Gods Behaving Badly: Media, Religion, and Celebrity Culture

5. Themes

109 5 THEMES Meryl Streep has turned sixty. She has dominated the headlines, says the journalist Shane Watson. She has refused plastic surgery, she is now starring in a film in which her character has sex, and “she eats carbs all the time, knocks back the booze, wears her hair messy, and generally defies all the rules of making it as a modern woman, never mind a Hollywood star.”1 Sharon Stone, who has clearly taken a very different approach to her self-image, is reported to have called Streep “an unmade bed.” Watson observes that Stephanie Beacham, Ivana Trump, Dannii Minogue, Victoria Beckham, and Cheryl Cole are on the side of Sharon Stone on this one. This has nothing to do with age, says Watson, “It’s about the Unmade Beds versus the Pristine Pillows—two different types of women with different styles.”2 The Unmade Beds also include Tilda Swinton, Helen Mirren, Stella McCartney, and Kristen Stewart. Unmade Beds like dogs, they eat cake, and while they may own a hairdryer , they rarely use it. Watson sees herself in this category, but the Pristine Pillows, she says, have been in the ascendancy: “We in the UB category have come under a lot of pressure over the past decade to conform to the prevailing PP standard; so, every so often, we’ll have a manicure, or get a really serious bikini wax, or diet ourselves into some impossibly teeny jeans. We’ve even been known to get our teeth 110 Gods Behaving Badly whitened.” Watson recognizes that Unmade Beds may be disorganized, but she concludes by saying that when she has to choose between Stone and Streep she knows “which side of the bed she would rather be on.”3 Almost twenty years before Watson’s article, Meryl Streep features in an article that explores a very similar area to do with women and the politics of identification and disidentification. Camille Paglia is praising Elizabeth Taylor, whom she calls “Hollywood’s Pagan Queen”: “My devotion to Elizabeth Taylor began in the late Fifties, when I was in junior high school and when Taylor was in her heyday as a tabloid diva. I was suffering sustained oppression in the Age of Perky Blondes: day after day, I reeled from the assaults of Doris Day, Debbie Reynolds, Sandra Dee. All that parochial pleasantness! So chirpy, peppy, and pink, so well-scrubbed, making the world safe for democracy.”4 For Paglia, Elizabeth Taylor was the antidote. She was the “pre-feminist woman” who used the sexual power that feminism has tried to explain but never managed to destroy. Taylor connects us to feminine archetypes; in her we see Delilah, Salome, and Helen of Troy. In Taylor, Paglia says, “[a]n electric, erotic charge vibrates the space between her face and the lens. It is an extra-sensory phenomenon.”5 This “pagan eroticism” is compared by Paglia to what she calls the Protestantism of Streep. Meryl Streep is fixated on the words, says Paglia. She “flashes clever accents to mask her failures.” If her work was dubbed for a movie audience in India there would be nothing left, says Paglia, “just that bony earnest horse face moving its lips.”6 Streep would be incapable of playing the great mythological roles. She could never be Cleopatra. Taylor, however, is a creation of the world of show business. She has the “hyperreality” of a dream vision. Streep’s actorly manner is a boring decorum beside the earthy sensuality of Taylor. Says Paglia, “I’ll take trashy, glitzy Old Hollywood any day. Elizabeth Taylor heartily eating, drinking, lusting, laughing, cursing, changing husbands, and buying diamonds by the barrel, is a personality on a grand scale . . . Elizabeth Taylor is woman in her many lunar phases, admired by all the world.”7 JudgMent—WhO gOes yOu deCide What is at stake in celebrity culture is not so much what we think of Meryl Streep or Sharon Stone or Elizabeth Taylor but what we think Themes 111 of ourselves. What is being debated is the kind of life we should live and how we should live it. It is the intersection of style and ethics, decorum and discipleship. We are asked to choose our gods and then we are invited, or indeed enticed, to sit in judgment upon them. Celebrity discourses routinely position the audience as divine arbiter. Here the symbiosis of the sacred self appears again...