Friday, October 30, 2009

Robbing Paris To Pay Brian Austin Green

When fake news starts seeming more plausible than real news, I think we have a problem.

Can I get a witness? Apparently, there has been a rash of buglaries in Hollywood. The victims? Fluffy girl-type celebrities in the general stripe of Paris Hilton, Lindsay Lohan and Megan Fox. Also, Brian Austin Green (he of 90210: Original Flavour fame), whose handgun was returned to him without him ever noticing it had been burgled in the first place. Brrr. American gun control laws are scary. The alleged criminal masterminds are a foursome of teenaged girls, who, according to the Fug Girls, used celebrity gossip sites like PerezHilton.com to stake out their targets' homes.

To which I say: what? No, seriously. This sounds like something The Onion would have concocted, along with their report on the gays and their unceasing co-opting of the animal kingdom. In a way, it's a brilliant comment on our culture's obsession with celebrities, the information era, the creation of person-as-commodity-who-then-sells-something, and other boring meta crap. In another way, it's totally bizarre and weird.

I'm a good mid-twenties citizen; I watch The Daily Show and watch Jon Stewart comment on the commenting. It works, too: he's funny, astute, and incredibly smart when it comes to reporting on the pandemic of falling down on the job the rest of the news media seems to be suffering from. But he (thankfully) leans towards the political side of things; so far, he's stayed away from the Balloon Boy shenanigans, or from inviting "reality" TV stars like those idiots from The Hills onto his show.

I mean, it's just too meta. The things we think are real turn out to be scripted; the events most likely to be scripted are actually totally legit. This girl gang and their movie-of-the-week shenanigans are the perfect blend of real and fake, gossip and news, private and public. It's really too bad that the best commentators of celebrity culture - including one hotshot by the name of Johnny Dangerous - are probably going to jail. Hell, Winona got sprung - why not these broads?

1 comment:

  1. I think the real being stranger than fiction is part of the uncanny nature of our epoch. In the arena of hanous violence, films "No Country" and "Natural Born Killers" try to work with this phenomena (but, of course they are themselves representations - although there are certainly real life crimes just as strange). Maybe this "meta-ness" of the real as represented is another layer of what Leonard Cohen calls "the breaking of the ancient western code".

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