Nine

Star Aura in Consumer Society (and Other Fatalities)

AND SO the rarity of a figure who lives a double life between film star royal and TV tabloid protagonist, a figure whose daily appearances on TV and whose single extended TV confessional interview exalt her aura and serialize her desperate story. She remains ever the star, while also the haggard talk show intimate in news broadcast, and it is as if once, and only once, around her life and persona, film and television alchemize. Aspects within TV, and between TV and film, that are usually antagonistic, synergize royally around her royal person to create her double persona. This is a moment when the media itself is employed around a single character to its fullest—and to extraordinary, peculiar, effect. One is stunned. (I am among the stunned.) This is the transcendental aspect of the icon: that the media seems to levitate around her. And since the public’s only real way of knowing her is through this levitation, an absolutely peculiar aura is formed called the Diana effect, or the Jackie effect, the product of all these forces in combination with the public and its desires.

The star icon’s rarity needs to be understood in terms of the unique synergy between disparate aspects of the media that happen around her: in terms of the media considered as an aesthetic system. This effect of the system is all the more rare in this our age of consumer capitalism, which reduces the aura of personages and things worldwide, one-dimensionalizing them. As the star and the diamantine reduce to the celebrity and the logo, the public secretly longs for that rare charismatic figure whose auratic values are not reduced but magnified. The desire for someone around whom to make a cult gets greater and greater. Then when it happens we are dazzled that our deep desire for someone beyond the mere one-dimensional celebrity can find fulfillment. It is not simply that the media have created a figure convulsing us like film stars do. It is that we are amazed she remains with transcendent power in the days of celebrity weather reporters and friends of Paris Hilton. Standing before Diana is like standing before a Michelangelo and realizing: once upon a time such a thing was possible to make. Except that no one made Diana, just as no one made Jackie or Marilyn or Grace, least of all these women themselves. A Diana is an accident of a system without intention or finality. And so she is all the more astonishing. It is a historical astonishment that a figure draped in the beyond can exist at all in our time. And yet, where there is homogenization there is the greater desire for such a figure, where there is marketing there is the greater desire for the above and beyond. And so the rare occasion becomes one in which the antagonistic features of the star system (film, tabloid, television) come into alignment. Earlier I called this alchemy. Now I shall call it aesthetic luck or aesthetic melodrama. Have it either way.

Consumer capitalism is context and also threat for the star icon. For consumer capitalism reduces aura to a marketing formula in a number of related ways. This happens partly through the mere fact of repetition. At first films were mysterious, the newness of the medium convulsing all manner of viewers, from surrealist poets to street cleaners. At first the mere fact of things and people appearing on-screen rang mysterious; all they had to do was exist in motion. However, as society became over time inundated with an excess of films, with an industry of such, the stakes of halo creation got harder and harder. Films and photographs gradually lost their power and had to work at retaining depth of aura, sense of mystery. See one cathedral and it overwhelms; see a hundred and only the best or most unusual retains this power. It is the same with films. Susan Sontag long ago made the point about the power of photography: see an image of a war victim and you are shocked, see a thousand and their power becomes derealized, their force rendered banal. It becomes a task of art, journalism, culture to keep the power in the image alive, the aura profound. Otherwise the image loses its force, fading like a worn coin.

This point has long been noted, above all by Andy Warhol, who adored repetition/reproduction precisely because of the deadening effect. A culture flooded with films and images of all kinds dulls experience and makes each liable to being treated as just another product in the market. This is the threat, I said earlier in this book, to the icon: the very circulation that creates and sustains her may also at any point deaden her. She is the living proof that aura may remain mysterious in spite of circulation, but the proof is also a fragile one. Especially (and this is the second point) because consumer capitalism thrives in a world of increasingly deadened images. It turns lost originals into new marketable logos in a marketplace where images are consumed with increasing rapidity (and vapidity). Genius, uniqueness, depth of aura: these qualities sell, but sell better as the item becomes one of a baker’s dozen, a thing turned into a product type: the Picasso plate, the Marilyn in quadruplicate, Rocky II, III, and IV. Over time consumer capitalism has come to mine the peculiar distance, religiosity, and charm of the lost aura into mass-producible product formats. Aura is that which is retained after the thing is no longer in use, no longer the object of sacred activities. And so Ralph Lauren takes the rumpled hunting clothes of the mink and manure English country set and remakes them in a way that carries in the design a hundred British and Hollywood film images of “Old England.” These can be purchased by the common man or woman, who wears them on the golf course, at the mall, to the movies. The aura of Old England becomes an advertising logo, a suit of clothes tailor-made for lawyers and stockbrokers on the rise, as in Julian Barnes’s novel England, England. Before you know it, six-year-old daughters of real estate magnates dress in Marie Antoinette wear, infants in Edwardian finery. The New York Times Travel section is mostly an occasion to advertise fashion shoots in faraway locations (blonde models in white on white Anna Karenina furs posed in the tundra of Lapland, Indian models in salwar chemises reclining on the parapets of Lake Palace, Udaipur, their jet-black hair overhanging the waters awaiting a golden prince to climb up and rescue them). In the Ralph Lauren store you may purchase a royal bed embossed with the House of Lauren logo with matching ensemble for your purebred dog: you too are a duke or earl strutting your stuff on the streets of Manhattan or Newport Beach, California.

The celebrity values in the world of modern art have turned logo in exactly the same way. I talked about this earlier: about the Picasso item, plate after plate, bowl after bowl, each reeking of the name PICASSO, so that the cardiologist or lawyer who purchased would be assured immediate recognition value for self and friends.¹ Between the logo and the celebrity Manhattan bowed down before its bad boy artists of the 1980s, whose “megagenius,” loudly proclaimed by gallery, critic, artist, and collector in one shrill voice, led to a long line of would-be purchasers standing in line for their share of product, resembling those who call months if not years in advance to book at the trendiest restaurants and still arrive to an hour’s wait at the bar. If you wanted a Julian Schnabel painting you put your name down on the list, waited months while he dished out the stuff, and then proclaimed joy and rapture when your name finally came to the top of the list and you got the call: “Your Schnabel is ready.” It was like an opening of the heavens. “Is it rare?” you might have asked. “Over easy?” “I like mine with sun dried tomatoes and fresh basil.” “It measures thirty-six by seventy-five, is a picture of a dead cowboy riding the empire state bldg like a Ford bronco and as a special treat the canvas is dripping with the entrails of dessicated sheep,” the answer came back from the gallery director over the telephone. “Does it have red in it, I like a bit of red in mine,” you asked. “What does it matter?” came the response, “It’s a Schnabel, and by the way the meter’s running out on this call, please make up your mind, there are plenty of other people who will take this work in a second.” So much for the rapt contemplation of the art object that characterized the days of awe, that is, aura, the days of aestheticism, the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, when persons took folding chairs into churches and museums to protect themselves from backache while the hours passed as they practiced brushwork. In the New York of the 1980s you ended up buying sight unseen, brand recognition was enough.

This turning of the aura into one-dimensional marketing logo with brand/celebrity recognition happened most forcefully in film. The starring role became reduced to a product type or star logo. With the advent of high-concept film in the 1980s, Demi Moore was marketed as an army private, hooker, working girl, brain surgeon, nuclear physicist, evil genius. Each role became reduced to the Demi-god, that false logo with sneer and sulk in tight jeans. The type became one-dimensional, the character reduced to the one-dimensional type. Film turned its own star auras into high-concept marketing images with instant recognition value and market penetration. This increasingly became the essence of film, which is why stars can have such enormous control today, with the power to end up owning their own production companies and directing their own films (with often miserable results): this while also adopting third world babies over the Internet. Is this the world of Will Success Spoil Rock Hunter (1957, directed by Frank Tashlin)? You bet! Rita Marlowe (Jayne Mansfield) is now the “titular head” of her own production company, orchestrated by one Rockwell Hunter (Tony Randall), aka Lover Doll, selling stay-put lipstick stay put put, stay put stay put stay put, to the tune of “Old MacDonald Had a Farm,” just like in the movie.

In the 1990s the public finally became sick of this scene, preferring an iota of mystery and romance in their films and film stars, and Hollywood again heightened up, readmitting some peculiarity/individuality in their films and stars. Contemporary cinema veers between these poles today. Thus is Benjamin half correct. The aura has withered and is in constant danger of withering more. But not because mechanical reproducibility dispenses with it per se. Rather because mechanical reproducibility recreates it but it then becomes mined by consumer capitalism, which degenerates it (the magic of film) into a glamour component, an advertising allure surrounding people and things on-screen.

This process has proved crucial to the market expansion of the star system. More newspapers got into the act; more independent producers wanted their piece of the action. There was more distribution to be had, bigger pictures to be made, and more money. The value of the star depended on her rarity, and the studios always understood that (keeping her shielded, while also making her available in limited quantity). But with newsprint and, later, television, more of the star meant better copy and better sales. Recall that quote from People editor Richard Stolley: “We’re scouring every facet of American life for stars. We haven’t changed the concept of the magazine. We’re just expanding the concept of ‘star.’” ²

With the expansion came the increasing need to divorce them from values of talent, natural-born beauty, apple pie values. Television allowed for more rapid turnover of stars (a new series, talk show host, confidante every year). As in all situations where increasingly rapid turnover of product requires increasingly rapid branding of product, the public then was given less time to bask in the aura of the star, who mostly did not have it anyway. Rather she should be quickly consumed and discarded. And I mean she, not he, because male stars still continue on with aura. Sean Connery can still (as it were) James Bond his way through a film at the age of seventy plus, bedding down with partners the age of his great-grandchildren. Clint Eastwood can still stride his way through all manner of battle. Jack Nicholson has yet to reach his peak, become as good as it gets. But actresses (e.g., those of the woman persuasion) flutter in and out with the speed of last year’s ready-to-wear, which is what they’ve become by the age of forty plus. Females are simply more commodified than their male counterparts.

As the market speeds up, more time needs to be saved. Rapid turnover of product means increasing conformity of product: there is no time to invent the new, rather the market depends on transfer of logo from old to new product every season. Each star becomes branded with a slight but distinguishable variant from the last, like a new ready-to-wear line or toothpaste. Stars appear and disappear with the rhythm of new and outdated fashion. Each stands for the new, but marketed as a variant of the old. This simulacrum of newness was perfectly illustrated by the sign that was plastered onto the curved wall of the Beverly Center, Los Angeles, in the early 1990s, around the corner from where I happily lived in the early 1990s: “Don’t blend in/The Beverly Center,” the sign read. Don’t blend in, shop: shop for the particular color and size that appeals to you. Stand out by purchasing a designer’s particular make of blended fabric that everyone else purchases to (similarly) not blend in. March to your own drummer in accord with the designer’s formula for individuality. Think you are different while taking silent comfort in being the same as everyone else who lives through the designer’s mirror. Pretend, therefore, you are Henry David Thoreau while acting like a Ralph Lauren model. Over time (call it the twentieth century), capitalism comes to mine this public consciousness of images in the form of product values, image types containing the peculiar distance, religiosity, and charm of the aura but in mass-producible/ownable form. And so Ralph Lauren and his mink and manure English country day world remade in New York with the aura of Old England as its advertising logo.

The star system expanded into most every aspect of public and private life (with it privacy became a public matter, a matter of public advertising, confession, talk show, and therapy). Broader changes in capitalism from industrial production to information, communication, and marketing systems led to generalization of star quality into market quality and creation of this star market quality in every field of business, from politics to religion. The extrapolation of the star system to American politics of course began with the Kennedy presidential debates, in which Nixon, it is said, lost because of his five o’clock shadow, that edge-of-night glow of beard that cast him in a sinister aspect. Nowadays presidential debates are a matter of physiognomy, gesture, and synced language—opinion/fact/analysis/vision and sound editing are all too often secondary. The Reagan principle is now permanent: always look sincere, always sound profound. Carry the movie version of history behind you like a terrible swift sword. Don’t say anything too controversial, because even if you do the media won’t pick it up except to nail you. Reduce your ideas to marketing slogans so you can brand yourself vis-à-vis other candidates in ten second sound bites. Don’t try to develop any complex ideas, you’ll never have the time, and, anyway, no one will listen. When these conditions of branding are generalized to all aspects of American public life, we’ve got headaches, and not only political. Film itself suffers, since its artistic uniqueness gets understood as a mere variant on media culture generally, a brand among others, like shampoo. Such migration of the aura away from the silver screen into the hair salon, the department store, the presidential debate is exactly what Warhol reveled in, exactly what turns the aura of film into simulacrum, a whiff of the aura in the form of marketing value. It is making things more difficult for the icon to shine through the maze of getting and spending, the marketing muck.

If I sound polemical, it is not because I think the star icon and her aura without its own historical problems. Indeed all art has its problems: Renaissance art, in celebrating violence, self flagellation, not to mention the abrogation of sex, is not exactly value perfect either. What we speak of in adulating the icon is the perfectibility of forms, a dimension of transcendence now, with the marketing of the aura, entirely buried. One wants aura because of its power of absorption, its capacity for glow, its relation to art. One wants it so one can also criticize it. Without it, there is no chance for art today—not much, anyway, given the rule of the market. One of my favorite authors on art is Robert Hughes, whose lambasting of the times I find appealing, even if I am not in exact agreement with his (many) opinions. His move, often exhibited in print, of reverting to past art as a bulwark against what he dislikes in the present is not a move of pure adulation of the past—not at all. It is a move that recruits history to criticize the present, to gain perspective on it. That is how I would like to use the aura here.

That and to speak of how rare the magic is when it happens in this system, in the guise of the star icon, even if she is trapped, and we are cruel in our way of watching her. She is a route into the tenor of the times, a song often off-key but also containing the allure of Ulysses’ sirens.

Even the royals have begun to market themselves through the media they also despise, a media that continues to make them miserable. Recently two journalists were arrested for having wire-tapped Charles’s and Camilla’s phones, in the hope of more juicy tidbits of the “I’d like to be your knickers” variety—language that by any standard other than that of purebred dogs is not exactly hot. The BBC released a suite of four DVDs in 2005 of short documentaries that had been broadcast on their channels: King Charles and Queen Camilla: Into the Unknown, Princess Camilla: Winner Takes All! Prince William and Prince Harry: Prisoners of Celebrity, and Harry: The Mysterious Prince. Are we talking about Harry Potter here or what? These titles are themselves a game of Quiddich with the market by those who, simulating themselves, seek marketable images of what they once were. The DVDs would be better were they filmed by the makers of the Harry Potter series, which also mines the elite English past for castle and lord. Schlock of course, simulation certainly, late capitalist marketing product indeed, but the worst thing in life is not being talked about, not being out there on your advertising terms, when the world is everyday tabloiding you on its terms. And they fail because the other royals simply don’t cut it on the level of star quality, resembling bull and heifer rather than classical beauty, lacking entirely in physiognomic response. They are a smirking, silly group and that is how they appear. A media is friendly only to the figure it causes to glow. And so the failure is vast: the royals are long on lineage and short on persona.

But those who film them know this. Their point is not to make Harry a star but to erase Diana from the royal picture, to show the royals can have a life on television without her to break the public’s ironclad association of Diana with the media. The royals now understand that with their falling ratings even they need an aura cast by the media. Since they’ve little to offer, they’ve ended up reducing the royal aura to a one-dimensional marketing logo of the People /Ralph Lauren variety. There are no more blinds on the windows of Buckingham Palace. No one can exit the media today. So much for the aura of royalty, however long the royals may or may not last.

And so in the half-century during which the icon arose, from Marilyn (her funeral did not take place as a TV media event and she was not on TV regularly) to Jackie (who was) and Grace (who was intermittently) and then crowned with Diana’s starring role in all media, the threat to the icon has increased along with, paradoxically, her media presence. Her survival value is all the more precarious, while the need for her is greater.

Or is it? Is the need greater? Maybe these days we prefer our idols to be contestants on American Idol? Or stars on reality TV programs like Survivor and (my favorite) Celebrity Rehab. Maybe the star icon with her halo for a crown is a thing of the past? And, if so, would this be a good thing or bad? Hard to say: some long for her type, revel in it, find it astonishing, but the “reconciliations” it offers between beauty and suffering are false. And the cult around her conceals blood lust for her pain under explicit admiration for her stardom. It is a whopping paean to voyeurism in all its aspects. On the other hand, in the absence of the star icon we are left with the aesthetics of Demi-gods and Handsome Harrys, of People and American Idol. These aesthetics preserve none of the mystery of a Garbo, Kelly, Diana, in spite of the royal DVD’s optimistic titles.

And even if they did, how terrible are the ways in which star icons, with all their aesthetics, get narrated day by day? How terrible are the ways their very publics swarm toward them like moths before the flame? What kind of mass confinement is this, and how can any human being bear it? So we might ask: where can human mystery find better presentation for star icon and celebrity alike? And we might ask: where can actual lives of human suffering and human beauty better be pictured or narrated for mass audiences? The paradox is this. The very media that are called on to narrate these celebrity and star lives levitate them, hunt them, curdle them, and turn them into the stuff of silver screen and soap opera. The pressure on the media to continue to tell their stories in a celebrity voice proves overwhelming. Other kinds of lives can sometimes fare better on the media: celebrity and star icon do not. And the tendency is for the media to celebrify, to turn ordinary lives into celebrity lives. Can the media reverse gears? Will the public be disappointed?

This is a question about the state of the media and also about the state of public understanding and public desire. It is a question not only about the narration of celebrities and star icons, but about lawyers, physicians, out-of-work employees, United Nations officials, and American presidential candidates. It is a question about the flow of information through the media, a media that is increasingly identical to the public sphere. It is a question about how the public seeks to understand this flow of information and the way public desires are shaped and satisfied by this flow. Such issues of truth, allure, and illusion weighed on intellectuals throughout the twentieth century. They are even more pressing today.

But here I am still stunned by the icon, still overwhelmed by her aesthetic power, still fascinated by her terrible story. Perhaps I am more like the weeping congregants at the Kennedy funeral, the Garland concert, the Candle in the Wind than I think. Should I go into celebrity detox? Or is the star as icon a kind of art that one should not, cannot relinquish? Even now I find myself of two minds on the subject.