Spotted this list of things we can learn from the Simpsons Movie marketing campaign:
1. Prior to the release of your film, create a successful television program.
2. Do this many years before TiVo, or the widespread availability of 200-channel digital cable packages, or Mosaic (that’s Netscape kids; do people still know what Netscape was?) and all that it begat.
Yeah, good luck with that.
Complaining that the news media is more interested in pushing irrelevant stories about celebrity misbehavior instead of informing and enlightening the public that they claim to serve is something that old, humorless people do. But, though I’m old enough to have fathered Hollywood’s current crop of irresponsible starlets and as square as the number four, I’m not going to talk about that. Any more. In this post.
Because as much as I want to complain that there is nothing informative — or even interesting — about Lindsey Lohan’s most recent run-in with the boys in blue, I’m beginning to think that something instructive can be gleaned from this mess.
If it weren’t for a pushy stage mother and a few lucky breaks, Lohan wouldn’t be famous. We wouldn’t be making “shame, shame” gestures at our television screens. And she would probably be in a lot less trouble.
In fact, she’d probably be in college right now. Probably just scraping by, and racking up student-loan debt. The vagaries of life would eventually see her landing a job in an office somewhere, probably in accounts payable or something. There she’d be, with her clique-ish friends, going out for smoke breaks and talking about how she got totally blasted last weekend, and worrying about how she’s going to pay her rent. Complaining about how her boyfriend got mad when she danced with some dude — hey, it was just one dance! It’s not like she was sleeping with the guy! Can she just go home, already? It feels like she’s been at work for, like, ten hours. Hey, Steve, she’s gonna cut out early. She’s got like a million things to do. See you at Chevy’s!
Thousands of office workers know people like this. It’s not a terrible life to live, though it might be a little shallow. But, if you’ve ever wondered what the lives of these people would have been like if they’d lucked info fame and fortune at a tender age, well, there you go. There’s Lindsey.
It’s tragic — okay, maybe it’s merely irritating — that someone with unstoppable self-destructive impulses and a low-tolerance for boredom can’t handle their own fame and fortune. But, confined to the world of the office-working and paycheck-to-paycheck living, these impulses can be controlled. You won’t be some crazy starlet, you’d merely be a self-absorbed asshole. And that’s a goddamn American right.
We submit that the world would be a better place if Lohan was shuffling paper in a stifling office job. Or, at the very least, we reject the lamentations of those who claim that a great talent is being wasted. You know what? The world did not need a remake of The Parent Trap, nor did it need the cinema stain that was Herbie Fully Loaded. Believe us, Mean Girls would have gotten made anyway.
And that’s what we want the media to stop. Especially you, Martha Stewart. Stop pretending that the world would be missing anything if Lohan was currently living in a one-bedroom apartment with a cat, and getting pissed on Electric Lemonade at TGI Friday’s. And sure, she’d still have a drinking problem and a suspended license, probably, but at least her shame would be private.
Please stop now.
From Websnark:
But when she said that God loved you? And loved me? And loved everyone? She meant that. She meant it with all her heart. And she felt that included everyone. The rich and the poor. Criminals and the innocent. The healthy and the sick. Heterosexuals, homosexuals, people of all creeds and races. Everyone. During the heyday of The P-T-L Club in the eighties, when AIDS was mysterious and homosexuality denounced by most evangelists as dirty and sinful — with the implication that HIV was a divine judgement against them — Tammy Faye Bakker had gay men and women on her show. She had AIDS victims appear. She exhorted her audience to pray for these people — not to abandon their sinful lives, but to be healed of their illness, like any Christian should pray for any sick person.
I knew Tammy Faye of old — I had a remarkably churchified upbringing — but all I can remember now is the scandal, and how nice she seemed in those clips from the Surreal Life.
What’s worse than depression? Double depression:
Double depression occurs when an individual who suffers from dysthymia, a persistent case of mild depression marked by low energy, falls into a major depressive state. It is not a new concept, but psychologists know little about the characteristics that distinguish double depression from dysthymia or major depression alone, according to Joiner.
The thing that’s always bothered us about the diagnosis of depression is that it’s often applied to people that have miserable lives and, therefore, have every reason to feel terrible. Sometimes traps are inescapable, sometimes problems are insoluble, and sometimes there is no reason to feel hope, or to have faith in the future. That one’s life is bad and is only going to get worse as they get older, deteriorate and die, on top of all their other problems, is a very real situation.
They found that double-depressed patients had high levels of hopelessness, whereas patients with either major depression or dysthymia alone showed more moderate levels of hopelessness.
“A patient who is hopeless has really just given up,” Joiner said. “They feel that the world is against them, the future is bleak and they are incapable of fighting back.”
Is a person with insoluble financial problems double depressed? Is someone facing a terminal disease double depressed? The idea that, if one can’t face unmitigated horror with a sense of hope for the future, means that some is therefore suffering from a pathological mental disorder is dangerous. Because then we don’t have to worry about doing anything about their situation, we can say that it’s all in their heads.
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