Michael Sennet is everyone’s idea of a celebrity. He’s a major Los Angeles actor who inspires the lust of every woman and the envy of every man. However, his wife is getting bored, he is being blackmailed by a paparazzo and there’s a psychotic killer in the background.
Sound familiar? It will do. Michael Sennet is at the top of the food chain until he is a victim of extortion by a photographer who has evidence of his affair with a secretary. Rather than pay up, Sennet kills the photographer and fakes his murder as a crime committed by the Vanity Plate Killer, a madman who roams the city topping people who have personalised numberplates. Unfortunately, things ripple out, as they generally do, and the bodies pile. (In tales like this, it’s not the crime that gets you, it’s the cover-up. The best example of this crime-rippling-out-of-control genre is Peter Berg’s 1998 film Very Bad Things).
Baum would like to think that he skewers A-list culture, but unfortunately writers lag well behind on this one. The blackmail itself is extremely unrealistic. These days there is little chance of extorting money from someone by threatening to reveal his or her extra-marital affairs. People aren’t that shockable; as Michel Houllebecq said recently, there are so few taboos left to break. A man who cheats on his wife is thought of as a rogue, a lad, a charming fly-by-nighter. Jude Law slept with his childcare worker: Richard Bacon was outed as a cokehead. At the time the tabloids thought that their careers were over. Bacon and Law survived because in the twenty-first century, adultery and drug use aren’t that big a deal. If Sennet had been blackmailed with, say, evidence of a coprophiliac fetish, that might have been more convincing.
There are many aspects to celeb culture that artists simply don’t explore. One is that, in the age of Big Brother and Pop Idol, celebrity has become random redistribution of wealth: every few months the media industry plucks people from the estates and ghettos and gives them a couple of years of the life that the aristocracy regard as a natural right. Falling out of a limo at two in the morning isn’t exactly the most rewarding career. But is it evil? Baum seems to think so. Baum writes as if we were living in the days of the Rat Pack; writes with a bitter, distant snarl, face pressed against the glass.
This book and all such books could be read as a Marxist fable. The unfettered wealth that public individuals enjoy could build hospitals, get the homeless off the street. And god knows, any reader of Holy Moly and Popbitch will know that many celebrities are complete arseholes. Yet the deeper moral of this book is unflinchingly conservative:
Being famous by himself was fine for a while but then he needed something more. Marrying a mortal citizen seemed beneath him – it felt like going backwards. How about doubling your fame?… Yet at the same time it wasn’t real. In Hollywood, celebrity was just as fleeting as drugs. Hollywood liked to tear people apart just as much as it liked to create them. There was only one concrete truth to life: everyone died. With murder Michael really was playing God and not merely feeling it artificially through the dust of a flower, or the adoration of other people.
This is from page 180 of Baum’s novel. Compare it to the following passage from Michel Houllebecq’s Atomised (page 253):
Having exhausted the possibilities of sexual pleasure, it was reasonable that individuals, liberated from the constraints of ordinary morality, should turn their attentions to the wider pleasures of cruelty. Two hundred years earlier, de Sade had done exactly the same thing. In a sense, the serial killers of the 1990s were the spiritual children of the hippies… From this point of view, Charles Manson was not some monstrous aberration in the hippie movement, but its logical conclusion.
These are essentially reactionary, Hobbesian theories. Rousseau said that man is born free, but is everywhere in chains; Hobbes, Houllebecq and Henry Baum are saying that the individual has an unlimited capacity for evil and violence and must therefore be kept subject to authority, restraint and checks.
It is an interesting critique, but probably not the one Baum wanted to make. Crime is material: the poor kill for financial gain, the rich to protect their financial interests. Henry Baum is a good prose writer and this is a gripping, readable story. But it doesn’t exactly puncture the celebrity bubble. The cokeheads of Hollywood and Soho will sleep all the easier for it.