What happened to my culture while I was at the library?
Most of you probably know about this already. Those of you with daughters between the ages of ten and fifteen surely already know. I was the one who missed it. I had my nose in a book about classical Greece, in a commentary on Pauline letters to the Corinthians. I turned my back for a minute, and look what happened!
..For what fellowship hath righteousness with unrighteousness? and what communion hath light with darkness? — 2 Corinthians 6:14
Paris Hilton got a show on MTV. It’s not like the show on Fox that blatantly made fun of her, showing her to comic, if nauseating, effect as a spoiled, vapid, bulimic, pill-addled, too-slutty-to-be-a-real-debutante, rich girl. She and Nicole Ritchie were objects of derision on the show where they attempted half-heartedly to adapt to farm life. Whatever one thinks of shows that make fun of the retarded or the terminally fashionable, this show did not celebrate Paris Hilton’s system of values or her lifestyle. I admit the once or twice I tuned in, seeing Paris covered in manure, forced to get up before dawn to feed livestock, it made me feel hope that Fox might give her some comeuppance in the name of viewers born without trust funds. It also gave me some vague hope for Ms. Hilton’s personal growth, as most of us have gained moral fiber by confronting challenges. Americans are schooled in anti-urban bias, and like many, I hoped the smell of cut wheat stalks might provide this morally challenged young woman with a sense of wholesome connection to others unlike her.
Of course, since then, Ms. Hilton has not grown morally. She has played some associative role in the drug addictions of former friends and celebrity addicts –Nicole Ritchie, then Lindsay Lohan, and Brittney Spears. After some false dismay about a private sex video “leaking” into the mediosphere, she has consensually flashed her genitalia like a shaved baboon to the paparazzi, and she has tried to get out of jail by using bribery and false medical reports after being convicted of driving while intoxicated.
Worse, she is, I believe, singlehandedly responsible for the epidemic we recently saw among young women of trucker caps and of sweatpants with “juicy” written across the backside. She has popularized clothes previously worn exclusively by Hollywood Boulevard sex workers. I’m for the unionization of prostitutes, but I don’t believe Ms. Hilton’s intentions were to spread awareness of their struggles, particularly since she appears so willing to cross their picket lines without pay.
I don’t mention at length Paris’ foray into pop music – - yes, while I was at the library, she recorded an album that seems to help bulimics by inducing vomiting without the need to stick the flat edge of a butter knife down one’s throat. Unlike some of her former friends who went to rehab, Ms. Hilton does not have even a thin, glossy veneer of musical talent.
All this would put her into a lamentable but imaginable category of phenomena — think of Geri Hall, former companion to Mick Jagger, whom no one took seriously, think of Charro, the blonde latina variety show guest star of the seventies who shook and started every word with the letter “j.” Think of meringue cookies eaten after full meals of healthy food. These phenomena really caused no harm to the culture at large, evne though they were not a sign of our culture’s health or sanity.
However, Paris Hilton has transcended the meringue category with her own television show on MTV — Paris Hilton’s My New BFF – and thus she is now the main course, a sign of America’s moral diabetes. MTV has found a way to institutionalize Ms. Hilton’s system of values and ethics into a contest, and they have made her its judge. The reality TV show takes in other vulnerable, bulimia-prone, stardom-seeking, psycho fans and determines through a series of formalized tortures which one of these girls will be Paris’ new BFF — more like BFTS — best friend for the season. The episodes play out like every woman’s worst memories of junior high school and of trying to gain popularity with the meanest girls by subjecting themselves to progressive humiliations (remember playing truth or dare with them?). It is the young women kicked out of the inner circle first who appear the least pitiable. Those who get closest in orbit to the sun that is Paris Hilton seem happy to be there, but they increasingly need to sabotage each other to move closer to the dark star.
In the last episode of the season, Paris takes one of the two surviving contestants to a spa, where they wear matching red bikinis in a scene fraught with that latent and vaguely lesbian tension that occurs between women who disdainfully compare every inch o f their own bodies to the bodies of others. They also go to the Hamptons for lunch, where they declare to one another, “I love you, bitch.” It isn’t supposed to be sad or funny. How long was I in that library? Paris, of course, drop-kicks this contestant two days later, proving that the words “love” and “bitch” really don’t belong together.
With the winner, if one can call a close relationship with Ms. Hilton a winning proposition, Paris goes shopping, and afterward, the pair of BFFs eat a sundae costing $1,000. They decide not to order two but to split one, not because the price is absurd but because the calories might add grams of fat to their emaciated bodies. Neither of them enjoy it, finding the edible gold and the caviar/ice cream combination distasteful. Neither asks, in this time of economic crisis, if it might not have been better to donate the price of the sundae to a soup kitchen. It is clear that the winner of the BFF battle is shallow and ambitious like Iago, that Paris is prepared to buy friendship from her, or at least the appearance of it. After all, Paris has been unable to hang onto friends who do not share drugs or need money.
What does Paris Hilton understand of friendship, anyway? Her non-contest-appointed friendships are always rivalries, it seems. She exudes neither warmth nor wit. She has a soulless beauty to her, empty but unblemished, as if she were poured into a mold at the Mattel factory in Japan and given Malibu beach-blonde acrylic hair. To play Barbies at this level is a form of annihilation. It drove Lindsay into rehab and the bed of Samantha. After too much Paris, Brittney shaved her head and beat a truck with a broken umbrella.
Paris was nowhere in sight, of course. However, most of us are not as distilled or frozen in our plasticity, and even those of us who would go so Hollywood cannot withstand such an ice storm. To be friends with a vampire is to become undead or its dinner, for what fellowship has light with darkness?
Again, I ask, brethren, what happened while my nose was in the books? What happened to girlfriends? It happens often that older women wag their fingers at younger ones. This is not new, the lamentation of the state of younger people’s morality. But I liken this show to a form of friendship pornography, as it cheapens, commercializes, and distorts friendships, treating them as contests and acquisitions, rather than the development of solidarity, affection and trust. Paris hugs these girls in the show (see the photo here) inexplicably clinging to a silver shaft that resembles nothing more than the ice pick of the movie Basic Instinct. Don’t turn your back on her, girls. She’s ready to stab.
