The tabloids are a lot of fun. They are also disturbing. When I saw a cover of one with the Gosselin's on it, I had to read the story to find out who they were and why I should care. It turns out that, other than having their lives filmed for reality television, I really shouldn't care all that much about them. I still don't. Whatever they are going through, the prurience of the tabloids has shown how easy it is to destroy what it creates.
The apotheosis of our celebrity culture is the viral spread of "reality television". Purporting to present "real life", it has been reduced to presenting images of "ordinary people" and not only offering a glimpse of their lives, but offering to all viewers the opportunity, by turns, to enjoy the spectacle and yearn for the opportunity as well.
In the first chapter of The Culture of Narcissism, Lasch writes the following on pp. 21-22:
The media give substance to and thus intensify narcissistic dreams of fame ad glory, encourage the common man to identify himself with the stars and to hate the "herd," and make it more and more difficult for him to accept the banality of everyday existence. Frank Gifford and the New York Giants, [Frederick] Exley writes, "sustained for me the illusion that fame was possible." Haunted and in his own view destroyed by "this awful dream of fame," this "illusion that I could escape the bleak anonymity of life," Exley depicts himself or his narrator - as usual, the distinction is unclear - as a yawning void, an insatiable hunger, an emptiness waiting to be filled with the rich experiences reserved for the chosen few.
As we reach the final, demented days of a culture no longer even pretending to insist on a distinction between public and private, personal and professional, or understanding that "fame" is quite a bit different from "renown", we are inundated with images from the lives of people who force themselves upon our attention precisely because they have no other resources that make their lives understandable, or even real.
What does it say about us, even as we face grim economic times and tough political choices, that our attention is seized by the personal problems of a couple who, it seems, have nothing to offer us but an object lesson in why fame and celebrity are not to be sought? What does it say about us that literally millions of dollars continue to be spent presenting us, the public, the lives of other people? Other than the related reactions of envy and desire - envy that we are not made as real as they; desire that we, too, can be made real this way - and the glee that always accompanies the destruction of artificial heroes (parents of eight children, it seems obvious that the Gosselins do not have the emotional maturity requisite for such responsibility).
Other than the very human reaction that I feel sorry for the children involved - not just that their parents are splitting up, but that they have to suffer such emotionally empty parents to begin with - I see the Gosselins more as an example of the decline of our culture than anything else. Again, to quote Lasch, on p. 22:
The modern propaganda of commodities and the good life has sanctioned impulse gratification and made it unnecessary for the id to apologize for its wishes or disguise their grandiose proportions. But this same propaganda has made failure an loss unsupportable. When it finally occurs to the the Narcissus that he can "live not only without fame but without self, live and die without ever having had one's fellows conscious of the microscopic space one occupies upon this planet," he experiences this discover not merely as a disappointment but as a shattering blow to his sense of selfhood.
What I find so powerful about Lasch's critique of celebrity is its prescience; he understood the end result of our narcissistic culture would be nothing more and nothing less than the projection of our collective psychic emptiness as an attempt to make "real" that which seems so unreal to us. We have become Narcissus, unable to tear ourselves away from our own projected beauty, never realizing that projection is unreal, the beauty a lie.
