The reason this question occurred to me was that a very common recurrnig motif in biographies and film-biographies of pop-culture heroes is the out-of-control turbulence that propells them onto stardom.
Again and again in all these popstar/rockstar bios, you run into the image of the agonized star, who starts to hate and despise his/her own stardom very quickly upon attaining that status. And yet, most of them start off by desiring stardom and recognition with all their might. But somewhere along the line, as they attain the longed-for status, they become disillusioned. This always happens once they realise that they’ve become stars for reasons entirely external to themselves, almost despite of themselves; and as they start feeling trapped in a position where they are obliged to provide the audience with what it wants. However, what the audience wants of them is not what they wanted to give (or be wanted for).
It is this sense of success-beyond-control that later drives popstars to all sorts of suicidal behaviors – frustration, depression, lashing out sprees, trashing hotel rooms, substance abuse – if not to suicide proper.
Seeing that these suicides are recurrent, they go beyond the individual circumstances of the Jim Morrisons, Kurt Cobains, Ian Curtises, etc. (and yes, here I assume that the sense of no control that drove these pop-culture success-stories to suicide is sth more than just a recurrent theme in the representation of popstar lives by various authors, i.e. I assume that the motif of the suicidal popstar is not just in the eye of the beholder, that it is a phenomena and not just an image). Therefore, we would be justified in looking for societal or systemic – structural – forces behind these suicides.
What would such a theory of pop-culture, out-of-control (anomic?) stardom suicides consist of?
Yes, Durkheim is probably going to be somewhere in the mix; can’t have a theory of suicide without your Durkheim;
But there’s also likely to be a Gramscian angle – the co-optation of subversive and creative elements by ‘the System’;
There’s gonna be some Adorno and Frankfurt School in there, too – the Star System…
I have to re-read some of this stuff, I’m not sure whether Adorno actually makes reference to suicide as part of the mechanisms that keeps the Star System going… he should have, anyway... cos nothing makes star-status more official than suicide, or at least a mysterious/equivocal/controversial death... and so, even (or especially) in their deaths, popstars promote sales and media distribution companies’ revenues, and thereby contribute or even constitute the complex system of celebrity-hierarchies, special collectors’ edition releases of rare presuicide recordings etc. etc.;
Probably some Barthes and the impossibility of true authorship could also explicate where the frustrations of pop-culture icons come from;
And definitely some Luhmann to round up the list – with his Ø-agency Systems Theory and the System’s voracious appetite for variability.
Seemingly unrelated – Czech TV made a courageous decision to air all of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah on the 70th anniversery of the Kristallnacht, on Sunday November 9th. Not only was this film likely to deter 99.9% of any potential viewers, but broadcasting it at one go also meant foregoing any commercial breaks for a time slot of more than 9 (!) hrs.
Now that I’ve watched this film again (we made it till about half past midnight, which is… about 7 ½ hrs through the whole thing), I realised that when I had first seen this film (I was about 15yrs old or so), and then when I’d read the transcripts about a year or two later, I probably completely misunderstood what it was trying to do/say.
Back then, I took this horrifying documentary on face value, i.e. as a film that was trying to recapture and represent the horrors of the holocaust by using testimonials, that is, to show the viewer what really happened, with testimonials of livings witnesses ensuring that the representation was as authentic as possible.
What I now realise is that another and by-far more important facet of this film is that it attempts to capture and represent how people (mostly people in Poland, but also in Israel, Germany etc.) perceived the holocaust in the 1980s. That is, to represent how the people who actually lived through the holocaust registered the events in their memories, and how they related them to the camera. Which is far more scary and terrible than “simply” attempting to represent the holocaust itself (an artistic goal that would have been futile, and which Lanzmann explicitly admitted was not his objective). One of the scariest moments in the film is when a Polish Jew (Simon Srebnik), one of the only two survivors from the extermination camp in Chelmno, stands among a throng of Sunday church-goers in this little Polish town.
He stares at the camera, speechless, as the people who openly testify to recognizing and remembering him from the war years start churning out the repetitive melody sung by most of the Poles in the film: the Jews somehow knew what would happen to them, they were somehow aware of what awaits them at the end of the train journey to the death camps. In other words, they knew it was coming, but still they did nothing - so in a way, they themselves are actually responsible for what happened. Their destruction was ineluctable, and they in fact embraced it. THIS is what’s really scary about the film – the way Poles (and a few Germans) explain the inexplicable, how they make sense out of what makes no sense. Is it a way of justifying why they never tried to help out anyone or resist? Is it a way of vindicating themselves after they took over their Jewish neighbors’ homes and property?
The Sonderkommando members who give testimonies in the film also reiterate a similar drugged-out, almost comatose perspective; perhaps not so much a feeling that their friends, relatives and co-religionists who got off the train knew where they were headed; but certainly a sense of things happening beyond their control and beyond the possibility of any intervention. It is the testimony of clogs in a Doom’s Day machine. Is it a way of quieting their guilty conscience for surviving even though so many people perished?
Another very scary aspect of the holocaust that arises clearly from this film is the total inability to grasp the scope and the extent of the operations involved in the Nazi death machinery. I was especially gripped by this feeling when watching the scenes shot at the sites of the death camps, as well as the scene in which Lanzmann interviews the amazing Raul Hilberg.
Leaving aside all moral considerations, bracketing any sympathy for the victims (and Jews were by no means the sole victims of the Nazi extermination policies) – one still finds it absolutely impossible to imagine how elaborate and overwhelming the whole thing actually was, from a strictly operational, practical point of view.
All those trains picking up “passengers” and taking them to the right destination, for example… can you just imagine an agency that would manage that for over four years in the middle of a world war, transporting hundreds of thousands of people from the Reich to eastern Poland or from god-forsaken tiny towns in White Russia to the Generalgouvernement… ensuring trains had enough coal, death camps had a sufficient supply of amunition and Cyclon B… it was nothing short of first-class Supply-Chain Management, operating in parts of the world where even today, in 2009, you could find it hard to get a train connection or buy a Gillett razor.
Though I hate to admit it, holocaust denial feeds off at least one aspect of what you would call “healthy” skepticism – the simple doubt that anyone could actually establish and successfully manage such an elaborate aparatus that would enable to systematically transport and exterminate 6M Jews. Quite simply, this is the inability to accept, or believe, that anyone could actually pull off such an extensive operation. And if you’ve worked longer than a week in any large organization, you probably know how difficult it is to translate strategy into a clear operating plan, and to turn an operating plan into reality. It sometimes seems that the harder you try to intentionally achieve an organizational goal, the slimmer the chances of actually achieving it. So much resistance, apathy, lack of coordination, errors, oversights, …
And this brings me to the most frightening aspect of the film, as I perceive it today.
Without detracting from the responsibility of the Nazis for the crimes and atrocities that they’ve commited, the film delineates the back-stage, behind-the-curtain side of the holocaust, adumbrating precisely all the forces at work that enabled the Nazis to carry out their plan. The quiet complicity and indifference of the Poles, the extreme and paralysing fear drilled into the Sonderkommandos, the apathy of the lower and middle rank SS members.
These are forces that were at least partially beyond the Nazis’ control or comprehension, forces that they could not have foreseen or taken into consideration in advance. And these forces amounted to nothing less than an army of invisible hands that pushed the 60-wagon long trains to the death camps. And the guiding force behind these invisible hands was people’s consciousness and their ability to comprehend and accept (thereby support and participate) the extermination efforts, to place the events set in motion by the Nazis within the scope of their reality, to tolerate these events as part of the real.
For if all that had driven the holocaust would have been purley intentional Nazi policies consisting (that is, consisted of nothing other than pre-meditated in-control efforts, or pure self-present agency, pure will), the Nazis would have never been so successful in destroying the living fabric of so many communities; they would have never managed to pull it off to such extent.
The success of the Nazi extermination policies (a success that was and remains partial, fortunately) was significantly reliant on the awakening and harnessing of countless individual and group interests, intentions, ambitions, inclinations, but also indifferences and inabilities… the holocaust was the collusion of thousands of wills and unwills that forged what for a period of time became an unstoppable force of destruction. The part played by non-Nazis was not insignificant at all - the non-Nazis were those that pushed the trains along the tracks when they were running low on coal, so to speak. The gaps in the Nazi death machinery that were made by resistence, bureaucratic inefficiency, apathy and so forth, were filled in turn by the willingness of non-Nazis to act and/or to suffer the Nazis to act upon them. I believe that the Nazi extremination policies, since they were more than just a single and isolated occurance, could have only taken place due to a certain allignment or elective affinity with the rest of the (non-Nazi) world. Therefore, I feel that it is justfied to say that these policies were successful in so far as it they were not entirely under control.
