In the fourth episode of the third season of The Simple Life, Paris Hilton and Nicole Ritchie go to work at a funeral home. Among the show’s usual clumsiness, the two distinguished socialites struggle trying to get a casket out of a hearse, which they nearly overturn, and even more ridiculously and infamously, they end up spilling the ashes from an urn. The episode produced a flurry of complaints from people who had recently lost loved ones, so John Podesta, the owner of the funeral home, ended up admitting that the ashes were really kitty litter and cement. As always, all of Hilton and Ritchie’s antics had been carefully planned.
A couple of months later Hilton admitted in an interview with The Sun that everything that happened on her reality show was fake.
Simple Life is a reality show and people might assume it’s real. But it’s fake. All reality shows are fake basically. When you have a camera on you, you are not going to act yourself. So before I started the show I thought I’d make a character like the movies Legally Blonde and Clueless mixed together, with a rich girl all-in-one. Even my voice is different and the way I dress is different from me in real life. It’s a character I like to play. I think it’s carefree and happy. The public think they know me but they really don’t.1
No one doubts that Paris Hilton’s public persona is a character product of an intense marketing and public relations effort, but to deny the interpenetration between “reality” Paris and “real life” Paris is rather moot, it’s going against the essence of her brand. In the words of her manager Jason Moore, Paris “lived the ultimate image and was the ultimate brand based on the right name, the right look, the right height, the right hair color, the right eye color, the right everything for a formula that far exceeded anybody else at that time.”2 Paris Hilton is the evolution of David Bowie’s plastic rocker (3.1), both person and product, real and unreal, a threshold made flesh. Like Wilde’s blue china (2.12) she has elevated herself to the rank of commodity and has become self-sufficient, she has turned her life into a cult of herself.
Curiously enough, what applies to the realist characters in Oscar Wilde’s time also applies to our celebrities (9.7, 9.9). If the characters in a reality show “do not succeed in producing even that impression of reality at which they aim, and which is their only reason for existing,” it is because they are too “real” (that is, hyperreal) in the sense that they have crossed the threshold that separates being from acting.
“The only real people,” says Wilde, “are the people who never existed, and if a novelist is base enough to go to life for his personages he should at least pretend that they are creations, and not boast of them as copies,”3 a matter that apparently Paris Hilton has taken to heart. But what are we to do if in our time the referentiality between the novelist and his creation has broken down? In our media realism the novelist is creator and fiction at the same time and the characters are copies of themselves.
- Andy Dehnart, “Paris Hilton says The Simple Life and her persona are “fake”,” Reality Blurred, July 7, 2006, https://www.realityblurred.com/realitytv/2006/07/the-simple-life-4-paris_show_persona_fake/ ↩︎
- Abby Goodman, “The man who ‘made’ Paris Hilton,” CNN, Noviembre 2, 2011, https://edition.cnn.com/2011/11/02/showbiz/celebrity-news-gossip/jason-moore-on-paris-hilton/index.html ↩︎
- Oscar Wilde, “The Decay odf Lying" in Complete Works, 975. ↩︎
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