The Guardian reported yesterday on a speech by Frank Cottrell Boyce (winner of the 2012 Guardian children’s fiction prize and Professor of Reading at Liverpool Hope University). In it, he had this to say about celebrity culture:
“Sometimes I look at celebrity magazines and reality TV, and it seems to be like a version of Henry Gustav Molaison,” [who lost his long term memory after a brain operation]…
“I can see something that’s going through the motions, and has the macabre galvanic twitchings of some kind of ghostly memory of what a story should be. ‘It should have a row in it, so let’s do one. It should have sex in it so let’s have some’. But it never really adds up.”
Being old an old curmudgeon, I tend to see celebrity magazines as works of pure evil. But not knowing who is who in the first-name world of the celebrity narrative has its compensations. Petal’s agony. Amber’s rage. Snickles cheats on Petey-Pete with Langoustine. The headlines have the disconnected quality of the plot-by-numbers book Plotto and its descendents. This is taken at random from Plots Unlimited, for example, from the section Conflicts Classified by Character Confrontations
Jack’s drunken friend Pete persuades Jack to take a drink, despite Pete’s knowledge that Jack’s doctor has warned Jack he musn’t drink.
It’s well recognised that celeb and ‘reality’ tales are crafted narratives. In her excellent book Monkeys With Typewriters Scarlett Thomas uses the same Aristotelian model to analyse the three act structure of both Oedipus and the reality show Supernanny.
It’s Thomas’s later section on the concepts of reversal and recognition in tragedy, though, that provides my favourite piece of popular culture classicism:
Celebrity stories are frequently told in the media using a tragic structure. It’s interesting to begin to notice this, and to realise that these are plotted narratives, not necessarily true stories. Usually much is made of the recognition ‘scene’ or interview, if there is one (and if not, often pictures of weeping and distress will do). Celebrity Big Brother is supposedly a non-fictional, non-scripted narrative. But in 2007 there was a surprisingly coherent recognition scene when Jade Goody realised… that her career would be over when she left the house because of her bullying of Shilpa Shetty. There was some dramatic irony here — we realised, though Jade did not, that she had already lost most of her sponsorship at this point… In the ‘scene’ she sits in the Diary Room for over half an hour sobbing. Among other things she says ‘I’m so scared … It’s so different this time around because I didn’t have anything to lose. Nothing. Now I’ve got so much. I don’t want to go through all that crap again.’ She is falling from a high place.
Although Cottrell Boyce is no doubt right that reality-celeb culture is both shallow and forgetful, perhaps there is a more interesting question to ask about these stories. How is it that we still default to compelling forms and archetypes that were identified over two thousand years ago? Perhaps our long term memories aren’t that bad after all.
