When I was an undergraduate at the University of Southern California, the Academy Awards were still being held at the Shrine Auditorium, which is located just north of Jefferson, directly across the street from campus. It’s quite a structure, built in the Moorish Revival style and opened in 1926. At that time, the surrounding neighborhood of South Central Los Angeles was an enclave of the wealthy. The enormous victorian and craftsman homes that litter the West Adams neighborhood offer some modest memory of this fact, even if the now run-down mansions are mostly rented out by the room to college students.

Many USC students live to the north of campus, between Jefferson and West Adams, Figueroa and Vermont. It’s an area directly blocked by the Shrine and its associated madness on Oscar night. I remember one year I had an afternoon philosophy class (I think it was with Dallas Willard) that let out just as the Oscar drama was beginning. (As an aside, the Seely Wintersmith Mudd Hall of Philosophy at USC is probably the most desirable university building I have ever encountered.) The car services and the bleachers and overall madness blocked Jefferson by that time, but on the walk from the opposite end of campus all I saw and heard were the press helicopters above. Dozens, perhaps. It sounded like Apocalypse Now.

It seems glamorous, yet on any other day, the Shrine was just a strange Neo-Moorish monstrosity out of place in a pretty lousy neighborhood. One might have cut in front of it (the front is on tiny Royal street) from an apartment north of 32nd St. on the way to class, or in the other direction, to the bus stop or the Del Taco. Red carpet glamour is hardly the sensation.

hendricks.jpgI thought of this becuse today I happened upon the image at right, of Mad Men actress Christina Hendricks at last weekend’s Creative Arts Emmy Awards. The show is now held at the Nokia Theater, which is just across from the Staples Center, as you can see in the photograph. It struck me because the image was reproduced on innumerable entertainment blogs, all discussing the glamour and fashion of Hendricks, Mad Men, and the Hollywood television industry in general. But as anyone whose ever attended a Lakers game or E3 knows, the LA Convention Center complex is a sweaty, miserable swath of asphalt, from which heat rises in waves.

I suppose heat and sweat are precisely the things that come to mind for many when they look at Christina Hendricks. But not asphalt, nor Del Taco, I’d suspect.

I’m not usually one to rely on etymological explanation, particularly since the linguistic turn increasingly feels like it was a wrong one, but in this case I’ll make an exception. We usually think of glamour as a word for enticement, allure, charm, beauty, and attraction. But “glamour” really means something subtly different: a magical spell. There’s some disagreement about its origins—the word seems to be an alternate use either of the Greek γραμμάριον (gram, a unit of weight for measuring potions) or the Latin grammatica (scholarship, but in its medieval sense occult learning).

This earlier, simpler definition also explains the Hollywood notion of glamour: a fascination that draws us in, even if it also proves illusory. But it also helps explain the Oscar effect. The red carpet, the gowns, and the like are not mere trappings of the glamorous. Instead, they perform the witchcraft that is glamour, glorifying Del Tacos, parking lots, and urban slums with glitz and glory. The red carpet is not a ceremonial object brought out to service the glamorous, but one of the many talismans that invoke the glamour itself.

The day after the Oscars or the Emmys, the mundane blight of things returns not because it was pretending to be something it wasn’t, but because the spell has worn off. Indeed, every glamour has an expiration date. When stars, media, and ideas fall from grace they do so not by misfortune or mismanagement, but because their charm has simply worn off.

published August 24, 2010

Comments

  1. tclark

    Aren’t the Academy Awards on Sunday nights?

  2. Ian Bogost

    Not that year. I remember it very clearly. They’re not always on Sundays.

  3. tclark

    Ah, I stand corrected, they were on Mondays for a while and have only been on Sundays the last decade or so.