When Anthony Patch, one of Fitzgerald’s failed heroes, learns that “desire
cheats you,” he refers to a phenomenon we now recognize as the power of glamour:
“It’s like a sunbeam skipping here and there about a room. It stops and gilds
some inconsequential object, and we poor fools try to grasp it—but when we do
the sunbeam moves on to something else, and you’ve got the inconsequential part,
but the glitter that made you want it is gone—.” We may demand the sparkling
surface, like a cellophane coating, yet what we are able to grasp will be of
little consequence. Glamour wields the power to capture its viewers’ attention
as if by a spell that fascinates and arrests. . . . Transfixed, one gazes at a
world of possibility that is foreclosed, inaccessible, yet endlessly
alluring.Glamour, of course, can gild not only inconsequential objects but deeply
consequential ones, including political leaders, policies, and ideas. Here,
although she never discusses such subjects, Brown’s analysis offers a useful
warning: “Glamour did not emerge from human warmth, morals, and the messy
emotions that define the everyday,” she writes of Hollywood glamour photography.
“Rather, in their place was the coolly aloof and beautifully coiffed
personality, hovering over the multiple indignities of life on the ground.”
Glamour not only makes things look better than they really are. It also tends to
edit out human complexity—including, in the political realm, the complexity of
disagreements, of clashing values, of diverse wants, of technological, economic,
and moral tradeoffs.
Powerful stuff.
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