Wading in the Velvet Sea

This is the week that both fell in the public eye, an eye that’s ever watchful, ever leering, ever ready for you to make one false step. They stood out in their respective fields, heads and shoulders above their peers. One could argue (although I’m not that person) that Belichick “earned” his stature more than Spears, but that’s selling Spears short, in my opinion. While I think it’s harder to run a football team than sing a pop song, I don’t think the latter is remotely easy, given my appalling skill at karaoke and Spears’ appalling performance at the VMAs this past Sunday.

If anything, her performance Sunday shows just how freakin’ hard it is to do what she did. Having spent a good ten years in technical theatre, I can attest first-hand how difficult it is to pull off any type of performance, and she by and large knocked her performances out of the part. Because that’s what she was: a performer, an entertainer. She was certainly NOT a singer. But she was a star, because she could perform. It’s not that everyone who loved her thought she sang well; I’d bet if you took an honest poll, maybe a quarter actually liked the sound of that screech of a voice that she had. But hardly anyone could deny her power to perform, and as long as she could do that, people would basically overlook her technical shortcomings.

Belichick’s skills centered around creating a football dynasty in an era where that was not supposed to be possible. The revenue-sharing in football, coupled with a stringent salary cap, was supposed to create a parity in which no one team could pull off what the Yankees and Red Sox do: buy enough talent to compete/dominate on a year-in, year-out basis. But along with the Pats front-office, Belichick created the seemingly impossible: a team that year after year contended for and/or won the Super Bowl. He has the personality of a bruised peach, but his record spoke for itself. So long as he won, his stature grew.

Both were raised only to be razed.

Lurking beneath both were the same forces that lie beneath every “celebrity” in today’s culture. I hate using the word “celebrity”, since it’s all but devoid of meaning at this point, but let’s just say I’m talking about everyone from Madonna down to those ho’s on “The Hills”. They are most famous than the rest of us, and 90% of the time, when pressed, we really can’t say why. There’s no ostensible reason that Lauren Conrad should be more famous than my brother, who’s funny and is good at his job and can drive through Route 93 like he’s playing “Pole Position”. I’m pretty sure none of those things apply to Ms. Conrad, who’s idea of “Pole Position” is probably a lot different from the one I just offered.

Point is this: those forces that conspire to lift a celebrity up also conspire to bring them back down. No great insight there. But I do find the juxtaposition of Spears’ and Belichick’s fall amazing, in that the two situations, which seem millions of miles apart, are in fact virtually the same. It’s just the direction each were attacked that differs, but both forces ended up in the middle, shook hands, probably took a few cell-phone photos, and then alerted TMZ and/or Deadspin about it.

In Spears’ case, those who admired her performing ability despised her lack of talent. Those who despised her good looks also coveted them. The virgin/whore dynamic, (initiated by designers, embraced by the star) served to further pull/push people in relation to her. In the football world, people lauded Belichick as a genius, and yet secretly wondered if he deserved such a title. People praised his success and also bitterly opposed each successive title. Love and hate fueled their rise. Take away the love? Thus comes the fall.

I mean, to read articles like this, you’d swear that the Patriots were the DIRTIEST TEAM TO EVER PLAY ORGANIZED SPORTS. I mean, jeesum crow. Don’t hold back, Dr. Z. Think he’s got an axe to grind? Go ahead, Google “cameragate” or something to that effect, and read approximately 8,000,000 articles that take aim at Belichick, his legacy, and the legacy of the Pats. I’ll some up all of them so you don’t have to waste you’re time.

“Ha, I knew it…I knew it! No one’s that smart. Clearly he cheated, and cheated all along, and that’s the only reason he and the Pats were ever any good. Also, did I mention he sucks? Genius, my ass!”

Over in the pop world, there are equally as many “I’ve always hate Britney, she’s never had any real talent, why can’t see just go away?” Now, it would be one thing if this were simply all us mere “bloggers”, us real people, saying such stuff, but no, on both the Spears and Belichick fronts, the assult is coming primarily from the media that made them famous in the first place. You can’t listen to ESPN for thirty seconds without yet another “expert” telling us what an a-hole Belichick is. And you can’t convince me for ONE SECOND that MTV didn’t know what it was doing by inviting an unprepared Spears to open their show. Couple that with the US Magazines of the world, who have relied on Spears’ visage to sell millions of copies, using her fall-from-grace performance as fuel to sell millions more now.

Because what are the crimes here, when it breaks down to it?

Britney is no longer hot.

Belichick is no longer a genius.

I mean, these are the basic things we’re using to tear these people down, right?

To me, watching Spears on Sunday was watching someone say, “Help me, for the love of God, get me some Renton-like help quickly. I don’t mind having visions of Sean Prestion crawling on the roof, fucking get me away from my psycho managers/family and let me eat Cheetos in peace!” And yet I was stunned by the majority of commentary centered around the astute thesis: “Damn, bitch looked like a fatty!”

I really wonder what the criticism would have been had she looked smoking hot and barely danced/lip-synched. I don’t think anyone would have said anything in other than a titter. Like, “Heh, man, Britney was WASTED, eh?” But nothing would have sent her down the rabbit-hellhole like looking like someone who just had two kids and tried to wear something she probably shouldn’t have. Of ALL the reasons to bash Britney, and believe me, there are many, this is the absolute worst one. She still looked better than 97% of the uglies at home watching her and texting “OMFG!” to their Five.

“Cameragate” likewise allowed people to poke at the thing they hated the most about Belichick: the thought, perpetuated on both sides, that, “Bill is much, much smarter than the rest of us.” Having gotten straight A’s through eighth-grade, I know all too well what it’s like to have people salivating at the thought of me getting a B. Use of this camera validates everyone who hated being intellectually inferior to this man, and gives them now a chance to say, “Aha! Dude isn’t smart at all. Uses cameras and illegal techniques. Also? He kicks puppies. Hey, that’s what sources in the NFL told me.”

In both cases, what made them unique, what made them stand out, what made them celebrities, failed them, and thus their plunge was both inevitable and precipitous.

After all, we measure ourselves against celebrities. It’s what we do. But forget all this “Stars: They’re Just Like Us!” crap. No one believes that. Not that it’s not possible (I actually think by and large that’s right), but because no one will allow it to be possible. Each individual sees a celebrity as either above them or below them, but never on the same level with them. We are the fixed point, the mean, the median; they are objects we yo-yo about, they are the pawns in a game they enter but never fully understand, and only leave the board when we’ve found a new piece to place atop it.

And it makes people feel good, because, after all, Britney’s not REALLY hotter than me, and hey, Belichick’s not REALLY smarter than me. Britney didn’t earn any of her success, and all of Belichick’s wins are completely tainted. I mean, it’s all makeup and cameras. We’re all the same. No one’s actually special. No one’s actually super.

And why do we do this? We do we pour hours and weeks and months into the ever-evolving calvalcade of fuck-ups we’ll never actually meet? Because it’s a helluva lot easier to do that than think and discuss things like a majorly messed-up war, fought in a place most of us will never be, fought by people most of us will never meet. It’s easier to take down Britney Spears’ supposed muffin top than actually figure out if the surge is working. It’s much easier to focus on videocameras of defensive coaches than it is to focus on videos of dead bodies and bombed villages.

Hell, I’m guilty of it too. I spend an inordinate amount of time trying to figure out what in the hell that smoke monster on the “Lost” island is. I engaged in a 90-minute discussion with my wife about why the election date in “Heroes” is different in the pilot and the second episode (eight days away in the pilot, five weeks away in Episode 2). It’s much easier and much safer to do these things, and it makes us feel good, because we made sure that no one else is special, that no one else is super, because we generally feel less than super ourselves, and bringing everyone down to the same playing field, into a morass of mediocrity, is the only way half of us can get up in the morning, brush our teeth, and get our asses to work.

In a week, I doubt we’ll much care about these two. We certainly won’t care as much as we do now. Something else will enter the 24-hour news cycle or Perez Hilton’s blog or TMZ’s site, and we’ll all move on. About the only thing that won’t move on is what’s going on halfway across the world, because thinking about that?

Well, that makes us feel less than super.

And we all want to be super.

Just as long as no one else is.