We’re going to try something new this week here at the Dear Dexter Theme Time Hour, and we’re calling it the Encyclopedia of American Celebrity Project (EACP for short, though I’m not sure it’s actually that much easier to say "the EACP" than to say the Encyclopedia of American Celebrity Project; we need a nickname, really, but I’ll let it emerge organically).

The point of the EnAmCel Project isn’t to be exhaustive, because that would simply be too exhausting, and would in any case involve a great deal of cutting and pasting from Wikipedia. The point is to use various people as concrete vehicles through which to deconstruct the institution of American celebrity.

We don’t care, for instance, that Tom Cruise was born in Buffalo (or was it Syracuse?); we might care, however, about his Scientology insofar as we’re interested in thinking about why Scientology seems to be so appealing to famous people.

I don’t have it all figured out yet, but I’m assuming I’ll learn as I go along. Also, any help from the peanut gallery will be appreciated.

Anyway … A is for Alba, Jessica.

When considering Jessica Alba (as I try to do for at least 18 minutes a day, 6 days a week (Tuesday is God’s day)), it soon becomes apparent that what’s seminal is her physical near-perfection. There are millions of beautiful women out there, and there are plenty of women out there who are more interesting- and distinctive-looking than Alba, but there are few who are as approaching perfect as she is. Her heart-shaped faced. Her blemish-free skin. Her cellulite-frei body.

She shimmers.

It’s no accident that she’s been cast in the Fantastic Four and Sin City movies, nor that her big break came in the TV show Dark Angel (pardon me, that’s "James Cameron’s Dark Angel"), playing Max "Dark Angel" Guevara, a post-apocalyptic genetically-enhanced super-being fighting for truth, justice and what was, before the post-Apocalypse, the American way. She looks like a genetically-enhanced superbeing; even her post-racial honey-toned skin color (she has Mexican, French-Canadian and Danish roots) is sort of futuristic.

This perfection has been both a blessing and a curse to Alba in her quest for A-list ascendancy. She’s marvelous to look at, and to masturbate to (did I just write that?), but her almost cartoonish flawlessness makes her difficult to cast in anything other than action and science fiction movies. She’s simply too perfect-looking to fully emphathize with. And it’s not apparent that she’s quite good enough as an actor to perform her way out of that pigeonhole.

Not that it’s such a terrible pigeonhole to be in, but I assume that Alba, like most people who become extremely famous, is driven by a desire to be galactically famous, and so at some point within the next few years she’ll find herself frustrated by her inability to pass from extremely to galactically famous. My guess, therefore, is that in 2009 or 2010 she’ll do something moderately drastic to try to break type and thereby break on through to the other side. She’ll probably play a junkie, in a movie directed by a Mexican. Or possibly a mentally challenged person, but more likely a junkie.