IN PRESUMED INTIMACY, SOCIOLOGIST CHRIS ROJEK WRITES THAT media audiences may have "para-social" relationships with two media apparitions: statistical people and celebrities. By "parasocial" he means emotional connections to remote persons far beyond our kith and kin (1-10). A big disaster intensifies such connections with statistical victims and with celebrities as audiences look for meaning, direction, and emotional outlet. As the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) infects every population, statistical people-once media's remote victims of disaster-are now us, comprising nearly eight billion and summarized in escalating numbers of the infected, the surviving, and the dead. As the COVID-19 pandemic unfolds, celebrities on social media have status as arbiters of this crisis, but an intensified domesticity has transformed their roles.Glimpses into celebrities' private lives, including their habitations, are essential to feelings of intimacy and kinship with them. The crafting of these seemingly private realms-including access to them-is part and parcel of celebrity marketing. In a disaster where massive numbers of people, worldwide, are forced to stay indoors, this display of domesticity is riveting. As people meet online, newly revealing their own domestic spaces for work and play, celebrities' domestic spaces are screen openings among many such openings. As celebrities are seen going about their daily lives, they perform among many ordinary performances and in relation to them. The contrast of their strange lives to the ordinary could never be more pronounced.One of the more interesting transformations is the spectacle of action heroes-who would normally be racing to save the day-placidly reveling in domesticity. These include Arnold Schwarzenegger smoking a cigar in his hot tub and feeding carrots to his donkey and miniature horse at his kitchen table; Sam Neill petting a duck and bird-calling; Patrick Stewart in an armchair reading Shakespeare's
At the height of violence during the Persian Gulf War, MacNeil/Lehrer introduced its war coverage with this striking backdrop: a target image with the words "Ground Zero" printed across it. Viewers knew very well what "Ground Zero" was: the ancient, exotic city of Baghdad, where a fairy-tale, dark-skinned demon lurked underground in a hardened bunker, magically avoiding surgical strikes. Despite the Bush administration's high moral ground on civilian casualties, the nuclear referent was omnipresent in wartime's political spectacle. Bush's New World Order, born from neo- conservative proclamations of the end of history, was represented in an archetypal nuclear sign: concentric circles imposed on a city.
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