THIS BOOK is about the star icon, Princess Diana, Jackie, Marilyn, Grace Kelly, that endlessly talked about and little understood persona, object of adulation, fantasy, and cult. It begins with a narrative of Lady Diana’s funeral, but it is not a “Diana book.” It takes off from the pairing of Diana and Grace Kelly, the one a royal who seemed to carry, as if by proxy, the mantle of film star; the other a film star effortlessly become Monaco royal. This transfer or modulation of aesthetic feature from one crown to another is the joint collaboration of media society and public imagination, hence the book’s title. Other books have been written about the star icon’s celebrity, which we pretty well know how to understand. However, no book has been written that seeks to cut through the gossip, the tabloids, and critical canons of scholarship to focus on her aesthetic formation: what it is about film and television culture, the star system, and consumer society that have made the star icon what she is. Recruiting a philosopher’s interest in the media, an ironist’s eye on society, and a love of popular culture, my book is an essay on our yearning for and consumption of such iconic figures.
Stories of celebrity and star culture tend to collapse the star icon into a general formula, losing all sense of her uniqueness. Celebrity culture we know how to understand, the star icon we do not. She is a celebrity, but also something quite different, a being, the book argues, caught between transcendence and trauma in her own life and in the public’s gaze on her. An effervescent film star living on a distant, exalted planet, she is at the same time a melodrama-soaked soap opera queen whose dismal life she is ever trying to flee or overcome and into the mire of which she constantly sinks—always with the help of the media. The very public that edges her on also secretly desires her to fall apart, since it will be the culmination of a whopping good story. This double life of the icon is sustained by a special alchemy between film and television detailed by the book. In its picture of opposing tensions and strange synergies between film, TV, and consumer society, the book understands aesthetics as a complex system and the star icon’s emergence as a product (or fault, depending on how you look at it) of the system as a whole. Along the way the reader will, it is hoped, encounter new perspectives on film and the aura of the film star, television, talk show, and serial, and the religious glow of the star in an age of consumer society.
The book is about the way society creates its aesthetic types and also about how it destroys them. It is about grace and it is about cruelty, about the public’s longing for charisma (in the guise of religion) and the indifference of its consumer stance. Written by a man in love with popular culture but also deeply critical, it is hoped that the paradoxes and controversies it details will keep the reader thinking even when the silver screen goes grainy, the TV is turned off, and the Warhol painting is left speaking only to the cold blue halogen light of the museum in its off-hours.
A book in multiple registers, multiple persons have aided in its creation. Parts were presented to a Hollywood audience at the house of John Rich, legendary television director and generous friend to the institute I direct, other parts to a philosophical group of aestheticians at the University of Michigan. The fellows of the Institute for the Humanities at Michigan combed over the manuscript in progress. Friends and colleagues gave generously of their time: Gregg Horowitz, Lydia Goehr, Nicholas Delbanco, Michael Steinberg, Ed Dimendberg, Marcia Kinder, Marjorie Perloff, Michael Perlstein, David Gritten, Laurence Goldstein, Kendall Walton, Everett Kramer, and above all, Lucia Saks, inamorata deluxe and companion in channel hopping.
My junior copywriter Sophia Saks-Herwitz helped with the book’s title. A part of a chapter on film has appeared in similar guise in my book Key Concepts in Aesthetics. Other than that, the material is new.