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Boo! by Pat W 10.03.11 MONSTER THEORY
The new gothic horror: Madness and mystery in celebrity tabloid culture « The Teeming Brain
"… This kind of neo-gothic tabloidism seemed to spike right after the death of Anna Nicole Smith in early 2007 — a starlet who, up until the moment of her demise, was a more traditional kind of horror show. In the same month, Britney had checked herself out of rehab, walked into a hair salon in Tarzana, Calif., and shaved off all her hair. By then it was clear that we were all participating in some kind of weird gothic metanarrative in which the celebrities were cast as monsters and the rest of us were standing around holding pitchforks or, at least, rolled-up copies of Us Weekly."
link source: wordpress.com »
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The essay appeared on September 2 at the Times website under the title “Tabloid Trainwrecks are Reinventing Gothic Literature.” It also appeared in the paper’s Sunday Magazine as “The Tragic Heroes and Doomed Heroines in Our Collective Tales of Terror.” Its thesis is that our collective obsession with the nutty, twisted antics of the celebrities who populate our modern media landscape — and by “our” I’m assuming the writer, media critic Carina Chocano, is referring mainly to current American and British culture — is a contemporary expression of the same psychological impulse that underlies the popularity of the classic gothic fantasies written by the likes of Ann Radcliffe, Matthew Lewis, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Summaries of the unspooling celebrity meltdowns and crises reported (created) in the tabloid media recall the standard plots and themes of these older stories, right down to the fact of sounding the same tropes of tragic…
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