On Easter Sunday, the actor Hugh Jackman rose from the waves to save his son. This quasi-miracle on Bondi beach was, happily, captured on camera, offering a close-up of Jackman’s kind command with feckless surfers, his locks damp with sweat and salt, his fetching wetsuit.
The resulting news story was the most-read article on the Guardian’s website that day – and it was not our exclusive. Millions of people around the globe have lapped up Jackman’s exploits. Millions more share an apparently unquenchable appetite to believe that our big screen superheroes are really super, really heroes, actually capable of feats which would floor most of us mere mortals.
We cling to this hope even as the facts slap us in the face. As Jackman explained, a fleet of professional lifesavers did the heavy lifting, and such splashes are bread and butter to any self-respecting Aussie. “It wasn’t as dramatic as it sounded or looked,” he said.
Such a strategy does not succeed. It never will. The headlines simply add the word “humble” to “hero”. Gods are worshipped more fiercely if they seek to downplay their deity.
Because we now live in an age in which everything real is drama – and traditional, constructed drama is therefore imperilled. An age which requires stars to be exaggerated versions of their fictional selves. Even those who are themselves famous cannot tolerate the alternative. A rugby star who happened to witness the rescue reported: “He just went into full-on Hugh Jackman mode. It was amazing.”
Today, we enjoy an unparalleled level of access to and knowledge about those in the public eye. This is the lens through which we watch the fiction they feature in. Fifty years ago, private lives could be stage-managed with immaculate choreography. Today, even the niftiest fixer struggles to cope. No matter: the movie business thrives, indulging our urge to get intimate with stars by presenting them to us in fictional iterations of themselves on screen. The more deeply we feel we know someone, the flimsier our ability to consume them as anyone else.
Take Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice – the Ben Affleck-starring blockbuster that’s overcome horrible notices and awful word of mouth to break records at the box office. Except of course that it hasn’t overcome anything. Conditions now allow negativity to be an asset. Its success is not because the film is critic-proof, but because people want to rubberneck at a car crash; a car crash involving very famous people who have themselves been through the wringer. The receipts make for interesting reading (it’s currently made $250m); more significant is that 20 million people have watched on YouTube a brief video of Affleck sitting in sad-eyed silence as an interviewer raises the critical reviews.
To be a mainstream film fan now is to worry at what is mask and what is not, to spot the joins and fill in the blanks. The symbiosis is irresistible, even when unintentional. “Sad Ben” Affleck’s Batman happens to be a mardy hunk, who spends his time crossly, toplessly bench-pressing then looking resigned as he wakes up alongside another nameless babe. Press interventions from Affleck’s ex-wife perpetuate the on-screen myth.
“He’s just a complicated guy,” said Jennifer Garner in a gogglingly honest Vanity Fair interview last month. “When his sun shines on you, you feel it. But when the sun is shining elsewhere, it’s cold. He can cast quite a shadow.” These are lines that could have come straight from the studio trailer.
Yet while we seek to check the credibility of stars beneath the costume, when it comes to ourselves we do the opposite. We enlist a full battery of editing tools to construct our own airbrushed celebrity and seed it as widely as possible. We are a long way from Wemmick, Dickens’s everyday clerk once considered prescient in his attempts to physically separate his public and private selves via drawbridge, moat and cannon: “The office is one thing,” he tells Pip in Great Expectations, “and private life is another. When I go into the office, I leave the Castle behind me.” No one wants such fortification now. It’s open-plan all the way, all the time; as many cameras trained on us as possible.
Unless your day job actually involves acting like a superhero, channelling heroics is pointless. It is the amplification of the truth – good, bad or warty – to which the public is now attuned. And this, I think, is why Garry Shandling, who died last week, was so brilliant. For with his chatshow sitcom Larry Sanders he revealed what we really appreciate is essence: good or bad, and most likely the latter. People, he showed us, are usually more venal than you’d anticipate, yet more pathetic. That is what makes them compelling.
In an interview with Jerry Seinfeld a couple of years back, the pair were talking about the jokes wasted when a standup comedian dies unexpectedly. Shandling was circumspect. Such material, he said, is “purely a vehicle for you to express your soul and spirit and being. It doesn’t have any value beyond that. It’s why you’re on the planet.”
Shandling’s presence was immense because he recognised that our primary desire is to see as clearly as possible into someone’s soul. Jackman is fab. But Shandling was my kind of superhero.
