Over at Worth 1000 they've been running contests to see what popular celebrities would look like without all the aesthetic work they undergo: the skin treatments, plastic surgery, needle-smoothed brows, coloured hair, trimmed orifices. It quite disarming to see the results, which they call Detouching: removing the retouching from airbrushed celebs.
I love the subversive element to this initiative, and the way that the same images used to build up careers and drive all the satellite vanity industries of fame can be subverted with simple tools and the same techniques. All these familiar faces look like they could be people you met on the street, not just people we see in a mediated way - in magazines, on television.
While we travelled through Greece a few months ago and learned about the pantheon of Greek gods it struck me that the role their ancient gods played and the role our modern celebrities play was the same. For some reason we need to believe that a select group of us are elevated beyond our status, untouchable and better than us. And at the same time as we follow and glorify their every move we love to hear how similar to us they are and we love to watch them fall.
Last week I heard Margaret Atwood on CBC radio talking about her new book The Penelopiad and, though her habit of asking herself questions and then answering them was incredibly annoying ("And what do we mean by this? We mean to share our experience of the world as..."), like she was delivering a homily on Sunday morning, she did succinctly tie up the origin and reason for mythology's resonance for me in a way I can remember. Our myths, she said, embody our wishes and fears.
So I think our celebrity culture embodies our wishes and fears. The stories that we pay attention to, that become the big celebrity stories that drive the recycling news culture to the frothy point, are the ones that most deeply reflect our wishes and fears. Young actors having their first big hit, established players redeemed for their long hard work with recognition, the star abusing their privilege and their talent and having it come back to bite them, affairs and romances and break ups and marriages.
How many times have you heard someone say, whether self-consciously in jest or not, that their situation or the situation of someone they know reminds them of a parallel celebrity story? These stories saturate our culture and thinking. I've heard it, I think I may have even said it. I think that celebrity is our main mythology, certainly more pronounced and universal in our culture than any religion or education. Now what does it mean?
Posted by James Sherrett at December 6, 2005 12:25 PM