Hooray for Hollywood Narcissists

Where the self-regard of the famous collides with the press that exists to inflate it — to the lasting embarrassment of everyone involved.

Hollywood runs two industries, not one. The first manufactures the star — a person whose gift for convincingly pretending to be other people has gradually persuaded them that they are uniquely, urgently qualified to be themselves at the rest of us. The second is the international press that exists to inflate the first, reporting each act of self-regard with a breathless gravity it would deny an actual war. Put the two in a room and they produce a spectacle that embarrasses everyone present and several million watching. The blade here aims at the narcissism and the machine that amplifies it — never at the craft of acting, and never at anyone's politics.

The Humanitarian

There is a star who discovers a grave global cause at the precise moment a film requires publicity, and flies eleven thousand miles by private jet to a climate summit to share their concern. The press reports the journey as commitment, the jet as an inconvenience nobly borne, and the cause as fortunate to have them.

The verdict: The carbon footprint of the flight exceeded that of everyone the speech asked to drive less — but the speech was very moving, and the speech is what gets covered.

The Suffering Artist

There is an actor who gained or lost forty pounds for a role and will not permit the conversation to move on from it. The diet is recounted as an ordeal rivaling the events of the film itself, the hunger described in the cadence of the genuinely persecuted. The press supplies the word 'brave' — a word it has quietly retired from use on soldiers.

The verdict: He pretended to be a man who suffered, suffered slightly in the pretending, and now requires that the suffering be the story — which, dutifully, it becomes.

The Acceptance Lecture

There is a performer granted ninety seconds of the planet's attention — for the achievement of convincingly pretending to be someone else — who elects to spend it instructing the world on a geopolitical crisis absorbed from a single documentary on the flight over. The room, composed of people professionally terrified of appearing to disagree, rises as one.

The verdict: Nowhere on earth is a less-informed opinion delivered to a larger audience to a more thunderous ovation, and the morning's headlines call it courage.

The Apology

There is a celebrity who issues a long, beautifully-lit apology for an offense no one had quite registered, emerging from it as the principal victim of their own scandal. It trends for a day. The press analyzes the lighting, the wardrobe, and the 'vulnerability' — and never the apology's curious absence of an injured party.

The verdict: It is the only species of apology engineered to leave the apologizer better-loved than before the thing they are sorry for, and it works, because the coverage was always the point.

The Relatable Billionaire

There is a star who insists, from the rail of the third yacht, that they are fundamentally just like you — they too know struggle, they too once waited tables, in a year referenced as though it were a war they barely survived. The press, reporting from the dock, agrees that the relatability is remarkable.

The verdict: Nothing signals the distance from ordinary life quite like the strenuous, well-publicized insistence that there is no distance at all.

The Method

There is an actor who remained in character for the entire duration of a shoot, making the work miserable for every electrician and caterer in his orbit, and who recounts the misery he inflicted as the chief evidence of his seriousness. He is profiled, reverently, for it.

The verdict: He has confused being difficult with being committed, and an entire press corps has agreed to confuse it along with him — because the alternative is a less interesting profile.

The Wellness Empire

There is a star who will sell you a candle for two hundred dollars, a jade regimen of no detectable mechanism, and a cure the relevant authorities describe in cautious legal language. The press covers all of it as a 'lifestyle brand' — a phrase doing the load-bearing work of not saying the other phrase.

The verdict: The genius is not the product, which does nothing; it is the discovery that fame can be decanted, at markup, into a jar, and that the coverage will arrive for free.

The Feud

There are two stars conducting a vicious quarrel by cryptic post, each fan army scrambled to defend a principal who will not name the offense. The international media live-blogs every syllable, assigning to a dispute over a seating chart the analytical resources of a hostage negotiation.

The verdict: Two people who require the world's attention discovered that the fastest way to summon it is to deny each other's importance, loudly, in public, forever.

The Redemption Arc

There is a celebrity who sits for the raw, honest, exquisitely-timed magazine confessional in which past sins are reclassified as a 'journey' — timed to within a fortnight of a project that needs the sympathy. The press provides the word 'comeback' and pretends, along with everyone, not to see the calendar.

The verdict: Sin, in this town, is not a debt to be paid but a raw material to be processed, and the press runs the refinery.

The Helplessness

There is a star who cannot open a door, carry a bag, or hold their own phone, having attained an importance that requires a salaried human for each function — and who regards this comprehensive incapacity not as a worry but as a résumé.

The verdict: At the summit of human achievement, it turns out, sits a person who has arranged to be unable to do anything at all — and a press that files the arrangement under 'success.'

Here is the part the coverage never covers: the machine cannot run on the narcissist alone. It takes the second industry — the outlet that reports a brunch order as breaking news, the correspondent who asks the yacht-dweller about hardship with a straight face, the headline that supplies 'brave' and 'courage' and 'journey' precisely on cue. The star manufactures the self-importance; the press manufactures the importance; and the two of them, locked in their long and fond collaboration, produce a spectacle that diminishes everyone it touches — the watched, the watchers, and most of all the millions who tuned in to feel, for ninety seconds, that this was news. Hooray for Hollywood.