This is going to be kind of disjointed, but that’s what happens when insomnia hits. Random neurons fired, producing this confused train of thought.
So I was poking around at Chizumatic, when I ran across a very odd quote that SDB extracted from an article. It seems some poor chap (the writer) is suffering from job fatigue. I say poor chap, because he’s a professional film critic. I could imagine worse jobs (arguably, I have a worse job), but that wasn’t what caught SDB’s attention… it was the idea of Harry Potter “slash fiction.” FYI, I reinforce the original author’s note, if you don’t know what the hell that is, count your blessings. I had to chuckle at him a bit though… I had the horror of learning about it in regards to Wesley Crusher from ST:TNG.
When I saw that the link went to MSNBC.com, I got curious (“What the hell is a reference to that doing there?”), and went to read it. I was highly amused by what set the poor schelp off.
Here was the last straw. I just heard last week, from an “industry� pal who must remain nameless, a story about how many zits (what they’d call “spots� at Hogwarts) had to be digitally erased from the new movie. It’s not true, of course. Or what if it is? They’re all 16 years old or thereabouts. Kids get zits. And these kids are megastars, each probably equipped with their own personal dermatologist on 24-hour standby. But it was Hollywood Gossip and therefore actual important information I needed to know. And the craziest feature of this bit of fake-out complexion reportage was its delivery to me in super-secret-double-probation hushed tones, as though these kids had been discovered with track marks on their arms or nabbed by paparazzi hanging out with Kate Moss. There is someone out there, more than one someone, in fact, who can’t get enough of breaking news like this, fabricated or un. But it was the last crack in my I-can-endure-any-amount-of-showbiz-silliness-because-it’s-my-job armor. I was officially and formally Harry Potter-Fatigued.
Oh, the horror! Teenagers get zits! Can’t have that, everyone knows that Hollywood stars are beautiful, perfect, wise, all-knowing, and altruistic. Just ask Sean Penn.
Magazines, trade newspapers, regular newspapers, news programs, TV shows, even an entire network, all dedicated to reporting breathlessly on what these people are doing, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, three hundred sixty five and one-quarter days per year. Papparazzi chronicling who is doing what with whom at whichever secluded getaway. And this guy’s finally tripped out by digital zit elimination.
You know what trips me out? The realization that if I’d seen zits on any of the stars during the movie, it would have been quite jarring. It would be like that scene in the first Indiana Jones movie where Bellaq (the French archeologist) and Jones are jawing at each other over a bazooka, when a fly suddenly lands on Bellaq’s lip — and gets eaten, apparently unnoticed. It totally breaks the viewer out of the movie to see that. I mean, come on! The Germans didn’t have bazookas in the first place, and they didn’t even have panzerfausts until ’42! (Heh. Gotcha.)
It’s not that teens don’t get zits…. it’s that Hollywood and the cosmetic industry have conspired to “digitally erase” them from our zeitgeist. Mundanes like you or I get zits. Not people we see on the big (or small) screen, or in the magazines, or on billboards (except those advertising zit removal, of course).
Sad, to realize our reality is so distorted by a bunch of Film Actor’s Guild types.