The Meaning of Recognition (56 page)

Why do the Americans find the incredible plausible? Sufficient to answer that they do. In the society that began the dubious work of raising the cult of celebrity to a world-conquering ideology,
the intention is taken for the deed. It’s the nicest thing about America, even if it is also the most dangerous. America is the most ritualistic society since Japan was ruled by the Tokugawa
shoguns. In America, every event is a ceremony, nobody is allowed to be alone, and everyone thinks that a heart worn on the sleeve must be more sincere instead of less. The result is a
superabundance of courtesy. When Americans are not busy bombing the wrong village, shooting down the wrong airliner or wiping out their allies with friendly fire, they are busy being polite. The
waiter really does feel it incumbent upon him, when he delivers your main course, to issue the instruction: ‘Enjoy your meal.’ My sincere answer to that would be ‘Only if
it’s good,’ but he would call the manager if I said so. Ritual must be observed. Worse, it has only to be observed in order to be taken as truly meant. To finish with the hair theme for
the moment, take the case of that great actor William Shatner. In real life, William Shatner is a smart, funny and delightfully ironic man. But his real life is not his public life. The public
William Shatner, after he left
Star Trek
, found that the hair on his head was growing thin. Instead of sensibly concluding that his abundance of testosterone was eating into his thatch, he
must have decided that it was being eroded for another reason, perhaps because the stimulating effect of warp engine radiation had been switched off. Whatever his reasoning, when he came back to
the screen as T.J. Hooker he was wearing on top of his head what is known in America as a ‘piece’. Three times as big as any natural hairstyle he had ever had, the piece looked as if a
live dog had been nailed to his skull. You could have thrown chunks of raw meat to that thing. Yet somewhere underneath that ludicrous construction, he still had the same sharp brain. He must have
known that he looked like a man crushed by a falling fox terrier. But he also knew that he was in America, where it is sufficient to make the claim in order to fulfil the expectation. Even unto
death, an abundant head of hair is a requirement, along with a set of perfect teeth. If the hair is taken from an animal, even if it is the whole animal, and if the perfect teeth are blatantly a
set of caps that jar with the tucked face like two rows of white plastic tombstones in the graveyard of a ruined church, still the requirements have been met. They are the requirements of
celebrity, and to that extent millions of anonymous Americans behave as if they were famous. We must not let this happen to us.

But it is happening to us, through the worldwide spread of reality television. Reality television actually started in Britain, when a series called
Sylvania Waters
elevated an otherwise
painfully ordinary Australian family to tabloid fame. But now the Americans are doing it too, and when America does something everybody does it. One of the many nice things about being at this
radio conference is that it’s much harder to do reality television on radio. I believe in popular culture, and I even believe that beyond a certain point it is useless to argue with public
taste. Popular culture is one of the key transmitters of ethics to the young. After the school playground and the influence of parents, if they have any, children get their principles from popular
culture. Hence the importance of keeping it within the bounds of civilized decency. Even when it has a foul mouth, it should not be allowed to speak evil.

On a flight across the Atlantic last week, I was characteristically unable to operate the multiple choice in-flight entertainment system, and got stuck with a screening of the latest Harry
Potter movie. I hadn’t seen the previous ones because Monica Bellucci wasn’t in them, and I expected to be bored. But I was thrilled. It was terrific: inventive, complex, witty and in
the best sense fantastic. No wonder the kids love it, and play scenes from it to each other, and can recite every word. But imagine if such a mind-forming creation were preaching, say, racism. In
Britain it has been black commentators, not white ones, who have been vocally worried about how so many hip-hop lyrics preach gun-nut violence, so I can safely say that anyone who is unworried
about the effect of popular culture when it turns sour is living in a dream. But reality television is not as toxic as all that. Most of the people who appear on it seem to have the same problems
with verbal communication as George W. Bush, but the relationships they form between themselves are often quite human and sometimes even touching. On a recent instalment of Britain’s biggest
reality television show, called
Big Brother
, a young woman who in all her life had read nothing but magazines met a young man who had actually read a book. The look of wondering admiration
in her eyes is with me yet. Her life was changing right there, and only a snob would begrudge the transformation.

But the downside can be depressing. Just before I caught the plane here, the British tabloids were front-paging a story about two unfortunate young celebrities whose marriage was breaking up.
The two young celebrities were identified by their first name – I think they were called Jane and Wayne, but it could have been Jean and Dean. They had met as participants on one of those
reality TV shows in which a houseful of people chosen for their psychological disorders vote each week to expel one of their number. Basically the format is a re-run of a Nazi atrocity but without
the machine-gunners waiting outside. In the future, and probably the near future, the machine-gunners will be waiting outside, but we haven’t quite reached that point yet, although if the
current contestants only knew it, the newspaper editors and book publishers waiting outside will have exactly the same effect as a belt-fed MG-42 manned by the Waffen SS. Anyway, Jane and Wayne, or
Jean and Dean, were either the first to be ejected or the last, I forget which. Perhaps one of them was the first and the other was the last. Whether in disappointment or triumph, however, they had
cemented the profound relationship they had formed on the show by getting married immediately afterwards. Now the marriage was over. Since the whole of the front page was occupied by their
photographs – she looking as if her car had been stolen, he looking as if he had stolen it – I had to turn to pages two, three, four and five to get the facts, which were scattered in
tiny gobbets of prose among yet more photographs of the two quondam lovers in their chosen setting, a house whose decor aspired to the taste of Donald Trump, plus overtones of one of Saddam
Hussein’s palaces as yet unlooted, with all its gold bathroom fittings still in place. This was the paradise they had built for themselves, and from which they would now be cast out.
Apparently the pressure of fame had been too much for them. You could hardly get a more poignant case of people who had done nothing believing they were somebody. The only element of reality was
the bit about the pressure of fame. They had certainly felt that.

They had become famous for having met each other on screen and fallen in love. This event was agreed by both themselves and the press to have been some kind of miracle – a conjunction,
defying the laws of chance, of two soulmates who might otherwise never have found each other. Actually nothing could have been more ordinary, because each of them meets someone exactly like the
other every day of the week. It would be impossible for them not to. By now, in the Britain that Tony Blair inherited from Margaret Thatcher and has somehow managed to make worse, there are
millions of young people who, without qualifications for attaining to the luxurious life of which they dream, nevertheless believe, and it is the only belief they have, that if they could find
their way to the right tree, it would have money growing on it. Money and celebrity. The press, keen to supply them with both those things, closed in. The pair of helpless young inadequates soon
found that the press, once it closes in, is slow to go away until there is nothing left drifting down through the pink water except bones. The likelihood that married bliss would be temporary was
intensified by the attentions of friends, acquaintances and the general public. Jane and Wayne, to the extent that they had ever had lives, now found that their lives were not their own. Even the
closest friends became enemies, because fame breeds envy the more it is unearned, and if you have done nothing at all to earn it, absolutely everybody is dying to see it taken from you. Nobody
looks at a photograph of Jesus Christ on the cross and asks ‘Why not me?’ because they know the answer: you haven’t been crucified. Every one of Jean and Dean’s friends
looked at their photographs and thought, correctly, that they could have been famous too. Thus the friends became betrayers, the acquaintances became informers, and the general public became
delighted ghouls at the scene of the inevitable disaster. The only remarkable thing was that the classic dynamics of celebrity were being applied to absolute nonentities.

Perhaps it was a good thing, a necessary sacrifice. Because Andy Warhol understated the case. He should have said that in the future everyone will not be famous for fifteen minutes, they will be
famous all the time. And indeed fame is by now not only what almost everybody wants, it is what almost anybody can get. If you want to be famous, urinate on the shoe of someone who is already
famous. You will be given your own television series. In Britain at the moment there is a famous couple you may have heard of called David and Victoria Beckham. David plays football very well some
of the time and Victoria sings very bravely all of the time, but there is some reason for their celebrity. There is no reason for the celebrity of a young woman called Rebecca Loos except that she
managed to sleep with David. By all accounts this feat is rather less taxing than to square the circle, but Rebecca has the plus value of looking rather more upmarket than Victoria. She might look
it, but Victoria, were the positions reversed, might have been less likely to sell her story to the press. Rebecca sold her story, and is now a TV star. The historian George Grote brought his
monumental, multi-volume history of Greece to an end at the point when, as he explained, the Greeks no longer realized they were slaves. We may have reached the point when people who sell the story
of their love-lives no longer realize they are nonentities. Having come into close contact with the famous, they convince themselves that they have caught fame, as they might catch crabs. The age
we live in is the apotheosis of the parasite. So far there are few formal studies of this phenomenon, but let me recommend Bob Dylan’s fascinating new autobiography, which will soon be
published. Judging by the extracts I have seen, it is the work of a master deceiver. He would have us believe that in order to escape the pressure of fame, he made bad albums deliberately. He would
have us believe that his early songs were never meant to lead his listeners on the path of social rebellion, and that he was appalled when they did. I suppose that’s why he wrote the song
with that haunting refrain, ‘The times they are a-changing, more’s the pity.’ But the stuff about how being one of the world’s biggest celebrities turned his private life
into a misery is obviously all too true.

It isn’t a matter of celebrity getting out of control. Celebrity is out of control by its nature. Everyone who becomes famous is convinced beforehand that his fame will be different. All
of them find out that it is bound to be the same, because no human being is naturally supplied with the defence mechanisms that can ward off universal attention. Every beautiful woman who becomes
famous, for example, acquires at least one stalker. If we think some of them don’t, it’s only because they have so far managed to avoid having to take out a restraining order. We found
out about Nicole Kidman’s poet when she went to court to get rid of him, or anyway try to. At the moment he is defending his human rights in the Hague, one of his human rights being the right
to make Nicole Kidman admit that she is in love with him. In reality, she awaits his inevitable reappearance with dread. She could put up with the poems he sent her, although if you read a few of
them you wonder how she did. She could even put up with his haunting her doorstep with a new bunch of fresh roses every morning. But when he offered to take her children to school in his car, she
had to call in the cops. You might have thought that she already had her work cut out, being married to a miniature Scientologist. Incidentally, in her latest movie she mistakes a ten-year-old boy
for her late husband. It makes you wonder if she ever mistook Tom Cruise for a ten-year-old boy. But being married to a fellow celebrity was something she chose. She did not choose her stalker. Her
stalker chose her. And there is a stalker for almost every celebrity: for all the women and even for most of the men. The penny dropped for Bob Dylan when he realized that not only he himself was
incurably famous, the weirdo who was cataloguing his garbage had become famous too. Dylan’s garbage-collector was sorting the garbage in order to write a book about Dylan, and then somebody
wrote a book about the garbage collector. Jodie Foster won’t allow interviewers to question her about the man who shot Ronald Reagan in order to impress her. But all her interviewers mention
that they are not allowed to mention it, and here I am mentioning it now. Something she never did is stuck to her for life, and the achievement of a serious artist is ineradicably branded with the
action of a psychotic. The Jodie Foster jokes will always be there. In 1982, some comedian said that Ariel Sharon invaded the Lebanon to impress Jodie Foster. It was a good joke, but it was on her.
The stalker never goes away. Yoko Ono is not a woman high in my affections. I listened to one of her songs once and suffered irreversible damage not only to my hearing but to my left foot, because
the radio was beside the bath and I tried to turn down the volume with my toes. But Yoko Ono is currently living with the knowledge that the man who shot her husband is scheduled to be set free on
parole. No doubt the prospect has already encouraged her to rethink her original position on the coercive power of the state. I truly sympathize with her, but her best chance of life resides in the
fact that the man who shot her husband is now world famous himself, and thus quite likely to inspire an assassin of his own, in the way that Lee Harvey Oswald was the inspiration for Jack Ruby.