Mad Icon Disease

By Liz Langley, AlterNet. Posted May 1, 2003.

My DNA strand has a bunch of typos in it. As a result I'm inattentive and nervous. On the upside I treat this for free by using Denial and Avoidance. I don't watch the news for days, can't tell you the names of some of my relatives or what many of my colleagues actually do for a living.

I can tell you where Jackie Chan went to school (the China Drama Academy), that David Lynch hates cooking smells (he won't allow food to be cooked in his house) and that before he became America's best chat catalyst, Bill Maher appeared in the movie, "Cannibal Women in the Avocado Jungle of Death." I pick up this stuff like a pop culture Swiffer, while real events slide off my brain like it was Scotchguarded. As Oscar Wilde, a celeb I could discuss for days, once said, "Through Art and Art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence."

In other words, real life sucks; movies are much better.

This belief puts me in the running for a new mental disorder -- Celebrity Worship Syndrome, or "mad icon disease," which was discovered recently by Dr. John Maltby of the University of Leicester. Dr. Maltby's findings appeared in the Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease, and you want to believe him just for being in such a fabulously titled publication.

CWS comes in three levels: mild, which means you like to talk about your favorite celebrities with your many real-life friends; moderate, which means you believe you have "an intense personal type relationship" with a celebrity; or severe, whose sufferers, Dr. Maltby says, "feel they have a special bond with their celebrity, believe their celebrity knows them and are prepared to lie or even die for their hero." The technical term for level three is "ca-rrrrazy."

This study doesn't just consider celebs of J-Lo level ubiquity, either; many people in the study professed unseemly attachments to one of Tony Blair's cabinet ministers.

In a story in the London Daily Telegraph, Dr. Maltby says that this interest in celebrities is not just entertainment for some people but has "a clinical component," and is probably due to the dominance of TV and the breakdown of family and community; people are replacing the real people in their lives with celebrities.

Of course the severe loony-stalker level of CWS is deranged but it's hard to believe that merely liking to talk about stars or even a star requires the label of "disease." And honestly, if family, community and reality were all they were cracked up to be there wouldn't be a need for celebrities in the first place; you'd be so entertained by the people across from you on the couch you wouldn't have a TV. Let's examine the facts:

• Your favorite film star will never ask you for a ride, charge you a tax or demand that you come over for Christmas and then nag you the whole time about your wasted potential; this is the job of friends, community and family. True, stars will not listen to your problems when you're down, but often real people won't either. And on the upside, you can change channels on celebrities. It's a relationship in which you always have the remote.



• If talking about people you've never actually met is a syndrome, then all my teachers were mental cases; none of them knew Socrates or Hemingway but they could talk about them until you wanted to kill yourself, too.



• Celebrities are a great bonding tool. You may have major rifts with someone over religion or politics, but you can always find common ground in a discussion about Michael Jackson.

Hollywood, in fact, is so divorced from your reality that it can make you divorced from it, too, for a solid two hours if the movie is good. Movies are what you take when you can't afford or don't care for drugs.

In Woody Allen's "Shadows and Fog," a magician says of his illusions, "People need them like they need the air." That's the role celebrities play in our lives; they're the adult version of imaginary friends (except we pay them millions). Escapism is less a choice, it seems, than an instinct.

Honestly, if you prefer to talk only about reality -- war, disease, poverty, murder, misery, politics, corporate theft, duct tape -- I'd venture to say you're crazier than anyone who ever held a vigil at Graceland or showed up at a sci fi convention. Over the years I could have been spotted in either one of those places. It's better than taking Zoloft and watching CNN.

Liz Langley is a freelance writer who lives in New York City.

              

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