The nineties.
The glare: flashing light, clattering shutters, the subject frozen in the back of a black limousine, facing off with an egregore: a thousand eyes, a Biblically accurate angel—insectoid, unfeeling. Inside the car, claustrophobia. The crush, the sweat, the excitement of other people’s desires surrounding you, closing in on you, compressing you, flattening you.
Heat death: bulbs burning out, smoldering, the crowd, the fever breaks, dissipating by moped, by bicycle, on foot, to darkrooms and rush-delivery photo labs so that the delirium can become an image, cold and still and fixed for eternity.
In this, there is some old idea of celebrity. When they were rarer, more fragile. They were still a mystery. People wanted to protect them. But all the same, they still wanted them. Like conservationists with secret collections of soon-to-be-extinct butterflies pinned in a vitrine.
Their own desires fed the frenzy, but still, back then, people—like celebrities—were more innocent. They didn’t know that they were the market that motivated the hunt. Their endless appetite for gossip would be the cause of the extinction event.
I’m thinking about Princess Diana—how she was doomed. Or maybe destined, depending on how cynical one is.
I remember hearing from Kurt Loder on MTV News that she had died. A wave of grief struck the world, or at least, some improbably large portion of it. At eleven, I don’t know why I cared. But I listened to Elton John sing “Candle in the Wind” and watched the funeral on TV and bought the commemorative Beanie Baby, which in retrospect seems like a marketing ploy done in poor taste. But again, we were more innocent then.
England had not been invaded since the armies of William the Conqueror landed at Pevensey Bay in 1066. But the British monarchy had been brought down by the flashbulbs, by the media glare, by the insatiable global appetite for gossip and intrigue that sent fortune hunters on scooters, armed with telephoto lenses, speeding after a princess in a tunnel next to the Seine.
Bret Easton Ellis, in his ode to Diana’s era, American Psycho, writes:
Reflection is useless, the world is senseless. Evil is its only permanence. God is not alive. Love cannot be trusted. Surface, surface, surface, was all that anyone found meaning in…this was civilization as I saw it, colossal and jagged…
Surface, surface, surface. Indeed, the monarchy could not withstand so much being brought to the surface.
In Palm Springs last week, I met a British flight attendant at a gay bar. He was in town for Coachella, obviously. I know—this anecdote is taking some very unpredictable twists and turns. When I told him I had been rewatching The Crown, his face lit up.
He was something most Americans find shocking, but anyone who has spent some time in England knows is unremarkable: a monarchist. A coronation-watching, Meghan Markle-bashing, jubilee-tea-towel-owning monarchist.
Both the United States and the United Kingdom see themselves as some of the oldest democracies in the world, but democracies of very different flavors, with very different political rationales. The Crown, of course, is a tale of the collapse of the British monarchy, which has not been dethroned so much as delegitimized.
#social #media #realism #Sean #Monahan
