Word: schickel
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Celebrities by definition have to be famous. Nothing says they have to be liked, and Richard Schickel's appraisal of fame is anything but a fan's notes. This is, he confesses at the outset, "a single-issue book," and the issue is the battle for the soul of a culture seduced and battered by machinery that puts image before substance and claims before creativity...
...Schickel, a TIME Cinema critic, ruefully considers all aspects of celebrity, including the dark facet of notoriety. John W. Hinckley Jr. stands as an exemplar, a recipient of that "wildly parodistic version of celebrity treatment that is accorded the criminal who has assaulted a well-known person. He gets a police escort and a motorcade . . . For the first time in his hitherto anonymous life people will be curious about his history, his thoughts. In due course, his ravings may find their way into print. Or he will have his story told by a famous novelist...
Although celebrity is as old as society, Schickel believes that its new malignance results from the rise of communications technology. "Over a century's span," he observes, "the proliferation of information has created a need for simplifying symbols--usually people, sometimes objects--that crystallize an issue, an ideal, a longing." Hence the crucial importance of the image factories of movies and television, and the power of still photography that inflates every incident, from atrocity to treaty signing, only to reduce it to a photo opportunity...
Celebrity status, as the checkout-counter newspapers constantly remind us, is no guarantor of happiness or security. Schickel reels off the familiar tragedies of those who found there was no room at the top: John Belushi, Freddie Prinze, Dylan Thomas, Janis Joplin, Marilyn Monroe. Yet some of the deceased, like proper legends, have regained their power in death. Humphrey Bogart is a greater celebrity now than when he was alive; so is John Lennon. The fade-out has become as important in life as onscreen; no wonder Hollywood repartee has become standardized: "Elvis Presley is dead." "Good career move...
...trusts her material, her impeccably cast actors and herself. In other words she does not lead the laughter at her own jokes. How nice it is to go to a farcically fizzing movie that bursts with youthful high spirits yet still treats you like a functioning adult. By Richard Schickel...