Celebrity Skin and The Family

For some of us who find we need respite from reality, escaping into the fantasy of music, movies, tv series, video games, dreams (through sleeping) etc. can become a habit at best and dissociation at worst. Vonnegut, in his book, “Farenheit 451” wrote about “The Family,” which resided in a room in one’s home where televisions plastered the walls and the fictional families and their narratives became ours, as our real lives shrank to insignificance in light of the authoritarian regime’s onslaught against our lives.

2 Loud 2 Old Music posted a song by Hole today, “Celebrity Skin,” that made me think of the movie, “The Substance,” which sparked this post. I, for one, am not after celebrity, but it made me think of the fantasy world I am escaping into more and more. What is this family that I’m looking up to and hanging on their every word?

What do my family members look like? They are impeccably dressed, in designer-labeled clothes, shoes, jewelry. There isn’t a strand of hair out of place. Their make-up hides all flaws that make skin look real. Many times plastic surgery, implants, skin stretching, lifts, additions, reductions, give them the plasticene Barbie & Ken looks. And… there is an unspoken message that you’ll be locked in the back closet and never seen on the screen if you don’t fit the template. Exceptions are oddball or otherwise weird, extreme tropes that fit as plot devices for the main characters.

Where do my family members live? Regardless of where in the world they live, and in what time, it’s always a place that is roomy, full of light, and where everything matches as if interior designers with bottomless budgets whirled in and perfected it to project an image of having made it, whatever having made it means for the place and time it happens. Nobody has a leaky roof, or a power outage, or a lawn full of weeds. Just like with the looks, unless the dwelling serves as a plot device, you aren’t going to see it. In real life, I remember taking my kids to Cedar Point and how the main street leading to the peninsula the park is on looks so bright and shiny, but I remember turning off on a side street one year; just a few blocks in, the squalor the employees of the park lived in was a real eye opener. I remember having to drive to Detroit once, to see some kids I had in residential treatment, with a co-worker who knew Detroit. I asked him to take me to see Eight Mile because of Eminem’s song. Eight Mile is a dividing line between the Ultra Rich and the Ultra Poor, where you literally cross the street and see it for your own eyes. How many of the Ultra Poor glue their eyes to the screen to forget what’s across the street?

How do my family members act? Well, they always know what to say. They always know how to react to situations, and the situations always resolve by the end of the movie. TV series, which are stepping in to replace movies, get us invested in their narratives and keep stringing us along. I seem to care more about what’s happening in their worlds than what’s going on in my own. I laugh at their jokes. I feel sad when they are cheated upon. Against all odds, when they do dirty deeds to others again and again in episodes 1-20, I’m able to forgive them and even adore them by episode 30. Why is it so much easier with my fantasy family than my real one?

Where do my family members go? If they are blessed with success, they return season after season, sequel after sequel, album after album. When a hugely popular series finally ends, it causes pain. We’ve been abandoned. Yet, even if canceled, they are immortal through varying storage methods, so they never really leave us. In real life, our family members leave. They die. They abandon us. There is no remedy but to carry on … and escape into another TV series. Or … maybe we can abandon The Family and start to live a life that is real.