proper way to deal with confusion in society is to increase that confusion by asking uncomfortable questions until the source of the difficulties is exposed. If the public personae of those who hold power are carefully examined in an historical context, the original connection between power and glamour can be seen to involve two very distinct sorts of fame. The first is that of useless celebrity, which abounded in the old royal courts and was of such concern to the courtiers. This fame remains today what it always was, dependent on but extraneous to a man's real functions, like icing on a cake. Theoretically harmless, in reality this decoration cloaks the public figure in a protective aura. The second kind of fame is that which should be attached to the acceptance of public responsibility. The purpose of such notoriety is to make the public servant visible to the citizen so that we may judge him. If he holds power in order to serve us, then we must see him clearly and understand what he is doing. Fame, in that sense, is an obligation to be perfectly visible and therefore transparent. Public figures today tend automatically to favour the first sort of fame -- that of the courtiers and stars -- in order to win and hold power. At the same time they obscure the manner in which they actually govern, while harping on about the prying of the media and the loss of their own privacy. In other words, they act like stars but insist that their personal lives are a private matter. This is patent hypocrisy. If you want to be a star, your sex life, indeed your orgasms, are of primary public interest, just as they were under the reign of the absolute monarchs. The real problem is that public figures are now famous for all the wrong reasons while being allowed too much privacy in the areas that matter. If they ceased acting like stars, their private lives would cease to be of interest. Full light on their lives as public servants, however. would create the kind of celebrity which no star could bear. If the searching lights of stardom were turned on public officers for the right reasons, the public would come to expect something quite different from its leaders. It would begin to make sense to proceed through questioning and confusion, instead of through the formalized intractability necessary to stars.
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