A Massive Swelling: Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease and Other Cultural Revelations

By Cintra Wilson

Whether you lust after it, loathe it, or feign apathy toward it, fame is in your face. Cintra Wilson gets to the heart of our humiliating fascination with celebrity and all its preposterous trappings in these hilarious, whip-smart, and subversive essays. Often radical and always a scream, Wilson takes on every sacred cow, toppling icons as diverse as Barbra Streisand, Ike Turner, Michael Jackson, and-for obvious reasons-Bruce Willis. She exposes events like the Oscars and even athletic jamborees as having grown a "tumescent aura of Otherness." Wilson's scathing and irresistible dissections of Las Vegas as "the Death Star of Entertainment," and Los Angeles as "a giant peach of a dream crawling with centipedes" pulse with her enlightened rejection of all things false and vain and egotistical. Written with her trademark zeal and intelligence, A Massive Swelling is the antidote for the fame virus that infects us all.

• Language: English
• Publisher: eBookIt.com
• Release date: Aug 24, 2016
• ISBN: 9780990574323

Cintra Wilson

Cintra Wilson is an American playwright, journalist and novelist. She has published two books, both taking a satyrical look at celebrity culture: ‘A Massive Swelling’ and ‘Colors Insulting to Nature’. She lives in New York

Book preview

A New Introduction for The 2016 e-Edition, by THE AUTHOR

A Massive Swelling was first published by Viking/Penguin in 2000.

The internet was just beginning to lose its baby teeth. There was no Gawker, no TMZ, no Perez Hilton, no Kardashians. The American Dream of home ownership was still intact; as was the dream of being suddenly discovered in your local 7-Eleven or live bait shop, and whisked off to an ecstatic new world of Hollywood superstardom.

In the context of today’s media climate, this sounds impossible — but when A Massive Swelling came out in 2000, it was actually considered to be controversial — or at least unforgivably rude. In some LA and New York circles it was tantamount to blasphemy; I was regarded with roughly the same distaste as someone who had just thrown up in the open coffin of a decorated war hero.

I am quite surprised that my shrill purple hyperbole on the subject of celebrity would more or less pass for reasonable entertainment industry reportage less than twenty years later.

Hollywood, as the propaganda arm of the American republic, has always (by accident or design) been a lopsided reflection of the larger political/economic context -- which, for the last 3 decades, has been a wholesale race to hit rock bottom financially, ethically, spiritually, and intellectually (on the brighter side, the unbearable tensions of this Fall of Rome-esque climate have produced a new Golden Age of television!).

There have been many notable ruptures in the culture of celebrity since 2000, and a particular few that I feel deserve mentioning.

I believe a seismic shift occurred in the landscape of fame-perception following the attacks of 9/11/2001. For some reason, the execution-style murder of the World Trade Center created the need for an abrupt democratization of Fame. Americans became suddenly aware of death; this created a kind of collective ego panic, loosely articulated as "I don’t care if I am not a Barrymore, Baldwin, Sheen or Paltrow — I deserve my shot at the big time, and I must sing on television right fucking now."

Enter: American Idol, a show that answered this cri-de-coeur by providing an avenue via which any mammal with a power-vibrato and a dream had a chance to yodel their way into overnight celebrity.

Like the roller-coaster elasticity that replaced the regulations preventing the economy from crashing like it did during the Great Depression, and the predatory mortgage opportunities created by this heedlessness, the perceived value of this newly attainable fame also started to hurtle downhill at breakneck speed at its moment of inception. American Idol created new stars, but it did so by diluting the currency of stardom. Overnight fame, like the real-estate bubble, was engineered with planned obsolescence in mind: it blew up hugely and quickly, for the purpose of producing a sensational wet pop. It was a disposable flash-Fame that coincided perfectly with the fad of disposable flash-cameras.

Reality TV was a whole other radical cultural Quantitative Easing which borrowed negatively against human attention units, and made the value of Fame plummet even deeper into the abyss.

When we got bored merely humiliating hopeful yokels on American Idol.

The public got restless, cruel and itchy for the spectacle of real tragedy.

Audiences wanted to taste blood on their teeth (perhaps because we were now at war, but denied the type of hardcore, Vietnam-style televised war coverage that might inspire a peace movement.)

This is when Paris Hilton dropped like bright phosphorus onto an already tinder-dry media.

Paris — like the city of love — was expensive and filthy…and this was her secret weapon. Nobody ever said anything nice about Paris Hilton, and this only made her stronger.

Paris was much too formidable an heiress to give a shit about public disgrace, or need anyone’s approval. Everything Paris touched was so frankly commercial and perfectly liteweight as to be fashionably anorexic, and therefore attractively loathable, in spirit.

She even put out a pop album to celebrate her own celebrated lack of talent: a heady combination of electronic drum-beats and candy-sick whimpers; a perfect soundtrack for a Hentai anime featuring a bunch of schoolgirls in knee-socks getting raped by a cartoon octopus.

Paris Hilton correctly assessed that pleasant artistic accomplishments were no longer capable of controlling the attention span of a world fizzling with ADHD (particularly at a time when pornography abruptly evolved from the relative unavailability of pricey magazine three-packs sold in back of the Arco station to free super-abundance on every personal computer) — but that there was enormous money to be made in disgrace and humiliation. To really capture a news cycle, you needed scandals, disasters, public tantrums, guns in airports, murders, shark-attacks, and frothing fits of atavistic, old-school racism (a la Mel Gibson). Fame has always been made of quantities of attention, not qualities. For any fame-seeking narcissist, more attention (positive or negative) means …you WIN (cue ominous Donald Trump-rally kettle-drums).

Public Outrage became the new Fame, and Paris was crowned its favorite whipping-blonde.

Proximity to Ms. Hilton was a proven health hazard: She blew all the clothing, morals, inhibitions and self-control of her victims sideways, leaving them emaciated, dehydrated, broke, disoriented and often in jail.

Under-stimulated American audiences suddenly delighted in going chicken-killer on Hollywood strumpets in crisis. A whole new breed of glossy tabloids were suddenly a-gush with reports of oversexed former Mousketeers, and their habitual binge-puking, Mercedes-totaling, Vicodin gargling, pantiless public meltdowns and stints in inpatient rehabilitation facilities that cost $45,000 a week.

Most Americans didn’t really understand how our own government was abusing us — congressional bribes, organized mass deceit via domestic propaganda, policy fixing, violations of privacy and human rights — these realities were too head-thinky and depressing, particularly after putting in a long day of wage-slavery. Paris Hilton, for a time, embodied the angst of our increasing sense of powerlessness; we understood her crimes.

You feel like you haven’t been screwed by the Man, said my friend Angus, in defense of Paris-bashing. If Paris goes to jail, there is still a middle class. There’s still an illusion of hope. We’re not the Philippines, yet. There’s still some kind of justice, and we’re not all just fucked.

When a bald Britney Spears hit a paparazzo's car with an aluminum baseball bat in 2007...that was the death gong of Fame as we once knew it. The Britney Industrial Complex, if not a signal point for the End of Days, at least marked the death of any vestigial remains of Old Hollywood Glamour.

Paris Hilton was constantly derided for being stupid, immoral and whorish, but she was, in fact, a post-Warholian pop genius of media manipulation: an extraordinarily talented infamy artist, who was effectively responsible for the greatest of the rough beasts slouching toward Bethlehem waiting to be bored: it was Paris who encouraged Kim Kardashian to accidentally release her sex tape, and the rest is history, or what’s left of it (and by historyI mean Caitlin Jenner).

After this book, I switched gears to write about fashion and politics, because celebrity culture was becoming so intentionally nauseating that criticizing it was merely encouraging it.

Andy Warhol’s predictions bore out -- Fame is now fifteen minutes long (give or take a few minutes)...and pop eats itself. I add this overclarification: Pop now cannibalizes itself at the speed of pop, with a metabolic rate rivaling that of the fruit-fly. Fame jumps its own shark, then the shark eats itself, over and over again on an endless loop.

A Massive Swelling was my first book. It isn’t a perfect beast.

There are chapters that I probably should have erased from existence with a series of hardcover and hard-drive bonfires; but in the interest of not trying to airbrush history or goose my own talents in retrospect, this is the warts and all- time-capsule version, as it was originally published.

I was right about a lot of terrible things — most regrettably, my prediction of the weird, tragic, untimely death of Michael Jackson.

I was wrong about a lot of things, like the universal panty-throwing appeal of Ricky Martin.

In retrospect, I think I was a little too rough on Celine Dion, who seems like a good egg.

My lovely assistant T. Ryan Ward removed a rude reference to Robin Williams, because we loved him.

In closing, I believe that Celebrity is still a Grotesque Crippling Disease.

Fame, unfortunately, is the only antidote available for the desperate sufferers of galloping narcissism, but, like any radical medical intervention or toxic chemical treatment, it continues to prove that it is deadly enough in its own right to be avoided.

As Dan Rather once said (to boos and raspberries from media critics):

COURAGE.

Cintra Wilson, 2016

Introduction

Statement of Intent,

or How to Read This

Book Without Wanting to Hurt

the Author

Around 1918 there was an influenza that killed nearly everyone. Before that there were locusts and frogs. There was an assortment of plagues. Once, a comet wiped out all the dinosaurs. There was a disease in Africa where people exploded.

Then there was this thing that happened to everyone in the twentieth century, where their insides grew small and weak and sad, and they all strove and suffered, and they sold each other down the river and fucked each other into pulp in order to obtain this thing they were all desperate for: Fame.

Some wanted it more than others; they were willing to push much harder, and were more ruthless and even more zealous than the others, and they were rewarded with everything the world had to offer: Constant slobbering attention. Obscene wealth. Armies of anonymous worshippers so hypnotized that they would saw off their own fingers just to be smiled at.

With the Fame came power and prestige. Those who had it were able to visually eradicate any evidence that they were ever slovenly, drug addled, morally askew, or fat.

I wanted fame every day, for years and years and years. Every American has wanted it at some point in their lives. You can hear the longing for fame in your stomach when listening to your favorite music; you can feel your spirit reaching toward your own ultimate greatness, and the intrinsic undertow of millions of arms reaching out to embrace you, begging for you to come into their love. Weeping to clap and scream for you. You owe it to yourself, you think. You owe it to the world to be immortal. The sun feels right hitting your face in a certain heroic way. It is true that people in our world only grow to their seemingly correct tremendous size when constantly watered with compliments; souls become bright and shiny from an abundance of love and recognition. They unfold like golden flowers; they swell to pink enormity like jelly-fat queen bees.

Conversely, most non-famous people are in a frequent state of dull torture from the lack of such boundless international adoration in their lives, as if they lived with a constant low-grade toothache, which makes us all grouchy and unkind.

Your auto mechanic–who secretly hates you–is only partially aware that the reason he hates you is because he is working on your car instead of being a famous and enviable sex symbol. Your barely concealed disgust with the rude, illiterate teen cashier with the fat, oily head at Blockbuster Video is only amplified triply by the nearby Entertainment Weekly cover featuring the expensively unkempt cuteness of Meg Ryan, who never has to deal with such people. Thwarted dreams of rock-'n’-roll superpower and oral sex in private jets are at least partially responsible for that nagging conviction that the world has been shortchanging every anonymous human since birth. As if to mirror the inequities of our economy, wherein 5 percent of the nation owns 95 percent of everything that is ownable, the overwhelming majority of our collective happiness has been stolen so that some goddamned TV teenager with oversized teeth can have more than she can ever use or deserve.

If a person in this day and age has two cents' worth of talent, it is considered his sacred obligation to Go for the Gold, to try and grab the big brass monkey ring, and otherwise make six to ten demoralizing career-and-connection-oriented phone calls a day, perform painful Top 40 hits at all the high-school graduations and bar mitzvahs, pay hundreds of dollars for eight-by-ten photographs of themselves looking like sexually available newscasters, and audition with seething positive energy for every ExLax commercial that comes down the pike, until the day that the opportunity for Fame reveals itself like a pinpoint of light down the throat of a large python. When the fame begins to look graspable, when the hem of the glittering Elvis robe is visible through the thick red haze, the righteously downtrodden Fame-seeker is suddenly licensed by history and common consent to achieve Fame by Any Means Necessary, and furiously lie, cheat, fuck and steal his/her way into various cocktail parties and hermetic inner sanctums until the photographers come and the magazines call and the beauties in the restaurants swivel and wink and shimmer.

If you have any potential at all, and you don’t pursue Fame, you are considered, by yourself and others, to be unambitious, self-sabotaging, or otherwise too fucked-up to do what the good Lord built you to do; you are pissing away your natural gifts if you don’t consider your POTENTIAL, which, translated into American, means vast, unrelenting MEDIA COVERAGE.

There is a little bit of talent in most famous people, even if they’re only good-looking–something for all the attention to stick to. Talent is not, however, the reason for fame anymore, nor is it the thing one really becomes famous for–one earns fame by notoriety, or one gets fame by having fame. The good old way of getting famous was to be very good at something artistic, and have everybody fall in love with you for it. That doesn't really work now, because, as many critics have pointed out, nobody is very interested in art for its own sake anymore; now one only does art as a necessary part of the equation, the means to the end of getting famous, so one can get plastic surgery and go to parties in order to lick and be licked upon by other famous people like puppies in a basket. Nobody wants to be a real artist nowadays, i.e., a reclusive, self-contained workaholic, because it's no fun—you don't get enough attention.

I was raised in an era when people believed that they should get instant gratification for any small blot of effort spat out into the world. Young artists today seem to expect they should be able to drool out a batch of sophomoric short stories or a notebook full of crude cartoon heads and insert them into a Versateller machine and get a tidy wad of laurels; and the problem is, many of them do. This creates false expectations, detrimental to the process of Creation. Our greatest artists throughout history have always had to wade through years of being broke, misunderstood and unpopular–spearheading the collective consciousness and having to wait in financial agony–while the rest of the world caught up to their fast and advanced way of thinking. Nobody raised with MTV has any interest in this process at all. They want to skip all the difficult athletic parts and go straight to having their heads on the Wheaties box.

Just because it is considered retardataire to trash celebrity culture does not mean it doesn't need to happen a whole lot. I realize that in the immediate climate, it is considered passé to bark out from a position of loathing for Hollywood and its monstrous by-products. The best and brightest pundits seem to imply that it is hipper to simply embrace Pop Life, even if one must bracket it in quotations and smirk at it through the lens of post-modern irony, and amusedly accept its rampant faults and perversities. Those concerned with spiritual growth seem to think critical flame throwing is merely negative. I have been accused of being addicted to the use of attack words to champion questionable ideas in this regard. I think that it is the perversion of this turn of the century that everything cutting or nastily true is repressed in the name of some form of quasi-Buddhist, ethical and/or politically fearful good taste. In this New Age, Politically Correct fin de siècle, the implication seems to be that

Reviews for A Massive Swelling

[jenneb_2 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I was trying to describe this book to a friend, and the closest I could come up with was "It's like if Tom Robbins and Maureen Dowd had a sordid one-night stand at some trashy producer's party in the Valley, and nine months later this brilliant and vicious woman sprang forth fully formed from the forehead of the editor of US Weekly."
But better than that.

I'm just sorry I didn't read it right when it came out--the world of fame and celebrity has gotten so much MORE grotesque since 2000 that I bet Ms Wilson would be spinning in her grave if she were dead. Which luckily she isn't, so I hope she'll write an update.