I found Monday night’s class discussion so helpful and useful-especially in terms of discussing DeBord’s use of the term “spectacle” to theorize about a global media economy. I found it very interesting to talk about what can enable access to the spectacle and whether or not everyone has the same access or can avoid or resist the spectacle altogether. I felt much of this conversation we were trying to determine whether or not we consciously participate in the spectacle and in what degree are we conscious or participatory? Part of me really wants to take that route and do a very theoretical discussion parsing out my ideas on these matters. However, for the sake of “fun” and “play” I am going to wrestle with these ideas via DeBords notion of “celebrity.” My previous reading of Debord was really in the context of visual representation and I find his notions of spectacle to be applied not only to the banal and mundane but also to those who take up a spectacular lifestyle through celebrity. I find this especially poignant and amusing in cases of reality television.
Although my translation is different, I found that DeBord identifies the spectacle in thesis 10, as, “Affirmation of appearance and affirmation of all human life, namely social life, as mere appearance.” If the spectacle is appearance, is image, is representation and the affirmation of these images, we can see this being performed so plainly in so many places. In the context of celebrity, we can see how images are affirmed, especially through their repetitive use and for the desire of others in the spectacle to mimic celebrities. As a professor at my undergraduate institution once said, “Celebrities are celebrities because they are celebrities, they are famous for fame’s sake.” Celebrities are not only a part of the spectacle, they are spectacle themselves—performing a spectacular image of what it means to be a celebrity whether it be the multiple attempts in rehab, excessive spending, or adopting children from foreign nations. As DeBord notes in thesis 60, “The celebrity, the spectacular representation of a living being, embodies this banality by embodying the image of a possible role…Celebrities exist to act out various styles of living and viewing society —unfettered, free to express themselves globally (emphasis original). What I notice from this is exactly what my professor noted, celebrities are not celebrities because of their acting, singing, or dancing ability but because they give us, the little people, models of the ways we should desire to live.
As a society we are presented with a character like Paris Hilton, who has no direct connection to being a celebrity, no specific talent (although some will argue that modeling was her talent and that she was a celebrity for that,) yet becomes famous for her spectacular lifestyle — mainly the fact that she is an heiress to a fortune. The recognition of Paris as a celebrity makes it possible for her to later launch an acting and singing career and even more ironically her “reality” show, The Simple Life. In this “reality” show, Paris and one of her friends are transplanted into different situations far removed from their Hollywood lifestyle, usually into small towns with common people, and everyone voyeuristically watches to see if she will in fact stick her hand into the cow’s rectum on the dairy farm while wearing her Prada dress. The fact that the show is even called The Simple Life alludes to the fact that these girls are actually the opposite of simple, but high maintenance, big spenders, causing a scene with the town’s local boys no matter where they are. The connection between the spectacle, celebrity, and capitalism becomes quite clear that they are all in fact contingent upon one another for success of propagating “the spectacle.” But it is also important to return to the question of our participation in the spectacle and whether or not we are conscious in our participation. I provide a clip of Ellen, in which, she becomes Paris Hilton's new BFF (also based off of a reality television show) and in turn partly because she is a comedian, but also because she is at least somewhat of a social critic, makes fun of the Paris Hilton enterprise.
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While Ellen may be poking fun at Paris Hilton's spectacle celebrity lifestyle, commenting on all of her pictures, driving her around in the Smart Car, and dancing in "the club" on the stripper pole, in a sense Ellen simply creates a different celebrity lifestyle of which to potentially mimic. We also begin to see the ways that Paris's lifestyle is taken up in shows like MTV’s Made, Cribs, Sweet 16 and others, which, generally turn ordinary people into celebrities by giving them a make-over, buying them a new car, or showing them living in an extravagant house. While we may think that a Smart Car may be resistive to the spectacle as opposed to driving a "pimped out" SUV it actually creates a new spectacle based on a different celebrity with a different lifestyle. In turn as we discussed in class I do not think DeBord would be more fond of Ellen's commentary on Paris's life since she makes money from her show and resisting the spectacle can not necessarily be done in terms of using capitalistic means, but I did feel that it could illustrate nicely two different examples of celebrity spectacles, different, yet the same. However, I wonder as we also talked about in class is it possible to as Audre Lorde writes, "Dismantle the master's house with the master's tools?" Is it possible to use the spectacle, as a mediated form of communication as a "celebrity" in order to change the existing spectacle?
I do not think that there are many examples of this out there but one that immediately came to mind from reading José Esteban Muñoz’s Disidentifications, was Pedro Zamora, a man/character on MTV’s the Real World: San Francisco. A gay Latino man living with HIV/AIDS, Muñoz claims that Zamora used the medium of the Real World and television to enrich the world with gay Latino visibility as well as AIDS activism. Through his work as a “televisual activist”(143), Zamora was able to use the spectacle of reality television to engage social justice work and reach a large group of people as evidenced through the thousands of letters a week that he received. Zamora was very conscious of his participation in the spectacle from the time he submitted his audition tape but knew that in order to reach a large range of people he would have to use the spectacle to sort of set his own agenda. He accomplished this, by becoming a focal point of the show giving a human face to homosexuals of color living with AIDS. He died soon after the show finished taping and thus, never experienced he kind of celebrity that “reality” television stars are often afforded now. And although there are historical, political, social, racial, gendered, sexualized differences between Hilton and Zamora, we can see how the spectacle may be used for purposes of social justice and not solely spectacle or celebrity.
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Not to conclude too sharply but I do believe we are all caught up in the spectacle at different levels, with different amounts of consciousness. There are certain parts of the spectacle (certain celebrities) we identify with and others we resist. Our choices are limited but the spectacle is not all bad as Gladys pointed out in class Monday night. The spectacle does allow us the medium to transmit messages and access information otherwise denied to us. I leave with another clip of Zamora, maybe a certain type of spectacle or celebrity himself, but one who was conscious enough to know how to use the spectacle to engage the work of resistance and social justice.
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