Monday, March 10th, 2008...
“Every day is another day starring you.”
“The idea that whoever appeared onstage would play not me but a character was central to imagining how to make the narrative: I would need to see myself from outside.”
~ Joan Didion
In the midst of the quicksand hazard posed by every single episode of Lost available online, and in high def, I saw an ad for Celebrity Cruise lines with a slogan at the end that i thought was fantastic:
according to a NYTimes article published last spring, “This Is Your Life (and How You Tell It),” research shows that the human brain apparently has a natural affinity for narrative construction, which not only explains why Lost is so amazingly addictive, but why but we are continually updating a treatment of our own life in our heads.
Short of offering “run from the paparazzi” adventure travel excursions and rehab amusement parks, the cruise line has taken a very resonant approach with the “every day is another day starring you” slogan. “Seeing oneself as acting in a movie or a play is not merely fantasy or indulgence;” according the the NYTimes, “it is fundamental to how people work out who it is they are, and may become.” In the era of TMZ, thinking about that personal narrative in the format of a celebrity tabloid seems only natural.
For further commentary on the subject, here’s Rolling Stone’s top celebrity for representing “America in Decline”:
4 comments
March 11th, 2008 at
in a blog post a while back about burning man, i wrote that it was “a chance to star in your own life for a week.” ( http://www.amyleblanc.com/index.php?id=P2154 ) a lot of people wrote me about that line, either saying it really resonated with them, or, for the more participatory citizens of the world, asking why you couldn’t star in your own life every week? i thought about that idea a lot. why only 1 week a year? for some people, they only get that feeling once or twice in a lifetime - their wedding day, etc. for others, it is specific places/times, like burning man. for the lucky, it’s every day.
a friend of mine has a t-shirt that says “special guest star”, and especially whenever i’m nervous in a social situation or some such, i try to move outside myself a little bit and think of myself as a character in my own life, inside a narrative, and it can dramatically change the way things feel, and is for whatever reason a bit empowering.
tangentially, i was thinking about that idea of ‘the stories we tell ourselves’ the other day. humans need stories. we create stories to explain things we don’t understand, and to put things into context. stories provide the background for our thought patterns, and what we think is logic. without stories, we have no memory, no history.
thx for this!
March 11th, 2008 at
hey amy, you should really check out that NYTimes article if you haven’t already. it talks about all the stuff you touched upon. you’d totally dig it: http://www.nytimes.com/2007/05/22/health/psychology/22narr.html?pagewanted=1&_r=2&adxnnlx=1205172957-apPe9HqxDWDK%20CyH0o0kow
March 11th, 2008 at
yes, thx - i have that bookmarked to read later :). also, that RS piece on britney is pretty gritty in a way that sort of makes my head spin around the ideas that are being discussed now about the myspace/”me” generation and youth obsession with publicity.
March 11th, 2008 at
Hi Jenka,
A great post. All the world is a stage, still holds true, now as ever. Fantasy and escape is a wonderful brand, don’t you think?
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