THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU writes:
It is surprising that there are not more celebrity suicides. A celebrity is a human being commoditized, as the Marxists like to say, and thereby robbed of the self that he or she might develop in the course of life normally lived. At the beginning, the celebrity-to-be is probably pitiable because he or she is the victim of his or her agents, managers, publicity spokesmen, and so forth, whose collective design of marketing the person as though he or she were a product entails depriving that person of personhood. At some point, however, when the celebrity-to-be achieves actual celebrity and begins to identify with dehumanized object-of-celebration, he or she becomes culpable in the charade and loses the privilege of being pitied. Commercial culture creates narcissists, many of whom are destructive narcissists, dangerous not only to themselves but to those near to them.
The narcissist is interesting to other people because he or she, showered constantly with orchestrated adulation, appears to the narcissist in everyone to validate narcissism. But the narcissist is a hollow person, a being of demonic emptiness, which cannot exist except by a constant infusion of one-way admiration.
Robin Williams always struck me as the epitome of the mass-entertainment celebrity-narcissist. His early nightclub and late-night television standup routines were addressed to the “hip” audiences, overwhelmingly young, of the 1970s and 80s, whom they impressed as “edgy’ because they were so frantic, incoherent, and seemingly cocaine-driven. According to the rumors, they often were cocaine-driven.
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