Mad Icon Disease

[Guest guest]

http://www.alternet.org/story.html?StoryID=15794 Mad Icon Disease Liz Langley,

AlterNet

April 30, 2003Viewed on May 1, 2003

 

My DNA strand has a bunch of typos in it. As a result I'm inattentive and

nervous. On the upside I treat this for free by using Denial and Avoidance. I

don't watch the news for days, can't tell you the names of some of my relatives

or what many of my colleagues actually do for a living.

 

I can tell you where Jackie Chan went to school (the China Drama Academy), that

David Lynch hates cooking smells (he won't allow food to be cooked in his house)

and that before he became America's best chat catalyst, Bill Maher appeared in

the movie, " Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death. " I pick up this stuff

like a pop culture Swiffer, while real events slide off my brain like it was

Scotchguarded. As Oscar Wilde, a celeb I could discuss for days, once said,

" Through Art and Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of

actual existence. "

 

In other words, real life sucks; movies are much better.

 

This belief puts me in the running for a new mental disorder -- Celebrity

Worship Syndrome, or " mad icon disease, " which was discovered recently by Dr.

John Maltby of London's University of Leicester. Dr. Maltby's findings appeared

in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, and you want to believe him just

for being in such a fabulously titled publication.

 

CWS comes in three levels: mild, which means you like to talk about your

favorite celebrities with your many real-life friends; moderate, which means you

believe you have " an intense personal type relationship " with a celebrity; or

severe, whose sufferers, Dr. Maltby says, " feel they have a special bond with

their celebrity, believe their celebrity knows them and are prepared to lie or

even die for their hero. " The technical term for level three is " ca-rrrrazy. "

 

This study doesn't just consider celebs of J-Lo level ubiquity, either; many

people in the study professed unseemly attachments to one of Tony Blair's

cabinet ministers.

 

In a story in the London Daily Telegraph, Dr. Maltby says that this interest in

celebrities is not just entertainment for some people but has " a clinical

component, " and is probably due to the dominance of TV and the breakdown of

family and community; people are replacing the real people in their lives with

celebrities.

 

Of course the severe loony-stalker level of CWS is deranged but it's hard to

believe that merely liking to talk about stars or even a star requires the label

of " disease. " And honestly, if family, community and reality were all they were

cracked up to be there wouldn't be a need for celebrities in the first place;

you'd be so entertained by the people across from you on the couch you wouldn't

have a TV. Let's examine the facts:

 

 

Your favorite film star will never ask you for a ride, charge you a tax or

demand that you come over for Christmas and then nag you the whole time about

your wasted potential; this is the job of friends, community and family. True,

stars will not listen to your problems when you're down, but often real people

won't either. And on the upside, you can change channels on celebrities. It's a

relationship in which you always have the remote.

 

 

 

If talking about people you've never actually met is a syndrome, then all my

teachers were mental cases; none of them knew Socrates or Hemingway but they

could talk about them until you wanted to kill yourself, too.

 

 

 

Celebrities are a great bonding tool. You may have major rifts with someone

over religion or politics, but you can always find common ground in a discussion

about Michael Jackson.

 

 

Hollywood, in fact, is so divorced from your reality that it can make you

divorced from it, too, for a solid two hours if the movie is good. Movies are

what you take when you can't afford or don't care for drugs.

 

In Woody Allen's " Shadows and Fog, " a magician says of his illusions, " People

need them like they need the air. " That's the role celebrities play in our

lives; they're the adult version of imaginary friends (except we pay them

millions). Escapism is less a choice, it seems, than an instinct.

 

Honestly, if you prefer to talk only about reality -- war, disease, poverty,

murder, misery, politics, corporate theft, duct tape -- I'd venture to say

you're crazier than anyone who ever held a vigil at Graceland or showed up at a

sci fi convention. Over the years I could have been spotted in either one of

those places. It's better than taking Zoloft and watching CNN.

 

Liz Langley is a freelance writer who lives in New York City.

 

 

 

© 2003 Independent Media Institute. All rights reserved.

 

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