Wow, I walk away for a few hours and bam! I am gonna put my thought out there and come back and read from 1PM on -- otherwise I'll end up entry number 48. So here goes, I start with a quote:
You spend your life trying to create a fantasy so real that people cross the line into a world you’ve created.
OK, when I first read the line above I didn’t see it as being about specific roles played by an actor. I thought Spandau was talking about Anna the star, Anna who’s become a larger than life representation of womanhood – something deliberately constructed to inspire dreams.
Deliberate? Well, I believe that the US at least has this “star” or celebrity culture which is explicitly designed to artificially close the gap between the observer and the observed. Why? Sell tickets and eventually sell a whole bunch more things from magazines to lunch boxes (ha!) People like Perec are at the far end of a continuum that includes little girls tarted out like their favorite girl singer and us, yeah even us. Starts out as a beautiful man or woman twenty feet tall on a flickering screen. Before you know it, it’s a photo spread, a stylist looking for the perfect dress or jeans and soon, somebody selling something and someone else buying it. It’s turning a person into a symbol to create a desire that becomes a dream that involves money.
So I see neither Anna nor Perec as responsible. Observed and observer, they play their little roles and most times nothing happens except some money exchanges hands. This whole little drama used to have a neat place in our lives – the movie theatre – and those days dreams were the end product. Now they’ve hooked a whole bunch of shiny little things to “movie dreams” and we are so inundated that we don’t know how to separate genuine dreams from manufactured dreams. So we get some Perecs, some unintended bumps and burps. (PS I am fascinated by group culture – sociology/anthropology major so I think this way far too often).