The blurb: From O.J. to Robert Blake to Kobe Bryant to Michael, the modern celebrity show trial makes us voyeurs at a morality play that showcases not guilt vs. innocence but wrong vs. wrong.
Some excerpts from Alessandro Camon's essay: (free with a day pass)
Celebrity trials offer a potent cocktail of fame, sex and violence; they allow us to look behind the veil that usually protects the private lives of stars; they tap in to collective feelings and fantasies about the very nature of celebrity. What they don't do is provide solutions, or even serviceable frameworks, for questions of right and wrong. Ultimately, they are just not about right and wrong. They are about wrong and wrong, and though they are tragedies inasmuch as they deal with terrible deeds and their retribution, they suggest a new definition of tragedy. ...
We (a lot of us, anyway) follow and discuss these trials to establish degrees of wrongness, or simply to see which wrong will carry the day. Few people would argue that Michael Jackson didn't cross a line with his bed sharing; the question was only how far he went beyond it. But at the same time, few people would argue that greed and hypocrisy didn't taint the accusations against him; the question was simply whether we could still buy them at all. When presented with this kind of situation, we must choose, or accept to be divided, between two wrongs. We don't have to believe that anybody is telling the truth. We can believe both that O.J. did it and that the LAPD is (or was) crowded with racists who compromised its credibility. That Robert Blake did it and that Bonny conned him six ways to Sunday. That Kobe did it -- that he did "something" -- and that his accuser set him up and embellished the tale. If there are innocent victims, they appear to be "caught in the middle," or twice exploited.
The outcomes, therefore, cannot be "resolutions." There is no "moral of the story" -- if not a twisted, ambiguous, ironic one. O.J. gets off as a slap in the face of the LAPD; he becomes persona non grata in his former L.A. hangouts and has to relocate to Miami. Kobe gets off but has to admit infidelity and make it up with gifts of oversize jewelry, tattoos honoring his "queen," and renewed commitment to his fans (as ultimate proof of his new faithfulness, he re-signs with the Lakers). Michael Jackson gets off but may soon have to sell the Beatles catalog back to Sony.
Much as classic tragedy is exact and rigorous, this American tragedy is messy and arbitrary. It is tragedy crossed with melodrama in its most degraded expression (the soap opera). It is tragedy for people who crave the frisson of morbidity much more than any catharsis. ...
We are now likely to feel stronger about the celebrities we don't like than the ones we like: a "reverse fandom" that can be a form of satire but easily spills into meanness. If we don't like certain celebrities, we want to see them embarrassed, ridiculed, reviled. If we like them, we still want to see them exposed at their most vulnerable. More interesting than the work celebrities do is the work they have done on them. We obsess on the weight they gain or abruptly shed, the fashion blunders, the mating patterns, the abrupt weddings and divorces. The union of two celebrities seems to create grotesque two-headed monsters such as "Bennifer" or "Brangelina." ...
My friend Larry Gross (a veteran screenwriter and one of Hollywood's sharpest minds) has convinced me that there is a new and profound cultural problem to contend with: as a society, we no longer understand power. The power of kings and dictators was always visible, tangible, understandable. The power of elected officers is by definition (if not always in reality) an expression of popular power. But the power of mega-corporations is as faceless and nebulous as it is pervasive. It hides in plain sight and communicates in code. Even the most powerful people in the world now seem harder to understand. George Bush is not the figure of gravitas, wisdom and trustworthiness we need a president to be. Bill Gates is not the charismatic, visionary egomaniac we expect the richest man in the world to be. They are ciphers, and they make their very power unintelligible. And so not only do we feel more powerless in front of a more absolute power, but we also feel unable to "relate" to it at all.
Celebrity trials provide people the sense of witnessing a form of history up close and personal. But the cultural dynamics represented in the trials always point to the fact that celebrities are ultimately "weird," and that mere mortals getting too close to them are (intentionally or not) inviting trouble -- which means they must also be weird. What we understand about celebrities is ultimately that we do not, cannot, understand them.
It's a tragedy of unknowing and incomprehension, suggesting the larger tragedy of incomprehensible power.