The Fame Monster

I’ve been thinking a lot about the overheated spotlight of fame in the last few days.

More specifically, what it means when we see someone relentlessly splattered on our screen or are unable to avoid incessantly reading about them in the news or on social media.

Who and what exactly are these people and how do they fit into the paradigm of who and what THEY really are?

Kinda like Kim K’s recent Met Gala look, you have to wonder… who is she?

And what do our reactions to and fascination with them say about us.

Two people now all over the news and in pop culture that couldn’t be more different prompted this.

In fact, the only thing they share in this moment, and likely for all time, is an outsized level of notoriety that IMPLORES us ALL to have an opinion on them.

1. The late Princess Diana Spencer, aka The People’s Princess.

And….

2. Kyle Rittenhouse, the now 18-year-old AR-15 rifle-toting killer of two men a year ago that was just found not guilty of committing their murder.

I know.

It doesn’t feel right to even carry them in the same thought, does it?

But bear with me.

Earlier this week I received the first complimentary DVD of the 2021 Hollywood awards season, Spencer. It’s a creepy little film about a reimagined pivotal week in Princess Diana’s life in 1991 where she is secluded at the Queen’s estate to celebrate Christmas with the Royal Family and must decide whether she wants to fully embrace her public doppelganger, Princess Di, or re-emerge as her fast disappearing true self, Diana Spencer, and in the process attempt to save her two young sons from the clutches of the royal version of the fame monster.

If that sounds a little pretentious, well, it is. But that’s because this film was directed by Pablo Larrain, who unapologetically played fast and loose with the facts of Jacqueline Kennedy’s life in Jackie (2016), a movie I personally loathed and would have turned off had I not been determined to blog about how truly disrespectful and sickening I thought it was.

Still, there is something about Spencer that sadly speaks to the latter part of 2021.

Not to mention that, in its way, and with the help of a disturbingly transformational performance by Kristen Stewart, it manages to give the people’s princess a momentarily quite happy ending.

It also helps that at the outset the filmmakers superimpose onscreen that what we are about to see is: a fable from a true tragedy. As we watch what seems like yet another crushingly awful exploitation of a dead person’s life we can at least relax into the idea that the filmmakers have copped to the fact that they’re cherry picking their way through a reimagined and reassembled graveyard of facts to serve their own purpose.

Not quite noble but, hey, when you’re as famous as Diana was and continues to be you’ve willingly bargained away your anonymity for the type of riches and attention that the rest of us mere mortals can only dream of.

Or have you?

In a sense that is the question Spencer asks and it’s best expressed when the philandering and quite awful version of her husband, Prince Charles, finally confronts what seems like a mid-nervous breakdown Diana with a sobering fact he presumes she had to have always known.

The idea that there are two of us, the personwe really are and the other one people take pictures of.

In the film Charles is speaking of the Royal Family, trying to drum it into Diana that this is what she signed up for and to think or act in any more authentic way will indeed literally drive her crazy.

Yet given what we’ve “achieved”(Note: Ahem) in terms of world interconnectivity in the last three decades this has now become an undeniable fact of life for all of us.

For it’d be naive to deny that in less than 24 hours any one of us could be living out the hideous fishbowl existence of our own 2021 version of Diana, but without the designer clothes and cool sports car she drives in Spencer.

Whether we enable it, whether we plan it or if, as in most cases, it happens quite accidentally.

This brings us to Kyle, the good ole boy cause celebre or object of international hate/love of the hour.

The moment this then 17-year-old little shit chose to travel to another state with a semi-automatic rifle he didn’t own strapped on his shoulder so he could strut around like a big bad PROUD boy, pretending to be someone he was not (Note: A military-style paramedic vs. a princess for the people) he was immediately trading in his anonymous life and willingly putting himself in the crosshairs of danger – red, white and blue style.

It might be true that he hadn’t planned murder – or well, multiple shots with a war weapon directly into the bodies or two unarmed people he would kill, though later be found not guilty of committing a felony against – but this was always in the cards.

The reason they call them military-style weapons is that they’re meant to kill people in the most efficient manner possible. To deny this is like denying that dating a famous person from a famously Royal family can very likely make you viscous fodder for the international consumption of venal gossip.

The difference, of course, is that young Kyle chose a potentially lethal weapon that he could aim at others for fun, frolic and effect. Diana chose a potentially lethal arena where many of the weapons of the world would eventually be borne down on her because, well, they could. And it’s fun.

Kyle quickly and enthusiastically became the hunter. Diana found herself hunted.

And it’s always better to be armed when you find yourself in the midst of a hunt. Until, well, it’s not.

By play acting soldier and making himself a minor in a minefield of social unrest, young Kyle was living out a video game fantasy of right wing revenge on the streets of Kenosha, WI over a year ago. But as often happens in these situations, who he truly was or could have become (Note: We’ll never know) got swallowed by the events he set in motion to hideously public effect.

With his exoneration in criminal court last week, it might right now seem that he’s emerged victorious and gotten away with it. Yet recent history often has a way of George Zimmerman-ing and Dan White-ing the crap out of people like him – shooters who walk away seemingly unscathed to only years later be hoisted on their own petards (Note: I’ve been waiting decades to use that comic book phrase from “Batman” and this is the first time it’s ever seemed appropriate).

Kyle might have physically survived a situation his victims couldn’t (Note: Tough crap crazy Judge Schroeder, I can use that word outside of your courtroom). But it remains to be seen if he can survive himself.

He’s scheduled to do his first post-court interview with Tucker Carlson to air on Fox Monday night and there has already been talk of him being offered an internship via accused child sex trafficker, Rep. Matt Goetz (R-FL).

So, I mean, that will certainly end well for him in the long run, right? Like, what could go wrong as the years go on?

Fame and some potentially small fortune might be currently knocking at his door but one of the things we know all too well as 2021 is coming to a close is that everything comes at a cost.

And I’m here to tell you as a college professor with two decades of experience that few, very few, 18 year olds have what it takes to weather the kind of relentless, ongoing storms Kyle will find himself in.

Fame is a harsh, relentless and unforgiving mistress as all of us adults who’ve been fortunate enough to live through Diana’s death AND the last thirty years can attest to.

No matter what side you’re on and no matter how dastardly or noble your motivations or deeds. Stay tuned.

Lady Gaga – “Monster”

11.14.21

by notesfromachair

A Bloody Mess

I check out worldwide sensations because I’m that kind of chair.

The type that offers itself up to anyone who wants to take a load off and comfortably, nee honestly, jaw about the latest, greatest and not so greatest of events and phenomena happening in our world.

This is what finally got me this week to tune into Netflix’s 9-episode global juggernaut Squid Game almost two months after its September 17 debut.

– When you’re watching a Saturday Night Live parody of something you’ve never seen you know it’s time.

– When you teach a classroom of college seniors who’ve all seen it (and loved it) and you’re the cheese stands alone you feel the pressure.

– Most importantly, when you’re a person who wants to express an intelligent opinion on what’s goin’ on rather than type/scream into your highly personalized social media newsfeed you owe it to yourself and anyone within eye or earshot to be informed.

In other words, shut the f-k up if you haven’t at the very least watched it, read about it or experienced it. Especially if IT’S everywhere, or seemingly everywhere, you turn.

This and an admitted morbid curiosity about everything even slightly morbid, is what led me to Squid Game. Or shall I say, in full confession, episode 1 of Squid Game.

Because the truth is Netflix would have to pay me, and do it quite handsomely, to get me to tune in to episodes 2-9. And certainly a lot more beyond that to get through its now sure to be season 2.

How much more?

Not even the fictional cash prize of $38.4 million for SG’s fictional players would do it because I’ve lived long enough to know that there is ALWAYS an irretrievably toxic hidden cost for you when that much money is involved with something you know deep down is just plain wrong.

At least for you.

This bloody mess of a series from South Korea taps into any number of hot button issues in the most banal, infantile, reductive and exploitative way possible.

Or, well, at least the first episode did.

But after a lifetime of viewing thousands of TV series and movies I got it. I truly did. And, well, I seriously gave it a try.

I don’t hate you for loving it. So don’t despise me for loathing it.

Think of Squid Game as the worst volume or sequel in The Hunger Game series. A story with all the depth of a Transformers film and all of the bloody action in every superhero movie combined were there no parents or uptight American studios to answer to.

The latter actually makes it sound appealing, which it clearly is, to some, um, many. This, more than anything else, disturbs me.

It’s seemingly bathed in the issue of class, themes of the have and have nots, the worst of human nature and the best of intensions gone awry.

In a practical sense, it also has the irresistible story hook of a bunch of people playing a high stakes game. I mean, who doesn’t love games?

More to the point, I love games. I mean, I L-O-V-E them. My husband and I used to have game nights, when we all felt safe doing such things so close together.

In fact, tonight I might even re-watch Michael Douglas and Sean Penn in the 1997 flick of twisted human desperation, The Game. That’s how much I love them.

Which brings us back to the subject at hand. How high stakes is Squid Game?

Put it this way, if you screw up the rules even once, you die.

Meaning you get quickly shot in the heart, through your head, out your brain, up your ass or even further down below until you disintegrate or explode into a bloody, flesh flattening heap.

As a viewer you’re mired in puddles and droplets and reaction shots of bullets impacting on the bodies of the dying spraying blood. On everyone and everything. Especially the surviving players.

And if you are a player who doesn’t survive your corpse will likely get piled atop or beside others and later get carted away. You will die in that brightly colorful warm up suit they gave you to play this series of games you might remember from childhood. On the other hand, if you don’t die and emerge victorious you will win $38.4 million.

Oh and it hovers over you in a giant gold piggy bank…

But the chances of that are the same chances you have of winning that amount in an American lottery, albeit at an unspeakable and, practically speaking, impossible to truly believe, voluntary risk-reward.

Since I didn’t venture past episode one, I can’t say exactly who is supplying the money. But I do know the game is being watched on closed circuit TV by what is likely a small group of very, very, VERY rich people so it’s safe to assume it is them who are doing the financing and the viewing.

In the show that I saw there is one person sitting on a lovely, sumptuous chair sipping either wine or liquor from a gorgeous glass, subtly luxuriating at the site of the carnage and yet, almost a little bit bored at spots.

No doubt this person has experience with the masses being exploited for their own amusement and financial gain.

The latter is clearly the case since no uber wealthy person does this much research (Note: A detailed dossier on everything about the dozens of players has been assembled in advance), and spends this degree of time and money, without some big financial payoff for themselves in mind.

Even if the deal merely involves a way to satisfy themselves sexually or socially (Note: Or both) their true aphrodisiac, if we dare to be REAL about it, is ALWAYS the assemblage of money and power, their quest to be the top dog.

OK but ya gotta admit the masks are good

This is why all the players participating/hunted in this game are seriously in debt, near penniless or at the end of their rope in every other way with only one last chance to grab what they perceive as life’s ultimate reward – MONEY.

It’s so…profound.

Well, at least it thinks it is.

I pictured Jeff Bezos in a Blue flight suit, sipping Courvoisier from a short baccarat tulip glass in one hand as he slow-drew in smoke from a gurkha royal courtesean cigar (Note: Google it – ok, here) in the other while he every so often watched everyone I ever loved or cared about, or could have loved and care about if I knew them, bleed out.

He’s already starting to look like a Bond villain

Call me crazy but this, to me, is not entertainment. Nor does it say anything, or anything much, about the human condition that I didn’t already know.

However (and it’s a BIG however), the success of Squid Game is another thing. And it says a lot. An awful lot.

Approximately 142 million people in 90 countries have streamed it. It’s generated revenue of almost $900 million in these two months on a budget of about $24.1 million for ALL nine episodes. That means each episode brings in 41.7% times what it cost to make.

Not only are all its top creatives being courted by all the major Hollywood agencies, it is likely to go down as Netflix’ #1 most watched and most profitable first season program ever.

The only way Netflix isn’t doing season two is if there’s a worldwide apocalypse that shuts down every….

Okay, better not manifest that idea given the climate, both literally and figuratively, we’ve barely managed to survive in the last 18 months.

But for this we can’t blame Netflix. As part of our new, connected/disconnected global community this is clearly in our nature.

I will be thinking about that in the coming days as the Kyle Rittenhouse jury figures out what to do about a real-life under age kid who shot into a crowd of people and drew blood and death as well as an audience well into the tens of millions and counting.

With equal dread.

Squid Game – “Red Light, Green Light”