FASCINATION OR FOLLY?

Congratulations to some unknown news writer at Global News for a wonderful turn of phrase. It went something like: “The catnip that attracts people to celebrity…” I may have got it wrong but the gist of it is obviously the bizarre fascination ordinarily sane people have for celebrity and scandal, for carnage and chaos.

You need go no further than the expressway where you have been “stop and go” for the last half hour. You finally arrive at tHe cause: a collision scene, complete with police cars and rotating red lights. Add an ambulance or two and you have the perfect formula for another dose of catnip. Of course, the jam is caused mostly by the ghouls who slow down hoping to get a closer look at the carnage. (It is, I believe, against the law to “rubberneck” by slowing down. I have never heard of anyone being charged or convicted.)

The latest lure for the thrill-seekers is the suicide of a man alleged to have beaten and dismembered his wife. The son of a wealthy man in Calgary, he was a contestant on a reality show, married a “model” and after two days of marriage appeared to have fled, leaving behind charges that he murdered the lady. We were glued to our TV news for all the details. We were treated to multiple shots of this ample-breasted woman (they were artificial) and head shots of the fleeing husband. We followed his trail to B.C. where he seems to have taken a boat from the U.S. side and entered Canada illegally. But you probably know all that.

The search was on. But he was too quick for the searchers, His body was found hanging from a coat rack in a motel room in Trail, B.C. The stampede to squeeze every last detail was on. We were shown people driving by and slowing down to gawk. There was even a shot of a woman who went close to the window of the motel room and shaded her eyes trying to get a look inside. TV stations paid the motel owner $100 just to get inside the room. The coverage included multiple “cuts” to the coat rack.

What is really going on with celebrity and ”event” fascination? The networks say “we are only giving people what they want,” and others among us say “that is so but where does the original appetite for blood and gore, for celebrity and gossip come from?”

It is always interesting to come face-to-face with someone you have watched on TV, or read about somewhere. It is all too easy to dismiss celebrities with a sneer and “They put their pants on like everyone else – one leg at a time.”

But where would we be with our impoverished, deprived, boring lives if we could not go ga-ga over Brad Pitt. Nothing in my memory has so occupied the human psyche as the mania over the death of Michael Jackson. The Pope didn’t get that much publicity!

I used to be well-known enough for people to stop me in restaurants and ask for an autograph or at least a hand-shake. That all disappeared. I’m not sure I miss it.
Just a few weeks ago sat the Festival of The Sound in Parry Sound, in the lobby during an intermission, a woman approached me with the familiar: “I know you from someplace. Who are you” I told her. I thought she was going to jump out of her skin. I was, I confess, a little gratified to be recognized after all these years of anonymity.

How many times have I heard “Wait till I tell my mother who I just met.”
But how do we really explain the fascination – often morbid? How do we explain the worship of Elvis? How do we explain the screaming people standing behind a rope watching celebrities disembark from their stretch limos? Beats me.