Many moons ago, I wrote a short post in which I explained why my dominant reaction regarding Paris Hilton had transmogrified from contempt to pity. The tipping point came when the contents of a storage locker she’d failed tokeep up the payments on was bought and then auctioned off. I wrote:
The kicker, for me, was the pictures of her with Girls Gone Wild founder Joe Francis. He’s pulled aside her bikini top to expose her breasts, and she looks stoned out of her mind.
She’s a sad, stoned, sexually exploited little girl. She has the genius of the narcissist — a intuitive ability to make people look at her and care about her — but the truth is that is that she has no idea what’s she doing, and she’s miserable unhappy, and all of us are probably complicit in her abuse when we talk about her, write about her, make fun of her, and look at half-naked pictures of her.
I didn’t get as deeply into the semiotics of Paris Hilton as I’d hoped, but I just came across this passage from Camille Paglia that I think gets at something about Paris that I’ve felt but never quite articulated. Paglia writes:
[I’m] disturbed by the litany of too many commentators claiming that Paris had done absolutely nothing to earn her celebrity. It’s true Paris had become overexposed, but only because she lacks Madonna’s brilliant facility for changing styles and personae to keep it all fresh. Paris was stuck in the rut of one look and was getting too long in the tooth to play the daffy ingenue.
While Paris became known to a wide audience through her self-parodying role in "The Simple Life," that TV show is a relatively minor phenomenon. The fact is that Paris has been a reasonably successful professional model since she was 19, seven years ago. Her collective body of work belongs to the chronicle of our time. Paris’ distinctive, riveting and often choreographic visual images were produced improvisationally on the nightclub scene as well as in formal shoots for commercial clients like Guess. She has given pleasure and diversion to cultural voyeurs around the globe and should be respected for it.
