Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [101]
In the past few years, we have all watched in awe as the people who were made famous via reality shows have succeeded in becoming even more famous by going on to run afoul of the law. We’ve seen everything from drunken disorderly behavior and/or simple assault (Jersey Shore, various) to homicide (Ryan Jenkins, from Megan Wants a Millionaire, killed his wife), from filing a false police report (Richard Heene, from Wife Swap and “Balloon Boy”) to drug dealing (a pair of guys from season 9 of Big Brother). In the new crime/celebrity/fame/asshole nexus, escaping into anonymity after doing something horrible is no longer the point. (See Sheen, Charlie.) Anonymity itself is the greater offense.
And it works just as effectively when you reverse Acts 1 and 2 and start your journey toward national celebrity by using a crime itself as your Act 1 “brand.” In this model, you simply move toward the boorish, rude, asshole-as-entertainment paradigm for your Act 2. The results are very much the same. (See: Buttafuoco, Joey.)
Thus, for the last decade, we have witnessed more and more examples of an increasingly savvy publicity-seeking criminal who has put as much thought and care into the planning stages of his crime as he would into an idea for a show or a film. In fact, we now expect our criminals to have done their PR homework before they burst onto the scene, since searching for a new perpetrator’s Internet presence will be the first research everyone does.
These days it only makes good sense that before a new criminal actually takes the stage with his first splashy illegal act, he has set up his website, Facebook page, MySpace page, and/or Tumblr, all loaded with the necessary photos, videos, manifestos, and blogs full of ranting he will need to launch his “brand.” A good example of a trendsetting twenty-first-century criminal who was ahead of the curve in terms of working with the media this way was crazy gunman Seung Hui Cho, who killed thirty-two people at Virginia Tech. The press kit he assembled and mailed out before he fired a single shot contained so many different head shots and action-adventure photos of himself in various fighting poses, along with broadcast-ready video statements and letters of disturbed criminal intention, that he practically deserved to get a producer credit on the nightly news.
It seems inevitable that criminals and celebrities will continue to borrow more and more from each other’s playbooks as they all strive to make the most of their time in whatever limelight is available. At this point, our culture has raised them all to understand that the closer attention they pay to ongoing details, like wardrobe and supporting cast, the better their prospects for being memorialized in films and books. Thus it just makes good sense for each new budding criminal to ask themselves, while still in their planning stages, “What image do I want to project? Do I want to seem playful or formidable? Tough guy or wounded victim? Man of the People or a sad, contemplative Man of Mystery? Vin Diesel or Johnny Depp?”
The Columbine killers still stand out as two who played the wardrobe card very well, whereas Colton Harris-Moore (dubbed the “Barefoot Bandit”) did equally well with the nickname card. So well, in fact, that he had several Facebook fan pages full of comments from well-wishers by the time he hit the headlines and was arrested for multiple incidents of grand larceny and breaking and entering.
Of course, once the crime and asshole entertainment