14 DAY TRIAL // Legendary actor Sir Anthony Hopkins has come to lament the state of our celebrity culture for how dumbing and numbing it is, as well as all those so-called stars whose purpose in life continues to remain a mystery, though they do make a lot of money off their “celebrity” status. In a recent interview cited by StarPulse, Hopkins says that either the world is going to the dogs or he’s growing old.
To prove his point, he singles out Paris by name, perhaps the most illustrative example of a person who is famous first and foremost for herself and only after that for the things she’s done. Hopkins believes things are not looking good, with the industry promoting all these women who are excessively thin, some of them anorexic and all of them without a soul. The industry is also pushing a model of androgynous celebrity, not in the sense of the eliminations of barriers for the creation of something new, but rather in the sense of blending in by standardization.
“We’re living in a pretty strange time. I went into a shop to buy my wife some clothes and I wanted them gift-wrapped. And they had this big plasma screen on with these women on the catwalk. I thought, ‘God almighty, what have we become?’ These girls – anorexic, walking like machines, no soul,” the actor is quoted as saying, though no mention is made of when and where he stated those things.
“You look at fashion magazines and you think, ‘What are we living in?’ You look at the red carpet, Paris Hilton, you know, these people and you think, ‘Is there anything going on up there?’ It’s a mass enslavement and it’s kind of fascism. And it’s the androgyny of it; the androgyny of the human soul. I don’t think people think any more. But maybe I’m just old,” Sir Anthony Hopkins further says.
Hopkins is not the only star to speak against the rise of the so-called new type of celebrity, the “sub-lebrity.” A while back, Joan Collins was also saying that we’ve come to live the day when it was deemed acceptable to have as goal in life your 15 minutes of fame or, at best, your own below-par reality show. “Celebrity” no longer means the same thing it did years ago, Collins was also saying at the time.