Popular Culture Review Vol. 16, No. 1, Spring 2005 | Page 113

“Self Matters”:
Latter-Day Notes on the Culture of Narcissism
“Oh, well,” sighed Narcissus the hunchback, “on me it looks
good.”
—W.H. Auden
According to my calculations, I should already be a much
bigger movie star than I am.
—Aaron Eckhart, American actor
The assassinations of the sixties, followed by the disillusionment of the
seventies, produced a sea change in the way Americans feel about heroes. In an
attempt to define postmodernism, social commentator Todd Gitlin noted that the
turbulent sixties “exploded our belief in progress, which underlay the classical
faith in linear order and moral clarity.”1 What Richard Nixon began, Bill Clinton
brought to—shall we say—a climax. A vacuum needed to be filled. Somewhere
between the fascinating presidencies of these deeply flawed men, the familiar
postmodern phenomenon of celebrity-as-hero had come of age.
Conventional heroes are, or were, supposed to stir deep emotions in
us—most notably reverence and awe; we place them, or they place themselves,
at a certain moral, even esthetic distance. This is how it should be with heroes,
or so we’ve always been taught. But no longer. In the late eighties, the World
Almanac and Book o f Facts published a survey in which 4,000 high school
seniors were asked to name their heroes. The top ten list included actor Harrison
Ford, singer Bruce Springsteen and guitarist Eddie Van Halen, Madonna,
Michael Jordan, Prince, Sylvester Stallone, Bill Cosby, and—most popular of
all—comedian Eddie Murphy. Ronald Reagan made the list too—“Dutch”
Reagan, whose presidency, as we know, owed much to his skills as an actor.
In this cultural climate, “traditional” heroes—even when they manage
to capture the public imagination—inevitably play second fiddle to celebrities.
In the summer of 1997, when Mother Teresa and Princess Diana died within a
week of each other, the European and American public mourned Diana with an
almost hysterical frenzy while, in the end, Mother Teresa’s passing was
relegated to an historical footnote.
Social scientists point to a fundamental element of narcissism in all of
this on the part of ordinary people. Unlike heroes of the past, contemporary
celebrities function as servomechanical extensions of their fans, who preen in
front of them as in front of a mirror (the casual nickname “Princess Di,”
popularized Diana, enabling her fans to think of her as an intimate
acquaintance). Ten thousand Eddie Van Halens grew up in the eighties and