A Vacancy at the Paris Hilton
A Vacancy at the Paris Hilton
Those who dismissed the ludic nihilism of Jean Baudrillard’s later works—his final resignation in the face of hyperreality’s triumph, his refusal to advocate on behalf of any illusory remnant of subjectivity, his concretization of evil in the encroaching logic of the object—should refer to a string of simulations reported in November of 2005, a month that—if history still existed—would no doubt figure prominently in its demise. As Iraq continued to explode and thousands of refugees from Hurricane Katrina found themselves cut off from the last crumbs of government assistance and public memory, celebutante Paris Hilton and three members of her roving entourage left a Hollywood nightclub to take their existential maw on the road. Hoping to outwit the paparazzi, Hilton’s boyfriend/chauffeur Stavros Niarchos—presumably out of reflex more than logic—threw a coat over his head and then promptly rammed Hilton’s $162,000 Bentley into the back of a truck. Naturally, they fled the scene, only to later be briefly stopped by the LA police. Despite an on-camera confession by one of the passengers that he “was the only one sober,” the police looked the other way and allowed the merry band to continue their night/week/month/life of menacing all honest working folk who might stand between them and a good time. The following day a spokesperson for the LAPD denied accusations that the quartet had received “special treatment,” while Hilton’s publicist noted, “It’s all very upsetting as you might imagine. But the important thing is at the end of the day what seems to be going on here is that Paris is the only victim. She’s going to be stuck with the tab of repairing that car” (Whitcomb 2005).
By inviting us to imagine that any amount of money might actually matter to Hilton, perhaps her publicist thought he had contained the incident by appealing to the average schlub’s empathy for the common “fender bender,” as if Hilton’s boyfriend had cracked up a ‘74 Gremlin backing into a Burger King dumpster. Such heroic efforts at populist spin were negated a few days later, however, when Hilton and Niarchos made their way to Las Vegas, whereupon Hilton, while purchasing some $4,000 worth of lingerie (and for maximum PR effect, a bullwhip), lost control of her pet lemur, Baby Luv. The lemur proceeded to run amok in the store before at last turning on Hilton herself (no doubt to the cheers of the store’s staff and patrons). Meanwhile, back at the hotel, the terror of encroaching boredom provoked Stavros and his buddies to activate the hotel’s sprinkler system, damaging twelve other rooms on their floor. Trading in levels of embarrassment and shame that would kill mere mortals, the couple remained in their protective bubble of wealth and self-absorption, and soon Paris, Stavros, Baby Luv, the bullwhip, and the $4,000 in lingerie were on their way back to Los Angeles, no doubt to find a replacement Bentley, or failing that, perhaps a car that runs on the boiled blood of nuns and orphans.
Of course, it is easy to take cheap shots at Paris Hilton; in fact, it is necessary—her entire career depends on it. In a culture that refuses to have any meaningful debate over issues of social and economic inequality, Hilton gamely serves as the stupid rich girl America loves to hate, not necessarily because she is rich and stupid but because she so wantonly violates certain unspoken protocols of fame. Americans take inequalities of birth, wealth, and opportunity in stride; but in a cultural economy where fame is inexorably replacing talent as the coin of the realm, a nagging, residual Protestant work ethic still expects fame to be earned the old-fashioned way—through excellence in some form of criminal, political, athletic, or artistic practice. So annoyed was Daily News gossip columnist Lloyd Grove at this injustice that he devoted an entire column to swearing off reporting Paris Hilton “news” ever again. “The arc of Paris’ ‘career’—from rich, witless party girl to rich, witless party girl with a television show—is an insult to the American sense of fairness: the idea that you get ahead by working hard, playing by the rules and acquiring a skill of some sort,” he grouses (Grove 2004: n.p.). As Grove’s disgust suggests, most Americans have learned to tolerate trust-fund kids as an annoying side effect of capitalism, but when the insanely overprivileged refuse to enjoy their wealth and leisure in private, demanding instead that we must bear public witness to their privileges as “talent” or “allure,” they transgress a much more powerful moral boundary, one that has allowed the fabulous and the drably normal to survive in nervous harmony for hundreds of years.
But herein lies the evil genius of this object we have come to know as the Paris Hilton, and why only the theoretical armature developed by Baudrillard over the past twenty-five years is equal to the task of “explaining” her continuing presence on the contemporary mediascape. For years, Baudrillard’s work has been facilely dismissed as ignoring the real world, overvaluing sign and simulation, and thus avoiding meaningful intervention into some leftist fantasy of a nonexistent public sphere. But honestly, what model of political economy, psychoanalytic demystification, or reception analysis is up to the challenge of explaining Paris Hilton? In assuming that Hilton enjoys “illicit” or “unjust” fame, we begin the search to uncover an underlying cultural, social, or psychoanalytic mechanism that would recuperate the Hilton phenomenon as a fleeting and perhaps curable pathology. But what secret is there to “uncover” in a figure whose entire existence has always been predicated on performing constant visibility and who circulates through all media (Grove’s column and this article included) as an object of depthless fascination? “She’s the perfect Bush-era heroine, because she’s all style and no content,” opines a snarky Naomi Wolf in the pages of Vanity Fair, making a stab at Baudrillardian posturing and yet still attempting to ground Hilton in some fantasy of historical determination. Even more off the mark is Camille Paglia, who in the same piece asserts, “People want to be soothed right now, and there is something about Paris Hilton that’s soothing” (Smith 2005: 280). Paglia assumes here that most Americans like Paris Hilton, when in fact, the vast majority of her media exposure is framed as negative irritation (strange that Paglia would confuse the two). Much more appropriate are Baudrillard’s comments at the beginning of Fatal Strategies: “Things have found a way of avoiding a dialectics of meaning that was beginning to bore them: by proliferating indefinitely, increasing their potential, outbidding themselves in ascension to the limit, an obscenity that henceforth becomes their immanent finality and senseless reason” (1990: 7). Fame and anonymity, style and content, talent and ineptitude, justice and injustice: how could we expect any of these binaries to adhere or correspond in the current mediascape? And what better way to conceptualize Hilton than as a bored object “in ascension to the limit,” a metonymy (but not a symptom) of the media’s ongoing proliferation into “senseless reason”?
Part of the vertigo here no doubt stems from the public experiencing a form of “the bends,” unable to surface from the real at the same velocity as the bright and shiny objects of simulated fame. For example, we had all made our peace with those peculiar celebrities who are “famous for being famous,” figures who appear to have little or no talent, and yet through sheer saturation become public institutions. Hilton, on the other hand, gives us the first celebrity who is “famous for being famous for being famous”; or, to put it more succinctly, meta/meta-famous. In so doing, she diabolically moves the already highly simulated institution of celebrity one step closer to complete obscenity—that is, toward a final annihilation of fame’s traditional trade in depth, mystery, and fantasy into a “more visible than visible” display of perpetual celebrihood as self-evident surface (Baudrillard 1990: 55). Hilton’s strategy has been to leverage her wealth, privilege, ignorance, and lack of talent in such a manner that she might become famous for wanting to be famous based on her wealth, privilege, ignorance, and lack of talent. Thus, every blip she makes on the medias-cape, be it yet another magazine cover or facetious public concern over her missing Chihuahua, only further accelerates a vicious circle of fame, wealth, and entitlement that in turn generates its own media gravity, attracting more exposure, opportunity, fame, wealth, and entitlement. It is a brilliant strategy for negotiating the media end-times—a perpetual motion machine of hype—and further confirmation of Baudrillard’s contention that today “the entire critical problematic of the media revolves around this threshold of tolerance for the excess of obscenity” (2003a: 29). In this paradoxical scenario, the more the public professes to hate Paris Hilton for her “fake” celebrity, the more truly famous she becomes, every detail of her life buttressing a Chinese finger-trap of envy and loathing. The more the public wants her to disappear, the more visible she becomes.
Perhaps this is why Hilton is wise enough to devote most of her energy to wrecking Bentleys, terrorizing lingerie shoppers, and milking brief engagements to fellow millionaires named Paris—the viral media attention to such hijinx is not a side effect of her fame in the entertainment industry but rather serves as the prerequisite that allows her to find “real” work in front of the camera; indeed, from her infamous “sex tape” to the panic that gripped young LA in the wake of her stolen PDA, Hilton’s “backstage” career has proven far more important to her persona than her “legitimate” turns as the star of The Simple Life, a briefly ambulatory corpse in House of Wax, or a bikini-clad burger-huckster for Carl’s Jr. In fact, it is doubtful such a radical experiment in simulation as Paris Hilton could take place without the concurrent proliferation of the lucrative offshoots of the culture industries that now thrive wholly on stoking the red-hot obscenity of Hollywood’s glitterati. While the tabloids have always been a factor in the industry, the current explosion of these ancillary Hollywood sites, from the traditional print rags to TV’s Extra to the web’s Gawker.com, has at last created a textual space coequal to the products of the entertainment industry. Much more than a mere supplement, these sites have moved from providing biographical background and gossip to creating an autonomous textual arena that is often more compelling in its dramaturgy than the bland recycled product proffered by the studios and television networks. The implications of this shift could not be more profound. Somehow, Hollywood has managed to go from producing actual entertainment to creating venues for the public to bear constant, almost mandatory witness to celebrities entertaining themselves (how else are we to explain Access Hollywood, MTV Cribs, and Ocean’s Eleven, texts ostensibly aimed at different audiences and yet united in their ritualized performances of narcissism?). In this respect, Hilton has realized the dream of every transvestite who ever passed through the gates of the old Warhol factory system: simulate glitz, glamor, and attitude, and a career will follow, not necessarily one that involves creating any actual art or media, but rather, a career that involves endlessly recreating one’s self for attention and consumption. Blissfully unencumbered by Warholian irony or East Village poverty, however, Hilton has succeeded where Holly Woodlawn and Candy Darling failed (one can only imagine the levels of irony that would be at play had Warhol lived to meet and interview Hilton). Only a highly capitalized and thoroughly naïve bid for such narcissistic spectacle could really hope to succeed. In the wake of Warhol, in the wake of Duchamp, any number of art hipsters might have let a lemur loose in a lingerie store as a self-conscious gesture of avant-garde agitation, but only a walking simulation of fame like Hilton—pure surface evacuated of all interiority—could actually succeed in achieving such sincere affectation so effortlessly.
Erotic Capital
Hilton’s ability to convert all forms of exposure into continued hype is a testament to the way today’s meta/meta-famous, like cockroaches, have become immune to the forces that formerly would have killed the merely famous. Bad publicity, overexposure, naked careerism, candid glimpses of condescension, decadence, and hypocrisy: in the past such “negatives” would have eventually overwhelmed a celebrity’s ability to maintain credibility with the public. For Hilton, of course, these qualities are the very foundation for her larger public career. No doubt much of this persona was indelibly established by the release of Hilton’s “sex tape” just before her mass media debut in The Simple Life. Waggishly titled One Night in Paris, the film documents an hour or so of sex between a then 19-year-old Hilton and 32-year-old Rick Salomon. For many years, young women in Hollywood had to worry that cheesecake or “art modeling” photos from their starving past might return to haunt them once they had settled into a comfortable character and career before the movie camera. Such photos are almost always more humiliating for what they say about the celebrity’s former class status than for the revelation of any private flesh. What beautiful actress would really be humiliated by the exposure of a famous and well-compensated bosom? Much worse is the glimpse into the actress’s desperate and hungry past, when the economics of flesh, lens, and desire were much more naked in their circuitry. Hilton, of course, has never struggled or starved, so the arrival of her sex tape—in advance of any career and in absence of any deprivation—has a much different pornographic effect. Not up to the technical or performance standards of professional San Fernando porn, the tape is less a “hot lifestyles of the rich and famous” than a rather clinical document about the sexual practices of the young, privileged, and bored (perhaps most jarring to viewers [and Salomon] is the moment a jaded Hilton interrupts the proceedings to answer a cell phone call, thereby validating Jerry Seinfeld’s claim that a cell phone at dinner [or in the bedroom] says to everyone involved, “I’ve got other options”). The press has reveled in stories of Hilton’s embarrassment over the tape, but truth be told, her career would never have flourished without this shadow porn text (whether actually seen or just acknowledged) in place to underwrite her arrival on American television.1 It is difficult to say how much the widespread downloading of the Hilton sex tape inflated the numbers for her subsequent television debut on Fox. One thing is for sure: it created a rather unprecedented reading protocol for The Simple Life and for the rest of her public career, inverting the chain of desire that traditionally informs the Hollywood imaginary. While generations of old spent years fantasizing about what their favorite starlet might look like nude, Hilton’s triple-X debut will forever make the public wonder what this party girl/amateur porn actor might look like if she could act, or sing, or do anything other than shop. Getting the sex and nudity out of the way up front has allowed Hilton to pursue her quest for absolute blankness unencumbered by any residual public desire or even interest in exposing her more authentic or real “private” self.
Hilton is thus an excellent subject for all manner of speculative play in that her blank surfaces can be read as either empirical evidence of total vacuity or as a sang-froid performance of studied detachment. Compare, for example, two famous quotations by the meta/meta-famous. On her reality marriage fiasco, Newlyweds, Jessica Simpson famously asserted one day that “Chicken of the Sea” was in fact chicken. That’s just stupid.2 But when Hilton arrives in Altus, Arkansas, and says to the locals, “I’ve always heard that people hang out at Wal-Mart. What is Wal-Mart? Is it, like, they sell wall stuff?” (The Simple Life, episode one), her bafflement is both stupid and brilliantly condescending. Hilton acts like she might be naïvely outraged at her treatment by the press from time to time, implying she is sincerely stupid and sincerely hurt at being called stupid. But then she will stage a revolutionary stunt like appearing in P Diddy’s “Vote or Die” campaign only to then “forget” to vote in that year’s election. What better way to remind her public that their hollow pursuit of political embetterment, like their pursuit of meaningful entertainment, has now been completely absorbed within the meta/meta-famous’s kingdom of absolute simulation? After all, why would Paris Hilton need to vote, or even entertain the plebeian fantasy that voting was actually important? Titillating photos of her wearing only a “Vote or Die” t-shirt are a sexual tease, certainly, but they are much more effective as a spectacle of eroticized apathy, a way of capturing the icy sexiness that only the absolute detachment of wealth, privilege, and apolitical boredom can provide. That’s hot because it is so bitterly and brutally cold.
Hilton’s unique performance of meta/meta-fame may imply that this phenomenon is wholly confined to her gender, age, and class. But there are in fact many roads to such hyperreal status. Consider, for example, the plight of Kevin Federline. If Hilton’s persona plays with that familiar line in the aristocracy dividing the highly decadent and the highly dumb (a trope dating back, no doubt, to the golden age of syphilitic insanity), Federline instead works the territory of the self-deluded goober moron, a meta/meta-famous celebrity who seems to truly believe he possesses incredible talent (Hilton, to her credit, would appear to understand she is famous only for her fabulousness). Indeed, the Hollywood Hills are now littered with people who are famous for being famously deluded. As is well know to tabloid readers, an obscure Federline had fathered one child and was expecting a second with ex-Moesha star Shar Jackson when he unceremoniously dumped his starter family to attach himself to pop tartlet Britney Spears, whom he subsequently married. Endlessly parodied and attacked as an irresponsible, lazy, gold-digging hillbilly freeloader, Federline finally fired back through his art, releasing a rap single in late 2005 titled “Y’all Ain’t Ready.” The track stands as an unwitting and witless anthem for the meta/meta-fame generation, Federline bragging that he hopes to soak the public for “about 2 mil” in record sales while reminding everyone that he enjoys frequent sexual congress with Spears. When the single leaked out as an mp3 on the Internet, critics were quick to agree, “No, we ain’t ready.” Inevitable comparisons were then made to Vanilla Ice, formerly the gold standard in walking white-rapper punch lines. Such comparisons, however, misread the full audacity of Federline’s gesture. Vanilla Ice at least understood he needed to feign some form of biographical street-cred in order to succeed as a white rapper, inventing an elaborate story of his life in the ‘hood to cover for his suburban Dallas upbringing. Federline, on the other hand, simply offers his own meta/meta-famous status as sufficient cause for railing against the hurtful persecution of the meta/meta-famous:
I’m starrin’ in your magazines
Now every day and week
Back then, they call me K-fed
But you can call me Daddy instead
We may not understand him now, but in the future it appears we will all be his bitch.
Throughout his rap, Federline accuses his detractors of not being able to handle his “straight 2008” sense of style, reminding us that the meta/meta-famous typically wage their warfare against the mundane populace on the terrain of consumption and style, proving once again that the culture wars, whatever their putative left-right politics might be, are in the end almost always about clashing taste formations. This was most evident in the series architecture for Hilton’s big media debut in Fox’s Simple Life. Tellingly, in its first iteration, the series began with the idea of flying yokels to Beverly Hills to be humiliated for misunderstanding the etiquette of valet parking, thereby reversing the folksy critique of the original Beverly Hillbillies into lifestyle pornography for everyone living west of La Brea Boulevard. Faced with preemptory criticism of this concept (coming in large part from those last great defenders of the real—Southern Senators), Fox retooled the show around Hilton as a vehicle for showcasing her superficiality and condescending snobbery. Season one took Hilton and her accessory friend Nicole Richie from their pampered LA environs to work on a farm in Arkansas. A classic of the new cultural wars, the entire series hinged on sorting out which taste culture the viewer would find more repellent—young Hollywood in all its narcissistic stupidity or regular working people condemned to a life of eternally nonfabulous boredom. The dirty little secret here, of course, is that the show—despite its putative placement of Hilton and Richie as the butt of the joke—was in fact structured for profound polysemy. At stake in the series were two visions of America’s future: in one, everybody under the age of thirty lives in LA and no one can remember how to milk a cow; in the other, the heartland masses storm southern California and return with the cast of The OC on the ends of their pitchforks.
Hilton’s talent for both conspicuous consumption and, even more importantly, passing conspicuous judgment on the consumption of others testifies to how the contemporary culture of celebrity has so radically inverted previous criteria for talent and creativity. If Hilton does have a talent, it is as a master semiotician of LA trend mongering. Surveying our recent crop of Hiltons, Federlines, and Simpson sisters, it is clear that the desire to become a star today is no longer attached to any fantasies about public admiration for one’s unique talent or a creative body of work (films, music, etc.), but appears increasingly to be wholly a function of transforming oneself into an unvarnished object of envy, and thus an arbiter of appropriate taste. The signifiers of fame have become so completely detached from expressive talent that any residual investment in “creativity,” “genius,” and/or “depth” has long since evaporated from the scene (twenty years ago, Rupert Pupkin in his most pathetic fantasies of fame and fortune still wanted to be a good comedian). In this respect, “talent” now appears increasingly to rest on an ability to reflect leisure, pleasure, and discrimination back to the masses in the form of idleness and spectacular consumption. As Hilton’s career demonstrates, her entire persona depends on her signature inability to do or contribute anything productive, making her fame the most pure and tasteful of all. In fact, since her entire persona depends on performing the role of a talentless and parasitical socialite whose only desire is to consume and be consumed as famous, then it necessarily follows that Hilton’s “success” in any given endeavor—music, TV, film, animal husbandry—would sully and thus threaten to undercut the entire foundation of her career.
Once upon a time, fame used to at least go to the trouble of masquerading as talent, or at least craftsmanship. Fifty years ago, Marilyn Monroe was apparently so tortured by the public’s refusal to take her seriously as an actress that she sought out Lee Strasburg, Arthur Miller, and psychoanalysis as a means toward discovering depth and credibility. And while there is certainly no shortage of mediocre actors still willing to join James Lipton in the Actors Studio to opine about the challenges of starring in Daredevil and Gigli, increasingly such charades are no longer necessary. The real art in the contemporary entertainment industry is finding a way to force oneself into the game in the first place. This seems especially true in the music industry, where the disjunction between fame and talent seems most acute. To whit: an American Idol contestant enters the audition room and proves within seconds he has absolutely no talent, looks, charm, or charisma. Clearly about to be dismissed, he pleads earnestly with the panel, “Make me into a product, mold me into whatever you need to move records.” Despite this demonstration of eager pliability, “mold-me” Idol does not pass on to the next round. The shock on his face reveals he truly believed his performance of insider knowledge would be the key to the kingdom of fame. Surely Simon, Paula, and Randy will respect that I, too, know this is all a charade, that with today’s studio and promotional wizardry, even Helen Keller could be on Top of the Pops. And why wouldn’t he think so? Ashlee Simpson’s career continues to thrive despite repeated brushes with a disastrous real. Even before a calamitous appearance on Saturday Night Live when she was caught lip-synching to the wrong song, a “Stop Ashlee Petition” had been circulating for months on the Internet. “We, the undersigned, are disgusted with Ashlee Simpson’s horrible singing and hereby ask her to stop,” it reads. “Stop recording, touring, modeling and performing. We do not wish to see her again.”3 After the SNL debacle, Simpson delivered a stunningly terrible performance during the 2005 Orange Bowl and was roundly booed by a crowd of seventy-two thousand. Realizing that the entire franchise was in danger of slipping away, Simpson returned to SNL the next season to sing an acoustic ballad, not so much as musical entertainment, but as a freakish “proof-of-life” demonstration meant to foreground the absence of any electronic chicanery and thus vouch for her authenticity. Despite such attempts to repair her credibility, Ashlee still found herself targeted a few weeks later by a group of Toronto art students. Staging “Operation Boo,” the students hoped to “take a stand against manufactured pop” by booing Simpson for a solid hour during a local record store appearance. Simpson no doubt laughed, or perhaps sang off-key, all the way to the bank.
Let Them Eat Hype
Perhaps there was a time when a wily band of Canadian art students might have prevented us from plunging ever deeper into the hyperreal paradoxes of meta-fame, maybe in the eras of David Cassidy or Tiffany or Debbie Gibson. For now, however, all such battles would appear to be lost—especially now that technicians at MTV have transformed a small coastal community in Southern California into a working laboratory for cultivating, nurturing, and harvesting the meta/meta-famous of the future. Having first performed their experiments in fame engineering in a series of Real World safe houses across the country, MTV has finally settled on Laguna Beach as ground zero in their project for slowly, inexorably rewriting Aaron Spelling’s camp horseshit of the 1980s as the new social reality of teen California, and by cathode extension, the nation at large. And in this next brood of celebrity simulation, Paris Hilton may at last have some competition. MTV’s reality series detailing the trials and tribulations of the town’s rich, white, and photogenic high school students has recently propelled a pack of newly graduated meta-famers up the 405 to LA in search of acting gigs and recording contracts. As it turns out, in the backseat of Hilton’s Bentley on the night Niarchos rammed into the delivery truck was Laguna Beach’s Talan Torriero. While it may still be too early to pick America’s next breakout asshole, Torriero certainly seems to have committed Hilton’s playbook of notorious nonachievement to memory. The New York Post reports that shortly after the wreck Torriero demanded to work the press line at a trendy LA nightclub, but only after the stipulation that no one could ask him any questions about his vehicular mishap with Hilton and Niarchos the week before (because that is what the famous “do”—they make demands and stipulations before deigning to speak). “There were no takers,” notes the reporter with laconic satisfaction (Johnson 2005: 6). But despite such sporadic resistance to his magnetic destiny, Torriero remains undaunted. “I’m doing an album, which is very exciting,” he tells MTV news. “I’m supposed to be discreet about it, so I can’t tell you what label I’m with, but it’s a really big label push” (MTV 2005: n.p.). Can the former quarterback of Laguna Beach’s football team actually sing? Who knows? But certainly, “rich and studly high-school jock” is right up there with “spoiled rich heiress” as a potential catalyst for another media empire of lust and loathing, helping to seal New Hollywood’s new profile as an inescapable extension of everyone’s worst high school nightmares.
When coupled with Entourage, The OC, and countless other sites of SoCal propaganda, meta/meta-fame would also appear to signal the final victory of Los Angeles over New York for the teenage and twenty-something imaginary. LA, which for years had to endure the missives of haughty New Yorkers (or worse, insufferably precious San Franciscans), has at long last, through its ongoing domination of the culture industries, recast itself as the new standard of youthful cool. In the process, what began twenty years ago as a caustic Gen-X skepticism for all institutions of culture and society has somehow morphed into an affable Gen-Y irony complacent with any and all modes of exploitative stupidity. If one could fast forward through the videotaped history of MTV, no doubt this transformation would unfold in the form of gritty Soho loft sets gradually collapsing to reveal the eternally sunny beach houses, movie premieres, and hillside mansions of the west coast. From its beginning, MTV was already clinging precariously to the last vestiges of an already wholly simulated countercultural authenticity, putting Huey Lewis videos in heavy rotation while the idealistic young VJs held out hope for a surprise visit from Lou Reed. No such confusion or schizophrenia exists today—MTV’s transformation has been complete. Perhaps realizing across the postmodern eighties that its entire premise of “rock ‘n’ roll television” was fundamentally oxymoronic and ludicrous, the network gradually began to embrace the cynicism of its own compromises, and like the rest of the entertainment world, began promoting the hype industry itself as an art rather than as the traditional adversary to all that was holy and good. Today, there might be a few teenage throw-backs who still dream of moving to Greenwich Village to become a poet, a novelist, or an angry songwriter (and, yes, they would be suckers for thinking these vocations were still in demand). But, like Torriero, more and more seem comfortable with defining the path to self-actualization as a guaranteed rung on the ladder of the LA club scene, a pimped ride, and the beatific synergy of a “big label push”; in short, success now equals unlimited access to self, money, and sunshine. And, as fame becomes increasingly detached from talent, achievement, or even potential, we can look forward to a world where, more and more, only less and less talented people will be drawn to Hollywood—like cloned moths bonded by a gradually disintegrating genetic code attracted to an increasingly simulated flame.
As with his prescient divination of America’s future obsession with terrorism and its gradual descent into mass obesity, Baudrillard also recognized the inevitability that California, like encephalitis, meningitis, and all other soporific diseases, would eventually tax the rest of the nation’s ability to resist a cultural economy based wholly on the obscene performance of consumption, pleasure, idleness, and envy. “The sad thing about California is that all willed activity is derisory there,” he observes. “Intellectual and social relations are mysteriously emptied of their content […] beneath all its easygoing ways, it is a chivalric world, with eyes only for the stars, and a courtly world, in thrall to the seduction of business and the love affair with images” (1996: 41). A common, cheap, and archly French swipe at California dreaming, one might say. But, typically, Baudrillard goes beyond this bit of received stand-up comedy wisdom to get at the real heart of the matter, noting,
What is hardest is that, in this idealized universe, it is not permissible to be bored. The need to preserve this paradisiacal reputation (much more than happiness itself) obviously makes life twice as difficult. There is an extraordinary pressure of collective responsibility. All new arrivals conform immediately; the solidarity is total. The Californians are committed to a job of advertising just as ascetic as the task of the Mormons with whom they share a geographical and mental space. They are a huge sect devoted to proving happiness, as others have dedicated themselves to the greater glory of God. (1996: 41)
Putting these comments back into the logic of stand-up comedy, a routine by HBO’s comedian/pundit Bill Maher on 26 September 2003 illustrates Baudrillard’s point—even as it eerily echoes the logic of Hilton’s Simple Life persona. “You know, the rest of America feels about California the way the rest of the world feels about America,” goes the set-up.
They hate us because we do what we want. They think we’re too blessed and too free, and it makes them nuts in the dreary hovels of Kabul and Tikrit and Lubbock, Texas [. …] Would anywhere else in America trade places with LA or San Francisco in a piss-soaked New York minute? You bet they would. Because I don’t recall anyone ever writing a song called “I Wish They All Could Be Rhode Island Girls”!
As many have noted, humor always contains both a grain of truth and the sublimation of anger. In its unabashed region baiting, Maher’s routine adds to the increasing burden placed on nonfamous non-Californians to perform as a miserable geographical Other, one that enables Los Angelinos stuck in traffic to fantasize about a bored (and preferably freezing) populace yearning for their perfect weather and the prestige that comes from living in proximity to the famous, meta-famous, and meta/meta-famous. Refusal to participate in this fantasy of a compulsory happiness stemming from the joys of a fame-based economy only elicits more confrontational hostility on the part of LA’s cultural workers, usually in the form of yet another movie, sitcom, or reality series about what it’s like to live in LA and somehow be connected to the entertainment industry. And if the endless staging of stars, convertibles, surfers, snowboarders, palm trees, and paparazzi should fail, there is always out-and-out name calling. “We have oranges, free oranges, everywhere,” observes Maher. “What grows on the trees in Scranton, fucker?!”
As the most visible personifications of this peculiarly Californian aversion to the encroachment of occasional boredom, Hilton, Federline, Torriero, and the rest of the meta/meta-famous push this ritualized performance of happiness to ever more dizzying heights. Imagine, for a moment, the depth of commitment to “fun” required to go clubbing till three in the morning, wreck an expensive car, elude the police, travel to Vegas with a lemur in tow, buy $4,000 dollars in lingerie while trying to subdue said lemur, and then negotiate thousands of dollars in damages with hotel management after your boyfriend’s antics get out of control—all in one week! Indeed, this performance of a “good time” seems so over the top, one suspects it could only be accomplished through some perfectly mixed eightball of uncut fame, narcissism, and mania.
As Hilton and her peers continue this “ascension to the limit,” this testing of the “threshold of tolerance for the excess of obscenity,” it would appear we are all doomed to live in the world of Café Flesh, an ambitious porno film from 1982. Written by its director, Stephen Sayadian, and subsequently legit screenwriter Jerry Stahl, the movie posits a postnuclear world where 99 percent of the world have become “sex negatives,” capable of desire and yet unable to actually have sex. One of their few pleasures is to attend Café Flesh, where the last remaining sex positives engage in hardcore sexual performances for a masochistic audience (both in the Café’s audience and the theater showing the film, a mise-en-abyme structure that makes this art-porno rather than simply porno-porno). In a riff on Cabaret, the entire proceedings are hosted by an obnoxious emcee, who taunts his audience by sneering, “I get off on your need.” Scenes of hardcore pornography—the sex positives in the throes of ecstasy—are repeatedly intercut with the reactions of an envious, frustrated, impotent, and increasingly sweaty audience. If we replace or conflate sex with fame, as many already have, it is not difficult to see Café Flesh as an allegory about the growing rift between media-positives and media-negatives, fame-positives and fame-negatives. Hollywood used to be a factory that produced entertainment. Now, in the world of Café Fame, it would seem we exist wholly for the entertainment of Hollywood, an anonymous mass that must attend closely to their bipolar vacillations between privileged lethargy and frenzied enjoyment. What else could explain the unchecked narcissism of The Simple Life, Federline’s “Y’all Ain’t Ready,” or anything linking the word “project” to any member of the Laguna Beach cast, other than their need to “get off on our need”? Perhaps this is why the public takes such great pleasure in puncturing the pretence of modesty in the celebrity class, their constant whining over a loss of privacy and the invasive threats presented by the public, paparazzi, and the occasional deranged stalker. It is rather like having to listen to sailors complain about getting wet. But in the end, maybe this is the only power left to the fame-negatives—to push the fame-positives into such absolute and complete obscenity that their powers and pleasures finally evaporate. Toward this end, the paparazzi should be encouraged and supported at every level, by federal law if necessary. All interferences and annoyances that can be hurled at the meta-famous should be attempted. Cut off their limousines in traffic. Put GPS tracers in their dry cleaning. Bug their homes for audio and video. Invite them to phantom charity events and photograph their confusion. Put their medical records and plastic surgery procedures on the Internet. Only if the meta/meta-famous become wholly visible 24/7 might they once again become invisible, or even better, irredeemably banal, a destiny Baudrillard argues to be the endpoint of all obscenity. “The obscene is what is uselessly visible—needlessly—with no desire involved and no effect achieved” (2003b: 44). What more could we hope for in describing our future in the world of the meta/meta-famous—a détente born of each party’s mutual boredom.
1. After settling litigation about the tape, Hilton now donates her proceeds from its sale to charity.
2. Although it should be noted, Simpson’s “stupidity” here instantly resulted in an offer for her to become the official spokesperson for Chicken of the Sea tuna. See Andy Dehnart, “Chicken of the Sea Wants Jessica to Be Its Spokesperson,” 23 Oct. 2003, Reality Blurred, http://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/archives/new-lyweds_nick_and_jessica/2003_Oct_22_chicken_of_the_sea.
3. Bethany Decker, “The Stop Ashlee Simpson Petition,” 2005, http://www.PetitionOnline.com/mod_perl/signed.cgi?StopAsh.