Word: famed
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...famed one is paradoxically as naked as an exile dispossessed. The celebrity enters into a powerful and potentially dangerous force field, a relationship with masses of people gone slightly insane; sometimes he encounters that side of human nature that forms lynch mobs: the beast. A surreal dynamic goes to work. The famous may find their fortunes held hostage by the moods and attention spans of people they do not know. The unstable affections of fandom have a life of their own and acquire an unpredictable but nearly absolute power over one's personal and professional fate. Fame becomes a form...
Sane, well-balanced celebrities accept their fame as part of their working life, but also an irrelevance and an intrusion and a pain in the neck. It is true that people live more comfortably with fame when they are confident that it is something they have earned by their own merit and hard work over a period of time...
...trouble is that fame at the end of the 20th century--a global, multicultural and multimedia saturation--gets distributed by a sort of cultural chaos theory, detached not only from merit in many cases but also from any comprehensible framework of value and virtue. And so beneath the surface floats a fierce sense of injustice--a sense of ethical dislocation, as if the laws of cause and effect had been rescinded. In such a culture, to be obscure is by definition to be a failure. The obscure man asks bitterly, "Why is he famous, and not I? What...
...guilty sense of the injustice of fame assaults the famed one as well: "Why am I famous? Why do all these people seem to love me? I don't deserve it. I am a fraud." The anguished, neurotic internal monologue gets dramatized in self-destructive ways (drug overdoses, alcohol, rampages, broken marriages, suicides or, if the celebrities are lucky, a trudge through the rehab that ends with confession and absolution in prime time: "I feel more centered now, Barbara"); all this mess forms up as part of the great sobbing dysfunctional pageant on display at the supermarket check-out counters...
...death, they undoubtedly defiled its setting. They took pictures of the dying woman. How could they? But they did. And now the two sons, the princes, face not only the loss of a loving and lovable mother but also a bereavement uniquely contaminated by the market forces of fame...