Glamour represents a special case of what the cultural anthropologist Grant McCracken calls “displaced meaning.” As sources of identity and hope, he argues, every culture maintains ideals that can never be fully realized in everyday life. To preserve and transmit these ideals, a culture develops images and stories that portray a world in which its ideals are realized—a paradise, a utopia, a vanished golden age, a world to come. When they are transported to a distant cultural domain, ideals are made to seem practicable realities. What is otherwise unsubstantiated and potentially improbable in the present world is now validated, somehow “proven,” by its existence in another, distant one.
The myth making of displaced meaning gives cultures the characters,artifacts, geography, and emotions that make their cherished abstractions seem attainable and true while keeping those ideals safely removed from the constraints and compromises of everyday life. Hence, the connection between the glamorous and the exotic. It’s easier to imagine a perfect life in a place you’ve never been, a place you know only from carefully selected images. California, Paris, and New York were most glamorous when they were hardest to reach. Yet these are, of course, real places. They are, at least in theory, attainable.
For individuals, McCracken argues, commercial goods often serve as “bridges to these hopes and ideals.” Your dream house represents not just a dwelling but your vision of the perfect family life, the perfect job, the perfect self. Owning a component of that dream—the perfect dining room set, say—makes the entire ideal it represents seem like something you can someday claim. If we can recreate the picture, we imagine we can live the life. The perfect artist’s loft, cook’s kitchen, or writer’s study will makes us who we want to be. Glamour gives utopia a tactile presence, a human connection. The audience identifies, at least for a moment, with the glamorous person, place, or thing. Hollywood’s Golden Age “portraits were romanticized ideals caught frozen in time: lasting objects of perfection to hold in your hands,” writes a historian. Glamour evokes the audience’s desire to escape to a world where its ideals and deepest yearnings are realized and, at least for a moment, glamour provides an imaginative entrance to that world.
But the ideal is always out of reach and so, in some way, must be the goods that symbolize it. Only then can tangible things remain bridges to intangible, and impossible, goals. That is why luxuries often take on displaced meaning. We cannot afford them or, like countless haute couture dresses, they require a setting or a physique few people will ever possess.
Reading this reminds me of my earlier entries on fantasizing and longing for ideals (e.g. here and here). I’m not sure how much I still agree with what I wrote. Perhaps due to my regular reading of the blog Overcoming Bias that I’m less capable of deceiving myself credibly anymore even though I think it might be interesting to do so.
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