The End of Celebrity

University of Texas at El Paso DigitalCommons@UTEP Open Access Theses & Dissertations 2015-01-01 The ndE of Celebrity Alex O'meara University of Texas at El Paso, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd Part of the English Language and Literature Commons Recommended Citation O'meara, Alex, "The ndE of Celebrity" (2015). Open Access Theses & Dissertations. 1116. https://digitalcommons.utep.edu/open_etd/1116 This is brought to you for free and open access by DigitalCommons@UTEP. It has been accepted for inclusion in Open Access Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@UTEP. For more information, please contact [email protected]. The End of Celebrity Alex O’Meara Department of Creative Writing APPROVED: ______________________________ Jeffrey Sirkin, Ph.D. ______________________________ Robert L. Gunn, Ph.D. ______________________________ Lex Williford __________________________ Charles Ambler, Ph.D. Dean of the Graduate School The End of Celebrity By Alex O’Meara Thesis Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of The University of Texas at El Paso in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of MASTER OF FINE ARTS Department of Creative Writing THE UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS AT EL PASO May 2015 TABLE OF CONTENTS TABLE OF CONTENTS……………………………………………………………….iii INTRODUCTION……………………………………………………………………….iv TEXT……………………………………………………………………………………..1 CURRICULUM VITAE…..…………………………………………………………..346 iii INTRODUCTION Celebrity and Conspiracy in The End of Celebrity Part I: Celebrity as Conspiracy In Don DeLillo’s novel Libra there is a scene regarding the famous photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald, taken before his failed attempt to shoot General Ted Walker, in which Oswald is holding a rifle and pamphlets in the backyard of his Texas home. In the book, Oswald is telling George de Mohrenschildt about that photo. “I sent you a picture,” Lee said. “What picture?” “It’s the kind of picture a person looks at and maybe he understands something he didn’t understand before.” “Sound mysterious,” George said. “Maybe he sees the truth about someone” (Libra 289). Later, de Mohrenschildt opens his mail and finds the picture. On the front Oswald has inscribed it, “To my friend George from Lee Oswald.” On the back Oswald’s wife has written, “Hunter of fascists—ha ha!!!” (Libra 290). Libra overall—and this scene in particular—is representative of what my novel, The End of Celebrity is about, which is that both celebrity and conspiracy are narrative constructions initially implemented to bring a sense of order to the chaos of reality, but which typically end up becoming real and chaotic themselves and, in doing so, create new realities on their own. This is realized in the book when two conspiracies—one in which an actor becomes a celebrity and another in which the government attempts to influence events to its own advantage—take on lives of their own and unexpectedly change lives and events as a result. In Libra the photograph of Oswald, with its accompanying scrawled messages, is indicative of how celebrity and conspiracy function as an objective thing that can be viewed iv several ways, none of which are objectively true or false. Oswald sees himself as a cold-blooded killer. His wife views him as a joke. De Mohrenschildt, meanwhile, thinks of Oswald as a perfect scapegoat to set up for killing Kennedy. Which of these descriptions is most accurate in describing the real Oswald? The novel itself does not definitively answer that question. Instead, the character of Oswald is left ambiguous. This is because Oswald, in the novel and to an arguably greater extent in real life, has become something more than a person. He has become a cultural touchstone and moreover, an image and an object; a malleable repository of information whose actions and reality are freely interpreted, and even altered, to accommodate the perspective of whomever is describing Oswald for whatever end they envision. When one becomes a celebrity it is not always, or even often, that one becomes rich, famous, and happy; lives life that way; and dies that way. The achievement of celebrity is often the start of a story, not the end. Similarly, conspiracies rarely start out with a plan that is then expertly executed so that the conspirators then enjoy the results. They also take on a life of their own that brings about a new, and often unforeseen, reality. Celebrity—or the act of making an individual a celebrity and sustaining them as an exalted member of society—is a narrative construct that functions as an externalization of a culture’s popular wishes, aspirations, and desires. As such celebrity is most certainly a conspiracy in the sense that it is an agreement by a group of people in a given culture to elevate a person that they say represents their beliefs. While the reasons for the public creating celebrities are many and various, it is always dependent on a generalized agreement by the public at large to celebrate that person. This is because without the tacit agreement of the pubic that that person is worthy of celebration, the celebrity cannot exist. Furthermore, public endorsement of a person elevates that person to representing, and even personifying the culture. v In the United States, according to David P. Marshall, in his book Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture, Celebrity status operates at the very center of the culture as it resonates with conceptions of individuality that are the ideological ground of Western culture. Moreover, the celebrity as public individual who participates openly as a marketable commodity serves as a powerful type of legitimization of the political economic model of exchange and value—the basis of capitalism—and extends that model to include the individual (loc. 763). The public, then, imbues individuals with the power to represent them both individually and culturally. This further strengthens the role of celebrity as a conspiracy, and one that extends the influence of the United States, or the “American way of life,” on a global scale. This is because “America's biggest export is no longer the fruit of its fields or the output of its factories, but the mass-produced products of its popular culture—movies, TV programs, music, books and computer software,” according to Paul Fahri and Megan Rosenfeld in the Washington Post. As an example, films produced in English by U.S. studios account for between sixty and sixty-five percent of all movies shown in the world (Fahri and Rosenfield). Of all celebrities, the movie star is perhaps the most culturally powerful. But they also represent the most difficult kind of celebrity to establish or maintain. The reason for this is that, despite agents, publicists, managers, lawyers, and the other various and sundry enablers of any celebrity’s success, movie stars are independently empowered by the public to fill the role of celebrity. In his essay, “Toward a New Definition of Celebrity,” Neal Gabler writes that, [T]he celebrity narrative as actualized by the process of ‘celebritization’ is the story of the people who have been sprung from the pack in a kind of new Calvinism. We suspect that however much they may protest against the idea of their exceptionality, those who live celebrity are the sanctified, the best, the most deserving. And having conspired in the creation of this new art form as fans, we get the dispensation to watch them, to share them, to consume them, to enjoy them, to bask in their magnificence and to imagine that we might have a narrative of our own some day, allowing us to join them (15). vi While celebrities influence the culture, it is the audience that creates, and can destroy, the celebrity. “What must be remembered about these various constructions of a film celebrity is that they are modalized or operationalized in the audience,” according to Marshall. “The film industry, the coterie of personal agents surrounding the star, and the star him- or her selves are involved in this active building of a public personality. Integrated into that structure is some measure of the response of a public and then the reformulation of that response (in whatever form) into the further cultural production of the celebrity” (loc. 2861). In other words, despite an industry of people who work the public has to ultimate power to shape and influence the narrative construction of the celebrity, and thus defines the celebrity object/image. It is the public who wields the ultimate power about who gets to be a celebrity, and who does not, and whether a celebrity remains popular or disappears into ignominious obscurity. To put it more bluntly, the movie-going public is notoriously fickle regarding those they exalt, and those they denigrate. The public will even reject a celebrity, and cast him or her out of popular favor, for reasons that have nothing to do with the actions of the celebrity. A good example of how much the public controls the popularity of a movie star is exemplified in what happened when movies went from silent films to talkies and, in that process, major movie stars had their careers utterly destroyed. The reasons went deeper than the tone of the actor’s voices, or their ability or inability to enunciate on the screen. The change indicated that the audience, according to Ty Burr, in Gods Like Us: On Movie Stardom and Modern Fame, had more power to determine for themselves, on an individual basis and with less influence from studios, what the star meant because they felt closer to the star

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