person’s talent, not their skill, not some manifest destiny of Fame that some person’s skills makes obvious. No ma’am, that was all us. We can point to that famous person and say, “WE DID THAT.” In that sense, Brackenridge reasoned, in that sense, we can feel like God.
It’s like a Chutes and Ladders board game of Fame. That’s what we’ve set up in our society. Land on the right square, make the right move, walk the right amount of steps, and you will climb the ladder to a higher position, to Fame. Make the wrong move, step on the wrong square, and you take the slide way, way down, away from Fame. We set that up, as a society. We set that up and we built that scaffolding that sits underneath, those pylons and wood beams in the ocean, under the pier. We built that, together. We watch the 24 hours of “entertainment programming” on E! We buy InStyle and Entertainment Weekly and Premiere and US and People and OK! and In Touch Weekly and Life & Style. We watch Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood and talk shows in the night and in the day. We read gossip blogs and pass around TMZ videos. We stuff our faces with paparazzi photos of the famous, in line at the grocery store, consuming it, can’t get enough of it. Every day.
Now, what’s that about? Why is that structure, that support mechanism for Fame, kept so healthy, strong, and robust? We keep it healthy and strong and fed so we can maybe use it someday. “Me!” If you let it die, this support under Fame, you stop feeding it and it will no longer be there for you. If you don’t attend to the nail-in-the-wood maintenance of it, of the beams in the water under the pier, it will collapse, and that option for you will utterly disappear. So, we keep it healthy. We read the magazines and watch the shows, and buy the clothes and cars that the famous wear and drive. We create reality programming, even, to make this Chutes and Ladders board even wider. Bigger! More squares! More ladders! Hell, more slides! EVERYBODY CAN BE FAMOUS. More ladders = more lottery ticket buyers. More chances to WIN! We keep it healthy, this machine, because someday, just maybe (we hold the hope), someday we might step on that square that holds the bottom of that Fame ladder and we will fly up it to another plane, another life, a way out of this one, and we will be hovering above, with a bundle of nice stuff.
Prior to the late 1990s, there was no frenzy to be famous. There were those who were tremendously famous, sure, but as huge as the Fame was, it was not coveted by everyone you met. What I mean is, it was compartmentalized, it was thought of with a proper kind of perspective. People were amazed when they saw the famous, but they didn’t then immediately after start thinking about how they, too, could attain some Fame. People didn’t really think that way back then. You were an actor and you were very famous, but these other people, they had their own lives and their professions and there was a self-respect in that. People seemed to take pride in whatever they were good at, whatever profession they had tackled. A dentist, a publicist, a finance executive, a stationery store owner, whatever. There was not this obsession we have now with becoming famous. There was not this shame that people seem to absorb now, that they or their business isn’t “famous.” “Gotta make my mark,” and not by being a good stationery store owner or a pet store manager, but by getting followers, fans, viewers.
That pride from before faded away for many, and instead having a camera follow someone around on a reality show started to become a baseline of “approval” and professional self-respect. If a camera was following you around, recording your every banal move, well then, you must really be something. So, around 2000, we had a perfect storm of entertainment-focused shows and magazines needing material, and reality programming making it possible for those lacking entertaining talents to become famous. When social media dropped in, around 2006, then everybody could join in on trying to have a semblance of Fame, depending on how many “followers” you had. How many people would be alerted as to where you ate lunch or would see pictures of your dog, wet and shriveled in your sink, while you gave him a bath? How many people? It was at that moment that the dormant human trait of “lack-of-followers paranoia” was awakened.
“I have 315 Facebook followers. Pretty nice. Look at that. Dum-da-dum-dum-dum. What’s Dave been up to? Let’s see. His account . . . Got it . . . What the fuck? 1,245 followers. What? How . . . How does he know that many . . . That can’t be real. How does he have that many followers? What the fuck? I gotta . . . Hey, everyone! I’m going for the big 2,000! Will you help me get there?! Tell your friends to give me a follow. Get me to 2,000!” And that’s the way that went. You got those posts, right? Those messages? Your friends trying to “break” 500? Trying to get to 1,000? Something like that? Sure. Kinda made you sick, right? I mean, here’s this beautiful tool to stay in touch with your people (or this perfectly evil way to market to you, whichever), and they have to go and pollute it with their lack-of-followers paranoia. That sucks.
* * *
OK, I can hear someone: “Who the fuck do you think you are, Bateman? You think, you assume, that everyone was just happy as pie in the ’80s and ’90s while you rolled around on your haystack of Fame and money and privilege and limousines and helicopters to the Super Bowl? FUCK YOU! You think we were just all happy back then, without all that? And how dare you put down our attempts at grabbing a little bit of that with our Twitter followers and our Facebook friends and our YouTube vlogs. You’re not the only one, you know. WE WANT ALL OF THAT TOO.” I can hear that. But it’s proving my point for me. Everyone deserves respect for what they do, and to be fairly compensated for what they’re good at, but for 99 percent of the population, it’s not for being an actor or a world-famous rock star. And that’s OK. That’s what I’m saying.
Size
Let me tell you how it used to be. This is going to sound like I’m 100 years old and telling you about “what it was like in my day, Sonny,” but it’s not. It was fairly recent. The Fame in the ’80s and ’90s was the tail end of the “concentrated audience Fame.” Imagine a time without cable TV as you know it, where the Big 3 networks rule. NBC, ABC, CBS. Nothing else matters. There are smaller local stations that play game shows, talk shows, and the reruns of the Big 3 shows. You have HBO in there, but it plays movies that were released in theaters a few years ago (“Home Box Office,” get it?). CNN has just started (1980) and Showtime comes along in 1983. So, cable is basically one station trying to fill 24 hours with news every day and a couple of channels playing movies you’ve already seen. The Big 3 networks were where it was at. And you had to watch the shows when they aired. Recording shows on videotape on your VCR was pretty new, and unless you were good with the VCR timer, it was a virtually useless way to catch your favorite show if you were away from your TV that night. No, this was “appointment television.” You’ve heard that term. So, appointment television and no Internet. Yeah, can you imagine? No 500 channels on cable and no Internet. (Whatever would you do with yourself if you were dropped into 1982 right now?)
OK. No Internet, a few cable channels, and video games were super basic; you went to an arcade if you wanted to play video games. It was the Big 3 networks. That was it. The Big 3 and the movie theaters. So think about it; if you were an actor on a TV show on one of the Big 3, you were IT. People would rush home from work to catch the show that everyone was going to talk about in the office the next day. You miss the show and you are not part of the conversation tomorrow. No watching an episode on your DVR or binging on the whole season later on Netflix. There was none of that. So, people would not miss their favorite show. They would watch it when it aired. That’s weird now. I mean now, I don’t know what nights or times my favorite shows are on. Do you? My DVR just grabs them or I find them online later. But back then, everyone made sure they were in front of that TV when the shows aired.
Let’s do the math. That translated into an average of 26 million people watching any one of the top three or four TV shows during the 1980s. Every single week. Think about this: the top TV show right now has numbers that would have had it cancelled after its first episode had it aired in the ’80s. “Ratings” tell you the percentage of people who had your show on, out of ALL the people who own a TV. The TVs that are turned on and the TVs that are off that
