MARK: Join me on my Soap Box

It seems like a requirement for being a celebrity is to skirt the line of sanity and to do so in the most public of ways. Sad to say, Amanda Bynes is the latest case of celebrity meltdowns. Over the weekend the former Nickelodeon star began tweeting incoherent messages, apparently trying to convince people that she had an eating disorder. She also claimed that a series of pictures taken of her and put online were not actually her, but an imposter roaming the streets of New York. Her behavior became even more concerning when she showed up at a gymnastics class at Chelsea Piers wearing fishnets and lingerie. Bynes apparently went out on the mat and started twirling and mumbling incoherently — speculation is that she is experiencing a manic episode.

I can’t say that I’m really surprised. Obviously it’s a serious matter and I don’t want to belittle whatever is going on, but Amanda Bynes basically started her career based on dissociative personality disorder — multiple personality disorder for those who don’t know. I remember as a kid watching the “Amanda Show” and being slightly unnerved by her stalker alter ego, Penelope Taint. Bynes would dress up in a wig and pretend to be an obsessed fan.

Caddy comments aside, laughing about mental illness isn’t okay and enjoying someone’s life as it spirals into a train wreck is cruel, especially when it happens in a public domain as it does for many celebrities. The celebrity meltdown has become a frequent occurrence in our culture. Britney Spears had her meltdown when she cut off all her hair and gained the equivalent of her younger sister. When Mel Gibson had his anti-Semitic and alcohol-induced rant, we all basically shrugged our shoulders and said, “see I told you he hated Jews.” And Charlie Sheen? Well, he’s Charlie Sheen.

I’d like to say that the increasing frequency of these meltdowns is merely a product of how public everyone’s lives have become. Everything can be uploaded to the Internet through our phones. Everyone has a camera in his or her pocket. When anything you do could wind up being a story on TMZ it’s amazing that stuff like Amanda Bynes’s case doesn’t happen every week. Being a celebrity in America is basically culturally induced schizophrenia, only those paranoid thoughts are completely justified and true. The irony of publically writing about my own feelings of disdain for the obsession American culture has with celebrities is that I’m a willing participant in the ugliness that I myself hate.

We all know this, and the fact that we do shows that hating the superficiality of celebrity gossip and all its poison is mainstream. There’s nothing subversive or new about hating a story like Amanda Bynes losing her mind, or Charlie Sheen publically going off the deep end, in fact its what we’re expected to do. The whole phenomenon is a self-perpetuating cycle that is geared to creating a higher demand of celebrity gossip and inane information to drown out anything important. The more I talk about it, the more people search for the story and not talking about it is not a solution, either.

Remaining silent when you feel a sense of moral outrage is an impotent response. As a solution, ignoring celebrity gossip depends on a collective effort to stop reading gossip news and feeding into celebrity culture. I don’t mean to sound like a defeatist, but so long as personable people do things to captivate our imaginations, there will always be a cult of celebrity of worship. You would almost have to ban people from being exceptional, interesting or entertaining altogether.

Of course anyone could argue that there is a positive side to having these incidents publically broadcast. They allow the issue of mental health in this country to come to the forefront. They allow those who are suffering from an apparent breakdown to get help and it allows people to show support to their favorite stars. But when Charlie Sheen had his infamous meltdown no one was talking about the issue of bipolar disorder in this country. All we did was make ironic t-shirts and Internet memes. And in terms of showing support, that’s the problem with celebrity culture isn’t it? We feel like we have a personal relationship with people who are complete strangers to us — there’s basically a stalker vibe built into the phenomenon. Saying it’s okay to broadcast someone’s mental instability is an irresponsible and disgusting aspect of our culture. And if it strikes anyone as presumptuous of me to lecture over a well-known and fully derided part of our culture, then all I have to say is that I’ll stop beating a dead horse when we stop treating people’s private lives as entertainment.

So are we collectively driving people to insanity? Is celebrity gossip a sickness in American culture? Are celebrity meltdowns the result of the pressure that we put on people to be exceptional? If so, does that make us a vicious and cruel people? It’s sad to say, but I think it does. It’s almost vampiric the way in which we prop people up in this idolatrous way and then find voyeuristic satisfaction in watching their lives play out, good or bad. The most frustrating part is that those who really care can’t really do anything about to change it. Gossip is homogenously mixed into the stew. So in this case, self-deprecation is called for.

Sandor Mark is a senior in the College of Arts and Sciences, and a weekly columnist for the Daily Free Press. He can be reached at smark@bu.edu.