Gutter Stars: Age of the Celebrity
welcome home, roscoe jenkins! and now that you’re here, i’ll be leaving
I know what Britney Spears’ vagina looks like, and having never conversed, met, or even been in the same room with her, I shouldn’t be so well acquainted with this image.
But I am—as are most people with Internet access and a depraved sense of decency. We also know that Judd Nelson’s Land Cruiser was towed on Feb. 6, and that Matt Dillon ate prosciutto at Fred Segal Mauro Café on Feb. 9 while Michelle Williams cried 16,000 miles away in Australia at Heath Ledger’s “life tribute” (that little tricolon came from just two pages of Us Weekly’s 680th issue).
We’ve truly found ourselves in the Age of the Celebrity, and thanks to the overbearing democracy provided by the Internet and modern technology, we’re no longer entertained by the godlike status of these personalities. No, we’ve found ourselves deep in the heart of a growing fascination with the deconstruction of those public images. We don’t want to gaze at stars in the sky anymore, we want to see them in the gutter—we want them to be “just like us.”
If the readers of these tabloid magazines are anything like average moviegoers, then Hollywood has surely lived up to its promise of giving the public what they want with Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins. In the film, Martin Lawrence plays RJ Stevens, a daytime-talk show crossbreed of Dr. Phil and Montel who has as many off-camera issues as Maury does when he steps off set. As we learn at the film’s outset (told through an Access Hollywood segment), RJ has just announced his engagement to the sultry Survivor-winner Bianca Kittles, played by a stereotypically sexy Joy Bryant. However, RJ’s past lies in the Deep South (as far away as you can get from Hollywood), where his parents are getting ready to celebrate their genuinely heartfelt, multiple-offspring-producing 50 years of marriage (as far away as you can get from RJ and Bianca’s image-driven romance). Predictably, worlds collide when the high-class, vegan, white-suit-wearing, Pomeranian-owning RJ is forced to go back home to his low-class, soul-food-eating, overall-wearing, 25-year-old-Labrador-owning family that prefers to call him by his “government name,” Roscoe Jenkins.
With the heavy emphasis on the Hollywood-player’s-embarrassing-Southern-roots-come-out theme, the film almost resembles a fictionalization of Britney Spears’ career trajectory, only with a (probably) happier ending. Much like the picture-perfect Britney of “Baby One More Time,” we first see RJ on top of the world, with his life seemingly in order (he even spouts out such twisted Hollywood clichés as “Aside from the hunger pains, being a vegan is the shit!”). But much as the Spears image began to die when she started going into gas station bathrooms without shoes on, RJ’s spotless persona quickly becomes soiled once he touches down in the South. Like those Us Weekly pictures, we see Roscoe at his worst back home: “Stars: They’re Just Like Us! They eat barbecue! They play softball! They get sprayed by skunks! They have hustler cousins and abusive sisters and neglectful dads and other dysfunctional family members that have contributed to serious self-worth problems and relationship issues!”
And in the spirit of not dropping the Britney ball, the real conflict of the story finds its home in the oppositions between fame and family, lust and love, and success and sacrifice.
I won’t spoil anything, but it will suffice to say that RJ learns that veganism and other manifestations of the pop/Hollywood system are no match for good ol’ soul food and family. In this vein, the film could even be read as a deconstruction of the Hollywood system, eventually championing real, down-home connections over the more shallow relationships of celebritydom. At least that’s how I’d like to imagine it was pitched to James Earl Jones and Michael Clarke Duncan when they decided to sign on.
The film really finds its merit in its faults (albeit unintentionally). Essentially a two-hour recreation of Us Weekly, the work offers several interesting observations about the contemporary obsession with celebrities’ blemishes. First, while those little pictures of random stars’ embarrassing moments are entertaining in a fleeting sense, the ultimate manifestation of this trend (which would be to focus solely on everything embarrassing about a celebrity and disregard any of their positive contributions—just what Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins does) is boring and almost depressing. If we extend this tendency of truly voyeuristic star humiliation to its logical fulfillment, we’ll no longer have celebrities, we’ll just have people—and while people are a-okay, they’re not celebrities.
Look at Britney Spears. Now that I’m intimately familiar with her custody issues, family problems, and vagina, it’s hard for me to imagine her ever achieving any sort of mythical status in my eyes again. I know too much about her—I’ve gone so far into her embarrassing off-camera life that if she ever does “come back,” I’ll have little interest in watching her on-camera attempts at making me believe that she’s anything but trailer trash. I’ve seen her vagina—when that happened, she lost all of her allure. I know a lot of other trashy girls, and they inhabit my life in person, so why should I spend my time looking at pictures of a trashy vagina when I could see one for real? The answer is that I shouldn’t. But I, or we, also shouldn’t aspire to trashy vagina—we should aspire to godlike vagina, and Aphrodite sure as hell never went to the club sans panties.
This is where my second observation comes in, or rather, my agreement with an observation that Nick Cave made in April 2007 while talking with Esquire: “The more information you have, the more human our heroes become and consequently the less mysterious and godlike. They need to be godlike. It’s something to lift us out of the commonplace and the mundane.”
I feel like that quote speaks for itself, but in case it doesn’t, here’s my plea to you: don’t see Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins. It will only let the industry think that we want to see more stars in the street, and trust me, we don’t. Stars belong on top—they give us something to look up to besides an empty sky.