Ryan's Brother
My happiest days this summer were steered by the O.C.; it was the O.C., on every morning at 9.00, that gathered the day and I to ourselves. Watching the O.C., the day and I were on equal terms, equally fascinated. I like the theme tune very much, I like the characters, I like that Julie didn't give her husband the poison she prepared, that there is a kindness in her as there would not be in other, similar characters in other soap operas. I like confused and angry Marissa, and I like Summer and her love triangles. But when they brought in Ryan's brother, when he was introduced to the show, I thought: now the day and I must separate; we've caught out the O.C.; it's secret is up; at its heart is a non-event it has tried to hide; the O.C. is a cover for what does not happen and cannot complete itself.
Ryan's brother is from the wrong side of the tracks, like him; he is brutishly good looking, like him; he takes up with Marissa - or rather, Marissa takes him up, coming to his door with gifts, driving him from here to there; they are to be friends. Only Ryan's brother abuses this friendship; unlike Ryan he has not been redeemed. So, according to the law, must he disappear from the O.C. But not before his doubling of Ryan, the guy-from-the-wrong-side-of-the-tracks all over again, has exposed the first Ryan for what he is: no different from the one who doubles him, caught in this play of mirrors in which, now, the whole of the O.C. is implicated. What is real? I cannot trust this programme and its makers. They are throwing events at me, replaying Ryan's story, playing it again in a kind of desperation. For they know there are no events and the O.C. is empty, that in the O.C. emptiness knows itself and speaks of itself.
So does the O.C., which carried me in strong and generous arms, let me fall. Gradually, the series winds to an end, but my faith was already lost. Now 9.00 is to be confronted without the strong arm of a soap opera. The day and I part, no longer reconciled, no longer gathered together at the head of the day as the puppy lies with puppy. Now the day and I fall back from one another; I am the earth and the day is the sky, and we are turned from one another. So is the cosmos set apart and the great dualism returns. There is no dwelling place; the O.C. is not as Holderlin's The Ister is for Heidegger, it is not the river which bears us all in its streaming and I am sad as though I had lived my whole life and were at its end. Premature death! I do not want to die because I've never lived!
The Red Carpet
9.00, the beginning of the day, the head of all waters. Without the O.C. there must be new albums, perpetually new sounds to listen to; and then there are the celebrity blogs, then the events with I will hold the eventless everyday at bay. These events - Renee Zellweger's marriage, its breakdown, the sting that caught Kate Moss snorting cocaine - are my sheld. I am afraid of time, which is to say, afraid for myself in time. Events are my sustenance; I write here only to mark the day. What seems occasional (it is the 19th September; I see the plant outside my window whose roots drown in overflowing drain water, and beyond the plan, the bins, then the wall) is in fact a plate of the armour I need to construct.
Happily, the celebrities live for me. There is always a premiere, always new dresses to admire. There are celebrities in dresses, the trial of the red carpet, the judgement of fashion successes and fashion disasters. Happily, there are celebrity blogs and celebrity magazines. Their very proliferation is a sign of a great need for myths that would allow us to cross the day. New myths, the new sustaining puranas with speak of our crossing life, which accumulate the wisdom that would help us to cross.
We knew Renee Zellweger's marriage would end; we knew, and the marriage played out as we knew it would. We knew, we looked on, but with infinite compassion, with infinite wisdom. So we can turn back to our own lives and those around us with the same wisdom and the same compassion. Reassurance - we all want the same things, we need the same things, the celebrities are like us, only larger than us and more beautiful than we are. They are gods, or the avatars of gods; they live and die before us in order that we learn of ourselves and our world. They instruct; we learn from their failures and their glories.
They are gods and goddesses, that is not in doubt. This is why we resist the elevation of reality TV stars to the status of celebrity. Oh, some of them are admitted into the pages of the celebrity magazine; where would be without Jade, magnificent Jade? But the others ... how can they but fail? How can they cross from our world to theirs, the world of celebrities? But there is glory in their hubris, and Big Brother is tragic to the extent that the freedom granted to those in the house runs up against necessity, that is, the failure of their bid for fame, its great withering. But there is Jade! Jade who is set against the other celebrities in the magazine, who is the night to their day, the backdrop that would allow them to shine more brightly.
The Gods
I have said it before, and it is worth saying again: celebrities, television are the dreams of the sleeping body of Capital. Dreams of Capital, which can never wake up. Capital which only slumbers, which will never rise from itself because there is no 'itself'; Capital that dissolves all forms and releases them to their streaming, Capital that is fate and necessity.
For Capital is time and Capital is ruin. I saw you, Capital, on Kate Moss's face. Cruel Capital that would ruin Renee Zellweger's marriage (or would have allowed to think that it might work)! Ah, but that cruelty is what we call fate, what we live as fate and know as fate. The gods are watching, but the gods are blind, the sky is blind and indifferent to us and to all but the streaming of money and its equipollences. Capital time, myths of Capital, this is our wisdom.
Nihilism: the introduction of Ryan's brother into the O.C., the breakdown of a marriage we would know would break down. It breaks in, then, a kind of nonsense that sets us apart from the day we traverse. The gods are leaving, having never arrived. Celebrities are leaving, having never come to us. Jade, concilator of the terrestial and the heavenly is leaving us. And who are we who are left, bereft of myths, of heroes, of heroines?