February 4th, 2008

Here is a very rare thing for me: I am going to comment on something current and pop culture. I am letting the zeitgeist (the spirit of the times) buffet and mold my words today. I usually like to avoid writing about the Issue of the Instant because it makes the words obsolete in short order. It's like preserving a newspaper from last Thursday: Who cares, really? But this one has got a hold of my mind and won't let go (and has for a whole month now) so here goes.

Re: Britney Spears Losing her Little Mind, Lindsay Lohan shipwrecking on the rocks of Bad Girl Island, and Amy Winehouse doing a spot-on imitation of the Homeless Crack Addict chic:

Anyone who pays even a small amount of attention to popular entertainment-based media will not have any trouble observing the steady downward spiral of these three distinct train-wrecks of young female entertainers. Oh sure, plenty of those Hollywood males are off the rails as well (e.g., as I write this, Heath Ledger's death is Big News), but we as a culture are especially thrilled/unhappy to hear about the girls as they throw their lives away with both hands ... and so, we focus on them. I'll be honest here: I think there are many elements at play in the obsession we are showing about them, and they are somewhat contradictory:

The experience of the famous must by now be a high-test 99.9%-pure distilled drug. Child stars of the past may have had the 75% or 80% version, and lots of them have slid down the slope, but there was always a significant weight of reality lurking somewhere that they could, if they wanted, anchor themselves to, even if through a long leash. But the instant-news small-world-is-your-oyster 24/7 lights and camera flash celebrity life made possible by global stream-of-consciousness media attention means that there is no chance for these young stars to build a pre-celebrity life to hang an anchoring rope around. There is no escape, no dark corners for their own privacy and self-respect. They never had a sensible grounding to learn no-pain-no-gain realities. Instead, they spent their young lives borrowing against the future. Their celebrity grew, and as their common sense plummeted to the ground below they maintained the attitude "so far, so good" while the ground rapidly approached.

We all know (or should know by now) that there is no flying, only free-fall. But without that grounded common-sense life all of us commoners have been forced to live, these young celebrity chicks have no way of knowing that. They just don't know what we mean when we say words like "grounded" and "common-sense". And they have a completely different sense of even the words that they do share with us: "humility" and "respect" mean something else entirely to them. Again, they just don't know any better, because their celebrity has temporarily buouyed them above those sharp rocks that we non-famous majority have to negotiate.

But unless a star is always rising (which is impossible), those sharp rocks eventually show up in your path. You cannot out-celebrity life itself, except to die (the sharpest, biggest, balckest rock of them all). Life itself is unavoidable forever. And the longer you spend avoiding it and the higher you fly above it, the more vulnerable you become to it when it finally arrives.

Something those three starlets are discovering right now.

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