“It’s been a crazy year. I’ve learned that being a celebrity is like being a sacrificial lamb. At some point, no matter how high the pedestal that they put you on, they’re going to tear you down. And I created a character as an offering for the sacrifice. I’m not willing to give my true self up. It’s a testament to my real personality that I would go so far as to make up another personality to give to the world. The reality is, I’m hidden amongst all the insanity. Nobody can find me.”

It may come as little surprise that I find so many religious–specifically Jewish–references in Fox’s self-analysis intriguing:  testament, sacrificial lamb, pedestals, True Self, offering to the world.

The plethora of these references makes sense given her Southern roots.  Fox was raised in a very strict Pentecostal family, which would help explain the many Hebrew Scriptural references permeating her interview.

The thought of sacrifice is always tied in with concern for purity–think “unblemished” in the sense of both sacrificial animals and mad- up starlets.  It’s fascinating–in the classically religious sense of both awe and horror –that Fox refers repeatedly in the interview to her understanding of her role as the personification of the bitchy slut .  She transgresses the boundaries of the classic, pretty, nonthreatening blond.  She becomes a kind of Lilith-figure, a screen on which to project male lurid fantasies of both self-immolation and boundary-breaking terrain intertwining both sexuality and violence.  By breaking the worldspace into pure and impure (holy and profane), the repressed/held back becomes instantly that much more attractive and seductive.

I think I get what she’s trying to communicate, though she has confused a couple of things. Nevertheless, I’ll take a Derridian stance here and simply assume the grammar-structure speaks through her thereby divining a bit from the personal intent (or non-intent) of Fox’s statements.

To wit, a sacrificial lamb isn’t put on a pedestal.  The pedestal refers more to a fetish object–in both the religious and, in Fox’s case, certainly sexual sense.  A pedestalized being is one that is turned essentially into an angel or god-like figure so that they can descend to demonic status, which in her case fits with the profile of Fox being possessed by a demon and cannibalistic-style eating men while getting it on with girls.  The sexual-religious interplay here–if not self-conscious on Fox’s part–seems so intertwined as to be almost automatic or reflexive.

This shouldn’t come as too much of a shock given that Hollywood is a secularized form of the classic religious devotion to a saint or guru.  Hollywood stars are, after all, called Icons and are lauded for their charisma–i.e. their grace or their sanctified shine.  And saints have to die as burnt offerings, so you begin to see where this is heading.

And it’s a game Megan Fox self-consciously comprehends and frankly admits to playing.  In that sense, she is far more interesting than sob-story cases like a Lindsay Lohan, the messed up Olsen Twin, or any number of vapid blond tween queens that have propagated like rabbits over the past decade, symbolizing the continued the extension of later adolescence both forward into the thirties and backward into the earlier teen (and even pre-teen…yuck) years.

Fox also mentions her real self/true personality, by which she means (I think) her non-Hollywood self.  The person who she admits likes eating at Red Lobster and purposefully plays upon the outrage-machine through (as she admits) the character she’s created for men’s magazine interviews.

Now in theological terms, the real self, her real self, is in fact the Soul.  The Soul that is united with God.  The dimension of our being that actually does have a “covenant” (i.e. a testament, in her words) with the Divine.  Is it a testament to her real personality that she has given the crowds their bloodless sacrificial offering?  Or is it just smart business sense on her part?  Does she really believe her own justification (word alert: another heavy theological term there)? [Read more →]

I agreed to do so and we proceeded to cut dairy, refined carbs, sugar, vinegars, sugary fruits, and all yeasty foods from our wheelhouse, while at the same taking a regimen of herbal supplements. The effects of this dietary shift were surpisingly pronounced. While on the cleanse I felt physically, emotionally, and mentally more clear and more energized.

Once the cleanse ended we tried to be slow in reintroducing banished foods back into our system, but Christmas loomed large and we both indulged more than we should have. After a particularly hearty dinner at my future in-laws I immediately felt the effects of what I had eaten and proceeded to curse myself, downing as much water as I could to flush out my system.

While flushing, I wrote the following post over at the Politics of Scrabble, noting,

It occurs to me that there are a myriad if things we put in our body without ever really thinking about it, much of it due to modern technology. Just like me prior to this cleanse, we have no sense of what the affects on our well-being are because we’ve rarely experienced life without these additives. But the effects can be stunning. I felt 120% better without all the stuff in my system that I cut out and I had no real idea how bad I felt before. I don’t count myself an enemy of modernity, but I think this points to the insight that postmodernity offers us in either its liberal/progressive or conservative flavours: just because we can, doesn’t mean we should.

Having now gone to see the same herbalist and been put back on the cleanse diet for the past two weeks, I am feeling the same healthy effects and that notion of “just because we can, doesn’t mean we should” is back front and centre in my mind.

Much of the drive of modernity is towards progress. In the eyes of modernity, progress solves all. With progress we move forward, we build bigger and better things, we create more for more people. It is a constant march forward, but often feels like we don’t take the time to either look back or look around to see where it is that we’re going.

Now, don’t get me wrong, I’m all for progress and I do see a lot of the benefits that the progress of modernity has provided. I don’t deny that there is, on the whole, less war and more prosperity amongst more people now than there has been in the past. I think those are good things. But I think the ethos of our day is also pointing to the need to ease our constant movement forward and to balance that movement with a careful consideration of what the impacts of that movement are. What do we damage along the way? What do we shunt to the side without even realizing it? As summed up above, just because we can do something, doesn’t necessarily means that we should. [Read more →]