This Is Running for Your Life by Michelle Orange

talent for perfecting the union, for getting shit done.
    Slowly, perhaps inevitably, self-consciousness slid into self-obsession. By midcentury, the bones of Theodore Dreiser’s American Tragedy (published in 1925, a psychic twin to Fitzgerald’s boom-as-bust Gatsby ) were being reassembled to tell the stories of our cult heroes. We thrilled most when they could commit to its full trajectory: humble beginnings, uncommon gifts, bridling ambition, discovery, stardom, hubris, excess, downfall, death. Monroe, Dean, and Elvis Presley are the holy trinity of this particular denomination. In the postglamour 1960s and early ’70s, rock musicians—Jim Morrison, Janis Joplin, Jimi Hendrix, Brian Jones—were more often martyrs to the faith.
    Even as the cornerstones of the cult of tragic greatness were being set and our lives grew more sheltered and domesticated, the public’s appetite for realism was sharpening. The “Method” hit Hollywood in the early 1950s, and its explosion of what was false or mimetic in performance reflected and fueled this hunger. Actors following Russian pioneer Constantin Stanislavski’s sense-memory method were encouraged to infuse their characters with past experiences and personal psychology, and audiences internalized the idea of acting as a form of self-dramatization. The strengthening pop machine brought us that much further into actors’ lives. We began following an artist’s life at least as closely as her career; eventually the two were married in a public narrative bound by the need for a strong dramatic arc. Andy Warhol made the earliest and most indelible comment on the permeability of this popular mythology with his coterie of invented “superstars”—damaged socialites and hard-luck drifters whom he packaged in the look and story that sold. You no longer had to die for your audience, although often and one way or another, you wound up dead.
    In the pre- and postmillennial decades the growing preoccupation with the private lives of public figures converged with and was quickly overtaken by a parallel obsession with fame itself. As tabloids and tabloid TV evolved, inventing an audience and its appetite for the “real” story behind the star, we sought to reveal our heroes to be more like us than unlike us. By closing the gap between stars and their audience, it was permissible—even logical—to declare open season on the fame they enjoyed.

    3
    Socialism is … above all an atheistic phenomenon, the modern manifestation of atheism, one more tower of Babel built without God, not in order to reach out toward heaven from earth, but to bring heaven down to earth.
    â€”Fyodor Dostoyevsky, The Brothers Karamazov
    When I was growing up, the centripetal fascination with old-fashioned stardom was about to give way to the entitlements of the famous age. We became more concerned with the things we deserved to know about public figures and what we were meant to be ourselves. Talent was no longer the main thing you needed to get over; if you could master a couple of the star narrative’s bullet points and look good in your underwear, the public would take you on as a boarder and barely hold a grudge. We moved toward an age of celebrity simulacra like Paris “This Is Just a Character I Play” Hilton, and the word icon became so widely and ill-used that The New York Times banned it from its pages. The new celebrity economy seemed unstoppably bound for a kind of nirvana: an inelasticity of demand for this kind of synthetic entertainment meant we could eventually all wind up “entertaining” each other, generating our own subnarratives of stardom and feeding the parts of ourselves instantly gratified by recognition, “followers,” our own names in little pixelated lights.
    A mean patch of briar lies between our parallel cravings for stories that are “real” and those with mythic dimensions, and some