Empire of Illusion Read Online Free Page B

can hang their fears and hopes. The problems of existence are domesticated and controlled. We measure our lives by those we admire on the screen or in the ring. We seek to be like them. We emulate their look and behavior. We escape the chaos of real life through fantasy. We see ourselves as stars of our own movies. And we are, as Neal Gabler writes in Life: The Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality, “all becoming performance artists in and audiences for a grand, ongoing show.” 7
    We try to see ourselves moving through our life as a camera would see us, mindful of how we hold ourselves, how we dress, what we say. We invent movies that play inside our heads. We imagine ourselves the main characters. We imagine how an audience would react to each event in the movie of our life. This, writes Gabler, is the power and invasiveness of celebrity culture. Celebrity culture has taught us to generate, almost unconsciously, interior personal screenplays in the mold of Hollywood, television, and even commercials. We have learned ways of speaking and thinking that disfigure the way we relate to the world. Gabler argues that celebrity culture is not a convergence of consumer culture and religion, but rather a hostile takeover of religion by consumer culture. Commodities and celebrity culture define what it means to belong, how we recognize our place in society, and how we conduct our lives.
    I visited the Hollywood Forever Cemetery in Los Angeles. It is advertised as “the final resting place to more of Hollywood’s founders
and stars than anywhere else on earth.” The sixty-acre cemetery holds the remains of 135 Hollywood luminaries, including Rudolph Valentino, Tyrone Power, Cecil B. DeMille, Douglas Fairbanks, Nelson Eddy, Bugsy Siegel, Peter Lorre, Mel Blanc, and John Huston, as well as many wealthy non-celebrities. Celebrity culture is, at its core, the denial of death. It is the illusion of immortality. The portal to Valhalla is through the perfect, eternally beautiful celebrity. “There’s nothing tragic about being fifty,” Joe Gillis says in the 1950 film Sunset Boulevard , speaking of the faded movie star Norma Desmond, who dreams of making a triumphant return to the screen. “Not unless you’re trying to be twenty-five.”
    We all have gods, Martin Luther said, it is just a question of which ones. And in American society our gods are celebrities. Religious belief and practice are commonly transferred to the adoration of celebrities. Our culture builds temples to celebrities the way Romans did for divine emperors, ancestors, and household gods. We are a de facto polytheistic society. We engage in the same kind of primitive beliefs as older polytheistic cultures. In celebrity culture, the object is to get as close as possible to the celebrity. Relics of celebrities are coveted as magical talismans. Those who can touch the celebrity or own a relic of the celebrity hope for a transference of celebrity power. They hope for magic. The personal possessions of celebrities, from John F. Kennedy’s gold golf clubs to dresses worn by Princess Diana, to forty-dollar Swatch watches once owned by Andy Warhol, are cherished like relics of the dead among ancestor cults in Africa, Asia, or the medieval Catholic Church. They hold, somehow, faint traces of the celebrities themselves. And they are auctioned off for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Pilgrims travel to celebrity shrines. Graceland receives 750,000 visitors a year. Hard Rock Cafe has built its business around the yearning for intimacy with the famous. It ships relics of stars from one restaurant to another the way the medieval Church used to ship the bones and remains of saints to its various cathedrals.
    Charlie Chaplin’s corpse, like that of Eva Perón, was stolen and held for ransom. John Wayne’s family, fearing grave robbers, did not mark his burial spot until twenty years after his death. The headstones of James