Eating myself to death in the age of netflix (my couch sees more of my ass than grindr does which is saying something) #anxiousdepressionbingetelevisionandyou

I dont know if I would be diagnosed by a professional as an emotional eater but there's definitely something that goes beyond nourishment in my habits. I eat to 'cosy' (as a verb), to fill the spaces of a room in a house that's a home, allegedly. To fill space where I otherwise feel I am not enough without the literal 'filler', that hackneyed adage of filling inner emptiness; but it's more than that. I eat to substantiate the otherwise void-ish pock-marked streaming of time, a current which passes sometimes without that immaculate feeling of completion, passing without that feeling of being airtight. Like to be anxious, to have cloudy thoughts and the inevitable sinking of the stomach which comes with dire thinking; those things take chunks out of the passing of time, create vacancies which I need to retroactively fill by eating, in proportion to the negative-strength of the thought and the damage done (which I alone can intuit; there is no objective measure for this devastation, only the lingering sense of things not being right).

Having the television on while I eat isn't the purview of the lonely, because I live with flatmates AND a loving partner. No, it's definitely more than this. If there's anything it's resonant with it's David Cronenberg's gestures in his movie Videodrome, namely the idea of staging cultural repatriation of the homeless with shelters that specifically cater to each transient's lack of televisual access. In the movie there's something hammy about cathode rays specifically, the then current television technology; like this fed a neural function directly, an empirical hokey-science McGuffin to better persuade audiences of the outlandish mind-control possibilities the movie explores (still outlandish even now after CIA papers were declassified detailing every lurid and very real MK Ultra experiment, no longer explosive speculation of the paranoid but after careful disclosure somehow just banal fact; go figure).

Obviously we've come a ways since cathode rays, we have LED and whatever is coming after LED blah blah blah. There's 4K whatever that is and HD, and Ultra HD which I think is less cutting edge than 4K. Anyway, the point is that the connection between comprehension of culture and a phylogenetic assimilation of cultural tenets and credos is not reliant on the tech. It's the memes themselves, it's language itself which inseminates the mind, which then seeds physical responses in the nervous system, which persuades the body to facilitate new forms, to bloom discordancies like cancers.

Videodrome got it half right.

But what do I know; maybe there does exist a frequency or tech which can emit instant mind-shaping rays or emanations. Like in Joss Weldon's Doll House.

Everything comes back to media, to television shows or memes or movies, their mythos and pathos shaping my sense of self, allowing me to even negatively locate myself in this miasma of warring pre-existing territories both internal and external. And I find myself taking comfort in eating in front of the television because, like in Videodrome, the food gives me a literal prop for what the images are doing. I am nourishing and strengthening myself, I am eating products of a certain world, this one, which will bolster my presence in it. Memes and cultural artefacts are metabolised by that part of myself which is member to a network of precepts, which collectively generate this sense of reality, life, society; it's the wider consensus, the great Jungian mesh which is living, responsive, and yet tirelessly normative in that it takes vital shape by a sort of passive majority rule (unconscious is the word). The minority report is a surplus, an excess. An unthreatening speck.

That 'surplus speck' is reified in the canon of underground, liminal, Avantgarde, where it's either starved into non-existence or brought back later on once the whole can assimilate it's code (so long as the functionality of the majority-construct isn't too disrupted, which it never is).

This is what it means to eat the spirit, partake of the sacrament of the flesh and blood of the lamb. Eat the sign. That is why I eat in front of the television.

Because it is godly, Eucharistic in it's implications. Sign becoming matter, of word becoming flesh. Episodes of Netflix's Chilling Adventures of Sabrina (in my opinion superior to Riverdale which it shares a universe with) transcending it's commercial and even technological confines as I partake of ramen and corn-chips and bags of microwave popcorn. These things inhabiting the same sacred function as those little wafers and sour red wine at mass.

Whatever is on screen I take into the spoonful of ice cream or mouthful of pizza and then of course into myself, assimilating the mythos and pathos of an adolescent devil worshipper who just wants to straddle the mortal and immortal world equally, aspecting with Emily as she takes Paris, physically invoking the True North and the first scintillating signs that winter has finally come. All through otherwise plain foodstuffs made profoundly substantial through the magic of story (which as magics go apparently isn't strong enough to remedy acid reflux).

Mea Culpa.

PARIS FUCKING HILTON; some thoughts on recent doco This Is Paris

I don't know what I was expecting starting the Paris Hilton documentary, whose release seems tone fucking death in this the absolute year zero of American empire. White fragility during a major overhaul of our structural racial prejudices? Or at least on paper this seems like an audacious move.

But actually watching it, expecting to find very little which would resonate with me, expecting to see nothing at all to identify with (because what common factors exist between the lives of a low earning brown gay guy and a hyper-affluent Caucasian heiress, respectively?); yeah, watching it I was more than surprised. By the end I was pretty much gobsmacked, crying, put into a melancholic and meditative mood processing anything from the markedly different expectations we have of male celebrity versus female celebrity, processing how desire speaks with traumas held in the body by which our wants are subsequently shaped and moulded, thinking about how ambition can often be an armouring against a world we perceive to be threatening. The documentary left me thinking about all of these things, and more. As good documentaries should.

A solid entry acts as a provocation, starting with the smallest aperture and expanding with persuasive realism, planting it's subject in universal themes. Which is technically also a strategy for broadening potential audiences and subsequently adding to the value of your product. But in this Netflix era are there any storytelling conventions unmarred by the minimising of profit logistics?

Anyway, the 'universal' themes of trauma in This Is Paris got me thinking; maybe rich people are just scared, like the rest of us. Which doesn't excuse the frequently bigoted conservatism that comes with wealth, the partitioning of themselves as a class from the labouring majority. Nothing ever excuses class violence. But Paris did get me thinking . . .

Obviously it's hard for me to sympathise with very wealthy people, and I know that seems ratchet; like, they're human beings too. It's just the struggles of highly 'successful' people (if being born into established lineages of inherited wealth is considered a moo-point in the category of success) are alienating, unrelatable because those 'struggles' often entail making difficult decisions around the handling of enormous resources the likes of which normal people will never see; let alone divvy up among tiers of a 'self-made' empire.

Nostalgia is very similar to dreaming, in as much as nostalgia locates and territorialises artefacts belonging to a certain time and place, characterised by a feeling. The similarity here is that dreams, their objects and settings, are rendered in a subjectivity unique to the dreamer; subsequently, their legitimate translation is almost impossible. Note I say translation and not decipherment, the possibility of the latter having been long assimilated within a pop-psychology zeitgeist thanks to Freud and Jung.

Paris Hilton represents a nostalgia for me, and it's one I find latching onto me and dragging me back to a whole memory-canon with more and more violence the older I get. It's that early to mid noughties era which isn't so unusual seeing as it was then that Paris first bloomed into mega stardom crested by a few good PR decisions around a leaked sex tape and a resulting reality-television series. With the effervescent Nicole Ritchie, who I still think is more charismatic than Paris. Maybe she's not 'more' charismatic; maybe the essence of what makes Nicole Ritchie watchable is just different. Anyway, in the interim many of Paris's celebrity practices, micro documentation to reality-television self-exposures and lucrative omniscient branding, have become not just a standard for the famous but arguably a measure by which everyday people live their lives, plugged in as we are to the carnivalesque panopticon of social media. The gaze of celebrity has moulded itself to the civilian, piggybacking the anxieties of a post-9/11 world which was already gestating and experimenting with invasive surveillance methods. Reality television is perhaps a concomitant and disingenuously benign symptom of this surveillance aesthetic, by way of which the latter was normalised practically overnight.

Carrying all these impressions for me in a conveniently self-minimised bundle of Paris-ness is Paris Hilton; and it's come to my attention, after seeing her documentary, that she perhaps enigmatically signifies similarly discordant themes (as a meme, as an idol) to the wider public. It's not just me that can't look away when she appears on my feed, or when I rewatch episodes of The Simple Life to see if her face is as quietly transfixing as it was back then; maybe even more so now because of it's waxen quality, what with being preserved in numerous difficult-to-pronounce unguents and drawn tighter than dick-skin with the surgeon's knife. Oh no. In fact, I suspect her appeal resides not just in the glorification of conspicuous consumption which Hilton and her ilk have come to signify as per a more conventional celebrity party-line (Kardashians, rappers and semi-professional bombshells etc), but most probably consists in large of a sort of po-faced dystopian mystique; the beautiful face of our demise, the siren with the scythe. The first symptom of a societal self harm which is equal to collective psychosis.

Because that's the takeaway from the documentary; that Hilton invented the vapid Paris avatar not simply as a means towards a marketable persona with which she could launch a bunch of product lines, but as a trauma response from a bad time she had in a 'troubled teen' boot camp her parents sent her to in Utah. We're given the gist of Paris's time at this facility in various animated flashbacks, and afterwards we're left with what's obviously meant to be something revelatory about Paris's authenticity, a notion of her at odds with the carefree and constantly partying bimbo which she's framed herself as for almost two decades. And yet there's something disingenuous about it which may or may not be the residual suspicion savvier audiences had ages ago that the Paris phenomenon was more constructed than we'd been lead to believe (not a stretch in itself; most pop artefacts are painstakingly manufactured).

And now the disclaimer.

What's somewhat off-putting about Paris's turn here is that in the midst of conversations about social media, how the compulsive documentation of oneself is something of a Hilton legacy, there's the uncanny feeling that Paris is simply updating the brand, giving it necessary depth only because the commercial barometer is suddenly pointing in a more woke direction. Thus the dissonance. If anything it resembles the most recent Netflix-Gaga collaboration Five-Foot Two, in which Gaga does a similar penance, alleging to dismantle her own artifice and give her adoring public a more candid glimpse into her life as she records her 'realest' record to date, Joanne (which is only 'real' aesthetically, in as much as it opts for country riffs over the usual electronic bells and whistles).

And yet like a fungi, like some bacterial culture beneath the costume and the suit, there's this impenetrability; perhaps the posturing of celebrities who are too far gone in their avatars, too used to fabricating human responses to properly expose themselves. Instead of actual 'realness' (whatever that is) we get a packaged version, 'real' as a performative affect. The marketable notion of realness only as a proportionate contrast to an existing brand's theatricality. It makes of Paris and her ilk sort of spiritual actors, like damned souls. The kind of profound loss of self that a real actor will arguably never know because it's always the other they're asked to enlarge, and not luciferic distortions of themselves. A written character who normal actors are lending their bodies and voices will rarely consume them like a warp-self might (despite David Lynch's contrary thesis; see Mulholland Drive and Inland Empire).

Gorgeous duplicity. That's what Paris Hilton represents to me now. The lucrative appeal of a life of lies, like a candy-coloured hyper-femme varietal of the espionage career otherwise demonstrated as aggressively masculine (spartan-miserable in John Le Carre, affluent-consumerist in Fleming). Her face hides both the collapse of the public sector crystallising in the impetus to self-objectify as the only means of salvaging a living from a collapsed economy, and also the airbrushed subterfuge of consumer society as a whole; pulled tight and painted seamlessly to hide the wrinkles, to hide the inordinate rot which the whole destructive-productive apparatus not only generates as a by-product, but arguably thrives on. I'm obviously becoming mythic and florid in my framing of a celluloid airhead now but perhaps the assumption of the banality of celebrity is a mistake; if Jung were alive he'd tell you about the magical thinking that orbits our investment in celebrities. And in this way, with A to D listers being member to a heirarchic pantheon of exemplar supermen, we can maybe position Paris Hilton as a figure of anachronistic femininity (a goddess of antiquity), nostalgic not just for being a synthetic artefact of the early noughties, but also as a surviving remnant of pre-feminist prescriptions for ideal female presentation and behaviour. A contemporary-aristocratic fantasy of the perfect woman.

Soft. Ageless. Utterly infantalised, sexualised, and finally canonised as the highest measure of womanhood. Even in the midst of 'wokeness' we are apparently not done with a collective appetite for The Marilyn. All she needs is a trauma and then presto; the new criteria of empowered female with a mind to reparative justice is met, though she remains a grossly entitled heiress whose primary concern always is branding. I think it's incredibly distasteful to be asking audiences to sympathise with an impossibly wealthy white woman in this, a time of such gruelling overhaul in which most people find themselves fully or potentially slippng through the cracks; if only because the ground has literally opened up beneath them.

I would sooner sympathise with the leader of North Korea.

I'm not saying that the rich don't share in a common humanity; of course they do. But the symbolic value of wealth in terms of discourse cannot be minimised. It's generally symptomatic of prejudicial distribution of resources (even if you consider it 'hard earned'), and most (maybe all) conversations around wealth right now should be primed for utopian builds, not ignored as the ambience of celebrity-in-confession. A confession which somehow justifies the broken systems by which that wealth was accumulated in the first place. It doesn't, bitch. And blinding audiences to the inherent cruelty of those systems by rendering someone who is so clearly not a victim, as a victim, takes up space where actual victims seeking empowerment through clarity might otherwise have a platform. Save the sob story for your weekly heiress-brunch sweetie.