I was reading Vogue the other night before I went to sleep—several snippet-sized articles about a pregnant ballerina and a really tall nightclub owner, as well as something about Drew Barrymore being 30. Sandwiched between the articles and the ads was this vivid Versace ad featuring Madonna. Don't get me wrong-- she looks great. But, something is wrong with this picture for me. Somehow her fabulosity is mitigated for me by the fact that they have her sitting behind a computer. This image makes me laugh. Maybe it's the concept of someone that dressed up, computing. Maybe it was the thought of Madonna, force of nature that she is, doing something I do every day. Maybe it was a multimillionaire doing an advertisement for clothes that regular people can’t afford, while she’s doing a regular person kind of thing. ....perplexing, really.
I slept on it, and woke up still thinking about Madonna behind a computer. Then I finally pinpointed it. It's not the clothes. It's not the millions. It was just the simple Heidegerean commonplaceness of Madonna, at a computer. So wrong—like seeing your first grade teacher come out of the bathroom for the first time. Teachers are supposed to be hermetically sealed, above the drudgery of everyday person life. I don’t like to think of the icons of my age peeing, or using email. Both are far too pedestrian, and the juxtaposition is too much for my starstruck mind to handle. In my mind, for some reason, celebrities don’t eat, they don’t poop, and they certainly don’t send email. I was raised in a “National Enquirer” family—my grandparents bought and enjoyed their “rag mags” every week, and there’s something familiar about this sort of celebrity worship. I know it’s wrong, but like a train wreck in my mind, I can’t stop it.
This is the reason why the new genre of “celeb-reality” are so disturbing to me, as are those National Enquirer “Stars Without Makeup” covers. Why without makeup? Do I really want to see my icons looking….like me? Emailing like me? Do I want to see them fighting with their husbands, picking up dog poop, and paying the electric bill? I want a better life for my celebrities. What’s celebrity culture for, but to help us escape the “everyday” of everyday life? I see people emailing all day. I don’t need it in my magazine, and I certainly don’t need it from my celebrities.
I'll let you know when I get an email from Madonna complaining about this piece.
