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Popular Icons and Contemporary Memory: An Apology, Year 2001 Marguerite Helmers continued . . .
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Subject: Sensual or Sacrificial? Behind Teresa and Diana are a third and fourth subject, implied in their status as icons and those who represents the ultimate sacrifice. Those subjects are the sacred and the profane themselves. The first is the Theotokos, Mary, Mother of God. The second is the ultimate of celebrity, American film actress Marilyn Monroe. George Steiner comments that much of Western philosophy since the nineteenth century claims to be searching for a subject when the absence of God is at its core. Yet, says Steiner, it is the presence of God that is in fact the subject of rhetoric. In this case, it is the Holy Mother who is the object of absence and we read her into the frame to create a trinity of women who are known for good works and sacrifice. Yet we may also read Marilyn into this trinity, a woman known less for good works than for her power to draw men and women alike into her fame, her image, her legend. All studies of contemporary cultural icons are intertextual and behind them all is the transparent, celluloid image of Marilyn Monroe. She lingers lovingly in the pages of John Hellman's The Kennedy Obsession; she announces her presence as a monstrous, bodily double of cerebral Virginia Woolf in Brenda Silver's Virginia Woolf Icon; she expresses the American ideal of rising to the top of fame in Gilbert Rodman's Elvis after Elvis. It is Marilyn who is there for the audience, maligned, misunderstood, fragile, a "candle in the wind." [4] Derek Stanovsky points out that Teresa and Diana are united in memory as idealized visions "of the virtuous woman" (146). No model for feminists, cultural critic Ruth Barcan comments, Diana instead "constructed her image in keeping with the dominant image of femininity" foisted on the public as "traditional" (50). Although the two were opposites in terms of the wealth that they brought to the scene of their charitable works—Diana the wealthy socialite, Teresa the Catholic nun who took vows of poverty—Diana and Teresa were similarly rich in the cultural capital of good works. Drawing from Luce Irigaray's comments that women are repressed by cultures that assume women will work for nothing, Stanovsky comments that "Mothers always work for free" (148):
As Chancey points out, and as I note in "Media, Discourse, and the Public Sphere," since Diana's death, the memory of her has been edited to eliminate traces of transgression. The simulacrum of "Diana," writes Chancey, represents Diana performing "all of the roles of traditional femininity (mother, wife, princess) and no transgressive qualities (sexually active, aggressive, aging)" (170). The photographs that are published now are "respectful and sentimental" (170-71). Contemporary cultural icons become the stuff of new public stories because the icons themselves are not "truth." Icons are "cut-up," fragments of persona, style, issue that are stitched together by the inquiring public to create a whole meaning. Contemporary cultural icons are embedded in the structure of myth, in narratives that are instantiated easily by members of the public, regardless of their affection or disaffection for a particular figure. As Roland Barthes points out in the influential collection Mythologies, "everything can be a myth provided it is conveyed by a discourse" (112). A discourse is the way a message is uttered, as oral, written, or visual language. In DeBord's conception of the spectacle, the image absorbs the primary interest of the viewer. The historical and biological person who is the media star—that aspect of the person which is profane or ordinary—is irrelevant to the memory, nostalgia, dreams, and narratives that can be projected onto the image. They are stock figures, banal in the sense that they are cliched type characters: the saint, the lover, the princess.
Yet celebrities are also arguments for particular narratives that envision and project life. "Celebrities figure various styles of life and various views of society which anyone is supposedly free to embrace and pursue," DeBord writes (38). Anything is possible in the world of the celebrity. As Lollie McClain, the author of the Teresa and Diana memorial, comments "imitation is the sincerest form of admiration. . . . I may not be able to do as much good as they have but still I can work to imitate their compassion, empathy and generosity." Yet the solution to the imitation of the spectacle is banal. It is limited to the local statement. It is personal, not global: "I can give more of my time and energy to reach out and help others. I can smile more often, hug and touch people more often" (McClain). McClain's comments serve only to point out the limitations of the iconic celebrity. As DeBord writes, the star "is in fact the opposite of an individual, and as clearly the enemy of the individual in himself as of the individual in others." While the Orthodox conception of dialogy is retained, without the encircling culture of belief and reinforcement of the written text of any scripture, the contemporary cultural icon is useful only as a "dark glass." [5] 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | Next Node | Notes | Works Cited
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