There should be a pane of thick, darkened glass between idol and audience. To be accessible was to lose. The man who sits in a cafe all day, mumbling as he reads the papers: he’s accessible. A taxi driver is accessible. A star shouldn’t even be seen eating.
That's a quote by Chris O'Leary, in a post about David Bowie, a subject on which O'Leary has done a lot of very good writing. Specifically about Bowie's internet ventures of the late 1990s. But it has me thinking beyond that field.
A while ago I started seeing people―mainly girls and young women―talking about "feeling seen." As in, "Thank you, that really makes me feel seen." But is this always a good thing, and is it a rare thing? We live in a world of both extensive surveillance and voluntary (more-or-less) self-exposure on social media. Everyone's seen. Everyone's seen a lot.
There's something to be said for stars going the Greta Garbo route: making movies or records or whatever and retreating to a private realm the rest of the time, while your image floats through the world on posters and covers. For the rest of us, it's probably better to blend into the physical world, not trying to sell yourself. It's definitely better for children and teens.
And it's probably not happening anytime soon. Still, worth trying.
2 comments:
The lyrics of Saviour Machine sound eerily prophetic now we're so much deeper in the web of internet culture and its version of ai well before it was anticipated:
Don't let me stay, don't let me stay
My logic says burn so send me away
Your minds are too green, I despise all I've seen
You can't stake your lives on a Saviour Machine
Disturbing as it is it was always fascinating, The Man Who Sold the World was a great album. The article by Chris O'Leary is informative and not one I would have been likely to stumble over myself. Thanks for that.
I agree with his statement about celebrities best off disappearing into their own lives as much as possible. Of course, most of them got to where they are through attention seeking that never abates. The ones I've long admired are the few like Greta Garbo, Marlon Brando, and Stanley Kubrick among others who prefer privacy.
It's funny you thought to mention overhearing girls and young women talking about 'being seen'. There's a high school we often pass on our travels around town that has a sign that used to announce upcoming events like basketball tournaments, debate clubs, and upcoming days off. For the past few years it has just one message: Safe Seen Secure. Now you've made me think about it for longer than the few seconds its taken to register I decided to see if I could its the origin. Turns out it was a pretty recent and very popular how to raise your child book called The Power of Showing Up. Now that makes sense, eh?
The expectation that a machine will be our savior is not a new one, but it's been taking on some bizarre forms recently. Richard Dawkins's belief that he's having a real conversation with Claude, for one. Dawkins's essentially mechanistic view of humanity may have set himself up for this. Bowie's "Saviour Machine" is a neat allegory of what might go wrong, as is Harlan Ellison's story "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream."
You're right that The Man Who Sold the World is a great album. I've always especially liked "All the Madmen" and "After All".
Attention seeking has become a game that anybody can play. Playing it can certainly be destructive to your psyche, though. The Garbo/Brando/Kubrick model allows one to have some kind of private life, although in Garbo's case it meant ending her career as well. Of contemporary stars, Keanu Reeves seems to keep a pretty low profile.
The Power of Showing Up, from the profiles of it I see on the web, seems to be a books with pretty good intentions. The authors may have good ideas as well, and might even have good effects. Still, past a certain point, all psychology is pop psychology, and it's a mistake to take it completely seriously.
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