A S K C A M I L L E
| Camille Paglia's online advice for the culturally disgruntled |
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Illustration by Zach Trenholm
Boycott Rosie, not the tabloids
Dear Camille:
I am surprised that you take sides against the paparazzi in the Diana tragedy. The self-righteous ramblings of highly paid TV news commentators about paparazzi sleaze are an attempt to preserve their own elite status. They exploit this tragedy to draw a bright line between themselves and the guys taking photos on the front line. However, since they profit from the same photos, their disgust is hypocritical.
Also, Diana herself courted the paparazzi, thus it was childish of her to complain when they were around at a time she didn't think convenient. By putting herself in the care of incompetents (as a mother, she had an obligation to know better), Diana herself carries far more blame for the crash than the paparazzi do.
Finally, I am totally disgusted with the movie stars who use this tragedy to whine publicly about the paparazzi hounding them. (There is even a rumor that three "mega stars" are hiring investigators to hound paparazzi and tabloid editors as some childish mode of revenge.)
The paparazzi are good examples of can-do men leading the charge, doing their job, aggressively making a living to support themselves and their families. You usually champion guys like this. They are blamed, unfairly, by selfish whiners who want to have their cake and eat it too.
Unimpressed by Di
P.S. Did you see Fran Drescher on "Larry King"? A shiksa wannabe, having wrung every last ounce of ethnicity from her looks, she shouted that Americans should boycott tabloids so the likes of her can live in peace. She then had the gall to compare her proposed national boycott to populist movements concerning labor unions and civil rights. This is heartless exploitation of an untimely death, much more so than snapping photographs at the scene of an accident (which happens every day, even when it's Joe Blow in a mangled car wreck).
Dear Unimpressed:
I completely agree with your indictment of the hoity-toity TV superstars
looking down their noses at "paparazzi sleaze." I vigorously support the
tabloid press as the authentic voice of mass culture, even preceding the
1890s circulation wars between William Randolph Hearst and Joseph Pulitzer.
Half-fictionalized as they are, the tabloids, with their twin themes of sex
and violence, tell the lurid pagan truth about life.
I began reading Confidential magazine, a notorious Hollywood scandal sheet,
when I was an adolescent and have steadily monitored the tabloids into the
present era of the National Enquirer and the Star, the most substantive
of the current grocery check-out rags. (Please note that American tabloids
are weeklies, while the London ones are dailies, intensifying the cutthroat
competition and sensationalism.) Though I certainly sympathized with Carol
Burnett in her precedent-setting, successful libel suit against the
Enquirer, I have relied on the tabloids to give early warning of sensitive
information -- like Rock Hudson's affliction with AIDS, which the tabloids were
reporting a full year before anyone else.
With their colorful candid shots of chic or tacky celebrity fashions and
their charting of the stars' love affairs and professional projects, the
tabloids are consistently entertaining and instructive. By publishing untold
reams of beautiful photos of the Princess of Wales, they played a major role
in making her a world phenomenon. It was the tabloids alone who brought
Nicole Brown Simpson back as a real personality, who gave her new life as a
charismatic presence through the sometimes risque snapshots of her lounging
in bikinis or sparkling at A-list parties. The sober mainstream press, with
its pious, tongue-clucking political correctness, reduced Nicole to a noble
or pathetic victim, a cipher -- but the tabloids, by showing her sexual power,
helped illuminate the turbulent obsessions and power games that escalated
into her brutal murder.
When Rosie O'Donnell (whom I liked as a stand-up comedian but whose work as a
schmaltzy talk-show host I find brittle and fake) recently called for a
one-year boycott of the tabloids by readers who want to honor Diana, I was so
outraged that I immediately bought copies of both the Enquirer and Star
in protest. O'Donnell was hypocritically using Diana's tragic death to grind
her own axes: Omitted from her histrionic appeal was the inconvenient
fact that the prior week's splashy Enquirer cover story (with just a small
inset photo of Diana on her Mediterranean vacation) was about the
motorcycle-straddling O'Donnell's alleged affairs with two lesbian lovers.
Sugar-sweet, all-American Miss Rosie has a shadowy closet the size of
Greenland. And folks, backstage she bites.
The profession of paparazzo is an admirable one to which I myself, in another
life, would have been happy to belong. I love the idea of the hunt, of the
wily game of patience, persistence, chutzpah and serendipity played by
celebrity photographers. However, I also respect professionalism in every
trade -- from prostitution to the presidency. The paparazzi have no right to
trespass on private property, to physically crowd or obstruct a subject or
to endanger lives by reckless driving. Nor do they have the right to create
incidents -- as we see illustrated in Fellini's
"La Dolce Vita" (1959), where the sprightly photographer Paparazzo (the
namesake of today's tribe), encamped with his pals outside a luxury Roman
hotel, goads a macho, drunken American actor into a predawn fistfight to
catch on film.
The paparazzi who were dogging Diana and Dodi all day from their arrival at
Le Bourget airport were jerks -- reportedly not just buzzing around the car at
high speeds on the drive into Paris but deliberately cutting in front of it
to slow it down, forcing Diana's driver to slam on the brakes. Bad driving
of this kind is not just unprofessional but criminal, endangering innocent
others. It's a miracle that in the tunnel chase from the Ritz later that
night, no one in slower cars was killed or maimed.
I also agree with you that Diana, who was 36 and no longer a naive 19,
deserves some share of the blame for what happened, since she surrendered
personal responsibility for her safety to a gilded lounge lizard who spent
his entire life parasitically feeding off his father's millions and cringing
from bossy paternal control. (I wonder whether the sexuality of the
recessive, "soft-spoken," skirt-chasing, ne'er-do-well Dodi is a bit more
complex than what we've been told.)
Everything we're learning about Diana's final summer suggests a pattern of
increasing desperation, of misjudgments about people and situations, of an
inability to be content in herself without vertiginous oscillations between
the glittering high life and showy acts (however laudable) of public charity.
Diana was remarkable and fascinating but driven by obscure inner forces.
That she was still emotionally overinvolved in her divorced husband's
private life is suggested by her continuing efforts to upstage or counter
Charles' dowdy mistress/nanny, Camilla Parker-Bowles, who was scheduled to
host a major charity ball (since canceled) on Sept. 13.
The week before her death, Diana admitted to an interviewer from Le Monde
that she "used photographs" to get her message across. It was to the press
that she turned for help when she was stonewalled by the adulterous Charles
and the dry, priggish bureaucrats of Buckingham Palace. It was really the
press who kept us in love with her for years, as we watched her uncoiling
from limousines or striding through hospitals and minefields. I am grateful
to Diana's paparazzi for creating brilliantly dazzling iconic images of her that,
taken as a whole, have given me far more aesthetic pleasure than anything
produced by the boring professional art world in the last 25 years.
But Diana's relations with the press were like that of the battered wife who
can never quite break from her abusive spouse. Diana was on/off, push/pull,
hot/cold in her contacts with photographers. She'd rage, then melt;
withdraw, then flirt. She was addicted to their attention because she was
starved for love. Her neediness, which touches our hearts, long preceded her
marriage to the stiff, phlegmatic Charles, whom she drove even further away
(that Germanic Windsor chill!) with her tears and pleadings for affection.
The paparazzi were our pimps in one of the great romances of the century.
Diana was a very strange and very gifted being whose real place was in the
performing arts. Some may have revered her for her good works and others for
her brave, warm, single motherhood, but the drag queens and Wildean gay
aesthetes (with whom I ally myself) adored her for her mercurial fashion
sense and her stunning grace and witty command of body language.
Choreography was her forte. She made magic moments that lit up the camera.
Whatever combination of fatigue, hubris and ineptitude led Dodi and Diana to
pointlessly try to evade their pursuers by dispatching a lame decoy and then
racing through the city streets without buckling their seat belts (idiotic),
it is nevertheless loathsome that the paparazzi circled like jackals while
the mortally wounded Diana was being tended in the car for the hour it took
to extract her.
I accept that this ghoulish voyeurism is the nature of the beast: See
Haskell Wexler's haunting 1969 film, "Medium Cool" (a semi-documentary saga
of the riot-torn 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago that begins with a
passing news team coolly photographing a lonely crashed auto containing a
moaning, injured, sexy girl). But I'd still like to bash this particular
pack of Parisian paparazzi over the head. Diana, who had given so much to
the world, deserved more dignity at the end than that.
I agree with you again about the unseemly intrusion by posturing pop stars
into these shocking events -- from Tom Cruise's sputtering phone call to CNN,
while we were still waiting for news of Diana's condition, to Madonna's
sanctimonious sermon about the media at the MTV Awards ("We're all one" and
must stop our "negative behavior" -- this from the woman who pushed S&M
scenarios in "Sex," posed naked hitchhiking in Miami and exposed herself in
a girdle at Cannes) to Fran Drescher's florid appearance on "Larry King." I
like Drescher for her raucous, old-style ethnicity, but I did think she came
off a bit parochial and self-absorbed when our thoughts were with Diana in
France and her sons in Scotland. I know what got Drescher's dander up,
however, since I had originally seen the published tabloid telephoto pictures
spying on her in a short bathrobe as she sassily bid an early-morning doorway
adieu to a nebbishy boy toy during her highly publicized separation from her
husband.
Photojournalism is central to our time, and it has had gifted
practitioners -- like Life's Margaret Bourke-White, one of those sterling dames
of the cosmopolitan 1930s whom I consider the best kind of feminist.
Because I have gotten so much gratification from poring over news photos, I
have personally tried to cooperate fully with photographers either at public
events or scheduled magazine shoots (for which I sometimes devised tableaux
featuring costumes or weapons).
Nevertheless, I was totally unprepared for my clash with an aggressive
freelance paparazzo after a 1992 feminist conference at Princeton
University. Without going into detail about the whole fracas (there was a
lot of pushing and shoving), let me just say that until you have had a
blinding, high-wattage professional flash go off in your eyes from a camera
thrust directly at your face, you can't imagine the rage that celebrities a
thousand times better known than me must feel at the constant torture
attending their every public move.
While the press must be kept free in a democracy, I favor the idea of
guaranteeing all citizens a cushion of safe space (at least three feet on
every side) into which no one should be able to intrude. Furthermore,
stalking laws need to be strengthened, so that fanatics following their idols
cannot hide behind press protections. Even with these reforms, however,
major stars are not likely to get much relief from the blazing eye of the
modern media sun. NEXT PAGE | Paglia's non-PC guide to colleges |
