Fickle fame

Some recent news items have interestingly portrayed the fickle nature of American fame, and how shallow and vapid it is.  Interesting to watch in progress.

One aspect of American fame is that the same things and personages that raise somebody to fame stand eager to rip them to shreds when they get there.  It'd be easy to say, and potentially correct as well, that having participated in the creation of their image, they are set up for a fall if they don't meet that expectation, but it's a little more than that in my view.

A recent example of that would involve the entire Josh Duggar saga. Now, readers of this blog, and there are darned few, know that I'm not a fan of the Duggars and never have been.  I always thought them a bit odd, or perhaps more than a bit odd, and I've chaffed at the occasional comments that they represent "conservative Christianity".  No they don't, if "conservative" Christianity is meant to include the millions of conservative Christians in the Catholic and Orthodox churches (the majority, fwiw, of Christians on earth), or those conservative Christians in numerous other denominations. No, the Duggars were interesting because they clearly belonged to something akin to a tiny sect, given their dress and lifestyle, and that provided part, but only part, of the fascination.  The remainder of the fascination was based on their just having a big family, something that wasn't unusual in the world until very recently.

Now, the Duggars traded on that fascination and turned it into a television career.  I have a problem with that, although I guess I can't fully blame them. But then, they were perfectly set up to be ripped apart when things went bad, and they did, in a bizarre fashion, mostly due to the icky behavior of Josh Duggar, who turns out to have lived a fairly hypocritical life.

The point isn't to defend him. Registering on a cheaters website is downright icky, in my view (and says a lot about how bizarrely dependant on technology we've become. . . do we need to register to cheat on spouses. . . seriously?).  No, it's just that the same media that made such a big deal out of them, is now ripping them down, and for conduct that it pretty much celebrates in other people (the cheating that is, not the other stuff).

Indeed, it's weird how fickle fame is.  If a public figure of the Duggars type, or a politician, cheats on his spouse, he's pretty much doomed.  Hollywood stars, on the other hand, get a pass and it'll just be passed off as some sort of tragedy for everyone, including the cheater.  Very fickle.

In contrast to this, we  have people who seemingly trade on their good public images for ongoing fame, as they convert their prior lives into one of trouble.  Fame is not only fickle, it's apparently addictive.

We've been given a potential example of that in the story of Bruce Jenner.  Jenner was originally famous for being an Olympic athlete.  Even at that time, fwiw, it seems to me that people speculated on him having same gender attractions, but that's another story.  Later, long after most athletes would be a thing of distant memory, he became famous again for being the second spouse of a family that's become seemingly fasmous for its female members being famous.  Or perhaps appearing on the cover of magazines with very little clothing on.  Now, he has announced as have a gender issue and he's becoming a woman, if a person can changed genders, which our DNA says we may not.

That's been celebrated and he's been announced as some species of hero.  In the meantime, he was involved with a fatal car wreck and will be charged with manslaughter, apparently.  That gets less press.  Odd.

It's particularly odd if we recall that Tiger Woods had a car accident that resulted in endless press attention, in part because he was . . . cheating on his spouse.  

Now, both are athletes, so why does Woods get the negative attention and Jenner does not.  I guess there's the cheating angle again, but Woods never set himself up as a public paragon of virtue (nor did he do the opposite).  Indeed, Woods is a Buddhist and therefore he certainly isn't a Duggaresque figure, although I'll confess I have no idea what the Buddhist position on monogamy is.

For another example, we have the weird story of the constant "look at me" displays by a certain female singer that rose up in the Disney child star factory.  I have problems with that entity in and of itself, but the displays, rather than the bold acts of individualism they're proclaimed to be, are more in the nature of childish spoiled brat displays.  Yet they are both fascinated and gawked at.  A similar meltdown, much less spectacular, has been given to at least one other female actress who ended up in constant trouble with the law, and while on a break from court displayed what she had in the Ossified Freak's journal.  Not so celebrated.  Yet another is just regarded as a pathetic meltdown.  Why is one celebrated and the other pitied?  Who knows.  Perhaps the difference is the degree to which the meltdown is genuine.

Speaking of the Ossified Freak, a young woman who rose to some level of fame as being one of the "girlfriends" of that fellow, which presumably entails certain conduct and to which other titles would have attached in a prior era, went on to marry some sort of athlete and convert that marriage into a television show. Why anyone would care about this sufficiently to watch it is hard to explain.  Following that, that fellow fell into some sort of scandal and now the same female figure is a character on a "boot camp" for troubled marriages.  I'd think that a television camera following you around in these circumstances would be troublesome in and of itself, but there you have it.  But here too, why do we care about this, and why does this sort of weirdness lend itself to a televised following? 

Indeed, that sort of public voyeurism may have been at least partially pioneered when it turned out that a really boring married couple, but one that included a former actress known for her portrayal of a girl in a California upper class high school, took that turn when it turned out that the husband was cheating on her.  He didn't get the Duggar treatment, as after all, he's an actor.  But from there on out there were endless episodes of the wife blubbering.  Heck, they both were cheating on other spouses when they started their relationship, so, D'oh!  But apparently not.  Anyhow, why would a person attempt to trade on that misery for fame?

Perhaps the most famous celebrity meltdown of recent years was the sad tale of Michael Jackson, who rose to fame on his music (which I never liked) but who spent his later years sort of freakishly altering himself.  Very odd and sad, but while the press noted his sad decline, the fame had clearly precipitated it.  So, he essentially was on display as a circus star the entire time. Very odd indeed.

Fame, Turning on Fame, Ignorance, and Double Standards

As anyone who has followed my occasional frustrated comments on television here knows, I was not a fan of the Duggars show, Nineteen Kids and Counting.

Indeed, for reasons that I have a hard time defining, there was something about the Duggars that made me uncomfortable.  A lot of people are going to be saying that now, so that's a little late to be claiming that, but it's true.  I couldn't quite define it then, and I can't quite now, but what I think it is, is that to a certain ill informed audience they defined "Christianity", or perhaps "Conservative  Christianity".  They don't.  And I don't think they claimed to, but rather they were sort of presented that way.

In reality, without delving into it too far, theologically they're a member of a minority offshoot of a certain branch of Protestantism, and from their they're actually part of a patriarchal movement within that minority offshoot, which makes them a minority within a minority.  That was probably obvious to anyone who studies such matters, which means that it's not obvious to most people.  Given that, however, it would be no more fair to even state that the Duggars represented the view of Conservative Protestants than it would be to say the Old Believers represent the views of most Russian Orthodox, or that the members of the SSPX represent the views of most Catholics.  Indeed, those statements, although erroneous, would probably be slightly closer to being true, maybe. And because they hold a minority Protestant view, within a minority Protestant view, their views fall very far from the views of many "mainline" Protestants and certainly quite far from the Catholics and the Orthodox.  Now, the Catholics, Orthodox, Lutherans, etc., know that, but because television is so ignorant, it doesn't necessarily know that.  Therefore, when we hear things like "the Duggar's conservative Christian views", we're really hearing something that's way, way, far off the mark.

Indeed, again, I doubt the Duggar's themselves would disagree with that, and in fact they would seem to fit into a demographic that would question the Christianity of at least certain other Christian Faiths.  I don't know that for sure, but I do note that they engage in missionary work in Central American, which at least raises some questions as that's a field already plowed by prior Christian missionaries, although they're all Catholic.  Usually when a group does that, they tend to do it because they don't regard the other Christian group as valid, although here again I'm supposing.  I've known some Protestant missionaries (and Catholic ones) who were true missionaries, and they spent their lives in some really wild parts of the world, indeed, in some areas that were downright dangerous for somebody of their occupation, which seems real missionary work to me.

Anyhow, all that's a long winded way of saying that part of what has made me uncomfortable about the Duggar's is the way that they've come to represent something that maybe they don't.  I'm a pretty conservative Christian (okay, on some things I'm a pretty liberal Christian . . . and on others I'm a pretty neither liberal or conservative Christian), but I don't feel my daughter has to dress in a peasant dress and I'm a pretty big fan of education.

Indeed, on that latter item, one thing that's bothered me for some time is that the girls in this show, which has massive female following, seem so limited in their options.  They seem pretty smart, but they line them up with potential spouses who just don't seem to quite mach their intellect.  Maybe they do, but they don't seem to.  Indeed, that would seem to be the case for whomever Josh is married to as well, but again I could well be wrong.  It all seems sort of odd.

So, anyhow, one thing that's bothered me is the way their identified as something they really aren't.

And by extension, now people who hate them because they re identified that way, are going to be ripping them apart.

Traditional Christians in recent years have come to regard themselves as under the gun.  Well, actually, some branches of Christianity have felt that way for a long time.  And for good reason, they really are.  It's become unsafe in the public sphere to simply hold certain traditional Christian beliefs, or certain beliefs that are consistent with certain Faiths. That's a shame, but its true.  It's also become safe to attack certain religious beliefs as the PC view of the media holds those beliefs to be out of sync with the times.

In truth, Christianity is always out of sync with the times, and if a person reads the Acts of the Apostles, that's clear. The Apostles knew they were out of sync with the times, and the Fathers of the Church were pretty darned plain that they knew that as well.  So that's not new.  What is a bummer, however, is to see some group, here the Duggars, get tarred and feathered by haters because they are seen to represent something they don't, while in turn the rest of us get tarred and feathered because of what the Duggar patriarchy apparently did, which isn't fair to the rest of us by any means.  Ignorance at work.  It's like being a member of one of those rare Middle Eastern religious minorities who get attacked because nobody knows what they actually believe, but they might believe what some other group believes.

Going from that, however, it's also interesting how chicken television and the media really are.  Everything is played so safe.  The Duggars were pulled from the air, which they should have been, but a certain other family which recently had a baby baptized in the Armenian Orthodox Church, a very conservative religions, lives a lifestyle that seems out of sync with that (or not, I'm not sure) and has a family member who is changing genders.   That's being celebrated on television.  Now, in this era, that's in sync with the general liberal view of the media, so the media is not going to take on the very un settled and difficult psychological aspects of that in a way that's controversial. That is, we're not going to hear any press on whether that's wrong in a psychological or metaphysical sense, but maybe we should.  But we won't, as that would be too controversial in the context of the times.

This same logic would apply, even more so, to "Sister Wives", a show that pretty much promotes plural marriage and which appears on the same network as Nineteen Kids".  Here we have a sort of irony that TLC promotes, though the show, the concept that the Duggars are Christian traditionalist, which they really are not, and that the very non traditional view (in the larger societal sense) of the Kody Brown group, should be tolerated.  It's a strangely mixed message, neither of which is very deep in its analysis.

Nor really very interesting, I guess, to the male half of the population.  Both shows really cater towards domestic blandness, which is the basis, oddly, and ironically, of their appeal.  Peculiarly, noting really is going to look at the domestic lives of the millions of other conservative Christian women that are actually part of the culture.  That would just be too normal.

And if we're going to look at really unusual groups, to Americans, maybe we should look at really interesting ones we know aren't part of the larger demographic and obviously are not. Why not, for example, look at Orthodox Jews?  There are a lot of them in the US, but TLC isn't following them around.  Or Moslems (in fairness, there was a show that looked at them, but for a group that has to be unpleasant to be a member of right now, why not look at their lives).  Or, Old Believers.  There are Old Believers in Alaska, why not give them a look?

Finally, stories like this become feeding frenzies in a shark like fashion.  I can't help but recall how, after the very weird Michael Jackson died, the press turned on him.  It seems fame can turn to blistering contempt in an instant.  

That's always been the case.  The people and press elevate people to fame, and then when things go wrong for them, they rip them apart.  Oddly, they create an Idol and then destroy it, and always have.  An odd aspect of human nature.

The Duggers. Yawn.

The Duggers come to my house every morning.  And the other evening they came here for a wedding of one of the daughters.

No, not in person.  On my television set. Somehow they've pushed out the early morning news and the female residents of the house follow their old episodes on television.

I don't understand the popularity of their show whatsoever really.  What it tells me in part is that, in spite of what sociologist like to claim, and in spite of what feminist wanted, the age old interests remain and are genetic in nature.  Women of all ages are really interested in domesticity including watching the weddings, marriages, and child rearing of other families.  Men may take an interest, but not enough to watch an hour of a bunch of people we don't know.

Beyond that, I really truly think the Duggers popularity, combined with all the vast number of shows that are somewhat related (all those wedding dress shows, the show on the worlds most boring couple, Guiliana and Bill, etc.) are a symptom of something basically human becoming rather rare.  Its weird, and its disturbing.

It's weird and disturbing as the popularity of these shows seems to indicate that in an era when women in particularly are more separated from traditional families and traditional roles, at some level the deep attracting to some elements definable appeal, and people who would claim the opposite should give some thought to that.  The Duggers portray what is basically as semi rural Southern family, dressed, on the female side, in a fashion that recalls the 1920s and 1930s.  They're sort of like the female characters in The Waltons times five. So what we see there is that something that was norm, nor nearly the norm, for most people not all that long ago is now deeply fascinating to people who aren't experiencing anything too close to it now and that its also so novel that it merits a television show.  The wedding dress shows likewise show women doing something that most women did, and did only once, not all that long ago, and much less expensively.  Now the novelty of it both fascinates and builds a formerly relatively routine event up into a colossally expensive and novel one.  Guiliana and Bill is the urban flipside of the Duggers, presenting the concept that young, hip urban (and exceedingly boring) couples can have it all, including an overendulged infant, all while remaining hip, cool, and boring.

Now, don't get me wrong here.  I'm not condemning any of these people (well, okay, I am Guiliana and Bill as they're as dull as wallpaper paste). Rather, I think this shows something that tells us something, and not necessarily something good, about what has become unusual or novel in our society.

Actors as Heroes

I've written on this before, but I can't really grasp why people care what celebrities who derive their fame from acting, or singing, or performing in some fashion, have to say about anything other than their fields of employment.  That doesn't mean that I feel that people with fame can't speak on whatever they might wish, but the association of those individuals with expertise and meaning escapes me.  There's no reason to believe that an actor is particularly knowledgeable on a social issue or politics or anything else, unless they go out and really demonstrate that.  Few do.

Along these same lines, I'm often amazed by the extent to which certain actors become incredibly strongly identified with institutions and values portrayed in their films. To some extent, that's fine.  If a person appears in a lot of religious themed movies, or better yet directs them, a person might be entitled to derive some belief about their values in that fashion.  But that only goes so far.

Recently a columnist for the Casper Star Tribune, Daniel Molyneux, wrote an article taking shots at John Wayne in this fashion.  Molyneax is a Lutheran pastor and writes on a wide variety of topics, and he must be fairly fearless as he really goes after Wayne, while praising Jimmy Stewart.  And he has a point.

The reason he has a point, in my view, is that there are a fair number of people who absolutely worship Wayne as some sort of a hero.  I don't mean to throw rocks at Wayne.  There's a new biography out on him by the same author who wrote about John Ford, and I intend to read it even though I care next to nothing about the lives of actors.  Its just that the Ford book was good and well written and this seems like a natural companion to it.

Anyhow, for that reason, I'll somewhat reserved judgment on Wayne, in part because the earlier Ford book did, giving some credence to his apologists who maintain that there were legitimate reasons he did not serve during World War Two. Still, my point is that he didn't serve in World War Two, and the piles and piles of people who somehow feel that he was a larger than life, real life Sgt. Styker, are off.

Indeed, I'm amazed that Wayne's career survived World War Two, which is another example, I think, of the Depression Era generation I've recently been writing about here being very "liberal" in ways that would now surprise us.  Several years ago there was a big controversy about the Dixie Chicks making some comments about the Iraq War in a concert that caused all sort of angst in some quarter, but here we see the World War Two American populace perfectly content to go to movies made during the war or immediately after it, featuring an actor portraying tough as nails military figures (Flying Tigers, Flying Leathernecks, They Were Expendable, The Sands of Iwo Jima), who never served in the military.  And for those audiences surely most reasons for not serving must have sounded very thin. They apparently just didn't care really.

That's fine, but we shouldn't confuse that actor, or any other, with the roles they played.  At the end of the day, John Wayne was a movie actor.  He did buy a ranch somewhere in later years, but he wasn't a real cowboy in the sense that ranchers who do that from early youth are, and he was never in the military.  I'm sure he had his virtues, and one thing that Molyneax missed is that he did wade into a crowd of Vietnam War protestors during the war to ask them to pipe down as a fellow actor he was with had lost a child in the war.  Still, it should be realized that Wayne, or Clint Eastwood, or whoever, are actors and when we see their popular image advanced, we're seeing the success of their acting, not their real personalities.

Fame

Fame must be an odd thing.  Additive apparently.

I hit on Google News the other morning and found a news story about Amanda Bynes, who apparently has taken up publishing photos of herself nude or nearly nude, on the net.  All I know about Amanda Bynes is that she was a child actress with a show on television called, I think, Amanda Please.  I remember when the kids were young, they'd watch it, and like most shows of that type, I absolutely hated it.  It was extremely irritating.

I wouldn't expect a show like that to translate into adult success, so one would hope that somebody salted away some cash so that those early years paid off somehow later.  I have no idea if they did or not, but now it would seem she's imploding in the public eye, or so desperate for attention and the revival of her fame, that she's willing to exploit herself in the worst possible way.  Bizarre.

But not isolated.

Another child actress, Miley Cyrus is in the news a lot as well, and a lot of that has to do with presenting herself in as trashy of way as conceivably possible.  As a child actress (with another show that I absolutely hated) she had a pretty clean image, so in contrast she's presenting the opposite now. Why?  Who knows, other than it gets her name in the press a lot. It doesn't seem to be translating into work, however.

Also in the news it seems that some figure who was on the MTV show documenting the lives of teenage single mothers has been engaging in filmed pornography.  That's not only bizarre, but disgusting.  I suppose this is basically the prostitution of her image for cash, and perhaps indicates a certain degree of financial desperation, but my gosh, really?  Who would buy this. And did she forget how she ended up being eligible for a teen mother expose in the first place?

And then we have Lindsey Lohan, who is always in the news trying to get out attention.  She's busy getting arrested, getting stoned, or selling herself in print.  Why?  Again, she was a childhood actress and then a teen actress. That's probably more success of that type than a person can expect, so a person ought to be good with that.  No reason not to just retire and enjoy things from there on out. But apparently that won't be the case, and for some it's better to melt down in the public eye than just go on and live a dignified life. But why?

Closer to home, last week saw a weird, weird news story where a UW student anonymously threatened herself with violent physical assault.  Apparently there was a UW centered Facebook page where students could go on and publish their crushes on other students. That such a Facebook page would be monumentally stupid is self evident, but none the less, it apparently was.  Anyhow, a UW student threatened herself, in the guise of an anonymous poster, with rape.  Now why would somebody do something that stupid?

I don't really know, but what I do know is that the student in question came into the public eye with UW invited radical Bill Ayres to speak, and then dis-invited him.  That whole episode was pretty stupid also, but it sparked a lawsuit, in which this particular student was a plaintiff, and she had her moment in the sun as a sort of celebrity.  These things pass, of course, but she's apparently kept on keeping on as a feminist figure.

I don't know that this is about fame, and I don't care if she is a feminist campaigner. That's her absolute right.  I do feel sorry for her, however, as this misstep is a bad one.  People ought to back off and leave her alone, as it's just a silly youthful error and nothing more, and this moment will surely pass never to be remembered, but I do wonder if it's another example of the corrosiveness of fame.


Perhaps the worst example I can think of concerning the strange impact of fame is the entire Khardashian clan.  We're constantly being afflicted with news stories on the three (or four?) Khardashian sisters and their sort of icky lives. 

I have no idea what the Khardashians are actually known for. Their father was a well known California lawyer, but so what?  They aren't.  And lawyer fame dies quickly with the lawyer, with only a very few, and very rare, number of lawyers being remembered even shortly after their deaths.  I doubt, quite frankly, that most people even recall that their father was a well known lawyer.  As for this collection of sisters, what have they done?  I honestly don't know, but at any rate they're constantly in the news with marriages, divorces, pregnancies etc.  I think they're famous for being famous.  The problem with that kind of fame is that it trades on image alone. They're not bad looking, of course, but they have to sell that, and not even in the fashion with a model or actress might.  It's really unseemly.

Of course, none of this is new or even news.  People have traded in their fame for eons, or at least as long as there was some sort of media which could promote self-promotion.  As I'm not well versed in this class of folks, I couldn't give specific examples, I'm sure, but I am quite sure it's long occurred, and that that this isn't new.  Probably what is new about it is that it now seems to be a requirement to do something really shocking or really disgusting in order to get the spot light turned back on, no matter how brief that light may be.

But it doesn't have to be so.  I can think of at least a few actors or actresses who were child performers who have recently seemed to pass into real adulthood, some preserving careers, and others recognizing that the spot light is now off, and therefore moving into other things.  And in the past, there's been some examples of people who have gone on to much more dignified adulthood's than we're seeing here, just as there's been examples of those who have flamed out, self promoted, or just acted badly.  I suppose that this is just another example of the Internet allowing something to be sped up, and conducted more openly in the public eye, for good and ill both.