Can't believe only one other person has said this...

Hiltowned!



Happy happy,
Joy, Joy.

/!
//!!
///!!!

Is Paris burning...yet?

Office Ninja

pharking theater majors.

Finally, someone twigged to what I was sending up...

I cannot believe how many people took that load of nonsensical tripe that I wrote seriously - until I read Sunny Ray's comments, and realised that there are people who will defend that putrid meatsack that we know as Paris.

When Ms. Hilton went to jail, I asked a number of people I saw what it was about Paris Hilton that people react to. I got various answers. Vapidity. Looks. Entitlement. Class Distinction. Lack of Talent. Those all seem to be part of the equation, but I can't help but think more is involved.



I was reminded of a concept I first ran across studying Soren Kierkegaard years ago. In his analysis of existential despair, Kierkegaard stated that despair/angst was a form of "sympathetic antipathy" or "antipathetic sympathy." That we are inevitably drawn towards that which we most wish to avoid. Kierkegaard first used this example in discussing children's fascination with things are mortified by. In adults, this despair has no specific object, but is simply a condition of living in separation from God.

His existential Christianity aside, I think Kierkegaard was on to something--the idea of "sympathetic antipathy" has a lot going for it in the way humans are often mesmerized by that they claim to be repulsed by. But what is there to invoke this quintessential aspect of human existence in Americans--why does it come to the surface here? Salon has one answer:

"At the very least, we were witnessing a coddled child having a severe allergic reaction to the real world. Hilton could certainly be losing her doughnuts in a medically authentic way, since by all appearances, she's never been punished, never been forced to eat anything she doesn't like, never had to sleep anywhere uncomfortable or wear anything unflattering. While the rest of us are more than passingly familiar with deprivations and things not going our way, Hilton could actually blow a fuse from what would look, to an outsider, like a mildly unpleasant experience."

Maybe it is the allergic reaction to being forced into the reality-based community? Perhaps a displaced politics? Perhaps after years and years of watching government officials attempt to create their own hermetically sealed bubbles of war and meaning, unchallenged and unchecked, seeing someone actually having to be accountable for their actions drove many into a pirahnic frenzy?

"And when you consider the fact that she's protected by relatives who talk openly to the press about throwing a party to celebrate their insipid child being released from prison early after having driven drunk? It makes simple sense to assume that not only is she unapologetic for her crime, she's absolutely indignant about her punishment. The Associated Press reported that "as Ms. Hilton was led away to await her trip back to jail, she turned to her parents and said, 'It's not right!'"

As a child, being indignant about my punishment inevitably brought on more punishment--I suppose because refusing responsibility is yet one more mark that one's attitude has not sufficiently been adjusted--a mark of childhood. Maybe its a toilet training issue, or the sense to start/endorse a Myspace petition to be pardoned from Jail by the Governor of your state, comparing yourself with President Richard Nixon.

I think its about someone having the status of an adult, with the privilege and ability of fantastic wealth, but with the appreciation/attention whoring of a child, with a Jesus ("God" + "Martyr") complex to boot. The peculiar combination of all three together ignites the ressentiment of the rest of us lowly plebians. It seems to be a synergistic perfect storm of sleaziness, which may be why so many cliched cultural commentators see her as embodying a larger-than-life metaphor for the decadence of 'our age.' But I'm after something more.

Something that crossing the boundaries of child, adult, and ordinary human ego gives us. Something more akin to Norman Bates's abomination. But not in the merely psychological sense.

Let's pull back a moment. It's poop, of course. Rich elites (and just as often, the genuinely poor and wretched) have never, ever played by bourgeois middle-class standards of morality to begin with. But the constant struggle of Ms. Hilton to stay in the media limelight at any cost while maintaining such an open flaunt comes at a real cultural price.

But ethically and existentially speaking--it is decadence. Not in that grand European Artaud or Beckett tradition. Decadence in the sense that this is not merely another inauthentic life--this is someone who works just hard enough to be inauthentic at every turn--someone who through both form and function enfleshes---nay incarnates the very principle of inauthenticity. It is a repudiation of everything Gethsemane teaches us about human tragedy. This is someone who wishes to be worshipped precisely for her incarnate inauthenticity. This is the subterranean, esoteric meaning of the term "American Idol."

It makes perfect sense that this is someone who has an allergic reaction to inconvenience. Dialectically, I am in turn reminded of the Agony.

In a secular sense, we are drawn, through sympathetic antipathy, towards an existential abomination.

In a religious sense, Paris Whitney Hilton is a secular Antichrist.