With the new generation of celebrities, the plastic quality of Bowie’s Ziggy Stardust (3.1) reaches its climax. The best expression of this new breed of plastic-humans may be Adam Lambert, runner-up in the eighth season of American Idol and frequent collaborator of Queen since 2011. Lambert’s tanned facial features seem thermoformed, his hair a lego piece, his outfits a collection of textures and surfaces (skulls, flowers, crosses, animal print, studs, zippers and seams), a media attire that tries to express an interior in vain. His co-optation and emptying of symbols of rebellion and discontent such as leather and studs is rampant to the point of being cartoonish (5.11.1). There is much swagger but most of it is the imitation of an imitation of an imitation. At times George Michael shows through, other times it’s Michael Jackson, sometimes David Bowie. Like Max Headroom, his plastic quality almost seems to happen in a mediatic void that is out of reach from the real world.

In Lambert the zone of indistinction between fiction and reality opened by the dandy is taken to its logical extreme (2.2, 2.5, 2.7). As in Reagan’s case (4.14), his manners and demeanor no longer conjugate the interior with the exterior, because they are not such anymore (5.10), they have collapsed into a surface that creates its own value by the simple fact of being a surface.