Fame

Meg Ryan

I was watching Meg Ryan today on Oprah because I just cannot help myself. I despise Meg Ryan. She is such a cold fish. Not to mention a Botox addict. She and Nicole Kidman should remake "Death Becomes Her" but as a serious drama, not a satire.

Anyway, Oprah's screen kept flashing ("Her First TV Interview in Two Years") and all I thought was that nobody really missed her.

They got to talking about Fame and both carried on a bit how they just don't understand what people find so fascinating about them. Oprah kept saying that "the red carpet is just a red carpet." But they seem to have forgotten that for a lot of people "a mortgage is just a mortgage" and stars represent a form of escape.

I also thought it was an interesting, though squandered opportunity to discuss why people are so obsessed with the famous and the sort-of famous and the barely famous. Why were there literally a hundred+ photographers up Anna Nicole Smith's butt at Supreme Court yesterday? Why is there an insatiable appetite for this? So much so that we seem to have created a whole cottage industry (Reality TV) dedicated to churning out sort of stars? I know that I personally never picked up another copy of Us magazine again after I saw "The Bachelor" on the cover for the 30th time. Who the hell is/was he? Who cares? Many clearly do.

The Reality TV star-making model seems to take the music industry approach to star-making: let’s throw a lot of darts at the board and see if we get a bull’s-eye. And I think Reality TV is really what pushed fame over the edge and made it accessible to anyone and made it a valid career objective. I mean, Reality TV has proven that you need no talent to become famous. You just need to click with viewers. And if you have talent, like Kelly Clarkson, it can only help.

But what is it about us as viewers? I think there is something about putting someone in front of a camera that automatically makes them more attractive than they would be if you lived near them or worked with them. What I mean is, seeing people on TV or in photos or on the Internet allows us to fantasize about them and build scenarios and that they have the validation of being on TV tells us that they are attractive and worthy of adoration. Even if they are not.

I know that the visual is very powerful for me. If I am going to hookup with someone I met online, I like to look at their photo(s) a lot before we meet. I begin to fetishize them. It heightens the anticipation and the eroticism. Of course the danger is that once I meet them, reality will be less than my expectations. But with people on television, we never have to worry about reality because we will always just have our fantasies.

But again, why do so many not only admire fame but crave it? I think it boils down to a nation of people that are insecure and egocentric and want validation, feel it's owed to them actually. Everyone from Baby Boomers on down is afflicted with this but I think that as Gen Y, in particular, matures it is going to be even worse because Gen Y has had parents and educators coddling them and telling them their shit is fabulous and their feelings are the most important thing in the world for their entire lives and Gen Y will expect strangers to feel the same way about them.

I used to want to be famous. I was “famous” (popular) in high school and I was “famous” in my early 20s in the sense that everyone in my circle knew me and I achieved some degree of notoriety. I loved it and the perks but I realize now that I was very insecure and I just wanted to prove to myself that I was not the unattractive misfit I felt I was and the way to prove that was to have beautiful people as my friends and come to me with their problems (or requests for coke lol.) I was also afraid of people I was truly attracted to and wanted my fame to serve as my introduction to them. After all, if they knew of me already, then being introduced to them would be easy.

But I matured and lost interest in that whole scene. It makes me wonder though, about people who become famous early on and never really know anything but. No wonder so many are so messed up. I have a theory about people who make it. And I mean really make it. Now, granted, some may not be like this, but I think in order to make it big you really need to be very unemotional and nostalgic when it comes to your family, you need to put your career first ahead of any relationship and that means being willing to up and move at a moment’s notice and to dump people who can no longer further your career. I think that people who come from stable, 2-parent, loving families are very rare in Hollywood. The people who make it big typically have peripatetic childhoods, single parents, abusive step-parents and on and on and on. In other words, lots of issues that shaped their feelings about relationships which is why they are able to focus so intensely on their careers and one of the (many) reasons whys they are unable to form lasting relationships as adults. In other words, they’re fucked up, like many of us. But they get paid a hell of a lot better.