Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar Review

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Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar ReviewMr. Ebert picks up where Marshall McLuhan, Camile Paglia and others left off, with a sort of Freudian neo-Platonism for the digital age.
The basic premise is that psychological creations, both by individuals and Western culture as a whole, have more tangible reality than reality itself.
The celebrities profiled did not achieve mythic status by dying; rather they were killed by their own creations, by the mythic doppel-gangers who haunted and hunted them until the flesh-and-blood people behind the masks simply could not coexist.
How did the celebrities create these personae when others failed? Did they have unique insights into the media? Were they born with special access to spiritual and psychological realms? It's not clear.
But it is clear that what distinguished these icons was the degree to which they were willing to sell themselves for fame. Where others stepped back from the abyss, they stepped forward. The steps leading up to their cultural sainthood is the subject of the book.
It's easy to see how mass adulation can corrupt. But what some might call madness, Ebert sees as very real angels and demons almost looking for the right host to then photosynthesize to life through the artificial light of the media.
If you are a strict materialist you might find Ebert's whole premise (and freqeunt digressions)a little "out there." Yet seeing is believing, and Ebert shows you the celebrities exercising--and exorcising--their powers. For example he observes that Elvis "literally" makes the convex tv screen bend behind his enormous energy when shot from the waist up on Ed Sullivan. Come to think of it, Elvis did just that, if only in terms of his psychological impact. For Ebert, the physical is a pale shadow of underlying reality. Thus his neoplatonism.
It would be useful to hear Elvis' own views of how he "bent" the screen, of his own spirtual experiences, etc. Instead all the celebrity lives are surveyed and the rest is merely conjecture -- but what wonderful conjecture! In the end I felt I was under a spell, one where reality is malleable and I could feel the possibilities and dangers that the celebrities themselves must have felt.
Mr. Ebert bills himself as an "independent scholar," but he is more so a kindred spirit to the very people he profiles, a word wizard for the (admittedly small) circle willing and able to speak his language.
Dead Celebrities, Living Icons: Tragedy and Fame in the Age of the Multimedia Superstar Overview

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