This is the edited version of the final report submitted to the enquiry panel, comprising the key points to be considered when reaching a summary verdict on the catalysts and causes of the tragic events of 19th March 2011 of which we are all aware.
1. Celebrity Culture
Celebrity is the twenty-first century religion. Our deities are on movie screens, on magazine covers and on television. Our day-to-day lives have become increasingly saturated by the warped manifestos, the twisted ideologies of the celebrity and their place in our society. Through escalation it has reached the point where we continue to obsess and wallow in the lives of others without ever even being aware of it anymore; it serves as a reflex, an unpleasant voyeuristic habit. The same voyeuristic habit that gives us cause to peer over neighbours’ fences, or decelerate past road traffic accidents. It is what provokes us to invest such a substantial portion of our waking consciousness in absorbing and soaking up this celebrity maelstrom like affectless sponges.
Whilst many endow themselves with cynicism and a vested sense of superiority to the people they elevate from ‘no-one’ to ‘someone’; we may know them to be no better than the court jester of centuries gone by perhaps; yet still we are magnetised into their orbit with a compulsion that is both unwarranted and reckless. In an era of celebrity dieticians, socialites, businessmen, weather forecasters, property developers, chefs, publicists, farmers, anything, nothing – we reflect a society that has truly begun to depart from the true straits of reality.
If Warhol’s 1968 statement that, ‘in the future everyone will be famous for 15 minutes’ was true for the twentieth century; in the twenty-first it might well be more apt to state that – ‘in the future everyone will be famous for 15 seconds’, since everyone already is famous; everyone can be their own movie star, porn star, sports star, guitar hero, if only they believe it.
However, in the reality TV and internet age there is a proliferation of false idols and ‘vacant celebrities’ – those who achieve their fame and status as a result of doing absolutely nothing of any discernible value. We have become immersed in a never-ending carnival of the desperate and the moronic, where people are encouraged to conform to all others, abuse all self-worth, and surrender all credibility for the reward of fame.
2. Reality Television
At its core, the appeal of the reality talent show and those who willingly participate, is to emulate and aspire towards adulation, the elevation of status and prestige from the doldrums of dull everyday existence to a new plateau of idolatry. The twenty-first century celebrity has aspirations only of celebrity in and of itself; it is seen as an intensely desirable commodity, something that is un-purchasable, un-downloadable, and – so we are led to believe – largely un-achievable.
The shows themselves serve as the factory production line through which ordinary people are processed and reprogrammed, wrangling their meagre ‘talents’ to the world like weary car dealers before being left at the mercy of the baying audience. Reality TV makes an art-form out of idiocy and depravity; the lower the contestant is seen to be willing to sink for audience approval, the greater the adulation, the higher the praise. The glorification of these individuals’ shameless self-promotion and desperation is writ large in bright neon appendage and served up to the public as their ‘comatose entertainment.’
It is my belief that the reason for the popularity of reality TV and talent shows comes down to people’s innate sense of personal repression and of being downtrodden by external governance and by unwelcome forces at work and at home that can serve to erode any individual’s sense of pride, purpose or positive well-being. If this is true then it must explain the incredible capriciousness with which these pseudo-celebrities are forged and then destroyed, often overnight or within the blinking of an eye.
As befits entertainment, humans desire to be witnesses to ritualistic humiliation – going back to the days of gladiatorial Rome or floggings in the street – purely to provide upward momentum to our own sense of dignity and respect that slowly continues to sink in a mire of self-loathing. We love to see tone-deaf victims led to the slaughter of a waiting audience in a singing contest; we love to see people caged and left to fuck and fight one another.
By routing for and attaching ourselves to those individuals who progress somewhat through these competitions, we amplify our love and affection for them; in effect it is the Story of Creation turned on its head – we create the gods out of our own fickle imagery. Since, if you were compelled to scratch beneath the surface, there would be no real worth to these individuals in their guise as ‘celebrities’, there is no basis on which to offer such affection. As such the relationship between ‘celebrity’ and audience is tragically doomed, as we realised with such horror in the events that have since transpired.
As a useful analogy in which to refocus the scenario, envisage the least desirable and most painful relationship situation between two lovers (save for actual physical or mental abuse being inflicted). It would not be uncommon for everyone at some point in their romantic lives to be an unwilling host to a league of anxieties and fears relating to whether or not they are worthy of their partner; whether or not they meet up to their high standards, imaginary or not. This is a breeding ground for paranoia that can work to corrode any and all pre-existing equality in the relationship. Each day that dawns could be the day that he/she decides to leave. Each person to whom they offer a smile could be one they abandon you for.
It is this core paranoia that takes a stranglehold upon each of these talent show ‘contestants’; they can feel the warm glow of the audience’s love and care, but this is precisely because they only bask in it at that very moment. What captures the public imagination today can be cast to the annals of memory by tomorrow; what strikes a chord now can easily be tuned out. It is this clinging sense of abandonment and scorn that I believe triggered the tragic events which shall now be examined in more detail.
3. The Events of 19th March 2011
On the day in question, the victims were in large assembly for a special one-off live broadcast of the reality TV talent show ‘--------‘ which had arrived at the finale of its 4-month-long tenure. An emotional climatic performance had been arranged by the show’s producers which would see the competition winner joined in collaboration by a vast ensemble of the show’s previous contestants who had lost out on the grand prize.
The production team had made allowance for 50-70 of these ‘losing contestants’ to take part in the performance and indeed that is how it proceeded on the night. However, what had not anticipated was the impromptu arrival of up to 200 more people who had also been unlucky participants in previous series of the show dating back up to 4 years hence.
Studio staff have since said to me that before managing to barricade themselves inside the spacious assembly room backstage, all the individuals had a funeral pallor, an ashen-faced quality as though they were being shot in an alternate light to everyone else.
At 8:42pm the 50-70 contestants took part in the song rendition with the series’ winner in front of the judges and live audience. At 8:46pm they began to make their way to the backstage holding area where the 200-or-so others had been waiting, supposedly in something akin to a trance; utterly unresponsive towards those staff members who attempted to enquire as to their motives for being there.
At 8:49pm the staff members and production team were forcibly expelled from the assembly room which was then apprehended for the entirety of the events that followed. The room was re-entered by security staff and members of the Metropolitan Police Force at approximately 9:35pm, where they found the floor strewn with bodies of the recently deceased, numbering 252 in all. Since internal CCTV equipment had been disabled during that time period it is not known precisely the methods that were enforced to carry out the murders, except that every single person was found to have ingested a lethal dose of cyanide poison in capsule form. As no sounds of commotion or resistance were heard by those outside the assembly room it can only be deduced that this was an act of ‘revolutionary suicide’ on a Jonestown-esque scale.
In the anguish that has inevitably ensued in the media it has been all-too-easy to condemn those involved as reckless imitators or, even more flippantly, as ‘sore losers’; but I fear that the reality of their mental well-being was much more severe and are themselves as a whole, largely blameless.
It must be appreciated that each one of these individuals had entered the competition proceedings with an identical lust for fame, attention and adulation from the public which could be deemed unhealthy. Over the varying courses of their time in the limelight they became heroes to many, elevated to false status by the media, and worshipped by fans who had stated themselves as such with the minimum of provocation or cause to warrant it.
Upon their slow but steady demise from the contest, that glorious light was shone elsewhere, the fickle audience spurned and cast them aside. Instead of the celebrity high-life that they had been foolishly exposed to over the course of several weeks, they were now expected to retire gracefully back to the squalor of mundane everyday existence; back to the supermarket checkouts, the sales pitches, the cleaner’s cupboards, the office staffrooms that they had tasted permanent escape from. Instead of receiving that continued celebrity love and respect, they became viewed through mocking, derisive eyes and cruel sneers from colleagues and peers who until recently had been cheering on their success from their homes. Forever resigned to a life as a ‘loser’, they became someone who had had their chance, had their modicum of fame, and couldn’t stomach the reality of sinking back into the same uninspiring person’s skin they had previously inhabited.
But where exactly does the blame lie in this tragic event? I refer to a fascinating rumination by the writer W.G. Sebald, who states that – ‘we know by instinct that outsize buildings cast the shadow of their own destruction before them, and are designed from the first with an eye to their later existence as ruins.’
In an analogical sense I would decree that the same can be said of the contemporary celebrity culture. With the lauding of ‘nobodies’ into instantaneous ‘stars’, we conspire to the creation of people we both envy and aspire to in equal measures. By the same subconscious logic we view these individuals with their downfall kept very much in mind. Their fall from grace we anticipate during the ascendency, before conspiring in wrenching them down into their demise. We might fantasise of them as car crash casualties, or suicidals, or assassination victims, or cancer patients, or as drowned versions of themselves washed up on a beach upon which we relax and control the tides.
I say that we the people are to blame! We must learn from this tragedy, this massacre of the disaffected, the jilted lovers of our media; no longer should we reward ignorance, applaud stupidity and indulge the wild fantasies of the everyman.
I conclude that with society’s health fracturing with the malaise of self-imposed fame, the only viable solution is isolation.
