"We are dealing here with something unprecedented prior to recent
years, the most appalling working out, acting out, of the habit of
false intimacy with well-known people into which so many of us have
fallen of late." So begins this ambitious series of essays on "the
culture of celebrity" - which, like George W.S. Trow's 1981 Within
the Context of No Context (a sort of holy text for Schickel),
expands a promising, limited notion into strained analogies,
unsupported generalizations, sneering tirades, and pompous
lamentations. Adopting John W. Hinckley's star-struck assassination
attempt as a highly dubious "paradigm" (always beware of essayists
who use psychopaths as paradigms), Schickel sees US society - an
amorphous entity usually referred to as "We" - as celebrity-crazed,
taken in by media imagery, living in a world of "false intimacy"
with TV stars and magazine covers, desperately grasping at the
"cult of personality" because all "sense of organization, purpose,
and stability in our society" has vanished. (For just one
documentation of the vast exaggeration going on here, see Michael
Schudson's 1984 Advertising, The Uneasy Persuasion.) An inadequate
history of celebrity/media impact in the Western world follows:
Schickel gives no attention whatsoever to religion - which filled a
similar need for earlier generations; he downplays the role of
fame, gossip, and tabloid-style news in the 19th century so as to
beef up his apocalyptic scenario. ("Our public context began to
lose touch with our private context some sixty years ago.") He then
moves through the Forties - "We might have been bemused by
celebrity, but we were not yet obsessed by it" - to the Fifties,
when "paradigms" Marlon Brando and Marilyn Monroe supposedly
ushered in cult-of-personality. ("When Brando buggers Schneider's
chic, saucy, cultured little bourgeois ass, he is buggering all and
everything that has bugged him.") Next, drawing on Jacques Ellul's
The Political Illusion, Schickel offers a confused overview of a
solid topic covered better elsewhere: the media-ization of the
Presidency. And weakest of all is Schickel's application of these
ideas to the art-world - which had its share of cult-personalities
and hyped trends long before Pop Art and Mark Rothko ("the
paradigm's paradigm"). Throughout, in fact, Schickel's sweeping
harangues suffer from a lack of historical context, from the
failure to distinguish between longstanding social tendencies (in
new guises) and genuine cultural deteriorations. Likewise, his
increasingly irritating "We" lumps together soap-opera addicts,
modern-art critics, and everybody in between - except for a
"worthwhile elite" that apparently includes Schickel, Trow, and a
few select others. ("We cannot redeem the world. But we can, we
unhappy few, redeem ourselves.") Marred, too, by Schickel's glib,
sarcastic, journalese style: hardworking but ineffectual cultural
criticism, identifying lots of all-too-real problems but going
astray whenever it attempts to understand or explain them. (Kirkus
Reviews)
In trying to understand the power of celebrity in modern life,
Richard Schickel ranges through every realm of our culture - film,
theatre, television, literature, art, the media, pop music,
politics - for examples of how celebrity shapes our world and bends
our minds. He considers the careers of figures as diverse as John
Kennedy and Marlon Brando, Marilyn Monroe and Dwight Eisenhower,
Walter Cronkite and Andy Warhol, among dozens of others. And he
reflects on the dangerous, sometimes deadly, political and social
consequences of the fascinating, largely unacknowledged
relationship between the famous elite and the unfamous majority. In
demonstrating how the carefully fostered illusion of intimacy
between these two groups has created a devastating confusion
between public life and private life, in showing how the play of
celebrity symbols has largely replaced the play of ideas in our
society, Schickel takes us on a journey to the heart of
contemporary darkness - and offers, finally, a chilling warning
about the psychopathic consequences of our national obsession with
celebrity. "Intimate Strangers is, simply, in my estimation, the
single most important book about celebrity." - Neal Gabler.
General
Is the information for this product incomplete, wrong or inappropriate?
Let us know about it.
Does this product have an incorrect or missing image?
Send us a new image.
Is this product missing categories?
Add more categories.
Review This Product
No reviews yet - be the first to create one!
Welcome to Loot.co.za!
Sign in / Register |Wishlists & Gift Vouchers |Help | Advanced search
(2)
