#22
I’ve been thinking a lot about the cultural space bourgeois and celebrity narratives of trauma, struggle, or transgression have been occupying over the past few years. How these stories, no matter how they unfold, become, with the aid of media collusion, messages of perceived authenticity — humanity— eliciting both curiosity and sympathy from us and pushing a dangerous idea: that trauma is indeed the great equalizer.
In 2020, This Is Paris was released, a documentary in which Paris Hilton discusses the abuse she suffered at Provo Canyon as a teen. Headlines followed about her declaring war on the multi-billion dollar troubled teen industry. Now, I do not doubt the horrors that go down in places like that. But, culturally speaking, so-called revealing documentaries like these, calculated attempts at sharing, are the handy tools I mentioned earlier, the ones which produce parasocial attachment without actually making the political or social impact claimed within it.
They also shift our focus away from the why and how disgusting industries like the one she’s speaking out about become so profitable. The conclusion that wealth and status will beget evil, abuse, and cruelty, every time, keeps being avoided. We rely so heavily on individual narratives of triumph over adversity to keep the ugly reality of power systems and the zero-sum hyper-competitive hell of capitalism at bay.
The panicked bourgeois parent needing to reign in an unruly heir — children with trusts and responsibilities — turns to outsource, something not entirely unfamiliar to his environment (nannies, boarding schools, etc.) Personally, I knew more people growing up who disappeared or turned up dead than people whose parents had the means or resources to send them away. While juvie loomed over our heads, the bourgeois will always have some power in evading, or at the very least delaying, the intrusion of the law into their lives or the lives of their children. Two very different pipelines. Perhaps this explains some of my reluctance to cut my heart open for these stories.
In individualizing narratives, Paris Hilton becomes a victim. Not of a class system but of her parents’ choices. No longer an heiress, now a survivor. Her enduring iconic significance is now more multi-faceted and sympathetic than ever, ripe with financial opportunity. Whereas there used to be a semi-ironic tone to Paris fandom, there is now sincere discourse surrounding her, rooting for her, which is the intended result.
Ultimately, this isn’t about Her; it’s about Them: the famous strangers who now require us to empathize with them.
Why should we extend our sympathy to people who don’t know our names and don’t care if we live or die? Why, when we can hardly muster up rapport and compassion to relate to our comrades, to the people with whom we share reality, should we feel for Them? Every day, we walk past each other’s suffering, shut our eyes, and plug our ears. Yet we are more than willing to offer tenderness to the people we have no tangible connection to, all this charity for experiencing something akin to what we mere mortals deal with daily — injustice, abuse, struggle, doubt.
I am not implying you should feel nothing when watching or hearing about things like this, I don’t think that’s possible, and you should not strive to feel less than you do. Still, our parasocial attachment to celebrities erodes and shifts our general consideration and benevolence for one another. We wrongly believe that it has no impact. Still, in continuously averting our gaze from what and who is around us and casting it into the one-sided void of the parasocial relationship, we carve out a space in our hearts for images, icons, symbols, strangers in the truest sense of the word.
This shapes our idea of who a stranger should be - exciting, intriguing, full, and rich with possibilities for our personal or fantasy narratives. And with that new perception, we are quicker still to ignore someone on the street, someone in need of our help, because the types of feelings those strangers evoke — discomfort, guilt, pity, concern, is in such stark contrast to the Good Strangers of celebrity, the ones who inspire. So you walk past the same guy you see every day, the one sitting on the corner or in the metro, and do Nothing. Instead, go home and watch a teary-eyed whoever the fuck tell you about the horrors of their bourgeois prison and feel something more manageable and less immediate. Because at home, so thoroughly estranged from each other, and in the glow or the shadow of those more fortunate, you still get to be victim #1.
Learning to step outside our social comfort zones, which have become so narcissified, and acknowledge the cruciality of organization and class solidarity, is key to resisting individualism. Of course, it will always be easier to virtue signal support to the glittery and the intangible than to do the labor of providing material support to who is right in front of us. Still, we betray no one but ourselves when the grip of parasocial attachment keeps us reaching for simple (comforting) solutions. Our relationship to celebrity leaves us wanting, insecure, disconnected, and disassociated: the ideal conditions for enduring individualism.
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