Star Trek Intimate Strangers

By Melvin Maddocks

Celebrities by definition have to be famous. Nothing says they have to be liked, and Richard Schickel's appraisal of fame is anything but a fan's notes. This is, he confesses at the outset, "a single-issue book," and the issue is the battle for the soul of a culture seduced and battered by machinery that puts image before substance and claims before creativity.

Schickel, a TIME Cinema critic, ruefully considers all aspects of celebrity, including the dark facet of notoriety. John W. Hinckley Jr. stands as an exemplar, a recipient of that "wildly parodistic version of celebrity treatment that is accorded the criminal who has assaulted a well-known person. He gets a police escort and a motorcade . . . For the first time in his hitherto anonymous life people will be curious about his history, his thoughts. In due course, his ravings may find their way into print. Or he will have his story told by a famous novelist."

Although celebrity is as old as society, Schickel believes that its new malignance results from the rise of communications technology. "Over a century's span," he observes, "the proliferation of information has created a need for simplifying symbols--usually people, sometimes objects--that crystallize an issue, an ideal, a longing." Hence the crucial importance of the image factories of movies and television, and the power of still photography that inflates every incident, from atrocity to treaty signing, only to reduce it to a photo opportunity.

Celebrity status, as the checkout-counter newspapers constantly remind us, is no guarantor of happiness or security. Schickel reels off the familiar tragedies of those who found there was no room at the top: John Belushi, Freddie Prinze, Dylan Thomas, Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe. Yet some of the deceased, like proper legends, have regained their power in death. Humphrey Bogart is a greater celebrity now than when he was alive; so is John Lennon. The fade-out has become as important in life as onscreen; no wonder Hollywood repartee has become standardized: "Elvis Presley is dead." "Good career move."

What makes Schickel's argument cogent is not only critical analysis but autobiography--the stammering voice from the heart. A child of the Midwest during the '40s and early '50s, Schickel belongs to the last generation that automatically placed "silver" before "screen" and "glamorous" before "star." The world of celebrities, he confides, became "The Great Other Place"--a promised land of grace and charm and wit where nobody was ordinary, nobody was dull.

His moral outrage in middle age measures the degree of early infatuation and ultimate disappointment. With the passion of a lover betrayed, Schickel protests that celebrities in the arts "are used to simplify complex matters of the mind and spirit." We look at the face and ignore the work. Celebrities "subvert rationalism in politics." We neglect the issues and vote for the image most skillfully packaged on TV. In every department of life, celebrities are a "corruption," Schickel's label for the shallowness and glitz of late 20th century civilization. With considerable reason, he blames celebrities and the cameras without which they could not exist for the decline of the English language. After all, what need does a race divided between paparazzi and voyeurs have for the fine distinction of words?

In the end, the author throws away his script and improvises a coruscating sermon. Celebrities become the graven images of this slack age, and on their well-coiffed, carefully blow-dried heads he calls down fire and brimstone. Others have drawn up the formal indictment against the cult of celebrities. Schickel offers a white-hot jeremiad. In idolizing and loathing the celebrities we conspire to create, we bury real humanity. Woe unto the celebrities whom we are so good at killing, he warns, and woe unto us. Is there an answer to this sorry circle of fame and deceit? Schickel's conclusion: "Resistance," holding out against the "new tyranny of the image. We cannot redeem the world. But we can, we unhappy few, redeem ourselves. If we cannot say no in thunder we can at least whisper subversion among ourselves." Such is fame, in 1985.