Well, according to the June 14 Daily Variety, plans are in the works to make a movie called "An Alan Smithee Film," written by the inexplicable Joe Eszterhas, to be directed (if talks go well) by the Hughes Brothers.

"An Alan Smithee Film" will be a pseudo-documentary in the "Spinal Tap" vein ("Spinal Tap" being a fictitious rock group from the '80s that eventually went on an actual tour). It concerns a Brit who's directing three superstars in a megabudget flick called "Trio." He hates the final film but can't take his name off it -- that is, put Alan Smithee's name on it -- because his name actually IS Alan Smithee.

Pretty thin gruel if you ask me, but the producers have already signed Sly (née Sylvester) Stallone to play himself. They also wanted Bruce Willis and Arnold Schwarzenegger to play themselves, but Arnold balked, to be replaced by Whoopi Goldberg (née Karyn Johnson). I'm not making this up.

The mysteriously successful Mr. Eszterhas, scripter of such classics as "Jade" and "Showgirls," explained: "Arnold has been fired from my script. By manual typewriter. Anything Arnold can do, Whoopi can do better." Whoopi playing herself is better at playing Arnold playing himself than Arnold playing himself? I guess if all you need is a star, any star will do; its precise degree of luminescence, or even location in the heavens, ceases to matter.

What does it all mean?

In this quaint Information Age of ours, in which data can be replicated endlessly, authenticity has become something of a problem. On a chat line, for example, you can pretend to be anybody you want to be (as long as you're text-based, of course). Who's going to know?

Even off-line, there's a sudden proliferation of nom de plumes, masks, secret identities and alter egos. What the right wing calls the dominant culture is going Hollywood in a big way.

In the old days, Marion Morrison became John Wayne. More recently, Reggie Dwight became Elton John. People have dropped their last names to become Cher, Prince, Madonna. Cary Grant, Engelbert Humperdinck, Marilyn Monroe, and Sting were all bright imaginary creatures, drummed into being by an army of publicists, costumers, gaffers, grips and producers to create avatars worthy of our tawdry little dreams.

The tradition is somewhat ubiquitous: Mark Twain, Mr. Dooley, Anonymous, Ann Landers, Miss Manners, even yours truly, Ian Shoales, are pure (or not-so-pure, in my case) inventions. But it wasn't until the '60s that reinvention of self became an everyday affair. Young women from the suburbs, under the influence of psychotropic substances, changed their names from Mary Jane to Starshine, moved to communes with hippies named Frodo and golden retrievers named Gandalf, to give natural birth to children whom they dubbed Dirt and Mailbox.

As they came of age, these children changed their names to Greg and Suzie and voted for George Bush. The Frodos of the world moved on to prison, rehab centers and graduate school. The Starshines changed back to Mary Janes and studied real estate. Many of them voted for Ross Perot.

Now a new generation of Gregs and Suzies are changing their names to 2 Tuff and Badd Grrl, in the hope that some of America's disposable income will adhere to them from their musical efforts. Hospitals are becoming Health Maintenance Organizations. Senator Bob has become Citizen Bob. Bill Clinton is trying unsuccessfully to become a William.

Macho Dennis Rodman dresses like a woman. The FBI is a counseling service to right-wing wackos. Left-wing wackos are highly paid diversity counselors to downsized corporations. Magazines like Wired take seriously the notion that the self is just a fiction; even our bodies can be transformed by prosthetics, tattoos and piercings into buff yet sensitive cyborg units. Even public events turn chameleon: Whitewater is either a scandal or a frame-up, depending on your political views. Life has become Rashomon, without Kurosawa's style and no subtitles.

Truth has failed us! In all walks of life, humans strive to turn themselves into masters and mistresses of their own ever-shifting fate, into Nietzschean overlords who can morph either into beings more capable of coping with our stressful and confusing times, or into beings who can transcend reality altogether.

The Freemen are the most extreme example of this behavior. They transformed themselves from psycho deadbeats into a superpatriotic militia. Whether they are creating a new reality or denying the old one remains to be seen. One of them, however, Dale Jacobi, recently shouted in court, "I'm being held against my will in chains under the threat of guns." To which I thought, "Well, duh. It's called being under arrest, Dale." What did he think? The FBI were going to give him and his ilk passes to Disney World?

At least, for all our self-delusions, we can still recognize a bad guy when we see one. Why then, when Richard Allen Davis was convicted of the murder of Polly Klaas, and the picture of him after the verdict, flipping a double bird to the victim's family and the camera, was plastered on front pages around the country, were we shocked? Did we expect a child-killer with good manners?