enRoute


	ENROUTE TV ENROUTE FM MEDIA KIT AIR CANADA LINKS WRITERS' GUIDELINES

ALMOST FAMOUS
What does it mean to be a celebrity in an age where everybody can be one?

Text: HAL NIEDZVIECKI

I’ll admit it: I want to be a star. And I’m not the only one. Somewhere in the back of our image-saturated minds, most of us carry around the idea that we might be famous one day. What we might be famous for seems increasingly irrelevant. These days, the predominant connective force in the world – mass entertainment – has only one message: You too can be big.

It seems that we’d like nothing more. The rise of extreme sports and professional Elvis impersonators, the inexplicable popularity of shows like The Bachelor and the plethora of on-line diaries and cameras are incontrovertible evidence of the growing number of people who are willing to do anything to access the celebrity--entertainment nexus that dominates our lives.

And who can blame us? The story of pop culture is always The Story of You. Songs tell us, "You’re a superstar, yes, that’s what you are," and movie plots peddle the Luke Skywalker/Erin Brockovich myth of the ordinary person who confronts evil and wins. In her hit song "Video," the attractive soul singer India.Arie tells us, "I ain’t built like a supermodel/But I learned to love myself unconditionally." She’s simply articulating the ubiquitous message of pop -culture: follow your heart, buck the system and become a larger-than-life, it-could-happen-to-you hero.

The more attainable celebrity seems, the more completely we are drawn into the yawning maw of entertainment. Thus, we see ever more elaborate schemes to "include" the fans with polls, focus groups, quizzes, on-line chats, reality programming and grassroots events, such as a recent Lucasfilm-endorsed contest of short films based on the Star Wars trilogy. Increasingly, the entertainment industry fans the spark for fame that it has implanted in our brains. It gives us just enough heady oxygen to keep us on permanent smoulder, perpetually teetering between real life and pop delirium.

To see how it’s done and to prove my theory, I visit Orlando. While New York, L.A. and maybe even Toronto are better known cultural-production centres, Orlando is the world’s unabashed fun centre, a place where theme hotels and massive amusement parks help beleaguered working stiffs indulge in an orgiastic frenzy of manufactured good times.

I stay in the Hard Rock Hotel, where rock music plays everywhere. (There are even underwater speakers in the pool so you can rock while you dunk.) The hotel literally submerges vacationers in the pop dream, creating the illusion that we are guests in some rock ’n’ roll maven’s mansion. The hotel, like so much of our entertainment world, preaches immersion in, and proximity to, fame.

After exploring the hotel’s fetishistic collection of roughly $1-million worth of pop music memorabilia, I visit the two adjacent theme parks, Universal Studios Florida and the new Islands of Adventure, both a short walk from the rock palace. The enthusiasm of my fellow vacationers for the attractions (and the hefty fees they pay) suggests they didn’t come to Florida to soak up the sun but to bask in the entertainment glow by entering a zone where a night at the movies can last all week.

After we emerge from an exciting movie, our immediate desire is to see it again: more-faster-better-louder. But what we really want is to be in the action: jumping from the airplane, catching the baddies, acting out our passions on the big screen. Pop entertainment creates that strange tension inside us: a desire to imitate the success of our heroes, which is really the desire to stand out from the pack and have our own unique celebrity potential recognized. Entertainment theme parks and hotels attempt to resolve that tension. Attractions like the Men in Black interactive ride, a real-time life-size aliens shoot-’em-up video game, attain the perfect balance: You’re the star of your own show, even as you share the same generic prepackaged experience with others.

Speaking of generic and prepackaged, my stay in Orlando includes a visit to Trans Continental Companies, famous for launching the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC, two of the biggest-selling musical acts in the last decade. Lou Pearlman, former owner of an airplane rental company, is the engineer of both those bands, although they have long since parted company after a series of -lawsuits. Nevertheless, Pearlman is undaunted and continues to churn out the kind of formulaic bubble gum pop that is just simple and tuneless enough to make us think, "Hey, I could do that!"

Trans Continental’s great new hope is the painfully misnamed boy band Natural. "We’re putting the band back in boy band," Pearlman enthuses, referring to the fact that these boys actually play their own instruments, unlike their predecessors who sung over pre-recorded tracks. I watch Natural go through their paces in a dress rehearsal before their big German tour. (Like the Backstreet Boys and *NSYNC before them, they are adored in Germany.) On cue, the meticulously trained band belts out love songs with the same passion that a Minnesota school teacher used to describe to me the Islands of Adventure Incredible Hulk roller coaster.

While Natural plays, I notice how every boy is the same, but different. The tunes are also the same, but not – each one saturated with lush harmonies and calculated to inflict maximum levels of unrequited desire in the target audience. It’s at that moment I realize that this next generation of pop stars are youngsters who grew up in the theme park world and can do nothing more than articulate its implanted doctrine of clichéd individuality. They want to be the real thing, but like the rest of us, they have been immersed in the collective fantasyland of entertainment culture and have no sense of what a "real" experience might feel like.

By playing dealer to our junkie, the entertainment impresarios have painted themselves into a corner. It is getting more difficult to entertain us because with entertainment implanted in every facet of our everyday lives, we constantly need more-faster-better--louder. The entertainment industry relentlessly promises fame but delivers increasingly ludicrous facsimiles of momentary celebrity: a stay at the Hard Rock Hotel, a ride in the MIB game, an evening with a boy band. The lucky teenage girls who strain to catch a glimpse of Natural as they exit the stage door assume that fame and celebrity lie just within their grasp. As long as they believe that, they will keep coming back for more, trying to find the boat that can take them to their own Island of Adventure.

But long after the thrill of such a brush with greatness is over and our faces are singed with celebrity desire, the implanted -passion seeps – like the dangerous Florida sun – past our skin and into our souls. There it lies in wait, leaving us anxious, -burning with expectation.