The good, bad and ugly are always with us
Last week a photograph of Khloe Kardashian found its way onto the internet and all hell broke loose. Within hours the public was being asked not to distribute the image. News sites used words such as “controversy” and “shock”. Twitter exploded.
Having seen the picture myself, I understand why: it shows Ms Kardashian without a stitch of Photoshop on her, a shockingly normal person looking upsettingly human. Her fans were incensed, not by the image but by its publication.
Kardashian, they explained, had not wanted the picture put online and was perfectly within her rights to try to control her image and how it is perceived in the world. Authenticity is a holy word for the young, so none of them wanted to suggest Kardashian’s public persona is a shiny facade, but the subtext was clear: as a performer enacting the role of Famous American and Interesting
Person, she is entitled to try to wear her mask precisely as she sees fit.
Some countered that by relying so unrepentantly on airbrushing, Kardashian was entrenching unrealistic and unhealthy body standards. Others simply mocked what they saw as a modern, Hollywood sort of non-event. The first group might have a point, but the second group were wrong. This sort of thing has been going on for millennia.
Whether it was diminutive pharaohs being portrayed in immense statues or kings and queens having their physical insecurities brushed away by court painters, the rich and powerful have demanded flattering representations of themselves since Grg The Uncertain stuffed a cassava down his loincloth and announced to his seven subjects (and the 13 bats with which they shared their cave) that he would henceforth be known as Grg the Mighty.
That unbroken tradition, however, seems to be wobbling on its sandstone plinth. And it’s not just Kardashian: the internet seems hell-bent on revealing the true, genuine, warts-and-all faces of historical figures who thought, understandably, they and their warts had got away with it.
Almost every week there’ sa new one on social media or websites dedicated to art or history: some bright young artist or techie has used artificial intelligence and/or DNA and/or their parents’ money to piece together the “true” face of suchand-such a historical figure.
In some instances, these “reveals” contribute substantially to undoing centuries of prejudice. I think it is a good thing, for example, that Jesus of Nazareth is being portrayed as a dark-skinned Middle Eastern man, rather than as Barry Gibb of the Bee Gees.
Most, however, I find somewhat dispiriting. I don’t want to know that Caesar Augustus looked like an English footballer. I certainly don’t want to know that Helen of Troy probably wouldn’t have launched more than 100 ships.
Still, I can imagine why these recreations seem to be becoming more popular.
It goes without saying that this is a confusing moment, a place somewhere between the doldrums of the 2000s and whatever comes after these plague years in which we now languish, endlessly presenting us with fragments that refuse to fit into a more conventional view of history.
This is a world of dizzying and dazzling contradictions, in which scientists have to spend an increasing proportion of their precious, vaccine-producing time explaining to people that no, they probably shouldn’t saw off their leg and no, being told not to saw off your leg is not part of a Deep State plot to take away your bone saws.
This is a world in which those wanting to leave the planet are international celebrities while those wanting to save it are unknown; in which it is not uncommon to hear 20-year-olds espousing Victorian prudishness while 80-year-olds do hard drugs and jump out of aeroplanes; in which the far Left and far Right have marched so far in opposite directions that they’ve met around the back of the planet and are moments away from falling in love and hatching a brood of tiny morons.
In such a world I suspect ordinary, familiar faces from the past might intrigue us and perhaps even soothe us, the relentlessness of the passage of centuries offering a paradoxical sort of comfort. Idealised profiles on temple walls are intriguing, but they are not us; they are people who lived life as we do, but who did it without dentists and therefore had it infinitely worse than we do.
Perhaps taken all together these banal little faces form a sort of human horizon, an unbroken stretch of land in the dim distance that tells us where we’ve come from and implies that, though we don’t know where we’re going, it won’t be entirely unfamiliar.
We’ll still need each other. We’ll still need dentists. But most importantly of all, we’ll still need Photoshop.
THIS IS A WORLD IN WHICH THOSE WANTING TO LEAVE THE PLANET ARE CELEBRITIES WHILE THOSE WANTING TO SAVE IT ARE UNKNOWN