Reality TV was a whole other radical cultural Quantitative Easing which borrowed negatively against human attention units, and made the value of Fame plummet even deeper into the abyss.
When we got bored merely humiliating hopeful yokels on “American Idol.”
The public got restless, cruel and itchy for the spectacle of real tragedy.
Audiences wanted to taste blood on their teeth (perhaps because we were now at war, but denied the type of hardcore, Vietnam-style televised war coverage that might inspire a peace movement.)
This is when Paris Hilton dropped like bright phosphorus onto an already tinder-dry media.
Paris — like the city of love — was expensive and filthy…and this was her secret weapon. Nobody ever said anything nice about Paris Hilton, and this only made her stronger.
Paris was much too formidable an heiress to give a shit about public disgrace, or need anyone’s approval. Everything Paris touched was so frankly commercial and perfectly liteweight as to be fashionably anorexic, and therefore attractively loathable, in spirit.
She even put out a pop album to celebrate her own celebrated lack of talent: a heady combination of electronic drum-beats and candy-sick whimpers; a perfect soundtrack for a Hentai anime featuring a bunch of schoolgirls in knee-socks getting raped by a cartoon octopus.
Paris Hilton correctly assessed that pleasant artistic accomplishments were no longer capable of controlling the attention span of a world fizzling with ADHD (particularly at a time when pornography abruptly evolved from the relative unavailability of pricey magazine three-packs sold in back of the Arco station to free super-abundance on every personal computer) — but that there was enormous money to be made in disgrace and humiliation. To really capture a news cycle, you needed scandals, disasters, public tantrums, guns in airports, murders, shark-attacks, and frothing fits of atavistic, old-school racism (a la Mel Gibson). Fame has always been made of quantities of attention, not qualities. For any fame-seeking narcissist, more attention (positive or negative) means …you WIN (cue ominous Donald Trump-rally kettle-drums).
Public Outrage became the new Fame, and Paris was crowned its favorite whipping-blonde.
Proximity to Ms. Hilton was a proven health hazard: She blew all the clothing, morals, inhibitions and self-control of her victims sideways, leaving them emaciated, dehydrated, broke, disoriented and often in jail.
Under-stimulated American audiences suddenly delighted in going chicken-killer on Hollywood strumpets in crisis. A whole new breed of glossy tabloids were suddenly a-gush with reports of oversexed former Mousketeers, and their habitual binge-puking, Mercedes-totaling, Vicodin gargling, pantiless public meltdowns and stints in inpatient rehabilitation facilities that cost $45,000 a week.
Most Americans didn’t really understand how our own government was abusing us — congressional bribes, organized mass deceit via domestic propaganda, policy fixing, violations of privacy and human rights — these realities were too head-thinky and depressing, particularly after putting in a long day of wage-slavery. Paris Hilton, for a time, embodied the angst of our increasing sense of powerlessness; we understood her crimes.
“You feel like you haven’t been screwed by the Man,” said my friend Angus, in defense of Paris-bashing. “If Paris goes to jail, there is still a middle class. There’s still an illusion of hope. We’re not the Philippines, yet. There’s still some kind of justice, and we’re not all just fucked.”
When a bald Britney Spears hit a paparazzo's car with an aluminum baseball bat in 2007...that was the death gong of Fame as we once knew it. The “Britney Industrial Complex,” if not a signal point for the End of Days, at least marked the death of any vestigial remains of Old Hollywood Glamour.
Paris Hilton was constantly derided for being stupid, immoral and whorish, but she was, in fact, a post-Warholian pop genius of media manipulation: an extraordinarily talented infamy artist, who was effectively responsible for the greatest of the rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem waiting to be bored: it was Paris who encouraged Kim Kardashian to “accidentally” release her sex tape, and the rest is history, or what’s left of it (and by “history”I mean Caitlin Jenner).
After this book, I switched gears to write about fashion and politics, because celebrity culture was becoming so intentionally nauseating that criticizing it was merely encouraging it.
Andy Warhol’s predictions bore out -- Fame is now fifteen minutes long (give or take a few minutes)...and pop eats itself. I add this overclarification: Pop now cannibalizes itself at the speed of pop, with a metabolic rate rivaling that of the fruit-fly. Fame jumps its own shark, then the shark eats itself, over and over again on an endless loop.
A Massive Swelling was my first book. It isn’t a perfect beast.
There are chapters that I probably should have erased from existence with a series of hardcover and hard-drive bonfires; but in the interest of not trying to airbrush history or goose my own talents in retrospect, this is the “warts and all”- time-capsule version, as it was originally published.
I was right about a lot of terrible things — most regrettably, my prediction of the weird, tragic, untimely death of Michael Jackson.
I was wrong about a lot of things, like the universal panty-throwing appeal of Ricky Martin.
In retrospect, I think I was a little too rough on Celine Dion, who seems like a good egg.
My lovely assistant T. Ryan Ward removed a rude reference to Robin Williams, because we loved him.
In closing, I believe that Celebrity is still a “Grotesque Crippling Disease.”
Fame, unfortunately, is the only antidote available for the desperate sufferers of galloping narcissism, but, like any radical medical intervention or toxic chemical treatment, it continues to prove that it is deadly enough in its own right to be avoided.
As Dan Rather once said (to boos and raspberries from media critics):
COURAGE.
Cintra Wilson, 2016
Introduction
Statement of Intent,
or How to Read This
Book Without Wanting to Hurt
the Author
Around 1918 there was an influenza that killed nearly everyone. Before that there were locusts and frogs. There was an assortment of plagues. Once, a comet wiped out all the dinosaurs. There was a disease in Africa where people exploded.
Then there was this thing that happened to everyone in the twentieth century, where their insides grew small and weak and sad, and they all strove and suffered, and they sold each other down the river and fucked each other into pulp in order to obtain this thing they were all desperate for: Fame.
Some wanted it more than others; they were willing to push much harder, and were more ruthless and even more zealous than the others, and they were rewarded with everything the world had to offer: Constant slobbering attention. Obscene wealth. Armies of anonymous worshippers so hypnotized that they would saw off their own fingers just to be smiled at.
With the Fame came power and prestige. Those who had it were able to visually eradicate any evidence that they were ever slovenly, drug addled, morally askew, or fat.
I wanted fame every day, for years and years and years. Every American has wanted it at some point in their lives. You can hear the longing for