Must we always have Paris?
I’M STILL wondering how Paris Hilton became famous in the first place.
By Scott Rochat
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
I’M STILL wondering how Paris Hilton became famous in the first place.
Sure, there’s the money. And the family name. And the lack of any sense of shame whatsoever. But up until a few years ago, she didn’t really do anything. Even before her sexcapades became the common currency of the Internet, Paris was famous for, well, being Paris.
That hasn’t really changed much.
Oh, I’ll grant you that she’s added a few credits to the old resume since the old days. There’s been a couple of odd movie roles, a hit TV “reality” show and — let us not forget — a 45-day sentence for probation violation that has been covered like the second coming of O.J. Simpson.
So she’s been a little busy. But at the end of the day, her celebrity is still less about what she does and more about who she is: Paris Hilton, the Spoiled Star Made Flesh.
In short, she’s famous not because of her efforts but because of our attention.
And boy, has there been a lot of it lately.
Personally, I could care less about the Perils of Paris. I suspect many of you could say the same. But lately, it has been near-impossible to avoid getting dragged into the morass. If this were a movie, the headlines would be spinning to fill the screen, one after another:
“Queen of skank brought to justice!”
“Outrage erupts as celebrity beats rap!”
“Wailing Paris dragged to slammer at last!”
The headlines are fictitious, but they mirror what I’ve been hearing, or even feeling myself. It’s easy to be smug, after all, when a spoiled child of privilege gets her comeuppance.
I even found myself enjoying it a little. And that scared me. Especially since I knew I wasn’t alone.
What does it say about us when we can enjoy someone’s troubles? Even if they deserve it?
Scarier still, I had to look up the crime she was originally sentenced for. Like many of my friends, I was ready to sentence Paris Hilton to jail simply because she was Paris Hilton.
It’s what built her up. It’s what brought her down. And it has left some ugly marks on us in the meantime.
I’m not excusing anything she did. But like any spoiled child, she needed an audience. And there was always one there. Even now, at her lowest point, the spotlights have never been brighter.
Many pundits are suggesting she’ll learn something from this. I’m betting she’ll learn that even when actions carry consequences, they also carry media coverage.
Some lesson, huh?
The best thing for Paris, the best thing for all of us, may be to simply walk away. Leave the spoiled brat in the corner and wait for her to grow up, if she still can. The rest of us have better things to do than revel in her antics or smile self-righteously at her punishment. And if we don’t, we should.
We can’t unplug the Hollywood publicity machine, alas. But we can disconnect our personal circuits. I know I plan to.
Paris may be burning. But that doesn’t mean we have to watch.
POSTSCRIPT: In a column two weeks ago, I put the total number of Elvis stamps at 124 million. A fan corrected me, saying that was how many were collected. The number sold was around 500 million.
So the “Star Wars” stamp may have a higher mountain to climb. Then again, as Yoda says, “Size matters not.” And after dethroning an Emperor, why not take on a King?
daveedailey (anonymous) says...
I had just been thinking about writing to the gazette to thank them for not running the Paris articles. This girl has gotten exactly what she wants form the media. I could not believe all the news on tv over this subject. What kind of message is being sent to the youth of America over this whole deal? I do not think that the news media needed to sensationalize this minute by minute drama. How sad, because this is a way of letting the public know that there is actually two standards of the way things are carried out in the US. The poor person's way and the rich person's way.
June 13, 2007 at 1:57 p.m. ( permalink | suggest removal )