I confess: I am not a morning person. Once upright, my greatest challenge is to focus in the mirror while shaving. To help me through the early fog I usually flip on the morning news shows, which serve as a conversational Muzak.
But one recent morning the background conversation suddenly caught my full attention. The familiar wooly haired film critic was interviewing actress Liv Ullman. “There are no rules that can apply to [every]body and there [are] many kinds of truths,” Ms. Ullman was saying. “The one which is easiest and best to live by is your own, the core within yourself.” She concluded, “I never told my daughter that what I say is the truth.”
I stared at the screen, shaving cream dripping from my face. Ms. Ullman may well be an accomplished actress, but does the fact she is a screen celebrity also make her a philosopher for millions of morning TV viewers?
Soon after, I chanced upon a similar interview with Jerry Hall, rock star Mick Jagger’s live-in girlfriend who has borne him two children. Phil Donahue managed such weighty questions as, “Was it a surprise when you got pregnant?” to which Hall replied, “Oh, yes, I was just lying there.”
And here is Hall’s cave-woman formula for keeping her man: “As long as the house is clean and organized and they are fed and have plenty of sex they’ll never run away.”
Even God gets his turn on the celebrity circuit.
Rita Jenrette, whose claim to notoriety was posing nude after her congressman husband stumbled into Abscam, is back in the news: she’s found religion. While fervently hoping her conversion is genuine, one has to swallow hard over her suggestion that God is “neutral” about public nudity.
Or consider rock celebrity Prince, whose albums sell tens of millions. According to the media, he’s “fervently religious”; his band joins hands in prayer before concerts, at which he combines overt sexuality with a song about Christ’s crucifixion, or struts on the stage in his underwear claiming he’s feeling fine “because the Lord is coming soon.”
A concert last spring found nearly 13,000 young Prince fans chanting his lyrics like a liturgy: “I’m not a human / I am a dove / I am your conscious [sic] / I am love.… I’m your messiah and you’re the reason why.”
Unfortunately, these are not isolated examples—for to command media attention these days, one need only be famous or near-famous. The reason for one’s fame is irrelevant, except the more outrageous, the better.
So an interview about the value of life with Bernhard Goetz would score better Nielsen ratings than an interview with, say, an intellectual Nobel laureate; or, one on marriage and family with Elizabeth Taylor would top James Dobson. The goal is not to inform, but to entertain—if that’s the word for the steady TV diet of banal puffery, served up by these hollow figures called celebrities.
In his insightful new book, Intimate Strangers, film critic Richard Schickel argues that television’s dominance has made the cult of the celebrity inevitable.
By its nature, TV requires “simplifying symbols”; thus it produces celebrities, which become the principal means to communicate ideas. Celebrities are the “chief agent[s] of moral change in America,” concludes Schickel.
Consider just two consequences of this chilling phenomenon.
First, to affect public policy, images—often slickly crafted—are more important than reasoned argument. For example, President Reagan gallops out of the White House, larger than life, daring Congress to “make my day.” His charisma makes him popular even when his policies aren’t.
The other side combats with images of its own, as when actresses Jane Fonda, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek appeared before a congressional committee to tearfully oppose Reagan’s farm policies.
None is a farmer or an agricultural expert. But, in a fitting commentary on our times, they were called as witnesses because they had played farm women in recent films. “We knew when they came forward,” gushed one political leader, “everyone would pay attention.”
This leads to the second consequence—the ultimate, unconditional victory of style over substance. Societies have always looked up to philosophers, persons of learning and distinction, to provide wisdom and noble visions. But, as Schickel concludes, today it is the celebrity—the famous or infamous—who “shape[s] minds and change[s] our traditional modes of apprehending and responding to the world.”
Thus Liv Ullman gives us our philosophy, Jerry Hall our morality, Jane Fonda our farm policy, and, most frightening of all, rock star Prince gives the theology of the eighties.
With media glitz replacing informed discussion, the sublime becomes indistinguishable from the ridiculous. Thus is the populace morally desensitized.
It is the church, however, which is the soul of the nation; the church which must prick the national conscience. But I wonder if we can.
We too have been lured into the promised land of imagedom. Electronic communications demand simplified symbols—no less for great ideas than for selling books or soft drinks. So the gospel is packaged into slick “what-God-can-do-for-you” 60-second, segments.
Said a Christian broadcaster interviewed on “60 Minutes”: “The main thing is just to create an image.… You’ve got to present a product that’s a little bit more appealing than the others.” Mind you, he’s speaking of the gospel.
And one has only to flip on Christian television or check our bookstores to confront the cult of the celebrity head-on. It’s not so outrageously blatant as in the secular world, perhaps—we follow our own rules—but the idols are there in force.
Thus, what is bending the mind of America may be eroding its soul as well. And that is something to think about.
