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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
Celebrity Lostness1/14/2007 21:00:31I'm about the last person on the internet to come across this, but the other day a friend pointed out to me this home video on YouTube of Britney Spears talking to Kevin Federline. People say that she is obviously stoned on something and then they laugh and say how sad the whole thing is and so on, and this is all probably true. I guess I should begin by apologizing to her by joining the crowd hawking this thing around. But in the United States, celebrity lives are to an extent legally public property, which extends to a larger meaning: too late, the video has entered a shared identity. Talking about it is talking about ourselves, like so much else, like People magazine and its spawn. The overwhelming sense I get from the video, as I attempt to make words out of it, is that Britney Spears is Lost. She (a worldwide sexual icon) begins by saying, whining, "I'm ugly." In a dark room with only one source of light and the shadow from a baseball cap covering her face, she burps loudly and seems to hit things (and nothing) with no provocation. "I feel like I've been missing out on life," she says, seriously, as if words are finally possible. She wants to travel in time, and is sure it is possible because she feels so damn behind, not living the way other people are. The video is rock bottom, so far as we can see. And all along there is the sneaking knowledge that we (the people) got here there, together with herself, through the covenant of celebrity that connects us. ("Celebrities are very Special people and have a very distinct line of dissemination. They have comm[unication] lines that others do not have and many medias[sic] to get their dissemination through" - L. Ron Hubbard (Flag Order 3323, 9 May 1973)) Lostness is a familiar theologian category, particularly in the American context. It is the opposite of the evangelical "saved" experience, taken for granted as a black-and-white question of the human condition. Lostness has its necessary place on the path to foundness, but it is self-evidently bad. Whether in the evangelical story, or the self-help story, or the newfound freethinking story, or whichever, people take their own meanings from the lines in Amazing Grace, "I once was lost, but now am found, was blind but now I see." The story, and its accompanying knowledge of lostness, carries wide currency. It can be argued that other contexts emphasize this less. European (particularly Catholic) Christianity, is more touched by the community experience than the conversion experience. The medieval church offered many examples of suffering within salvation, such as Julian of Norwich and St. John of the Cross. What they endured was not quite lostness, for they held to their faith, but it would appear to many Americans perhaps too dangerously close for comfort. But seeing Britney Spears like this, and probably so many of the celebrities we idolize in moments we don't see, may suggest that normalcy is closer to lostness than we like. How do I know if I am lost? I guess for the moment I leave this as a theological open question.
re:Celebrity Lostness - 1/15/2007 14:29:35
re:Celebrity Lostness - 2/14/2007 07:51:31
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