Who Are These People?

Once thing that is fun abut being an old person is that when the inevitable parade of celebrities makes their way across your screens, you get to say: Who in the hell are these people? The distance between the breathless coverage and their utter anonymity to you is quite entertaining. True, their romances and controversies are from my perspective rather insipid. But that's not really the notable thing in play. What you learn as you get older is that everyone is playing roles in life. This doesn't mean that they are phony or anything, or unimportant, but rather that instead of being ruled by imperatives in our lives that are somehow imposed on us -- which is how it feels when you "fall" on love or feel sexual attraction -- we live out identities that are actually projections of our innermost values. When you get to the level of "celebrities" what we get are figures who represent or embody great society-wide feelings and concerns. That doesn't mean these are everybody's concerns. Most celebrities play out the concerns of young people I think. Indeed I couldn't care less about 90 percent of celebrities, especially movie stars. They mean nothing to me. Which is why it is so weird that the NYT treats each new episode of Saturday Night Live as news. I doubt that anyone under the age of 45 reads that paper, so they, too, must be joining me in saying each Sunday morning, Who the hell are these people?!

I'd have to admit, however, that I do identify with certain modes of "anti-heroes" in books and shows/films. For example, I like Michael Connelley's Bosch series of hard-boiled, police procedural mysteries. I've read all of them, and have enjoyed the Bosch TV series with Titus Welliver playing our driven, pain-in-the-ass detective. When I stop and think about how it's not just a matter of liking Harry Bosch, and realize that the character is dream projection of a certain orientation in life, it is both fun and a little, um, concerning. You see, Bosch is a man who is motivated by an unrelenting need to discover the truth, and his drive and integrity inevitably make him clash with the higher-ups in the institutions he moves through, concerned as they are with protecting their positions and the compromised demands of the power structure. Hmm. Might this have had something to do with it when I encountered intense conflict with various employers who instituted top down diktats that I just couldn't go along with? This is not to say that I should not have prized my integrity. But maybe the "bad guys" in these morality plays were there to give me the opportunity to exercise said integrity and not compromise my convictions. Probably Shakespeare said it best of all, right? "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely players; / They have their exits and their entrances, / And one man in his time plays many parts."