SOME years ago, I was standing behind Alec Baldwin at a party while talking with another writer, when the actor turned around and offered us a cigar with the most postmodern smile I have ever seen. “Have a petit robusto,” he said. He exaggerated the “eet” in “petit” ever so slightly, a delicate emphasis that had the effect of making comically explicit the absurdity of applying “petit” to “robusto.” When he got to the latter word, he pronounced “robusto” one syllable at a time — “Ro. Bus. Toe.”— with such ironic vigor that cigar, celebrity and offer collapsed into layers of self-parody. He was a famous actor playing a regular guy who was acknowledging the fatuity of being a celebrity even as he was savoring its every moment. You felt he really, genuinely, wanted to be liked, at the same time as he couldn’t have cared less whether you liked him or not.
Flash forward to the reports last week that he had tried to punch a Daily News photographer, an infraction that has come to seem the celebrity equivalent of passing a standardized test, but which caused a sensation in Mr. Baldwin’s case. The overheated response was predictable. In a country where the average, unprivileged individual enjoys more opportunities for gratification than in any previous society, celebrities provide a symbolic test case, getting carte blanche to do what they please. It is like the latent promise of the American condition brought to sudden fulfillment. To put it another way: Imagine a credit card with no credit limit, and no obligation to repay anything, becoming a person. (See Mr. Baldwin’s hilarious Capitol One Venture Card commercials. He plays just such a personified credit card, selling a credit card. Or as he says in “Glengarry Glen Ross,” performing essentially the same character he plays in the commercial: “Because only one thing counts in this life. Get them to sign on the line which is dotted.”)
Celebrity morality play falls into three categories. The first is celebrities who make their morality a mystery. They stay so private that relatively nothing about their private lives is widely known: DiCaprio, Eastwood, Ford, Streep, Kidman. The second is celebrities who, faced with absolute gratification, publicly combust: Charlie Sheen, Mel Gibson, Woody Allen. (There is also a subcategory of celebrities who have to keep combusting just to remain celebrities: Lohan, Kardashian et al.)
The third category, I would argue, Mr. Baldwin invented and occupies alone. He is the celebrity who enjoys wealth, glamour and power, yet stumbles through them, commenting with insight and self-deprecating humor on his stumbling like an ordinary guy traveling through stations of the everyday cross: The frustrated message on his daughter’s voice mail. The rudeness toward the flight attendant. The altercation with the photographer. Since fame is now a universal obsession, we are interested in other people’s experience of fame the way we are interested in other people’s experience of affliction. It is therapeutic to see Mr. Baldwin stumble, and then good-naturedly mock himself, and this is why we repeatedly forgive him. He handles fame with humility. He is robusto, but also petit, the little big man. Even the envious, self-righteous furies on the Web couldn’t turn his trifling infractions into crimes.
Mr. Baldwin possesses what you might call the salutary egotism of avid living, as opposed to the rotten narcissism of amoral grasping and mistreatment of other people. He and Mr. Sheen are like two categories of celebrity existence: Good Hollywood versus Bad Hollywood. Ego versus Narcissus.
On the one side: the Mr. Sheen who shot a girlfriend in the arm, who was accused of trying to choke his wife, who was discovered to have destroyed his hotel room in a drug-fueled tantrum while the porn star he was with locked herself in the bathroom — even as his wife and children were staying in the next room. Those are the abusive wages of mega-solipsistic entitlement. The guy boasts about himself on Twitter, too. And he inserts “man” at the end of his sentences suspiciously often.
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