Chasing Celebrity

Just after his 31st birthday, Hal Niedzviecki had an epiphany facilitated by Hallmark. It was no doubt the first of its kind for a guy whose life hadn’t been a typically Hallmark affair to that point. He’d been a rebellious teenager (drinking, staying out late, “borrowing” his parents’ credit cards and failing classes). He’d gone on to become a writer. He founded a ’zine called Broken Pencil devoted to alternative and underground culture. He wrote challenging, edgy books that were well received but pointedly outside the mainstream (most recently the novel Ditch, which Kevin Bolger described in The Globe and Mail as“bravely original and skillfully executed” but also “creepy, sickening and possibly even downright offensive”). In short, Niedzviecki at three decades was a committed nonconformist. An individual. And, as you might expect, he would not have wished to be any other way.

Then he turned 30 and his long-supportive, liberal-minded parents gave him a Hallmark card with a picture of men in grey suits under the heading: “Conformity—proudly serving painfully boring people since time began.” And inside: “Happy Birthday to a nonconformist.”

Then he turned 31 and his long-supportive, liberal-minded parents gave him another Hallmark card, this one with a delicate landscape under the heading: “The challenge is to be yourself in a world that is trying to make you like everyone else.” And inside: “Happy birthday to a one-of-a-kind you!”

These cards depressed Niedzviecki. How had this happened? How had nonconformity become so mainstream that some lame-ass Hallmark freelancer from Sausalito knew enough to celebrate the fact?

Well, Niedzviecki got to thinking about just that, and the fascinating result is Hello I’m Special: How Individuality Became the New Conformity.

Fascinating, that is, if you are interested in popular culture or, at the very least, if you believe popular culture is a reflection of who we have become in the globalized Western world. This point is important to readers because Hello I’m Special is densely illustrated. Niedzviecki angles his discussion through a labyrinth of examples: illegal backyard wrestling leagues to Elvis impersonators to celebrity chefs to Oscar Wilde, Andy Warhol, David Bowie, Marilyn Manson and Anna Nicole Smith and that is (swear to God) before the bottom of page ten. If you really, truly, never watch television, the book will be hard going.

Otherwise, you will find at the heart of Hello I’m Special an elegant, cautionary argument. Complex and not entirely resolved. It goes like this.

Everywhere you turn in popular culture, there is evidence that nonconformity, rebellion, assertive individuality (whatever you want to call it) has become more than just commonplace. It has become the dominant social norm. It is the way we arrange ourselves, our social hierarchy organized according to who out-individuals whom. Those kids from Mississauga pile-driving each other into the grass and airing the video at the Backyard Wrestling Federation website? They’re part of it. So, too, are those who hire spiritual consultant Charmaine Schulman, who helps clients create religious ritual tailored to their individual taste. So, too, all the people who name their girls Trinity (for the kick-ass heroine of The Matrix) or drink a “non-brand” beer such as Pabst or wear truckers hats or sign up for liposuction on television. They are all embracing a late-modern ethos of self-creation, something Michael Bracewell called in The Nineties: When Surface Was Depth “the ability within individuals to realize themselves as a mythology.”

“Losers are those who are content to stick with the crowd,” Niedzviecki writes of this phenomenon. “Winners are those who reinvent themselves to stand out.”

And on one level, naturally, the development must be celebrated. Who wants to re-submerge their individuality in traditional social structures? A pious intrusive church? A strict social hierarchy based on blood lines? Arranged marriage, anyone? Don’t all raise your hands at once. Still, Niedzviecki’s winners are losers too, he is keen to point out. Because breaking out of the conformist past and into individual modernity leaves many of us with a personal mythology isolated entirely from any other. Alienated, indeed, from the very pop culture that gave rise to the nonconformist impulse in the first place.

Niedzviecki acknowledges a debt to the German sociologist Georg Simmel here. Least known of sociology’s “big four” (the others being Marx, Weber and Durkheim), Simmel advanced a highly ambivalent view of modern mass culture, which he felt had done nothing less than change the human personality. The pre-modern person was defined entirely by the tight social circle into which he or she was born. Membership was not optional and dependence was total. The modern person is defined by a much more complicated set of memberships (personal, professional and otherwise), leading to many more unique notions of what any person could be.

But Simmel also hung out with Marx, so he had certain pessimistic feelings about all this, too. Just as the division of labour had alienated the producer from the product, so too did modern man find himself surrounded with cultural “objects” that he desired, that he needed, but that existed separately from him and over which he had no control. Social theorist Lewis Coser summarized Simmel’s view: “The cultural universe is made by men, yet each perceives it as a world he never made. Thus, progress in the development of objective cultural products leads to an increasing impoverishment of the creating individuals. The producers and consumers of objective culture tend to atrophy in their individual capacities even though they depend on it for their own cultivation.”

Back to Hello I’m Special, which, I can tell you, is more fun to read than either Simmel or Coser. In Niedzviecki’s formulation, the contemporary gulf between humanity and culture is the gulf that exists between our newly minted individualists and popular culture. This gulf is systemic, and it arises (to simplify somewhat) from two parallel and linked sub-phenomena. First, the self-esteem industry. Second, the incandescent rise of “celebrity” from a rare quality vaguely envied to the most widely shared personal value and aspiration among pop culture consumers.

The confluence of these forces—Niedzviecki illustrates with particular zeal—is a place where everybody wants to be and believes that they are special. That they can and will become famous or rich or whatever else they might want to be (although it is rarely anything else). It is a place where you might meet a guy like Dr. Phil. A place like the Hard Rock Academy, where you can pay for stardom coaching that will never get you anywhere. It’s a place like the gravel field next to the Metro Convention Centre in Toronto where thousands of people waited—some for 48 hours—for a 30-second audition in front of the Canadian Idol judges. “Thousands of bright, funny, interesting, horribly deluded people,” as Neidzviecki puts it.

“Anyone can become what they want to be.” So says a 16-year-old wannabe from Windsor. And in which school would she be taught differently? Certainly not the one where Avril Lavigne dropped out at the same age and the principal said, with no apparent irony, “I am thrilled for her success. We think she’s an excellent role model for students who have lofty dreams.”

This structure of things, Niedzviecki believes, is odious. It is odious because it is selling a fantasy understood to be unavailable. We want in but we cannot get in (Simmel again). But more importantly, in perpetuating this endlessly unsatisfying transaction, pop culture replaces real individuality with a fake commercial kind: a conformist nonconformity, a pop myth by which the Dr. Phils and Oprahs of this world “aim to create good little individualists who at once believe they can do anything, but don’t actually upset the ration of one superstar for every million people by successfully managing to do anything.”

What then? Well, there’s alternative culture, isn’t there? Niedzviecki (who was once dubbed “the guru of the underground and alternative,”no doubt to his personal chagrin) isn’t so sure. Is the zine Found a real alternative, its content consisting of nothing but writing and photos found and submitted by strangers? What about K Composite, a glossy magazine that features celebrity style profiles of ordinary unfamous people? Or Trampoline Hall, where people speak on topics they don’t know much about. “I start to wonder about all this,” Niedzviecki writes. “I mean what is it, exactly: Entertainment? Social criticism? Is it really outside mainstream values, a challenge to the celeb system or merely a footnote, a way for a bunch of indie-hipsters to feel as if they are outside the mainstream even as they, basically, follow its form and values?”

I suppose there is always extreme behaviour. When the societal norm is individualism, perhaps the situation calls for some kind of hyper nonconformity to position oneself as a true rebel. Neidzviecki’s scalding arc through this materialleaves no doubt as to his hopefulness in the strategy. He starts at the “Horror Suite” at the Hard Rock Hotel in Orlando, then bounces through the films À Ma Soeur, Battle Royale, Kill Bill and House of a 1,000 Corpses. (Quoth Rob Zombie: “There is no upside, it’s morally corrupt.”) Then onward through Vice Magazine, Richard Metzger, Lee Boyd Malvo, David Berkowitz, Richard Ramirez, Theodore Kaczynski. You can see where Niedzviecki thinks extreme behaviour leads even before you get to anthropologist Francis Hsu saying, “Achievement and violence in fact spring from one common denominator: rugged individualism.”

Which brings us to the close of Niedzviecki’s case against the new individualist conformity. This ending, happily enough, is not accomplished with any particular solution. There can be no single solution, of course, to the problem of how to be individual. But he does introduce us to some new revolutionaries: People that are, at the very least, unplugged from popular culture to the greatest possible extent. People who live on islands accessible only by barge. People such as George Sawchuck, a mountain-man wood carver who appears to eschew fame or artistic success of any kind. (He regrets his one Vancouver Art Gallery show.) “I do what I do not because I want to be some sort of hero for the underculture, but to survive as an individual with an identity.”

Hello I’m Special is a portrait of a conflicted time, written in a style to suit.With its dense brocade of illustration, it pushes close at times to a variety of sensory overload familiar in popular culture itself. One imagines that the online version of the book would be enhanced by tickertape- style banners across the top and bottom. A CNN newscast where no single talking head could ever be enough to capture the flow of present events.

There are also occasions when one feels Niedzviecki casting his net too widely. There are moments when it reads like The Hero with a Thousand Faces, every conceivable snip of narrative in any conceivable tongue and culture all intended to support the single core idea. In Niedzviecki’s case, this means the odd item of evidence that refuses to fit the argument. The Slow Food movement is probably more about health than it is about neo-traditionalism. Internet dating may not be as much about the myth of selfinvention— although who is going to know if you mlie about your income?—as it is about the decidedly non-mythical desire to get laid. And it feels like Niedzviecki is trying to have it both ways when I read that high obesity rates are an indication of the new ersatz individuality (it’s okay for me to be fat), then three pages later find that so too is anorexia (the impossible pursuit of celebrity-driven body images). Only normal weights are truly individual? Normal as in conformist normal, or normal as in nonconformist normal?

Minor quibbles. Occasionally, a book comes along that I feel should be required reading in high schools. (To the extent that anything should be required reading in high schools. It took me a decade to get back to Orwell after what we did to him in grade 11.) I no doubt feel this way thinking back on all the dumb ideas I had back then and how much simpler growing up—becoming an individual—would have been if I had just read this or that. Which is probably wishful thinking. Still, here is such a book.

But then, maybe it wouldn’t be a good idea for Niedzviecki to make that big a target out of his ideas. A Hallmark card would surely follow. “The challenge is to be a true individual in a worldwhere everybody else is also trying to be an individual but doing it all in the same way.” And inside: “Happy birthday to a non-conformist genuinely different from all the others!”