A S K C A M I L L E
| Camille Paglia's online advice for the culturally disgruntled |
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Illustration by Zach Trenholm
IS ANNE HECHE ANOTHER
VAMPIRISH YOKO ONO?
Dear Camille: As you've probably read, Anne Heche has been with a lot of guys -- Steve Martin (two years), "Volcano" producer Neal Moritz (until just recently), John Cusack's older actor-brother Billy Cusack and (allegedly) George Clooney. Ellen DeGeneres is her first woman, apparently. They got together on Oscar night at the Vanity Fair party at Morton's. What does your gut tell you about where she's really at, sexually? (As you also may know, her father was a closet gay who died from AIDS in 1983, and Heche has said to interviewers that his death taught her not to lie about herself and her emotions and to live openly and honestly.) She seems to have really tumbled for Ellen. But the haste of the whole thing -- meet Ellen on March 24, start going around town with her openly by April 10 or thereabouts, fire her agent and manager and hire agenda-friendly CAA agents and Ellen's manager, Arthur Imparato, on April 22 ... it all seems kind of pedal-to-the-metal, no? They're in the throes of mad passion -- they're in that stage of things, obviously -- and here's Anne making all these major career decisions. I don't know. As Joel Weinstock, the heroin-buying gangster in "The French Connection," said to Tony Lo Bianco's character, "Move carefully, move cautiously. You'll never be sorry." What do you make of all this? Jeffrey Wells
Dear Mr. Wells:
Now that the choking clouds of cinders, ash and dust have settled after the
gaseous media explosion of Mount St. Ellen, we can all dig through the rubble
and see what's left. Whether the show "Ellen" is a tufa corpse or whether,
mummy rags trailing, it will stagger through another season remains to be
seen.
Last week's episode, where Ellen came out to her parents, was pretty flat and
predictable. Blessed be the terminally meek who answer reveille for this
week's episode -- where Ellen will come out to her bosses. How many times can
we spin round the Coming Out Carousel? Next week: Ellen Comes Out to the
Pope! Next month: Ellen Comes Out in Space! Next year: Ellen Rocks
Jehovah and takes the Blessed Virgin to her First Dance!
After the p.c. whirl is over, Anne Heche may be the biggest fashion victim of
this whole saga. It's already irritating that whatever career damage Heche
may suffer will be solemnly attributed to her lesbo affair with DeGeneres, when in fact Heche has herself to blame for flibbertigibbet exhibitionism of asinine proportions.
Post-Oscar, Heche zeroed in on the then very stressed Ellen like a
heat-seeking missile. "I saw Ellen across a crowded room," Heche proclaimed
on "Oprah" (aired April 30). "I was just DRAWN to her." Can lasting romance
be instantly born at a glitzy Vanity Fair party? It smacks of the
high-tabloid "Confidential" era of Jayne Mansfield and Mickey Hargitay, when
scotch-soaked show-biz types would meet, mate and marry on sleepless,
three-day junkets to Las Vegas.
Heche confided to Oprah, "It was very clear from the second I saw her that
this was something more powerful than anything I could have controlled!" Dare one suggest that Ellen's media-fueled, center-of-everything, charismatic, super-celebrity status at that heady Hollywood moment might explain her sudden irresistible appeal to the roving Heche?
My cranky suspicions about Heche's motivation were not allayed by her
beady-eyed, messianic posturings on "Oprah," where Heche told the world:
"My soul was meant to be with hers. In love, there's no sex, no
segregation. There's just LOVE ... It's actually very exciting to be a
representation not only of Truth but of Love ... We thank God every day that
we found each other and are so happy. We do a lot of Gratitude -- a lot of
'Thank you, thank you, thank you, God' (stretching both arms heavenward) for
giving me this in my life.'"
Heche, the daughter of a choir director (not a minister, as reported), sure
likes to talk that talk. "I've lived my life in Truth always," she
pontificated about her affair with Ellen. "This was the easiest thing in my
life I've ever done," she went on -- which if true means that Heche is now
conducting her life with the mental depth of a pancake.
"What of the people who say 'Yuck'?" Oprah rather bravely asked. "I'm sorry
for them," Heche breezily replied. "This is HEAVEN to me" -- crudely jerking
her thumb at a wanly smiling Ellen as if the latter were a sack of potatoes
on sale. "This was how God wanted me to be," Heche later grandly informed
the audience.
"She's a real vampire, that woman," muttered my partner, Alison, about Heche
as I re-ran the "Oprah" tape the next day. Alison and I are both concerned
about Ellen DeGeneres' important contribution to television history getting
all tangled up in this sophomoric escapade engineered by a ditzy, glib,
upwardly mobile and shamelessly self-interested movie actress.
The women's joint "Oprah" appearance gave me the willies because it reminded
me of the way that that boring Big Issue Priestess, Yoko Ono, got her claws
into John Lennon and sucked all the surrealist comedy out of him. As Heche
carried on, Ellen's face registered a mix of emotions, from the luminously
buoyant to the poignantly sad: At times, one saw flashes of the depressive
substratum often ascribed to comedians' personalities. I loathed the way
Heche treated Ellen and their relationship as a vehicle for Moral
Abstractions and Salvation through Self-Discovery.
Nor was the gay cause helped by the grotesque way both women reportedly
behaved at the black-tie White House Correspondents Dinner in Washington,
D.C., on April 26. Who among the heterosexual guests were ostentatiously
nuzzling and necking like that? -- always the sign, by the way, of people
insecure in their own mutual feelings. In a photograph that will live in
infamy, the two women are standing with the tuxedo-clad president of the
United States, a formal situation that demands dignity and respect. But
Heche has her arm obnoxiously thrown around Ellen's shoulders, as if it were
the annual softball picnic of a small-town gay bar.
Time will tell whether the Heche-DeGeneres liaison is built on rock or sand.
What we definitely don't need, however, is more manic public hi-jinks that
make lesbians seem shallow, flighty, immature, crass and provincial.
Meanwhile, I shall be praying to the earth gods that Ellen's comic genius
will survive her current encounter with the Volcano Vulture, whose
leatherette wings have whipped up that scorching ole devil wind. Dear Camille: I am hungry to get your thoughts on America's obsession with thinness and phobia about fat. While I admit that fat-phobia has gotten more pervasive in the last 20 years, as a tubby Midwesterner, I view it as predominantly an elitist, bi-coastal thing. Where I come from, people just don't seem as flipped out by obesity as the East Coast writers and news media and Hollywood-types seem to be. Don't these people know any fat people who are not lonely, lazy, gluttonous buffoons? The "fat activist movement" is mired in useless, feminist-based identity politics. Do you see any hope for meaningful social change in this area? Please Pass the Butter
Dear Please Pass:
A major theme of my "Women and Sex Roles" course at the University of the
Arts is the oscillation in fashionable female body types through history,
beginning with the ripplingly obese cult images of the Stone Age. (I
analyzed the most famous of these, the so-called Venus of Willendorf, in
"Sexual Personae.")
The fat woman is desirable in periods where basic survival is at stake or
where maternity is a high ideal. In an agrarian economy, a plump wife is a
prestigious symbol of a man's material prosperity. Folk wisdom has always
rightly seen the heavy woman as potentially the best mother, since wide hips
make childbirth safer and easier and large breasts are best for long-term
nursing.
In more affluent periods, dominated by city or court, the thin woman is in,
since mental rather than physical activity is more valued; hence elegant chic
becomes a marker of high social status. In his wonderful book "The Nude,"
art historian Kenneth Clark contrasts the Vegetable Venus (the cushiony
Venetian odalisques of Titian and Giorgione) with the Crystalline Venus (the
tall, slender, more intellectual Venus of the Florentine Botticelli). In
"Sexual Personae," I argued that ancient Egypt, with its stylish,
small-breasted, aristocratic women, is the ultimate source of the rigorously
strict ideas of beauty that feminism is always condemning in its assault on
the modern fashion industry.
What you correctly observe about the obsession of the urban Northeast and
professional Los Angeles with female thinness is due to the rampant careerism
of the cultural elite. Motherhood was systematically devalued for 25 years
by mainstream feminism and its media flacks. Despite the silicone scare,
breast amplification is still widely considered an enhancement, but only if
unrealistically yoked to a youthful slimness of torso and hips. Maternity
awards trophy children to the superachiever, but she must get her postpartum
lard off as soon as possible: Witness the talk-show-audience accolades
washing over sylphlike Jane Seymour for popping out those twins and shrinking
herself back down in an elf's wink.
Roseanne was truly revolutionary in the way she appropriated Jackie Gleason's
authoritative, Falstaffian mass for female comedy. I remember Roseanne
declaring in an early interview that "an important woman should take up
space." In the old immigrant era, ethnic grandmothers were as impressive as
Spanish galleons. The same is true of the historical Mammy figures whose fat
is now unfortunately (and in my view wrongly) labeled as "sexless" and
"degrading" by African-American women scholars in recent books on racial
stereotypes among china collectibles.
In a cameo as myself in Cheryl Dunye's new film "The Watermelon Woman"
(attacked by conservatives for profaning the N.E.A. with black lesbianism), I
praise Hattie McDaniel's Oscar-winning performance as Mammy in "Gone with
the Wind" and say how much McDaniel, from her first, shouting-out-the-window
scene on, resembles my own formidable Italian grandmother, to whom I
dedicated my first book. The Southern white women in that movie, in
contrast, are either debutantes hysterical about their 16-inch waists or
pasty-faced do-gooders who go down at the first diphtheria bug or labor pain.
The archetypal Mammy figure is ultimately an African symbol of abundance and
fruitfulness, and it is no coincidence that Dunye (who is half Liberian, half
African-American) has reclaimed her at a time when anorexia is the idée fixe
of white middle-class feminism.
Rosie O'Donnell should be central to a rethinking of this issue, but I find
her phony and stiff. O'Donnell has admitted that when she is thin, she's
uncomfortable with the sexual attention she gets from men. This isn't fat as
dynamic life force; it's fat as fearful barrier/bandage against the wounds of
the world. With her cloying sycophancy and juvenile schtick, O'Donnell
completely lacks the free-flowing, often teary emotionalism and intuitive,
nearly oracular empathy of classic Oprah at her heaviest and best.
The main problem of Thin-is-In eras is that they force most women into a
constant war with nature. The hormones that kick in at puberty give women
their voluptuous curves; heightened estrogen levels also cause the weight
gain of pregnancy. Too many middle-aged, upper-middle-class Anglo-Saxon
women these days have unappetizingly wizened faces from over-dieting and
excess facial surgery. We really need to re-train the eye to help women find
and flourish in their genetically destined silhouette, whatever that might
be.
I was pleased to see that Madonna gained some weight back during her
pregnancy and that she has recovered the glossy, glowing look she had before
that steely, aerobicized, early 1990s period, when she carved herself down to
wiry, marionette scale. When I recently saw the National Enquirer's
exclusive photos of Madonna's infant (caught as mother and daughter got out
of a limousine in Europe), I was startled. "Tina Onassis!" I blurted at
first sight of Lourdes' very pretty but unexpectedly chubby Latin features.
What path will rich little Lourdes be allowed to take? As one of the great
contemporary arbiters of female body image, will Madonna the Omnipotent
Mother decree for nature or culture? In the Age of Pop, it's usually the
stars and their progeny who reshape our rules. Dear Camille: I've followed your analyses of the Dionysian element in pop/rock stars for some time now, so I must ask you: Am I just getting old or are we suffering through one of the most boring periods of rock history? Alternative rock (and who doesn't detest the term?) started out promisingly enough with Kurt Cobain's Beatlesy punk, but has degenerated to instance after instance of slouchy, jeans-wearing lead singers with hair in their faces, mumbling/shouting obscure references to their personal pain. At the other end of the dial, black music seems to be composed of either over-singing "soulful" balladeers who give Michael Bolton's histrionics a bad name, or gangsta rappers on ego overload who are all attitude and no music. Who even knows what country music's all about these days? Do we have anything to look forward to in the next millennium, or do I have to go back to classical music's Romantic outlaws -- Mahler, Wagner, et. al -- to get some satisfaction? Hurry, my CD player's getting rusty. Looking backward in L.A.
Dear Looking backward:
I share your ennui about current rock music, which has frequent glimmers of
promise followed by fizzling letdowns as new bands fail to develop and build
artistically. In fact, I rather peevishly expressed my feelings about this
in an article in last November's Guitar World magazine (which several months
earlier printed my tart critique of the rambling lyrics of Led Zeppelin's
monumental "Stairway to Heaven"). There is absurd overpraise nowadays of
minor, derivative work from second-rate bands that come and go like May
flies.
Thanks partly to the enormous success of popular music, which has fragmented
the audience into many lucrative genre niches, we will probably never recover
the 1960s cultural moment when each new song and album electrified an
entire generation. Musical innovation has slowed, creatively and
technologically, and political issues have become less urgent and more
diffuse. Generation X, raised in suburban blandness, has very little to sing
about and has castrated itself even further by trying to fuse vapid political
correctness with rock, an inherently aggressive, sexist form. Grating
whining has become standard, from Nirvana and Hole to Smashing Pumpkins.
We've settled into an Alexandrian period of erudition and repetition in
music, so I suppose we should make the best of it. The ever-expanding CD
library will soon contain the whole corpus of popular, classical and world
music, which gives us enviable access to vast knowledge undreamed of by prior
centuries. My highest musical pleasure of the past month has been in busily
playing and replaying not any new music but a recently acquired two-CD Pat
Benatar collection. Benatar and her husband, guitarist Neil Geraldo,
produced a stunning number of hard rock classics that still sound fresh and
dynamic after 18 years.
All of the arts -- not just music -- are suffering an identity crisis at the
moment. The art world, except for a brief p.c. frenzy of Stalinist
literalism in the late 1980s and early '90s, has been steadily sinking into
the doldrums for 25 years. In my opinion, cultural energy at the end of the
century has abandoned the traditional arts and shifted to the Internet -- which
is why you and I are having this conversation! If the arts are to revive, we
need to make them much more central to primary and secondary education, a
public policy issue I will continue to address. Searching for a higher level for your container? Ask Camille.
Why I Go For Women With Big Beaks (02/18/97) The Purity of Allen Ginsberg's Boy-Love (04/15/97) The Heaven's Gate castrati community (04/02/97) More cleavage and glitz! Less Crystal! (03/25/97) The tyranny of racial categories (03/18/97) How do you handle a hungry man? (03/04/97) Bookmark: http://www.salonmagazine.com/columnists/paglia.html |
