Celebrity, Mythology, & The Machine (part 3)

Charles Dickens carte-de-visite (ca. 1860–69)

III. THE MEDIA'S OWN CREATURES

The eighteenth-century newspaper scooped up the beau monde as readymade celebrities. Many of high society's denizens would have been happier without the public scrutiny. Probably it was only those people and families who were either trying to climb the social ladder, found themselves in a position of precarity, or feared the airing of a private scandal who truly cared about what the plebians writing for the newspapers had to say about them. 

Despite the newspapers' role in bringing the affairs of the fashionable universe to the public's attention (and stationing themselves as a sort of magic mirror in the fashionable household), the media didn't get into the business of manufacturing its celebrities until the nineteenth century. True, the papers weren't above bringing eccentrics, perverts, and madmen into the textual spotlight to be gawked at by a public that would have otherwise been ignorant of them (then as now, sensationalistic content moved product), and of course coverage was allotted to the scientist, inventor, political activist, philosopher, or businessman who rose to prominence in their respective spheres of activity. But the first modern celebrity was the figure whose sphere of activity was the mass media itself: the literary celebrity, who made his entrance onto the public stage during the same decades that the fashionable intelligence column became a fixture of the English-language newspaper.

These new sorts of eminences were, like their counterparts on the twentieth century's silver screen and the twenty-first century's black mirror, those best endowed to make themselves a creature of the medium in which they worked, through a combination of ingenuity, talent, restless ambition, and a personal charisma they could weave into the very fibers of their productions.

Celebrity, Mythology, & The Machine (part 2)

George Cruikshank, The Prince of Whales or The Fisherman at Anchor (1812)

II. THE VIRTUAL REALITY OF THE BEAU MONDE

The germ of celebrity culture as we recognize it today was incubated in the crucible of the mass media revolution. Not the printed and bound book, but the newspaper, which attained a recognizably modern form during the eighteenth century. Government accounting data from Britain suggests that the annual circulation of newspapers rose from about 2.4 million copies in 1713 to 16 million copies by 1801.¹ In addition to publishing current events reports, partisan propaganda, editorial essays, poetry, columns about mathematics, etc., the city periodical was also apt to disseminate a great deal of gossip.

Readers of eighteenth-century London journals such as the Tatler, Town and Country, and the World could enjoy regular helpings of juicy content about the impropriety of the upper classes. Though similar in spirit to People and TMZ, they resemble their modern progeny about as much as a tyrannosaur looks like a chicken. Their correspondents typically referred to their subjects by an initial or pseudonymously, expecting the savvy reader to decipher the clues as to whom they referred. Dirt on the rich and powerful was often shoveled up in the form a satirical poem (Alexander Pope's 1712 epic The Rape of the Lock being the most famous example, though it wasn't originally printed in a newspaper), but most often it was served in in the grandiloquent prose of the period.

The ostensible purpose of these primitive scandal sheets was muckraking: the pseudonymous author of the short-lived Female Tatler (one Mrs. Crackenthorpe) claimed her intention was to shame the well-to-do into regulating their own behavior and setting a better example for the "inferior classes."² Doubtless the editors of longer-enduring journals understood that whatever excuse was made for it, lurid content moved product.

From The Freeman's Journal of Dublin (Jan. 16, 1843)

Celebrity, Mythology, & The Machine (part 1)

Heath Ledger shrine by Kaitlin (2012?)

For what follows I am indebted to Shirley in two respects. First: some months ago (this piece was put aside and picked back up three or four times), she and I got in an argument about her sympathetic interest in Kim Kardashian and Pete Davidson, which I simply couldn't make sense of. It prompted me to probe the topic of celebrity culture out of (1) a genuine interest in understanding how it works and where it came from, and (2) spite.

Second, she has often suggested that I break up my more precipitous effortposts into more approachable segments, which seems worth giving a shot. Let's see how it goes.

 

I. MYTHOLOGY AND THE MEDIA ENTITY

Though the term "parasocial relationship" was coined by modern sociologists observing the effects of electric media in the 1950s, parasocial interactions predate recorded history. Their earliest instances occurred between preliterate peoples and their gods and spirits.

It may be objected that supernatural beings don't actually exist in any meaningful material sense, disqualifying any of them from acting as the second party in a parasocial interaction—but to the members of a prescientific "tribal" society, their reality was as much a given as that of the sun in the sky and the earth underfoot.

On the other hand, one may point out that an individual might have good reason to believe that an ancestor spirit was aware of his or her life and deeds, and we propose that if the believed reality of a deceased but conscious family member should be considered effectively real, then we're actually making the case that the interaction is of an interpersonal rather than a parasocial character.

Maybe. But we needn't go deep into the weeds of ontology to observe that if "nonhuman persons" such as gods or spirits could be said to have reciprocated believers' interest (to the understanding of those believers), they did so only mediately. This is to say that there is in fact a difference between the appearance of a mysterious, unmasked man with antlers who emerges bodily from the forest during a druidic ritual, speaks and responds to the celebrants in articulate human speech, clasps them by the shoulders, and then disappears in a cloud of mist before their eyes, and the hunter who returns to the village claiming that a deer with which he made eye contact was a god in animal guise, recognizing and communing with him an uncanny moment of eye contact.

In a paradigm of primary orality, gods and spirits are media entities. Their images gaze at believers through the bulbous eyes of idols fashioned from wood or stone, admonish or menace people in their dreams, cyclically accomplish their famous deeds during storytelling performances and commemorative rituals, and make their desires known through the voices of human liaisons. Their reality has its basis in communal speech and ritual enactment, the devotional behavior they inspire, and the psychological transformations of the physical environment which they effectuate; they "exist" as verbal relations carried out in the field of experience, set up and maintained by the social group.

Peter and the Basilisk

Samuel Colman, The Edge of Doom (1836–38)

  Where is the end of them, the fishermen sailing
Into the wind's tail, where the fog cowers?
We cannot think of a time that is oceanless
Or of an ocean not littered with wastage
Or of a future that is not liable
Like the past, to have no destination.
  —T.S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages" (1943)

The United States' Evangelical Christians are a cohort in decline, and only the kookiest of them habitually scrutinize Israeli politics for signals of the Rapture. The vulgar fashionability of Nostradamus peaked in the 1990s, and at this point we're all fairly certain the Mesoamerican Long Count calendar did not, in fact, apprise us of the Earth's expiration date and/or the dawn of The New Age. 

And yet, prophecy has not been discredited and is far from dead. Chiliasm and apocalypticism are a pair of bats too stubbornly lodged in the belfry of Western consciousness to be shooed out by a sequence of ideological paradigm shifts. We can't seem to let go of the idea that history must arrive at a culmination and we can know in advance what it is. All that's changed are the methods of augury and our relation to whatever sort of future we suppose is preordained.

My Little Cockroach: Friendship Is Magic

Concerning the cockroaches, there was an extraordinary phenomenon, for which none of us could ever account.

Every night they had a jubilee. The first symptom was an unusual clustering and humming among the swarms lining the beams overhead, and the inside of the sleeping-places. This was succeeded by a prodigious coming and going on the part of those living out of sight. Presently they all came forth; the larger sort racing over the chests and planks; winged monsters darting to and fro in the air; and the small fry buzzing in heaps almost in a state of fusion.

   —Herman Melville, Omoo: Adventures in the South Seas (1847)

American cockroach (Periplaneta americana)

It’s time we discussed the cockroach.

Is it misunderstood? Certainly. Most of us don’t trouble ourselves to learn about something that makes us shriek and dry heave. But since cockroaches aren't going anywhere, perhaps we should to become more knowledgeable of these contumacious neighbors of ours.

Young Justice: A Postmortem (or: Kneel Before Hugbox)

After spending more time writing about Magic: The Gathering than was sanely warranted (and not saying very much interesting about it for all the words, words, words) I wanted to be done scribbling about pop culture dreck for a while. I've got other stuff on my mind.

Then I went on vacation and got covid with a side of insomnia. I hadn't brought my laptop (all of my vacations are also digital detoxes) and only packed the sort of books that one can't effectively read when they've got a fever, a head full of germs, and are running on three hours of sleep. So, once again, I kept myself distracted late at night by writing something easy. Pop culture is easy.

So, this is a transcription of fevered chicken scratches, tidied up and expanded a bit. I already regret typing it, am intensely annoyed at committing time to editing it, and will surely hate myself for posting it. I'm going to bed.

Magic: The Gathering: The Worldbuilding: The Writeup (8 of 8)

Because for rational beings to see or re-cognize their experience in a new material form is an unbought grace of life. Experience translated into a new medium literally bestows a delightful playback of earlier awareness. The press repeats the excitement we have in using our wits, and by using our wits we can translate the outer world into the fabric of our own beings.
   —Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (1964)

Is anyone surprised that McLuhan articulated the appeal of games writing over a decade before even Pong and Dungeons & Dragons were on the market?

I'm putting this last part out ahead of schedule because I'm ready to be done with it.

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