In Voltaire’s Bastards, J.R. Saul analyses how the mortal inkling to stifle divinity and demote the Creator bolstered the earthly race to perfect the image, leading us to the present point.
The enthrallment with celebrity has brought us to a whole new state of mindlessness, no doubt. Sometimes, this frantic quest for renown assumes a perilous turn as was the case, of late, with Tembu Ebere aka Town Cryer.
The comedian, in a recent interview, disclosed that he went ‘partially blind’ for 45 minutes during his attempt to cry for one hundred days and break the Guinness World Record (GWR) or the longest crying marathon ((cry-a-thon) by an individual.
Ebere said he suffered partial blindness after he experienced “headaches, puffy eyes, and a swollen face as he forced himself to cry, in order to set a record.
The Cameroonian skit maker, who is based in Lagos, announced his quest in the wake of Hilda Bassey’s successful outing as the new cooking marathon champion, after dethroning Indian chef, Tata Landon, who set the previous world record of 87 hours, 45 minutes in 2019. The GWR vetted Bassey’s 93 hours, 11 minutes as the new world record.
Ebere is simply one of the curious characters that crawled through the womb-wall of Nigeria’s vanity complex, in the wake of Bassey’s feat.
The astronomical rise in attempts to set new world records spanning frivolous feats – from the longest kissing hours (kiss-a-thon) and massage sessions to the longest crying marathon (cry-a-thon) among others – prompted the GWR to react via a tweet, asking that Nigerians must first apply and have it confirmed by its team before attempting to set any record.
As Nigerians hustle to outdo each other at breaking and setting frivolous records, the nagging question persists: “To what end?”Yet the hustle persists as more youths commit their imagination and passion to extreme and featherbrained quests.
Thus this minute, conversation degenerates into mere gossip and heartfelt dreams manifest as perfections of perversion across the social and mainstream media. Everybody is a sucker for celebrity; everybody wants to be “high society.”
The current enchantment with renown has assumed a worrisome dimension. It is the stalest repetition; public lust for celebrity provokes worry – you begin to wonder why too much passion is squandered in pursuit of too little substance.
The hankering for renown spirals across social platforms and pervades the public arena, insignificant as the spores of the toadstool yet impinging on the surface of the Nigerian mind, poisoning it, till it becomes not much in expression and thought. Superfluity meets superfluity; when our lives cease to be inward and contemplative, dreams manifest as perversions, interaction degenerates to mere tittle-tattle and society relapses to the filthiest of averages.
The interaction between the public arena and the celebrity hopeful channels primal fantasy even as it skirts the borders of a business transaction. The result ultimately manifests in celebrity or the flipside of renown.
Nonetheless, the proverbial 15 minutes of fame thrive by the same tired artifice, the same choreographed ruse, the endless denials of lust by fame junkies that never seem to peter out.
The hustle thrives by vintage artifice. It is a stylised ritual. Everyone is part of the con – celebrity hustlers and the audience. Together, they perpetrate a public pantomime of pain, and a fervent yearning to get one up the system perceived to have denied them so much – and given too much to the devious band constituting the political and business class.
Any story of an individual breakthrough is welcome as a hard-earned retaliation against the system. The jazzy, sensational backstory of each emergent celebrity is what drives the mob to a frenzy.
And the most powerful narrative of today, the most potent story across Nigeria, is one of bankruptcy and impoverishment; it is one of enslavement of a desperate and abused working class to a heartless employer and political class.
Through the burning banality of it all, many immerse in the illusions of the arena, and embrace whatever delusions make it easier to live their reality or pervert it to their whims. For most, succour subsists in the belief that however bitter their reality, the illusions of renown will dull its pangs.
Yet every celebrity is a media creation. While some may be deserving of the exaltation liberally accorded them, not a few are undeserving of the hero worship they enjoy and so desperately seek. It is hardly the fault of the celebrity, however, that the press and society, in general, have chosen to accord them immeasurable hero worship despite their glaring deficiencies.
It takes more than lust and newsworthiness to create a celebrity. The vast, interlocking web of resources and institutions involved in creating and maintaining a single celebrity is astounding. From media outlets to fan clubs and agents, from media products to gossip columnists, a celebrity is never solitary, but often the result of hundreds of backstage orchestrations.
It is even all the more disturbing to watch our fascination with celebrity gossip slide into precisely the kind of ruthless pursuit of its subject to which we claim to be ostensibly opposed. Despite the evils of an inordinate hankering for fame, the addicted gladly explain their obsession away as some kind of virtuous curiosity.
There is no such thing as virtuous curiosity. In respect of the subject matter, our interest often does violence to its object. On the flip side, it leaves the society stuck in a revolving cycle of spectatorship that believes in its own virtue even as it corrupts itself – a perfect representation of Jacqueline Rose’s “perverting of curiosity in motion.”
And even our so-called superstars have learnt to profit albeit fraudulently from society’s perverse curiosities about their affairs. From Chaucer’s early poem, “The House of Fame,” whose hero-poet wrestles with the fame bestowed on him by society to Martin Scorcese’s film, King of Comedy, in which an amateur comedian jokes to a national television audience that it is “better to be king for a night, than schmuck for a lifetime!” celebrity worship continues to fester.
Even amid skyrocketing inflation, financial ruin, and insecurity, the obsession with celebrity thrives by the junkie’s smirking depravity and the sudden melting of inhibitions of the Nigerian public. It’s like the holocaust and the apocalypse.
Society stands at ground zero, incinerated by external and internal invaders. The press, on its part, plays a pimping pawn; by constantly lending its platforms as channels to solicit secondary pawns comprising celebrity hopefuls cum fortune hunters, eager to do anything to achieve renown.
Such characters simply cheat themselves of a learning experience; they circumvent a slow, steady, educative path to acclaim, to self-intoxicate in accidental celebrity. Unknown to them, the instant fame and opportunities in which they luxuriate are merely flash currents in the electric moment before lightning strikes, and they are reduced to rubble: celebs, glitter and all.
A glance behind the glitter usually reveals something more than a colourful paradise. It invalidates the deceptions of fame and instant wealth. It is akin to what Saul Bellow likened to picking up a dangerous wire fatal to ordinary folk or rattlesnakes handled by hillbillies in a state of religious exaltation, in his novel, Humboldt’s Gift.
Many who grasped these super-charged wires and serpents have been found to incandesce in acclaim for a little while, and then they wink out, which leads to a more profound suspicion of celebrity.
