Used to be, tracking the downward progress of a soul was hard work. You had to read your John Milton and listen to Satan’s sniveling imprecations against God (“Better to reign in hell than serve in heaven”) or plummet along with Marlowe’s “Doctor Faustus” (“Cut is the branch that might have grown full straight . . . “) or wince and squirm through the outraged denials and subsequent tearful confessions of preachers and presidents.
To see somebody rot from the inside out, you had to put forth a little effort.
Now it’s easy: Punch up YouTube. Snag a copy of US magazine. Flip to CNN Headline News.
These days, you can watch a soul sink in seconds. In fact, if you try to make a celebrity’s hellish fall last a little longer — if you think you can turn somebody’s personal disintegration into an all-day sucker — you’re a fool, because everything happens so quickly now that to blink is to miss something essential.
So we get to observe singer/dancer/soul-in-peril Britney Spears opt for a buzz cut, then pop into rehab and pop back out again — as if rehab were some sort of coke-dusted cuckoo clock — and then just when you think her life is settling down, there she is again: Channeling Lancelot with a cheap bumbershoot, jousting with the tinted windows of a paparazzi’s chromium steed.
She’s a mess. She’s also 25.
The two are probably not unrelated.
But are Spears’ troubles just the usual kid stuff — a pampered generation’s version of the James Dean wail, “You’re tearing me apart!” in “Rebel Without a Cause” — or part of some larger, more ominous transformation? Artists and entertainers often fucntion as advance scouts for the rest of society, getting us ready for what’s ahead. Could Spears and every other prodigal sis — a Paris Hilton, a Lindsay Lohan, a Nicole Richie or, in what seems like mere seconds ago, a Kate Moss or a Courtney Love — actually be well-coiffured canaries in the cultural coal mine, warning us that the air’s turning foul in a hurry?
“I grew up with Madonna. She was rolling around on the floor singing ‘Like a Virgin.’ Is this really that much different or are we just focusing on it now?” asks Angela West, an Atlanta-based photographer whose exhibition “Sweet 16,” provocative portraits of 16-year-old girls who hail from her hometown of Dahlonega, Ga., is on display at Chicago’s Carl Hammer Gallery.
“There’s certainly more media exposure of these things now,” adds West, 36. “There’s more of everything.”
More. More choices, more channels, more Web sites, more magazines, more blather, more blogs. More coverage of events such as Anna Nicole Smith’s Friday funeral. More talk, more type, more camera angles, more chances to see rage and mayhem and nervous breakdowns in real time.
Are more young people screwing up — or does it simply feel that way because we can view the fabulous flameouts in so many different venues? And is it just celebrities who are out of control, or are regular kids without three-picture deals at DreamWorks also wobbling drunkenly across tightropes to nowhere?
Eliot Schrefer, author of the 2006 novel “Glamorous Disasters,” declares, “There’s so much material being broadcast now — but it does go beyond that. There is increased dissipation, more than ever before. The same urges have always been there, but there’s a lot more capability now.
“You can splash hard younger than ever before. You can blow out harder, faster,” says Schrefer, 28, whose novel deals with rich high school students in New York, where Schrefer lives, and the expensive tutors their parents hire to get them into Ivy League colleges. “We’re definitely at a watershed.”
`Leering, jeering’
Nancy Nall Derringer, a writer, editor and cultural blogger (www.nancynall.com) based in suburban Detroit, has had it. Up to here. “What creeps me out about it most of all is the leering, jeering public reaction” to the meltdowns of Spears et al., Derringer writes in an e-mail. “What’s made this situation different is the Internet/paparazzi/always-on media culture. When everyone carries around a camera in their cell phone, you can’t keep cameras out of places they were always banned.
“When we’ve already been conditioned to believe that no part of life is off-limits to cameras, and when a perpetrator of one of those shows is Britney herself — what was that show? `Frantic’? No, `Chaotic’ — what are these latest developments but just another episode?”
Derringer, 49, mother of a 10-year-old daughter, adds, “It does feel like some sort of turning point. I suppose what bugs me about today’s scandals is the bread-and-circuses aspect of it, how cruel we can be when confronted with what, in another era, would be considered real human tragedy.”
Indeed, with Spears’ latest spree — the peekabo game that the newly shorn chanteuse played with her rehab stint — there was an almost palpable sense that the story suddenly had gone from funny to . . . not. Even some comedians rejected the easy punch lines. Craig Ferguson, host of “The Late Late Show” on CBS, told his audience recently that for the time being, his show would be a Britney-free zone. “We shouldn’t be attacking the vulnerable,” he said. “She clearly needs help. She’s got two kids. . . . She’s a baby herself.”
(Before we get all misty-eyed about comedians’ nobility, it must be noted that some of them couldn’t find the high road even it showed up on a GPS tracker. On Wednesday, Carson Daly’s “Last Call” indulged in a number of lame Spears jokes, including a call to a faux Spears sporting a voice straight out of a Marlboro hard pack, and then he smirked and referred to her puking backstage.)
Yet for many, recent days have brought a feeling — hard to put a finger on, but present nonetheless — that a line has been crossed. The air seems festooned with a strange new sadness. We’re challenged to figure out if it’s temporary — or if it signals an incipient cultural apocalypse. As Rebecca Traister recently wrote in a Salon.com essay, with the latest Spears antics “you could practically hear the national laugh track fading to a few awkward giggles.” We’ve been licking the plate clean of Spears tidbits but still can’t get our fill, Traister believes, because we forget she’s a real person, not a fictional character from a prime-time soap. “Britney is not Amy Dorrit, or Luke and Laura. . . . We need to remember that whatever is happening to Spears right now is happening not for our amusement, but to her detriment.”
Even Spears’ fall, though, could end up as fodder, notes Koren Zailckas. The 26-year-old author of “Smashed: Story of a Drunken Girlhood” (2005), the best-selling memoir about Zailckas’ alcohol-fueled misbehavior in high school and college, says Spears’ putative cry for help happens to be a familiar and fashionable career move.
“My fear is that 14-year-old girls in rural Kansas are looking at pictures of Britney and romanticizing Promsies,” says Zailckas, referring to the favorite rehab clinic of the rich and famous. And it all fits neatly — too neatly, Zailckas cautions — into another prominent American myth: the instant makeover. “It’s sold exclusively to young women. One day you can be one thing, the next day, you can be another. There’s a glamor to rehab.”
We love it
And we do so relish our celebrity turnarounds, don’t we? We love the press conferences with those lurid revelations followed by earnest vows of “Never again!” We thrill to the media-enriched mea culpas. Entertainers who have regaled us with the standard scandal-and-redemption script include Robert Downey Jr., Charlie Sheen, Corey Feldman, Drew Barrymore — and Robert Downey Jr. and Robert Downey Jr.
Yet is there something different about the present moment? A difference of degree, if not of kind? Something darker than the days when Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald jitterbugged on tabletops? Something that can’t be dismissed by the obvious truth that a million cable channels and a thousand billion Internet sites and a few dozen well-placed cell phone cameras make lurid celebrity doings much harder to miss?
“It does feel a little catastrophic,” concedes Zailckas.
Alex Kotlowitz agrees. The Chicago-based writer has been observing young people for a long time now — his 1991 book “There Are No Children Here,” considered a modern classic, follows two boys growing up in an impoverished Chicago neighborhood — and he has seen a profound change. Media images of sex and violence roll through American homes in a great tawdry wave, he notes. And like it or not, we’re all getting drenched.
“The cultural landscape in this country is pretty astonishing,” muses Kotlowitz, 51, father of a daughter, 12, and son, 9. “We end up spending much more time scrutinizing Anna Nicole Smith’s death than we do the war in Iraq. It’s got me deeply concerned.
“Britney Spears is not some new phenomenon,” he adds. “Look at Judy Garland. Indulging in drugs and alcohol in youth is not new.” But the chronicling of those excesses has reached epic heights, Kotlowitz says. “It’s just so much more accessible. Adults, parents have less control.”
So what can we do? Urge Congress to yank the “E!” channel? Fine MSNBC for its grotesquely over-the-top coverage of Anna Nicole Smith’s demise?
Absolutely not, declares Kotlowitz: “It’s not something you can legislate. That’s what makes it such treacherous turf.” The glorious cultural free-for-all that gives us everything from the “Jackass” movies to “There Are No Children Here” is also what allows the Spears stories to leave their mark on the 24-hour news cycle, spreading like a grease stain on a white tablecloth.
Is the present moment — with its anything-goes videos, its endlessly televised infamy — really any different from crazy days gone by? “Yes and no,” writes Derringer. “People are people. We behave and misbehave in predictable ways and will continue to do so.” Ultimately, though, young souls are shaped more by their families than by YouTube, Derringer believes. “I know the culture influences kids — but not as much as parents do.”
You’d expect that kind of talk from a fortysomething mom. But what about the twentysomething Schrefer? Asked what advice he’d give the reeling Spears, he says: “Don’t expect happiness or self-esteem from glamor or fame.”
So where should she be looking?
His answer is less “Girls Gone Wild” and more Laura Ingalls Wilder:
“Loving connections with family.”
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jikeller@tribune.com
