Celebrity : Our Culture’s Most Famous, Most Revered, Are Actors Or Musicians.
Lately, on Twitter, there’s has been such a nasty influx of spam that utilizes the fame and name of Britney Spears.
The internet’s made the globe one culture, and nasty celebrity gossip is shared at the speed of light. It’s ‘viral’, supreme. Perez Hilton is himself an internet celeb because he is, well, a nasty celeb
gossip.
Snarky is a new word, but being snarky isn’t new at all. Neither is celebrity gossip, fame, nor the-worship-of.
Nor, apparently, is sleeping with celebs, idealizing, idolizing.
A British schoolteacher named Tom Payne noticed how important celebrities were to his young students, and how much they wanted to be celebrities. So, he researched why. From that, he wrote a book called Fame: From The Bronze Age To Britney.
Idealizing, Sleeping With, Destroying The Famous
“Fame”…links the ancient, classical world and our modern, celebrity-worshipping culture. The book asks: “Why does anyone want to be famous?”
“I was teaching adolescent boys all about these ancient civilisations and it rapidly became apparent to me that they took all of this celebrity culture stuff rather seriously,” says the softly-spoken Payne, 38. “And I thought maybe I should take it seriously, too. It seemed like it was worth studying in a bit more detail. I’ve tried to take on these subjects in a manner that could almost be considered academic. Crucially, I also wanted it to be funny.”
“I think people often underestimate the relevance of classical texts to contemporary society. I think I’ve been aided by the success of films like… 300 and Troy, which have helped cast light on the relevant periods…”
The author soon began to see links between different celebrities’ stories; particularly, he says, the doomed:
“I saw this crime, punishment and regeneration pattern,” he adds.
Payne’s book’s title is taken from its first chapter; and it is here where the basest human tendency to criticise and revel in the misfortune of celebrities – particularly in the case of Spears – is explored. Her famous hair-cutting incident, lit by the flashbulbs of the world’s media, is comparable, claims the author, to the tales of human sacrifice as told in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis, in which hair is cut from the victim’s head, symbolising their path to self-destruction.
And the celebrity comparisons continue….
Can we think of anyone who has recently had sex with a celebrity, potentially in order to further their own career…”There is always a steady spate of these social climbing situations in the British tabloids, and the best equivalent I can think of is in Ovid’s Art of Love,” says Payne. “He discusses how people often try to have sex with people higher up the celebrity ladder than them, or pretend to have done so, to make themselves better than they are.”
Such thoughts also emerged in Greek myth when Dionysus became angered, after his aunt Agave claimed that his mother Semele had never slept with Zeus. “She taunted her sister by saying Zeus never shagged her,” concludes the author.
While they flourish, then, we treat our celebs as semi-divine. Words such as “diva” and “sex goddess” are dead giveaways. But the story doesn’t stop with our elevating them to divine status. Because we then have to kill them.
Fame suggests that for all our glossy surface modernity, the most primitive of all blood rites, human sacrifice, is still at the heart of our culture — a word that derives from same root as “cult”, after all. The only difference is we don’t acknowledge it any more.
Gross hypocrisy is also evident in the ploy of blaming “the media” for the deaths of our deities. As Payne pithily points out, “The media, they’re us.” The same public that laid down flowers and teddies for Diana bought the magazines that paid the paps to chase her to her death in the underpass. The same public buys magazines showing the most repulsively invasive “upskirt” photographs of Britney when she’s already near the edge of sanity. But, says Payne, this is exactly what tribal societies have always done. After worshipping their heroes for a season, they kill them. Quite often they then flay them and wear their skin, as in ancient Mexico, or eat them, or preserve body parts as relics.
Best,
;~Dana
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Very thought-provoking! Thanks for sharing this! :)