Paris Hilton - Frankenstein Bound

In the 1931 James Whale film "Frankenstein", an obsessed scientist creates a monster by defying the laws of God and nature. Through various nefarious deeds, Frankenstein constructs a beast from the body parts of those already dead. When it all goes wrong and the life form begins its inevitable fall into evil and murder, the outraged populace blames the creature and eventually kills it. I would contend, however, that the true blame lies not with the creature but with its creator, Dr. Frankenstein. True, Frankenstein had originally noble motives, seeking to aid mankind by unlocking the secrets of life and death, and he had no idea that his experiments would eventually cause Man (and himself) so much sorrow. But ultimately he was meddling in things that he had no business meddling in, he glorified science over faith, and ambition and pride over humility and perspective.

Paris Hilton might be feeling a lot like that creature right now, if in her frazzled, dilapidated state she can truly feel much of anything at all.

Like the Frankenstein monster, Paris Hilton did not ask for the world she was born into, nor did she ask for the conditions of her birth. She didn't ask to be rich, spoiled and totally insulated from the realities of living a normal life. But she was. She didn't ask to have a life in which she would be perfectly fine if she never raised a finger, or in which she'd become famous for doing basically nothing. But she was.

And now, like Shelley's creature, she's being punished and vilified for the conditions of her birth, just as she previously benefitted from those conditions by being given jobs (modelling, a terrible TV reality show) that she would never have gotten had she been poor into different circumstances. It's obvious that her wealth and celebrity made the judge in her DWI case go above and beyond the pale in order to show how "tough on crime" he was, and its that same prejudice and pigheadedness that's sending her back to jail instead of a rehab facility, a pathetic, quivering mess. The same pill that had given her strength was now poisoning her.

But Hilton's rise to fame, as blasphemous and wrong as it was, is like the monster's turn to evil in that both of them were merely reacting to the world they were born into. Hilton apparently has never had to be responsible for herself or anything else, and her rise to fame because of a homemade sex video, "The Simple Life" and a racy fast food commercial probably only further served to convince her that life was indeed her cherry tree and all she had to do was pick from it without much effort or consequence. Nothing in her short life seems to have prepared her for anything different.

Now she faces real consequences of her bad behavior. Now she no doubt is confused and angry and depressed as the her former world that countenanced any and all of her childish behavior crashes around her, and the sanctimonious public hoots and jeers and leers at her every weak moment. Every newscaster can barely stifle their ghoulish glee at the site of Paris crumbling before their eyes, apparently mistaking her downfall as some huge victory for the concept of justice. Certainly she is no different from any other criminal and her wealth and celebrity should not shield her from facing the consequences of her actions, but neither should she be punished more severely because the American public was foolish and shallow enough to anoint her Queen of Spoiled Snobs. No one forced any of us to watch her shows, follow her extracurricular activities or live vicariously through her. We could have all just chosen to look away, but we didn't.

And now that she has been brought low, we all puff out our chests and point our fingers at her and proclaim ourselves better than she is because she' tried to mitigate a sentence that is by all logic out of proportion to her crime, as if any of us would do any different. Hilton used everything she has, wealth, parents, fame, whatever public sympathy she can muster, to extricate herself from a situation that is clearly causing her to unravel (though she later seems to be accepting her fate, most likely on the advice of agents and "handlers). Can any of us truly say that we would not do the same, using whatever weapons we had at our disposal? The hypocrisy should, I suppose, be shocking, but it's not. It's predictable, just like everything else about this depressing saga.

America revels in building up its villains then shooting them down. They did it with Anna Nicole Smith, they are doing it now with Paris Hilton and Lindsey Lohan. It's like we are one huge dysfunctional family that neglects our children and rewards them for doing all the wrong things and then when their individual dramas finally play out to their logical conclusions we push our children away in revulsion and deny that they are any part of us, but like the Frankenstein monster, they ARE us, or at the very least, our creations. They are what we have made them, and if we don't like what we see we should take a look in the mirror and try to change ourselves and what we value and what we pass along to our children before passing judgment.

Paris Hilton epitomizes priviledge and greed and irresponsibility, we all say. In every office, factory, household and public place people talk about money; how little they have, how they want more, how they deserve more, how much happier they would be with more. So, like our attitude about almost everything else, our attitude toward the rich is hypocritical. We revile them for being well off, we rage that they don't deserve the advantages that life has given them, yet we covet their status and secretly yearn for the same privileges.

No one should grow up that well off financially in a world where millions go to bed starving every day. No one should ever become so insulated from reality that they feel they are above the law, and no society should allow its children to value artifice and material possessions and decadence over virtue and inner purpose and humility. Don't look at Paris Hilton and point your wagging finger; look in the mirror. We all did it to her, and we do it to ourselves and our children every day. The same morbid curiosity that made the villagers gape at the Frankenstein monster's hideous visage is the same morbid curiosity that makes us cling to Paris Hilton's every inconsequential act. The same dual reaction of fascination and repulsion that defined the townspeople's relationship with the monster is the same way we react to the celebrity gods that walk among us; we hate them and yet we can't look away from them.

But there's another, more telling, parallel between the sad creature of fiction and the sad creature we see on our TV screens every day. The Frankenstein monster was made OF us, BY us (or at least one of us). He was sewn together from the feed, hands, head, arms and legs of normal people, just as this sick fascination with the rich and famous comes not from some netherworld of depravity but from our own conscience choices. Both are what we have made them, and we paradoxically blame them for being so.

I'm not trying to make Paris Hilton a martyr, by any means. I watched her TV show a total of one time and hated it. I don't really care what she does, who she dates, or what she thinks about anything. But I don't hate her; like Frankenstein's creation, I hate what the universe has made her.