Figure It Out

by Wayne Koestenbaum

  Nicole Kidman is not a spokesperson for high hair. But her attitude toward her hair (her tendency to keep it back and piled) is consonant with high-hair philosophy. Pulled behind and up, the hair expresses a dominating temperament, temporarily restrained by politeness or strategy.

  Nicole Kidman no longer swims in my health club’s pool. She has taken her high hair elsewhere. But my fantasies about high hair’s power to demolish and uplift the spectator have remained stationary.

  2. Annette Funicello Circumlocutions

  Annette Funicello, who starred in the 1960s TV show The Mickey Mouse Club, occurred to me this morning while I was watching a bee stumble into the center of a sloppy rosebud—a type of rose I call “beach rose” (though in truth it is a rugosa rose); I used to see this species of flower on the road to Hammonasset Beach, where once I observed two men undress in the cubicles near the showers. There is no logical connection between Annette Funicello, a beach rose, an inquisitive bee, a beach’s cubicles, and the men who long ago stripped, under my inquisitive gaze, in the vicinity of weakly sputtering public showers. When Funicello enters my beach-rose-abutting consciousness, I do not bar her entry: I invite her, in her capacity as hovering wordless shadow, to dominate my mood. I grow more precise in the imaginary presence of Annette Funicello; and yet I also grow more blurry. To Annette Funicello I owe my oscillation between blur and acuity; to Annette Funicello I owe my command of clear edges, as well as my surrender to haze. And yet I owe her nothing. I invited her into this essay’s room. I resuscitated her, and asserted her timeliness.

  My older brother played cello—plays it still—but had no fun playing it. Or did he have fun playing cello? Do I slide into the funnel of reminiscence by finding Funicello? Funicello is where you and I encounter each other. Funicello is the beach cubicle and the map to the cubicle. Funicello—as a sign, a career, a body of theatrical work, and a reputation—Funicello as a saucy and concrete imago—is the only real raft I can cling to in this ocean of pointless saying. My prose is alive only because it repeats Funicello and thereby, through the ear, summons your collaborating presence. Fundamentally I need Funicello so that I can make sense; Funicello is the rock around which these dimensionless periphrases circle. In the presence of deliberate circumlocutions Funicello sends out her clear light; she sends out shadow, too. What happened to the men changing into their bathing suits at Hammonasset Beach? What will be the fate of the beach rose I observed this morning, and the identityless bee that the rose contained and hosted? I earn legitimacy—I steal tether—by summoning Funicello without explaining Funicello; the freedom not to explain Funicello is the plushest lounge I’ve encountered in my long search for wayside venues willing to host my void-entranced calisthenics.

  3. Madonna’s Usurpation

  Many were the times, in the 1990s, that I drove to the beach, while spinning, on the car’s CD player, a Madonna compilation, “La Isla Bonita” seeming the theme song of my own flight into the sun’s narcotizing ability to stun any realistic thought out of my head. “La Isla Bonita” promised a fantasy escape to an island—an exclusive club—that wouldn’t grant me admission. I didn’t feel attractive enough to belong to “La Isla Bonita,” but the song’s derivativeness (in its derivativeness I locate my pleasure) entitled me to feel I had the right to a sloppy, secondhand membership in whatever erotic festival that the song, and Madonna herself, embodied. When Desperately Seeking Susan was first released, I felt that Madonna was getting more attention than Debbie Harry, but that Madonna was less beautiful and less vocally subtle than Harry. Madonna was a usurper. I should have loved Madonna’s shallowness, and her canny manipulation of it. Instead, when Madonna rose to fame, I already was in mourning for Harry as a figure beginning to experience premature obsolescence. I’m a headstrong student of star culture; in that school, I matriculated early. (At age four.) And, at the beginning of my studies, I understood that obsolescence was the preferable liqueur, even though the world might condescend to superseded figures. Why I love the obsolete is a long story. Longer, perhaps, is the story of why I think it is my mission to convince the world to love the obsolete.

  4. Taylor’s Tweets

  Dame Elizabeth Taylor was the moniker under which the star tweeted. I believed these tweets—believed in their authenticity; believed that they emerged directly from the star’s consciousness and will. They seemed trustworthy emanations from a heretofore inaccessible nugget of Liz-consciousness. I remember the instant of shock when I happened upon a Liz tweet (or a “Dame Elizabeth Taylor” tweet) for the first time, and felt touched by her sudden proximity. Now that moment strikes me, in retrospect, as an overly credulous surrender to a fiction of star-presence. Liz wasn’t really there, behind the tweet. I was being hailed by a seductive illusion, however tangentially grounded in the actual directives and words of the Dame herself. Had I tried to respond to the Dame with a tweet of my own, I’d doubtless have been disappointed by the impossibility of reciprocity. She could hail me, from behind the fortress of her star machinery; but I lacked the power to hail her.

  5. Omar Sharif Jr. in Being and Nothingness

  Recently I started using Instagram. At first, I posted under a pseudonym: “dans_les_ruines.” The phrase comes from a Gabriel Fauré mélodie, “Dans les ruines d’une abbaye,” set to a poem by Victor Hugo. I didn’t want to post as myself; I chose to post as a ruin, a French-tinged trace. I posted under the guise—the alias—of a fragment from a poem long ago set to music and now forgotten.

  For one of my Instagram posts, a digital collage, I downloaded (from the internet) a photo of Omar Sharif Jr., an openly gay star, who happens to be the grandson of a more famous actor. Using Photoshop, I juxtaposed this photo of Sharif fils with the phrase Being and Nothingness, snipped from a downloaded photo of the title page of Sartre’s tome, translated into English. One hashtag for my post was #remakes. Another was #beingandnothingness. Another was #omarsharifjr. The title of my post: “Omar Sharif Jr. in Being and Nothingness.” A few days after posting this fictional film-still from an imaginary remake of a book, Being and Nothingness, which could never plausibly be the basis of a film, I was pleased to discover that Omar Sharif Jr. himself “liked” my post. Omar Sharif Jr. has an Instagram account; whoever is in charge of that account “liked” my post. Did Omar himself see my collage? Did Omar appreciate it? Or did someone who works for Omar see the post? In any case, I experienced a tiny, unverifiable instant of star-reciprocation—an uncanny greeting from a man who represents the becoming-spectral of a “stardom” originally represented by his grandfather. Out of the nothingness of the internet abyss, which poses as community, I felt Sharif’s touch, and I became, momentarily, a confirmed Being.

  6. Liza in Rehab

  I wasted the last fifteen minutes online reading a comment thread, tortuous and arcane, attached to a People magazine account of Liza Minnelli checking into rehab. The article averred: “The actress, 69, has already checked into the facility, the name of which is not being disclosed.” Many of the thread’s grousers attacked issues of spelling, punctuation, grammar—mistakes made not by Liza but by online bacchantes. One anonymous visitor complained: “to troll, you need to be at least partially mentally competent and speak English people can understand.” Another said: “Are you joking or do you really spell like that?” Another: “The slaughtering of the English language is so sad.” Another troll offered: “You seem addicted to capitalizing everything. Learn some grammar and punctuation. And stop whining. It’s a turn off.” Another anonymous quibbler offered: “Some people don’t understand what Caps are for. It’s really strange. She also begins sentences with ‘Because’ so clearly she has more issues than just Caps.” The “she” in that sentence refers to an online troll, not to Liza. As far as the comment-thread writers are concerned, the problem is not Liza’s addiction but language’s addiction to its own procedures of consumption and correction. Who is in rehab, Liza or the sentence? Stardom and its fallout are verbal matters, O attentive reader.
How stars behave—how stars behave inside us, after we have introjected them, or swallowed their stories whole—is subject to linguistic laws. We find stardom in our bodies as a verbal residue in need of arrangement and arraignment. Jurisprudential issues (crime and punishment, obedience and reward) surround the arrangement of words: call it syntax, call it punctuation, call it spelling. Am I here? My presence is up for grabs, as up for grabs as what happens inside or outside the body of any star whose image seems to tell a simple story. Spelling a name and discovering an identity are tricky matters, exceeding the reach of any reader but the most ashamed. Remember Liza with a “Z”? Isn’t Liza—and every principle that her stardom, or anyone’s stardom, in or out of rehab, represents—always stuck with the job of giving spelling lessons?

  (2005–2017)

  CELEBRITY’S SECRET AMELIORATIONS

  1.

  I’ll add my two cents as a devil’s-advocate defender of celebrity’s secretly salvific tendencies. I know that celebrity is a capitalist or post-capitalist toxin; I know that civilization is disappearing down celebrity’s hole. I recognize all the arguments against celebrity. I understand celebrity’s connection to fascism: citizens worship the Leader simply because the Leader’s face is recognizable. Celebrity, as a subject, depresses me; and yet I feel compelled to rise to its defense as an aesthetic playground, a zone of carefree libidinal intensity. (For some spectators. In some circumstances.) I speak as a cannily retardataire mystic; as a surrealism-oriented advocate of unconscious energies; as a haruspicator of celebrity entrails; as a prurient detective; as a close reader of celebrity faces.

  2.

  Above all, I bring to you one simple argument (although in general I avoid arguments): for good reasons we may condemn the culture of celebrity, but in the contemplation of human faces (famous faces lend themselves to reverie and close study) I find aesthetic grail, solace, complexity, absorption, wonder.

  3.

  No. That sounds too old-fashioned. Let me say, instead, that human faces (especially beautiful faces, or faces that a culture defines as beautiful) are ideal subjects for time-bending contemplation. Studying a face, we stop time. And the exercise of stopping time is one avenue available to a human being in search of amelioration.

  4.

  We’re stuck in human bodies, with human faces, and the only way out of that dilemma is to study (to memorize, to adore, to stylize) a human face and a human body.

  5.

  The recognizable face—the celebrity face—is merely an object for attentiveness; a visual token; a retinal mantra. A pair of cheekbones. Eye sockets. Eyelashes. The space between eye and ear. The horizon of the hairline. The reef of the nose.

  6.

  For many years I gave embarrassingly serious thought to the face of Jacqueline Onassis. I tried to justify that seriousness, to rationalize it. But I didn’t say clearly enough that the reason that I allowed her image to occupy my consciousness and to dwarf all other prudent and moral considerations was simply the fact that on her face (as given to me by the media, usually in still photographs, not moving images) I could spend time and thereby stretch time. I didn’t say clearly enough that the reason I loved Jackie’s face was that media artists (paparazzi, magazine editors) had given it to me, and that this face had a spaciousness, a blankness, a beauty, a tranquility, a sameness-to-itself (always the same Jackie-face) that allowed me to treat it as a sanctuary, a point of embarkation, a port to which I could perpetually return, if only to find nothing there, or a something so full of implication that its cacophonous innuendos coalesced to form a zero.

  7.

  Aren’t we biologically programmed to respond to human faces? And, if we’re shown the same face, again and again, a silent face, a face in photographs, aren’t we (against our wills, against our better judgments) liable to develop tranced emotions in response to it?

  8.

  There are worse crimes than loving human faces, or succumbing to the lure of a familiar (meaningless, spacious, trademarked) face.

  9.

  Maybe it was a technology like Photoshop (avant la lettre), or retouching or airbrushing, that gave Jackie’s face, in photographs, its shininess; contemplating her face, I was responding less to her celebrity than to the visual properties of her cheeks, hair, and eyes, as photographed entities. I have often used the word shine (a word with philosophical complexities, at least in German, where it intersects with ideas concerning appearance, being, semblance) to describe the non-matteness, in Jackie’s cheeks and eyes and hair, when photographed, that drove me into chambers of stopped time, internal reverie-aquariums; shine has become for me almost a holy word, or a thought-stopping word, to describe the way that the space between an eye and an ear, or the space between the hairline (at the forehead) and the coiffure’s summit, forms a prairie or plateau. Look at a photograph of your favorite celebrity’s face; find the face’s blank zones, the places where a certain non-differentiation takes hold. Find the places where the “known” aspects of the face intersect with a dumb, unsentient absence. Cheek, before it reaches the eyes or the nose, is merely cheek; cheek has no identity. I have sought in the celebrity face those zones where identitylessness flourishes in the midst of trademarked identity.

  10.

  Sometimes I find those oases of identitylessness in the celebrity’s eyes, especially when the eyes don’t stare forward but swerve to the left or to the right, as if avoiding the camera. At those moments of looking away, when caught by a photograph, the eyes reveal mostly white, the iris decentered. Looking at the whites of celebrity eyes, I see an abstract zone, an interstitial region not exactly beautiful but arresting, usable. I can use the white of the celebrity eye as a lotus-eater’s isle, as a rest stop on locomotion’s (or intellection’s) dreary highway. I can stop being a self. And I can become, instead, a contemplator of the white of the celebrity eye, the part of the eye that can’t see.

  11.

  You could accuse me of being a self-deluding fetishist, savoring a human body’s displaced zones, whereon I can project my own internal objects. If you offer that critique, you’d avoid the truth of my testimony, and its applicability to your own plight. If you brand me a fetishist who exercises too freely his flights of fancy upon the helpless figures of the famous, then you’d ignore your own potential tendency to lose cognition’s grip by falling under the sway of a stranger’s eyes, cheeks, mouth, nose, hair, tongue, teeth, chest, legs, feet.

  12.

  Consider a widely disseminated photograph of actor Sacha Baron Cohen—star of Borat and Brüno—nearly nude on the beach at Cannes. Baron Cohen, famous man, appeared in an embarrassing thong on the beach, his buttocks visible, almost all of his splendid yet weird body available for our speculation—a body nude except for the bare essentials of his “Borat” persona (goofy glasses, curly hair, geeky shoes and socks). When I google “Sacha Baron Cohen Cannes” I get 138,000 results; when I google “Sacha Baron Cohen Nude” I get 130,000 results. (That’s not many, for a celebrity.) There are thousands of other nude or nearly nude bodies, famous or not, on whom I could dump my sordid hungers, and so why does Baron Cohen excite from me a particularly intense regard? Perhaps because the internet has allowed me to see the stretch of his thigh as it leads up to the buttock. I can see the thigh reach the buttock and become the buttock itself. And I can think “thigh,” “buttock,” repeatedly, slowly, but abstractly, because the mechanism of photography and of global information-transfer has acted as a go-between, a chastity belt, a buffer, between my prurient curiosity and the real Baron Cohen. In my scene of looking, celebrity is not the intoxicating agent; instead, celebrity is the anti-inebriant, the mediator, the neutralizer, the anesthetic. Celebrity is a pair of surgical gloves. Celebrity is the prophylactic fabric that entitles me safely to regard Baron Cohen’s thighs and buttocks, but when I study his thighs and buttocks I am not studying celebrity itself, I am studying “thigh” and “buttock”; the fact that celebrity culture brings into my home this vista of thigh
and buttock is the grounding premise (the proscenium, the deus ex machina) but not the ingot itself, not the desired essence.

  13.

  I am not interested in Jackie Onassis’s fame. I am not interested in Sacha Baron Cohen’s fame. I depend on Jackie’s fame to bring me her hair, her cheeks, her eyes. I depend on Sacha Baron Cohen’s fame (and on his audacity, his exhibitionism, his wily, Dada-esque use of the media as an arena for blitzkrieg performance-art interventions) to bring me his thighs, his buttocks. Fame is the assembly line, but it is not the commodity traveling down the conveyer belt. The commodity is eye, hair, nose, thigh, buttock. The mystery is why we need celebrity to convey to us, in media wrapping, these essential comestibles.

  14.

  I speak as someone starved for eye, hair, cheek, mouth, nose, thigh, buttock. Are you already sated with these viands? Are you not in an emergency state of perpetual need, a craving easily satisfied by the celebrity body? I stage my hunger—I exaggerate it—for communication’s sake. I amplify my desire so that its clown-like volume might strike, in you, an answering echo.

  15.

  I bring to the act of studying the celebrity face the same taste for absorption, the same appetite for trance, the same willingness to magnify incidental details, that I bring to the contemplation of visual art, including abstract paintings. I look at an abstract painting with the same rapacity for detail (and for a Lethean obliteration-of-minutiae) with which I look at a photo of a beautiful star.

  16.

  Hypothesis: we crave the celebrity face not because of that face’s qualities or associations, but because it is a face we have already seen. We enjoy, in this face, the fact of having already witnessed it. We enjoy the face’s pastness, its identity as recalled object. Uselessly we crave figures we already know, places we have already visited. Deeper than nostalgia, perhaps, is this desire to retraverse, to experience recognition. Consuming the celebrity’s image, we consume our recognition of it. We consume our own sensation of comfort at having returned, at having landed somewhere indubitable.