Hello again,
I found myself reading this excerpt from Sharon Tate’s memoir recently. It was published a few years ago but I came across it last week and I got a lot from reading it (to me it felt timely too) so I thought I’d share it here and discuss some elements in particular.
I really like reading actor memoirs and slightly old interviews, from the time of less PR constraints. Now celebrity interviews can be kind of boring, gushing and cliché ridden (“she walked in wearing barely a scrap of makeup but still looked every inch the LA woman”, “his biggest role has never been on the screen, but as a fierce father to his three kids”, “X is the nicest man in pop”, and so on). The most interesting ones I find are those with someone who is famous in a niche way and so not surrounded by a huge PR circus. Although obviously some are still good, I like this one a lot.
But, anyway, it wasn’t always like this, and a celebrity is essentially a person who lives a very strange and extreme life, and so has an odd, fascinating relationship to the world and, theoretically at least, interesting things to say. They are removed from other people and made an object, and made to represent all sorts of different dreams. The fantasy of being unbearably beautiful and desirable, of being known and respected by a huge audience (strange that this is a human fantasy, when you think of it), and of having access to other elite, distant people and spaces, at the cost of ‘normal’ ones. (When you write it down like that it does sound strange that this is such a widely held dream, I think. I have a theory on this. Maybe more on that another time.)
There is this thing of celebrities having to seem relatable now. I don’t know if this is driven completely by influencer and reality TV culture. But I think it is true that the whole point of influencers and reality TV stars is that they are a very specific kind of relatable, and my sense is that this has created a standard which other celebrities have to pretend to meet.
The dream of traditional fame is that if you are exceptional and determined enough you are elevated above the world. The influencer/reality TV dream is that you do not have to be exceptional for this to happen. Actually (and I have written about this before) influencers are often cosy, tea and biscuits sorts. The whole point of someone like Molly Mae is not that she is the most beautiful, or the most stylish, or the best at anything. Really, the point of her is that she is not.
The specific kind of relatable that celebrities perform now is the cosy influencer one, in which they are people who sit in eating take out and watching crap TV, or they are hunched over, miserably checking their phone by the pool on holiday, wearing joggers to go to the corner shop, and so on. I find this miserable simply because I don’t want everyone and everything to be grotty and squalid. I don’t find someone like Molly Mae aspirational, I find her depressing. I still (and I think a lot of people feel like this too) prefer the other fantasy in which celebrities are glamorous aliens, and there is something at the centre of it all, a real product. A will to make something, to push forward in some way.
And, actually, conversely I think this is the truly relatable thing about a great actress. Or perhaps not relatable, but recognisable. There was a passage from the excerpt of Tate’s memoir that really stuck out to me, about how she got the part in Basic Instinct, really a tale of ‘by hook or crook’.
That makes it sound easier than it was. It was not easy. Chuck had to break into the casting director’s office with his credit card and steal the script so we could read it, as no one would give it to us. I knew right away that I wanted to play that part. Chuck then called the director, Paul Verhoeven, every day for seven or eight months to get me a screen test. I had already done Total Recall with Paul, but Michael Douglas didn’t want to test with me. Hey, I was a nobody compared to him, and this was such a risky movie. So Paul tested with me, and kept playing my test after those of everyone else who had tested.
Eventually, after they had offered the part to 12 other actresses who had turned it down, Michael agreed to test with me.
The test is online. You can watch it if you want.
There is something deeply recognisable in this, I think. It is not cosy or safe, actually it is the opposite of unthreatening, the opposite of what influencer culture sells. There is not the sense that anyone could do this. Most people could not.
But it does feel true, and I think many people would recognise the truth in it: That if you want to make or do something the world will probably keep saying no, over and over again. And you have to keep pushing regardless.
As a woman (who is, to caveat, nothing like the iconically beautiful Sharon Tate on the face of it) I saw something that felt so true in this, that sense of barriers. I think (or it has been my experience and that of other women I know) that if you are a woman trying to make anything you are constantly told that the work you do is not the real, true work. As if even you wouldn’t take your own work seriously, not really. Or you are treated like a fan instead of a producer, regardless of how much you produce. I wrote about this a little here, and I made a joke out of it. You have to have a sense of humour about these things. Well, what else can you do?
But anyway, it may be true that everyone eats takeout in pyjamas sometimes, but there is no shared essence of humanity beneath a commonality like that. An anecdote like Tate’s feels true in a deeper sense. And I think her determination is the most interesting thing about great celebrities, the most recognisable, and maybe the biggest element of fantasy too. The point of a story like this is that most people fear rejection too much and would feel too humiliated to keep pushing, but she didn’t. And this is what made her a star.
The moral is that, with determination, a person can make the world bend slightly. I wonder if that’s really the biggest dream that a true star sells, not that any of us could make the world bend. But simply that it can bend, it is possible.
The influencer world in which the dream is that any ordinary person off the street could be a star, not through force of will, but in a fairly random fashion, may feel attainable. But I think that’s why I find it so depressing.
It doesn’t have a message about what can possibly happen, about what people can do.
Till next time xxxxx
I am doing a “salon” with Celeste Marcus from Liberties in July if you want to join us, I think it will be fun. Here is a code for free tickets: Libertellect. I have an essay out with them soon which I’m excited about.
And pre-order links for Lazy City are here.
Some Things I Liked Recently:
I met Hannah Starkey to talk about her exhibition at the Ulster Museum for the British Journal of Photography, which I absolutely loved. I got so much out of our conversation so I am sharing my piece on it in this section, as the conversation was a thing I loved, here is an excerpt:
The erosion she sees is in terms of a culture which tends to instruct young women about how to present themselves, how to act. “I always thought of women as being very strong and individual,” Starkey tells me. Raising two daughters has made her aware of the pervasive influence of Instagram and social media, in terms of beauty standards, but also more benign seeming social trends. She refers to the constant iterations of ‘X girl summer’ type hashtags. “It’s like: Will you stop telling women how they have to be, or a guide on how to be female. That’s not the foremost thing in their lives, their gender.”
More flowers!
This should have been Sharon *Stone* through out! The eagle eyed among you (hi Tim) spotted it. It was done deliberately as a reminder that nobody edits these or reads over them, or by a careless accident. You decide.....