R E C E N T L Y
Celebrities' fatal attraction to public sex
Bill's victory stogie: Just a cigar?
Behind the baffling bevy of beautiful boys
Giving homosexuality a bad name. Plus: Madonna's star rises again
The glory of female curvature
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A L S O
About Camille Paglia
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C O L U M N I S T S
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Dear Camille:
My friends and I want to know what your insights are regarding the gender
roles in the Nicole Kidman-Tom Cruise marriage. Whenever one sees Kidman and
Cruise, Kidman's photos betray her as stoical and icy where
Cruise appears as an ageless, perpetually smiling boy. Could this be a
gender-role reversal, or did Cruise exchange a butch mommy figure (Mimi
Rogers) for a "lipstick" drill sergeant? Rumors of their sexual
orientations aside, they seem quite compatible.
Star watching in Gainesville
Dear Star Watcher:
Gay scuttlebutt is sometimes totally wrong -- as it was, for example, about Katharine Hepburn, Burt Reynolds and Lauren Hutton. I would be very surprised if the sexual histories of Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman included anything more than the mildest homoerotic trifling. Their relationship reminds me of the one between pretty-boy actor Hugh Grant and spokesmodel-actress Elizabeth Hurley -- whose ferociously aggressive mind and spirit came blazing out at me from the radio one day. ("Who the hell is that?" I asked myself as I sat dumbfounded in my car at the Wawa store, too fascinated to get out for that loaf of bread. The very animated, very brainy Hurley was being interviewed on "Rosie O'Donnell" on an ABC affiliate picked up by my FM band.)
Heterosexuality comes in many shades. Psychologists have known for years that women, out of their biological maternalism, are often physically attracted to the latent boyishness in men, which needs lifetime nurturing. (I can't imagine having the patience for that!) Kidman's cool, commanding aplomb allows Cruise's boyish beauty to live and thrive -- for which we should all be grateful: He is a fine actor with a splendid body of achievement. And he is certainly more robustly masculine than that chicken-hearted, butter-nosed baby dyke, Leonardo DiCaprio, who didn't even have the balls to face his fans and peers at the Oscars.
Dear Camille:
What are your views on contemporary literary fiction? Do you find it so
culturally irrelevant that you don't allot it all that much time or
thought? After watching movies and television and reading the National
Enquirer, do you even have the energy to wade through the latest Nadine
Gordimer or Don DeLillo offering?
Andrew Weber
Dear Mr. Weber:
My position, as I suggested in my dialogue with Glenn Belverio about Jacqueline Susann's camp classic "Valley of the Dolls," is that the "serious" novel has been abandoned by the Zeitgeist. While I enormously admire novels of that genre's great period, from Jane Austen and Honoré de Balzac to Thomas Mann and Virginia Woolf, I have very little interest in anything written after World War II. Patrick Dennis' undervalued "Auntie Mame" remains my favorite novel of the past 50 years.
Movies, television and popular music are now the world's primary cultural forms, with creative energy flowing into nonfiction. The "serious" novel still has local power in England and Europe, but in the United States I think it's dead as a doornail. Major American novelists are in a mental cul-de-sac: How can I care about any writer, like Toni Morrison, who boasts about never watching television? My leisure reading time is devoted to political, social and historical matters -- especially the archaeology of Greece, Rome, Egypt, western and central Africa, India, China and Pre-Columbian Mexico.
Dear Camille:
What did you think of Ellen DeGeneres (in her interview with Diane Sawyer on ABC's "PrimeTime Live" last week) weepily blaming the cancellation of her TV show on the hard-hearted, homophobic ABC patriarchy?
Yours truly (and I mean it),
Camille
Dear Camille:
Thank me for the question! Did I not prophesy, in these very virtual pages, that that fiendish, meringue-blond Jabberwock, Anne Heche, would suck all the humor out of her gullible lover, Ellen, just as Yoko Ono did to mama-seeking John Lennon?
Pumped up by Anne's shrill, preacher-daughter pretensions, Ellen forgot her vocation as artist and entertainer and launched herself on a psychobabble crusade to Save the World. Suddenly, she was Nurse DeGeneres, brooding over sentimental thank-you notes from desperate gay teens (which she tastelessly read on-air to Sawyer).
"Ellen" wasn't canceled because it was "too gay." It was canceled because it was unfunny and lost its audience (including me). ABC executives are not therapists. They run a business that whips male and female, gay and straight through the same commercial thresher. The bottom line has ruthlessly ruled the entertainment industry since studio-era Hollywood.
Ellen got her head turned by gay activists, with their arrogant contempt for the mass audience, which they believe should be manipulated for their own private agenda. Last year's brilliantly done coming-out episode addicted Ellen to coterie adulation. This season, I became alarmed at and progressively disgusted with the stacking of "Ellen's" studio audiences with gay partisans, whom one could hear childishly whooping at and loudly cheering the faintest, corniest gay innuendos. Ellen the gay Joan of Arc eclipsed Ellen the gifted comedian, as she slowly lost touch with her real audience, the everyday viewers who had made her show a hit in the first place. Goaded along by that pedantic poseur, the horrible Heche, Ellen let her show degenerate into a banal, one-note lavender laugh track -- with plot, character and dialogue suffering.
Behold the wonderful fruits of coming out of the closet: One year later, Ellen's lost both her show and her sense of humor, and she's crying on TV! But oh, she's so very "happy" with Anne, as they plan to conceive and give birth -- yet another example of female civilization regressing to grass huts (a Paglia maxim). When was the last time a man carried on so shamelessly at the cancellation of his show? The only parallel is Morton Downey Jr. loopily drawing a backwards swastika on his face in an airport washroom.
Ellen, you had the best power angle of any gay entertainer in history, and you blew it. Stop blaming other people and playing the victim. You are responsible, and it is maudlin hypocrisy to pretend otherwise. Please get back to what you do best: incisive social commentary of broad appeal. Art cannot flourish in a political prison.
N E X T_P A G E | All hail the priapus!
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