Mythologising the spectacle
How fascinating is it to know about celebrities — their love and romance! Yes, the celebrity culture takes us to a mythical world filled with spectacles, glamour, wealth and magical stories about friendship and break-up. And we — the unknown/faceless crowd — are seduced to consume this fairy tale, and derive some sort of pleasure in gossiping about these glossy stories. Hence, these days we are continually talking about the ‘magical’ couple, Katrina Kaif and Vicky Kaushal, and their spectacular wedding at Six Senses Fort at Barwara in Rajasthan. And innumerable media houses fulfil this irresistible desire to know almost everything about the grandness of this show.
Consumer culture wants us to live with a sense of ‘lagging behind’ because it needs our inner emptiness to sell its fairy tales.
Hence, with absolute wonder, we are seeing the ‘exclusive first picture’ of the newlyweds ‘walking hand-in-hand around the corridors’; Katrina’s engagement ring, we are told, looks similar to Princess Diana’s iconic sapphire ring; we are also informed of how 50 people were working day and night to give a final touch to the couple’s ‘Juhu love nest’; Katrina’s red bridal lehenga, or the five-tier cake that was brought on the sangeet night, or even the tales of 20 kg of organic mehendi — yes, the spectacle looks like a Karan Johar blockbuster. Who can afford to miss this ‘hyper-real’ show?
Why is it that the celebrity culture fascinates us? Is it a kind of escape, or some sort of temporal relief from the harsh reality that envelops our everyday existence? A clerk in a government office continually humiliated by his boss; a cashier in an over-crowded bank without breathing space; a housewife terribly tired of the endless cycle of routinised work — washing, sweeping, cooking; a young girl in a middle-class locality continually visiting beauty parlours to look ‘beautiful’ in order to get married; a young man struggling and somehow surviving without any meaningful engagement or vocation — yes, for most of us, our everyday world seems to have lost its meaning, or become what Albert Camus would have regarded as ‘absurd’.
Possibly, the celebrity culture is like a glossy film with all sorts of stimulations and bodily and psychic sensations that enables us to escape from the monotony of existence. Or is it like some sort of wish fulfilment? Is it that a college girl from a lower middle class neighbourhood in Mumbai too is dreaming of Katrina’s lehenga? Is it that while travelling in the noisy/crowded local train in Kolkata, we too are dreaming of romancing with our partners on the beach in Maldives? Is it that we too love to post the images of our ‘happy’ moments on Facebook— the way Anushka Sharma and Virat Kohli appear to be ‘eternally happy and blessed’?
We live amid a media-simulated consumer culture. It stimulates us to consume everything as a ‘brand’— be it a dating app, a honeymoon package in a hill station, or a diamond ring for Valentine’s Day. It is not easy to be free from this seductive logic of consumerism. And it is important to acknowledge that the consumer culture needs to construct and disseminate the images of celebrities to endorse, sell and glamourise diverse ‘brands’. No wonder, celebrities —cricket stars, sports icons, Bollywood heroes, beauty queens — too need to continually keep the ‘mystery’ surrounding them alive; they too need to see that their ‘brand’ images are continually in the process of circulation. Is it, therefore, surprising that there is a speculation that Katrina and Vicky have sold their ceremony’s telecast rights to Amazon Prime for Rs 80 crore? In other words, techno-capitalists, hidden persuaders and management gurus promoting the culture industry have to keep the celebrity syndrome alive. And glossy magazines, Instagram/Twitter messages, fashion shows, beauty contests, or spectacular wedding ceremonies must reproduce this cultural politics. This is good business!
However, the moot question is whether it would ever be possible for us to free ourselves from this pathological obsession with celebrity culture. Possibly, the answer is a kind of deep insight that enables us to demythologise the spectacle. It is like realising that life — even for these celebrities — is not like a picture postcard. For instance, the eternity of impermanence cannot be escaped; today’s beauty queen is tomorrow’s skeleton; or today’s ‘happy marriage’ is tomorrow’s ‘divorce petition’; or the dramatic rise of ‘stardom’ is inseparable from the pain of finding oneself suddenly irrelevant and invisible! Life is what it is — moments of joy and laughter, intense moments of inexplicable accidents and tragedies, anxiety and ecstasy, psychiatric drugs and sleeping tablets, fame and invisibility. Yet, it is important for us — I mean unknown people like us — to realise that there is extraordinariness even in the ‘ordinary’; and there is love even amid struggle.
Love does not require a diamond ring; nor does it demand the ceaseless circulation of Facebook images of togetherness. Love is not the monopoly of the rich and the powerful. Instead, quite often, the burden of inflated egos of the rich obstructs the flow of love. And at the same time, it is not impossible to see the ecstasy of love in what appears to be ‘ordinary’— say, in the cancer ward of a hospital when a man nurses his wife, and cleans her frail body; or, as O. Henry depicted in a path-breaking story The Gift of the Magi, in the rhythmic relationship between Della and Jim. In fact, there is no mythical paradise, no magic land. It is only here and now that we can find a meaning, or an experience of beauty and love. But then, the consumer culture wants us to live with a sense of ‘lagging behind’ because it needs our inner emptiness to sell its fairy tales.
