by Geoff Olson

Greed drives the desire for profit at any cost. Envy is a mainstay of the fashion industry, and marketing as a whole. Anger is subtly exploited in the Army of One fantasies of video games and recruitment advertisements. Pride fuels the “high self-esteem” bandwagon. In the era of hypercapitalism, these and most of the other so-called deadly sins have been rehabilitated by the market as positive, even praiseworthy, states of mind. “Sin” has been spun. Hence, what I call The Deadly Spins.

Every time a friend succeeds, a little something in me dies.
– Gore Vidal

In the middle ages, the corrosive emotion of envy was an obvious choice for Pope Gregory’s list of seven deadly sins. Yet it is qualitatively different from the other scourges of the spirit. Unlike anger, pride, lust, gluttony, greed, or sloth, envy never gives the illusion of short-term pleasure. From the moment it starts, envy only brings anguish and sorrow.
We are flooded daily with mass media images of beautiful people having expensive fun in magnificent surroundings. Of all the Deadly Spins – desires once considered sins and now spun into beneficent forces by modern marketers – envy moves the most product. The nagging sense of not measuring up to the super-beautiful, super-rich standard set by popular culture festers away under the collective consciousness like an unlanced boil, driving us into the market for some fashionable fix.
The disease has even inflamed modern relationships. A study conducted recently on the dating preferences of men and women found that the expected minimum for physical beauty has risen over the past two decades. Younger generations expect more in a partner in terms of appearance.
Is this because of all the perfectly symmetrical faces, with their indices of glowing genetic health, staring out at us seductively from magazine racks and TVs, or projected to godlike dimensions on the movie screen? The authors of the study suggest this is indeed the case. The multiplication of these media images means there are greater numbers of young men and women who will no longer accept “average” looks. They want to re-imagine themselves as desirable hotties – and if they sometimes doubt they meet the pop culture gold standard themselves, they can at least demand this bar is reached by a partner.
What animates this attitude isn’t so much beauty per se, as the fact that the famous are generally much better looking than the non-famous. The train is fame; movie-star looks are the caboose. On the popular singles website nerve.com, dating singles get to respond to the category, “what celebrity I resemble the most.” Respondents offer “Meg Ryan type,” “Russell Crowe look-alike,” and the occasional modest comparison to a lesser star not considered conventionally beautiful. Celebrity is increasingly the baseline comparison for ourselves and others.
The envy industry is everywhere these days, but one area of the world stands out. According to Salon contributor Cintra Wilson, the event horizon of this spiritual black hole is found in Los Angeles, and the singularity where reality ceases entirely is Hollywood. Wilson is arguably the most savage critic of the celebrity-seeking mindset. Her book A Massive Swelling is subtitled Celebrity Re-Examined As a Grotesque, Crippling Disease, and it effectively eviscerates the Californication of the North American self-concept, along with the “kind of screaming pink self-loathing that burns supersonically through all psyches in LA like a dated racing stripe.”
Wilson moved to Los Angeles in 1995, with the intent to creatively carve out another aperture in its commodified culture. “What better place to go than a city that orchestrates all the attitudes I hate the most about the American mentality?” she wrote. “I thought I would fiddle like Nero with my nourishing little artistic pursuits while Babylon burned.”
What she discovered was a city so consumed by envy that its adherents are sometimes literally disabled by it. In one passage, she describes the most relentlessly self-advancing among the LA acting set: Hollywood extras.
“These types of actors are also the people who will go horribly crazy if somebody they know, or vaguely know, gets famous. They have to take to their beds, it’s that bad, their lives are over, they are in Hell. They sink into a self-loathing depression that lasts years, and it’s all they can think about: “That fucking bitch is famous and I’m not?!? God loves Hitler more than he loves ME!!!”
The deadly spin of envy is fed by the sense of entitlement that runs rampant through the US mindset, according to Wilson. “If a person in this day and age has two cents’ worth of talent, it is considered his sacred obligation to Go for the Gold, or try and grab the big brass monkey ring, and otherwise make six to ten demoralizing career-and-connection-oriented phone calls a day, perform painful Top 40 hits at all the high-school graduations and bar mitzvahs, pay hundreds of dollars for eight by ten photographs of themselves looking like sexually available newscasters, and audition with seething positive energy for every Exlax commercial that comes down the pike, until the day that the opportunity for Fame reveals itself like a pinpoint of light down the throat of a large python.”
This doesn’t just hold in the entertainment profession. The LA zeitgeist has been packaged, shrink-wrapped, and stamped for export to the rest of the US, and the world beyond. Once the box is opened, the contents skitters away like the face-sucking critter in Alien, dripping acid on every field of endeavour, from journalism to science.
I once received an invitation by a media figure in Vancouver to attend a lunch hour gathering of successful artists, writers and musicians. I attended a few times, but the vibe was all wrong. The chumminess felt disingenuous. At one of these lunches, the host leaned over and told me in a hushed voice the reason for my invite: “you never know who’s going to be famous next.” The invite apparently had little to do with my work. It was about the buzz that was beginning to attend my name. Unfortunately for the collector of soon-to-be-celebs, whatever local buzz I had failed to rise into the air-raid siren of national fame.
This brings us to the ambivalence that celebrity feeds. We both love and hate celebrities, precisely for having all the things we don’t, chief among them the constant attention of millions. So we like nothing more than demonstrations that the famous are just like us, or worse. Yet the nimbus of really big-money celebrity comes without a dimmer switch; it can’t be turned off. No matter how nutty Marlon Brando got in his old age, he hung on to his cachet. Bob Dylan can turn out any old piece of recorded crap, but he will always be the primal beatnik from Greenwich Village. And in the course of a career suicide, the megawattage of fame may even brighten into full-on infamy, which is even more blinding. Robert Downey Jr.’s successive attempts at druggy self-sabotage did not remove him from the Hollywood A-List (at least not until he was actually jailed and unavailable). In LA, a chemical dependency or some other spectacularly bad behaviour is not a source of disapproval from polite society, as it would be for the rest of us. It’s the source of a book contract, or a series of teary “I’m-a-victim-too” appearances on Oprah or Barbara Walters.
“The implication of Fame in this value-warped society is: you’ve made it,” writes Wilson in A Massive Swelling. “You and your talents are so bright, you are somehow physically and spiritually light-years beyond all us bone-sucking hacks. I yowl in disgust at this bias.” The acidic author counsels against thinking of fame as some glorious blessing bestowed on the lucky few, who then demand our fealty. “Let us not worship these people, for it is like bowing down to a two-headed calf: unholy and weird.”

Vancouver writer and political cartoonist Geoff Olson can be reached at gefo@telus.net