Expository Writing: Shaping Information Diane Ackerman

My other worry is a vague one, more in the area of at­mo­spher­ics, intangibles. I feel kind of wrong even mentioning it in this time of trial. How can I admit that I am worried about my aura? I worry that my aura is not . . . well, that it’s not what I had once hoped it would be. I can explain this only by comparison, obliquely. On the top shelf of my bookcase, among the works vital to me, is a book called Trials and Triumphs: The Record of the ­Fifty-­Fifth Ohio Volunteer Infantry, by Captain Hartwell Osborn. I’ve read this book many times and studied it to the smallest detail, because I think the people in it are brave and cool and admirable in every way.

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The ­Fifty-­Fifth was a ­Union Army regiment, formed in the Ohio town of Norwalk, that fought throughout the Civil War. My ­great-­great-­grand-­father served in the regiment, as did other relatives. The book lists every mile the regiment marched and every casualty it suffered. I like reading about the soldiering, but I can’t really identify with it, having never been in the ser­vice myself. I identify more with the soldiers’ wives and mothers and daughters, whose ­home-­front struggles I can better imagine. Trials and Triumphs devotes a chapter to them, and to an or­gan­iz­ation they set up called the Soldiers’ Aid Society.

The ladies of the Soldiers’ Aid Society worked for the regiment almost constantly from the day it began. They sewed uniforms, made pillows, held ­ice-­cream sociables to raise money, scraped lint for ban­dages, emptied their wedding chests of their best linen and donated it all. To provide the men with antiscorbutics while on campaign, they pickled everything that would pickle, from onions to potatoes to artichokes. Every other day they ­were shipping out a new order of ­home-­made supplies. Some of the women spent so much time stooped over while packing goods in barrels that they believed they had permanently affected their postures. When the war ended the ladies of the Soldiers’ Aid said that for the first time in their lives they understood what united womanhood could accomplish. The movements for prohibition and women’s suffrage that grew powerful in the early 1900s got their start among those who’d worked in similar ­home-­front organizations during the war.

I don’t envy my forebears, or wish I’d lived back then. I prefer the greater speed and uncertainty and complicatedness of now. But I can’t help thinking that in terms of aura, the Norwalk ladies have it all over me. I study the pages with their photographs, and admire the plainness of their dresses, the set of their jaws, the expression in their eyes. Next to them my credit card and I seem a sorry spectacle indeed. Their sense of purpose shames me. What the country needed from those ladies it asked for, and they provided, straightforwardly; what it wants from me it somehow can’t come out and ask. I’m asked to shop more, which really means to spend more, which eventually must mean to work more than I was working before. In previous wars, harder work was a civilian sacrifice that the government didn’t hesitate to ask. Nowadays it’s apparently unwilling to ask for any sacrifice that might appear to be too painful, too real.

But I want it to be real. I think a lot of us do. I feel like an idiot with my tears and shopping cart. I want to participate, to do something — and shopping isn’t it. Many of the donors who contributed more than half a billion dollars to a Red Cross fund for the families of terror attack victims became angry when they learned that much of the money would end up not where they had intended but in the Red Cross bureaucracy. People want to express themselves with action. In New York City so many have been showing up recently for jury duty that the courts have had to turn hundreds away; officials said a new surplus of civic consciousness was responsible for the upsurge. I’d be glad if I ­were asked to — I don’t know — drive less or turn the thermostat down or send in ­seldom-­used items of clothing or collect rubber bands or plant a victory garden or join a civilian patrol or use fewer disposable paper products at children’s birthday parties. I’d be willing, if asked, just to sit still for a day and meditate on the situation, much in the way that Lincoln used to call for national days of prayer.

A great, shared desire to do something is lying around mostly untapped. The best we can manage, it seems, is to show our U.S.A. brand ­loyalty by putting American flags on our ­houses and cars. Some businesses across the country even display in their windows a poster on which the American flag appears as a shopping bag, with two handles at the top. Above the ­flag-­bag are the words “America: Open for Business.” Money and the economy have gotten so tangled up in our politics that we forget we’re citizens of our government, not its consumers. And the leaders we elect, who got where they are by selling themselves to us with tele­vi­sion ads, and who often are only on short loan from the corporate world anyway, think of us as customers who must be kept happy. There’s a scarcity of ideas about how to direct all this patriotic feeling because usually the market, not the country, occupies our minds. I’m sure it’s possible to transform oneself from salesman to leader, just as it is to go from consumer to citizen. But the shift of identity is awkward, without many pre­ce­dents, not easily done. In between the two — between selling and leading, between consuming and being citizens — is where our leaders and the rest of us are now.

We see the world beyond our immediate surroundings mostly through tele­vi­sion, whose view is not much wider than that of a security peephole in a door. We hear over and over that our lives have forever changed, but the details right in front of us don’t look very different, for all that. The forces fighting in Afghanistan are in more danger than we are back home, but perhaps not so much more; everybody knows that when catastrophe comes it could hit anywhere, most likely someplace it isn’t expected. Strong patriotic feelings stir us, fill us, but have few means of expressing themselves. We want to be a country, but where do you go to do that? Surely not the mall. When Mayor Giuliani left office at the end of 2001, he said he was giving up the honorable title of mayor for the more honorable title of citizen. He got that right. Citizen is honorable; shopper is not.

The Reader’s Presence

1. ‑How does Frazier characterize shopping as an act of patriotism? What sacrifices does he make in the name of patriotic consumerism? What words and phrases exemplify the way he satirizes the call to shop?

2. ‑Frazier discusses the sacrifices that patriotism asks of citizens. How is “sacrifice” defined in the first couple of paragraphs? Compare that definition to Frazier’s discussion of sacrifice toward the end of the essay.

3. ‑Frazier is known primarily as a humor writer. At what point did you recognize the humor in Frazier’s writing? Where does his tone modulate and become more serious? Why? Compare Frazier’s use of humor to Langston Hughes’s in “Liberals Needs a Mascot” (page 707) and “That Word Black” (page 709).

Neal Gabler

Our Celebrities, Ourselves

Neal Gabler (b. c. 1950), a senior fellow at the Lear Center for the Study of Entertainment and Society at the University of Southern California, is a media critic and film commentator whose work focuses primarily on the impact of show business on mass culture. A former ­co-­host of public tele­vi­sion’s Sneak Previews, his books include An Empire of Their Own: How the Jews Invented Hollywood (1988), Winchell: Gossip, Power, and the Culture of Celebrity (1994), and Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality (1998). Gabler contributes to numerous publications including American Film, the New York Times Book Review, and Video Review.

Gabler sees entertainment as a “demo­cratizing force.” He notes, “You don’t need gatekeepers to understand entertainment. You don’t need elites or interpreters to gain the plea­sure from entertainment. As I define it, entertainment is largely a function of sensation and emotion. It unseats reason. It’s a kind of mass force, rather than an elitist force. Anybody can respond to it. It challenges social controls by its very nature and even psychological controls.”

In “Our Celebrities, Ourselves,” which appeared in the Chronicle of Higher Education in 2003, Gabler looks at how the search for “sensation and emotion” in entertainment has given rise to a new cult of celebrity.

It has been more than 40 years since the historian Daniel Boorstin, in a now famously clever turn of phrase, defined a celebrity as someone who is known for being well known. If he ­were writing about celebrity today, Boorstin might describe it less flippantly as one of America’s most prominent cottage industries and one of tele­vi­sion’s ­fastest-­growing genres — one in which spent entertainers can find an afterlife by turning their daily existence into ­real-­life situation comedy or tragedy. Anyone caring to stargaze can see The Osbournes, The Anna Nicole Smith Show, Star Dates, The Surreal Life, and the network ­prime-­time celebrity interviews conducted by Barbara Walters, Diane Sawyer, Jane Pauley, and others. A reality series for VH1 capturing the life of the former star Liza Minnelli was derailed by a spat between the network and the principals. Meanwhile, cable networks continue to troll for celebrities eager to expose their lives to the public. Programs on the drawing boards include one in which ­over-­the-­hill stars spend the weekend with typical families, and another in which stars return to their hometowns and revisit their roots.

When Boorstin was writing in the early ’60s, celebrity was one of those absurdities of contemporary culture — a large and ­ever-­growing class of public figures for which there had been no pre­ce­dent. Celebrities existed not to entertain, though they usually ­were entertainers, but rather to be publicized. Their talent, as Boorstin put it, was to grab the spotlight, whether or not they had done anything to deserve it. Now they have not only become an entertainment themselves, a kind of ambulatory show, but are also a cultural force with tremendous appeal, though exactly what that appeal is has been hard to determine. Most conventional analysts, from the pop­u­lar historian Barbara Goldsmith to the pundit Andrew Sullivan, find celebrity a form of transport — a vicarious fantasy that lifts audiences out of the daily grind. Others, like Joshua Gamson in Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America, see ­celebrity-­watching as a ritual of empowerment through deconstruction. The audience doesn’t seek to be elevated; it seeks to bring the celebrities back to earth. Still others, notably the rulers of the media, attribute the rapid rise of celebrity to mundane financial considerations, like the cheapness of programming ­real-­life celebrities as opposed to fictional stories, and to the power of celebrities to sell magazines and tabloids by appearing on the cover.

There is no doubt some truth to each of those explanations — particularly the last one — but none of them fully expresses the range and power of celebrity in contemporary America, or its rampant march through the culture. None really gets to the root of the matter. To do that, one may have to think of celebrity in an entirely new way — not as a status that is conferred by publicity, but as a narrative form, written in the medium of life, that is similar to narratives in movies, novels, and tele­vi­sion.

The only difference, really, is that since it is written in the medium of life, it requires another medium, be it tele­vi­sion or print, to bridge the gap between the narrative lived and the narrative watched. In fact, celebrity narratives are so pervasive, with so many being generated, that they have subordinated other narratives and commandeered other media, until one could argue that life itself has become the dominant medium of the new century, and celebrity its most compelling product. Though purists will blanch at the thought, celebrity may even be the art of the age.

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When you think of celebrity as a form of narrative art — the romances and divorces, the binges, the dysfunctions, the triumphs, the transgressions — you can immediately appreciate one of its primary appeals, which is the appeal of any good story. Boorstin was wrong: Celebrities aren’t known for being well known. They are known for living out ­real-­life melodramas, which is why anyone from Elizabeth Taylor to Joey Buttafuoco¹ can be a celebrity. All one needs is a good story and a medium in which to retail it, and the media, always in desperate need of a story, are only too happy to oblige. And so we get the saga of Ozzy Osbourne, ­one-­time ­Goth-­rock star now stumbling through life as an addled dad to his own teenagers, or Whitney Houston insisting that she isn’t addicted to drugs even as she crumbles before our eyes, or Mariah Carey telling us how she has rebounded from a ner­vous breakdown (she was really just exhausted) and a series of career disasters.

Of course, conventional narratives can provide equally riveting tales, but celebrity has advantages over fiction, not the least of which is novelty. Traditional narrative forms are so familiar to us now, especially with the proliferation of tele­vi­sion programs and the staggering number of books published — well over 100,000 each year — that they have become exhausted, attenuated, predictable. We feel as if we’ve seen it all before. Celebrity is an antidote to that sense of exhaustion. Though celebrity ­narratives themselves have certain conventions — already, the idea of a ­famous eccentric displaced into normal life, which The Osbournes introduced a year ago, has been stolen by Anna Nicole Smith — they also have a frisson² that ­so-­called imaginative narratives lack.

Part of that frisson is the intensification of one of the staples of any form of storytelling: suspense. Readers or viewers always want to know what’s going to happen next, and there are some readers for whom that tension is so excruciating that they race to the end of the book for the outcome so that they can then read comfortably and without anxiety. Celebrity, playing out in real time, obviously has suspense, since there is no author to imagine the finish, only life itself to devise the next scene. One never knows what will happen. Who knew that Sharon Osbourne would be diagnosed with cancer? Who knew that Michael Jackson would dangle his infant son from a hotel balcony, or that his nose would erode into a nub after multiple plastic surgeries? Who knew whether Winona Ryder would be convicted or acquitted of her shoplifting charges, or what the sentence would be? Who knows whether Jennifer Lopez and Ben Affleck will be wed or whether something will happen to spoil their idyll? No one knows. The scenes just keep unspooling, and we wait, like Dickens’s 19th-­century readers eagerly snatching the next installment of his new novel, or like the moviegoers in the ’30s watching the weekly chapters of a serial — only it is not just the what that we anticipate, it is the when or even the if. Fictional narratives have closure. They end, and the characters are frozen in time. Celebrity narratives resist closure. They go on and on and on.

Celebrity has another advantage over conventional narratives. All narratives depend on our emotional connection to the material — not only on our anticipation of what will happen, but also on our caring about what happens. In the case of fictional tales, we must, in the timeworn phrase, suspend our disbelief, because we know that what we are watching or reading is not real, although to be conscious of the unreality would seriously undermine, if not destroy, our sense of engagement. We must believe that these are not fictional creations but people, and that there is something at stake in the outcome of their story. That is one reason Henry James insisted on “felt life” as his aesthetic standard.

Great works still compel us to suspend our disbelief and convince us that we are watching life itself, but that is a harder and harder sell at a time when many Americans, particularly younger ones, are aware of narrative manipulations and regard all imaginative fiction as counterfeit. Celebrity, on the other hand, doesn’t require one to suspend disbelief, because it is real, or at least purports to be. The stakes are real, too. Sharon Osbourne may eventually die of her cancer. Kelly Clarkson would get a record contract if she won American Idol. The various celebrities who beam at us from the cover of People each week will find romance or will recover or will succeed — or they won’t. Either way, something is at stake. There are consequences that we will be able to see down the road. It matters.

Finally, there is the appeal of voyeurism that is heightened precisely because celebrity is unavoidably contrasted with the fictional narratives in which most celebrities find themselves. For many fans today, the roles that celebrities play, both on tele­vi­sion and in movies, and the roles they assume as they project themselves in the media, operate as a kind of ­disguise. They obscure the real person. Celebrity purportedly allows us to peek behind the disguise and see the real person in real joy or torment. This has resulted in an odd reversal that further underscores the power of celebrity. There was a time when celebrities, with a few exceptions, interested us only because of the work they did; their movies, books, albums, TV shows piqued our curiosity. We wanted to know more. But the ratio of interest in the work to interest in the personalities within the work has changed. Now the work they do serves as a curtain that celebrity draws, but since celebrities almost always have a larger appeal than that work — more people certainly know about the Osbournes than buy Ozzy’s albums, just as more people are following the exploits of J. Lo and Ben Affleck than watch their movies — the work is almost an ­excuse for the celebrity. In effect, you need a curtain so that you can reveal what is behind it. Celebrity, then, is the real narrative — the real achievement.

After the terrible events of 9/11, some predicted that the days of celebrity obsession ­were over, and that Americans would prefer the comforts of closure to the roilings of reality. It hasn’t turned out that way. If anything, 9/11 itself delivered a narrative of such extraordinary impact that it was impossible for fictional narratives to equal or approximate it, and it may even have created a new aesthetic divide — not between good stories and formulaic ones, but between real stories and imagined ones. In that context, celebrity, for all its seeming triviality and irrelevance, survives and thrives because it still has the mark of authenticity.

That element of authenticity is critical in understanding the public’s attraction not only to the text of celebrity, but also to its subtext, without which celebrity would just be a bundle of melodramatic, albeit real, stories. The deeper appeal of these narratives is that they address one of the central tensions in contemporary America: the tension between artifice and authenticity, between the image and the reality.

The celebrity narrative is especially well suited to reify that issue. One is likely to think of celebrities as creatures of artifice. They wear makeup and costumes (even when they are not before the cameras, the hottest ones are dressed by designers), they rely on ­public-­relations stunts and gossip to promote themselves, and they play roles and affect attitudes. That isn’t just the public’s view. Celebrities often think of themselves in the same way. Cary Grant was once quoted, perhaps apocryphally, as having said that it wasn’t easy being Cary Grant. Presumably he meant that the persona was vastly different from the person who inhabited it, and that the latter was always having to work to become the former.

That idea — of a distance between the celebrity as public figure and the person within the celebrity narrative — is, indeed, the basis for almost every celebrity narrative that features an entertainer, as opposed to narratives, like those of Joey Buttafuoco or John Wayne Bobbitt or Kato Kaelin, that create the celebrity in the first place, out of notoriety. As I wrote in Life the Movie, virtually every celebrity profile, be it in People, Vanity Fair, The New Yorker, or on Entertainment To­night or Access Hollywood, focuses on the celebrity’s battle to find himself or herself, to achieve some genuineness, to understand what really constitutes happiness instead of settling for the Hollywood conception of happiness.

These stories are all chronicles of ­self-­discovery. Now that she is rid of Tom Cruise, Nicole Kidman can find herself. Having broken up with her boyfriend, Justin Timberlake, Britney Spears is flailing about trying to find herself. Winona Ryder’s shoplifting was a cry for help to enable her to find herself. Whitney Houston is now in a state of denial, but she will eventually have to find herself or perish. Lost in romance, drugs, abuse, failure, breakdowns — you name it — celebrities must fight through the layers of image to discover who they really are. Whether that is just more ­public-­relations blather or not, those are the stories we read and see every day.

It is the same pro­cess that is charted on the new celebrity tele­vi­sion shows. Ozzy Osbourne may be ­brain-­fried and distracted, but his life, for all its oddities and even freakishness, is touchingly ordinary in its emotional groundedness. Ozzy has found himself in his family, which makes the program remarkably ­old-­fashioned and ­life-­affirming. Next to the ­
F-­word, the word most often used on the program is “love.” Similarly, Anna Nicole Smith, the former Playboy centerfold now overweight and bovine and searching for love, may be a moron, but there is something attractive in her almost pathetic ordinariness beneath all her attempts at grandeur. Watching her and Ozzy and the minor stars from old sitcoms now looking for love on Star Dates, one is reminded not how different these celebrities are from us but how similar they are once they have recognized the supposed falsity of the celebrity way of life.

All of that may seem a very long way from the lives of those who read and watch the celebrity narrative — us. Not many Americans, after all, have had to struggle with the sorts of things, like romantic whirligigs, drug detoxification, and sudden career spirals, that beset celebrities. And yet in many respects, celebrity is just ordinary American life writ large and more intense. In an ­image-­conscious society, where nearly everyone has access to the tools of ­self-­invention and ­self-­promotion — makeup, designer clothes, status symbols, and quirks of behavior, language, and attitude — people are forced to opt for a persona or ­else to find out who they really are. That is the modern condition. Each of us, to a greater or lesser degree, is fighting the same battle as the celebrities, which is why celebrity, for all its obvious entertainment value, resonates psychically in a way that few modern fictional narratives do. Celebrity doesn’t transport us from the niggling problems of daily life. It amplifies and refines them in an exciting narrative context.

And so we keep watching as we might watch any soap opera, engaged by the melodrama, or any sitcom, amused by the comedy. We watch not because, as Boorstin wrote, we are too benumbed by artifice to recognize the difference between celebrities and people of real accomplishment who are more deserving of our attention. Rather we watch ­because we understand, intuitively or not, that these celebrities are enacting a kind of modern parable of identity, with all its ridiculousness and all its tragedy. We watch because in their celebrity — Ozzy’s and Anna Nicole’s and Whitney’s and Winona’s and J. Lo’s and Mariah’s and even Jacko’s — we somehow manage to find ourselves.