Misc.
On Wednesday night, I caught the premier of Adrian Grenier’s documentary, Teenage Paparazzo, on HBO. It’s a nice enough piece of fluff, ostensibly about a 14 year old rookie pap who’s better at his job than most veterans. But the most interesting part about the whole affair is when Grenier interviews a social anthropologist who offers a couple of theories regarding the concept of “celebrity” and why our collective appetite for them seemingly grows over time.
In a recent study, members of some primate species or the other elected to go hungry (literally starved themselves) in order to be able to stare at pictures of the dominant members of their society. The only other images that caused them to do the same were extreme close ups of the hind quarters of females. (Oh…so that’s why I’ll still buy a copy of “US Weekly” when I’m down to the change jar and washing my dry clean only-s in the sink…) We may have an ingrained evolutionary response to idolize and want to constantly observe the dominant members of our society. This once served to keep us alive (these alphas would teach us how to hunt game, build housing, use tools), but is now kinda useless (look bored during a beej? bejewel our Blackberries? choose Jason Wahler over Paris?!.)
The other theory is that is a world of less tightly knit families and towns, we don’t gossip about the town drunk or our crazy Uncles as much as we used to. So we use celebrities as sort of cultural conduits for working out our collective morals and values. What’s too far? What’s OK? What’s still considered “bad”? We work all of these things out with celebrities as stand-ins for the town whore and pin a scarlet letter on Angelina Jolie (she stole Brad!) instead of Hester Prynne.
It’s probably some mix of the two although I’m more inclined to get behind the latter. The star machine of the studio system took advantage of the fact that we wanted to see our ideals (aesthetically, representing virility and beauty) made 10 feet tall and learn (how to love, seduce, be elegant, be a stud…) from them – so direct link to the first theory. We should have had that need satiated. And, in a way, it was until the post-sexual revolution 70’s –when society was starting to be made up of a myriad of social mores- that we started to even think of celebrities as actual people.
Also, Chantal Biya. She is the First Lady of Cameroon. That hairdo is named after her – it’s one of two that are. (The one pictured is for formal occasions, duh.)
This is Chantal with Paris Hilton.
With Carla Bruni. (Why the stern side-eye, Chantal?! Both of your initals are CB!) Also, am I the only one that thinks she sort of looks like Kimora Lee Simmons? Trannyliciousness to the second power!
