We’re too worried about contagion, lost income and feral gangs to watch millionaires singing Imagine in mansions. Aren’t we?
You might think, in a time of global panic like this one, the movements and behaviours of the rich and the famous are rendered dizzyingly irrelevant, candy floss-light non-news designed to distract us from The Great Looming Bug. You’d be right. In many ways, the face of fame is destined to change after all this has blown over: many people we consider famous now, at the start of all this, will no longer be famous when it is done. This is because the machinery that makes them famous – the movies, the reality shows, the album productions, the photoshoots – will cease production for months, and the great unseen currency in which the famous trade – relevance – will fade alongside it. Like, do we really need “Florence Pugh” as much as we’ve been pretending we do this last year? Coronavirus will be that acid test.
But even when the concept of celebrity ceases being a social function – you can’t be famous in the wastelands, can you? You can’t “I have 5.5 million Instagram followers” your way out of a feral gang beheading – I ask you this: knowing you live on a planet where Jared Leto is out there, existing … do you not think you will be fundamentally curious as to what he is up to? Just to keep track of his movements to ensure he doesn’t tiptoe too close to you, if anything. You want to know what Jared Leto is up to. As long as Jared Leto exists, we simply must know what he is up to. This is the true nature of fame. Leto is a creature so distant, so baffling, we simply must gaze at him in wonder. In any other timeline – alternate universes shoot off into the infinite where this is broadly true – we would keep him in a bulletproof tank inside a zoo, and pay tickets to go and look at him.
Wow. 12 days ago I began a silent meditation in the desert. We were totally isolated. No phone, no communication etc. We had no idea what was happening outside the facility.
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