“modern celebrity as a hollowed-out, mummified version of Christian fame”
“Raiders of the Lost Arc: Is Joan of Arc the prototype for modern celebrity?“,by Jessica Winter on Slate.com.
Donald Spoto’s Joan: The Mysterious Life of the Heretic Who Became a Saint is reviewed by Winter. He apparently takes a more historically appropriate look at the great saint. She’s an enigmatic character to us moderns, but somehow compelling in so many ways.
Or is it just that we like celebrity?
… When fame is sought solely for itself, rather than for God or for a secular higher calling, then the anguished prelude to transfiguration can become an ugly vestige of the earlier religious incarnation of celebrity, lacking meaning except as spectacle.
… But if we look upon modern celebrity as a hollowed-out, mummified version of Christian fame, we suddenly have a context for the ghoulishness of so much contemporary stardom, the sheer number of sordid off-ramps in celebrity Babylonâespecially, it seems, for young women: Their endlessly repeated passions of self-starvation, zombie debauchery, drug-scrambled neurons, kamikaze recklessness, and penitent public rituals are displayed for our delectation on countless celebrity Web sites, with relics available on eBay.
