The Russian lover and I had dinner in SoHo a few weeks ago. We drove up on a Saturday afternoon, and after some pretense at considering going anywhere else we ended up at Felix. Last summer we ended up there almost every Sunday evening. We liked it because it was... boisterous. It was the place where people went to eat and drink and be unruly in a very civilized way.
Well, we found ourselves there again this year, and while the crowd seemed smaller and tamer, the food was still good, the mojitos were still strong, and the staff was still friendly and indifferent.
We finished up dinner and a bottle of wine, and teetered out into the street where we (almost literally, thanks to the mojitos) bumped into Jessica Simpson and John Mayer. This was after the news had broke in People that Jessica was in love with John and dating him seriously, but before Jessica set the ladies on The View straight and informed them that the truth was in fact the opposite.
Anyway, in my semi-drunken euphoria I mentally observed: Oh, that's Jessica and that guy she's with before my celebrity-obsessed brain sat up straight and noticed: That's Jessica Simpson. And John What's-His-Name! Followed by doubt: Was it really? Maybe it just looked like them. Did I just see Jessica Simpson in person and almost stumble drunkenly directly into her person? Why didn't I get a second look? Maybe this convoy of black, tinted SUVs here belongs to someone else. And then I became obsessed with the idea that I had maybe seen Jessica and John on a date, live and in person, but also maybe I hadn't and only thought I did. The lack of closure was maddening.
And then I started to wonder why this was all so distressing to me, anyway. Why did I care about having seen or not seen a person I neither admired nor liked? Why does an otherwise rational, intelligent human being such as myself become a sputtering star-struck puddle of pathetic?
I don't really have answer, but here is my theory du jour:
Seeing a media personality in person is like seeing God incarnate. Stay with me on this. Our only exposure to this caste is through media filters -- images and sound bites, the collected rumblings and rumors of gossip columns and tabloid shows. These people exist as abstracted ideas -- in my life experience, Brad Pitt and Bill Clinton and Madonna cannot be confirmed as any more real than Harry Potter. So if I see Brad at Starbucks, or see Madonna live in concert, there now exists a real person where before there was only the idea of a person.
And anytime this happens, whether I care about that person or not, it confirms for me that the lattice of reality I'm being asked to believe via the machinery of media does in fact exist as the objective reality. And what a relief THAT is.
I'm sure centuries from now this vague existential anxiety will be well understood and dismissed. By then, it will have become as natural as breathing for our species to accept reality via the senses directly and reality via media exposure as one and the same. We already do, intellectually. But maybe one day it won't matter whether someone exists as a flesh and blood person at all; maybe one day all we'll have is media projections -- shadows signifying nothing. Celebrities will be nothing more than the equivalent of complex computer programs, and we will all accept this, and we won't need to see the man or woman behind the curtain anymore, because he or she will not exist.
It's not that crazy; I mean, we've been doing something of the kind for millennia already.
It's called religion.