big pictures

This morning's Hollywood gossip channels remark two very different actresses and their polar feelings about photographers and being photographed--

On the one hand, that little, underaged, gymnastics-stunted television star, Hayden Panettiere.

On the other, that little, wise and beautiful, divine fur coat-sporting, eating disorder-stunted movie star, Christina Ricci.

Obviously, it's unfair for me to compare these two. Ricci is a founding father, A&P is down with most anything she has to say (we don't even impeach her for Black Snake Moan--that shit was Craig's fault). Panettiere, on the other hand, is one of those of the younger generation that we spit on for fear of being prematurely aged by the Culture Industry and because dudes think she's hot and we disagree. However, with or without an oppositional quote from steady(ish), grown Ricci, Panettiere sounds over-dramatic and foolish. What kind of an upstart young actress doesn't want attention from reporters on a red-carpet? Long before these internets, when Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks took their 1920 honeymoon press tour of Europe (yes, publicists were around before sound), a whistle stop appearance in Lenin's Moscow brought a crowd of over a million fans, a number of whom were trampled to death--so powerful and far-reaching was the celebrity created by our first cinema. I mean, talk about ruination! In later autobiography-authoring years, Pickford would recall that Soviet photo-op as the most miserable and frightening experience of her life.

I have a lot to say about tabloids, the imaging of celebrity, the desire to appear as a photograph; a large portion of my book on B. Spears is dedicated to popular imagery--paparazzi pictures, music videos, and television commercials. And, of course, I view much of this stuff as dangerous and violent, but working actors do press. It's simply part of their job, and don't tell me anyone who becomes an actor isn't categorically attention-seeking, particularly child-actors like these two. Methinks Miss Panettiere has delusions of grandeur, a notion that she is the sort of Hollywood star who has passed into the heady death valley of people-turned-visual-icons. She is not. She is a girl on a primetime drama who dates her costar and has some generationally ordained name recognition and maybe a few magazine covers (Self, Seventeen...?). Lady needs the Entertainment Tonight correspondents of the world to affirm her employee status and keep her afloat (working past the age of 25). Lawd.