Underexposed Overexposure: <i>One Night in Paris</i>

Abstract

f, as Fredric Jameson has claimed, “the visual is essentially pornographic . . . its end in rapt, mindless fascination” (1), Paris Hilton is the potentiation of this idea made flesh. More, and more successfully than other celebrities who sing, or act, or in some way do, Paris Hilton’s brand rides on her license to simply be in the public eye, to be in her body, to be visible. She is, then, essentially visual. In a media environment populated by images of celebrities taken in their natural habitats and made available to us on our desktops, Paris’s lack of discernible productive activity is a boon. Unsullied by the unreasonable inference that we too might sing, or act, or in some way do, we are freed to examine Paris as she feeds the meter on Wiltshire this afternoon, dines in West Hollywood tonight, arrives at the party afterward. Her efforts to sing or act, while generously eclectic (Wikipedia describes her debut album, Paris [2006], as “a mix of pop/rock and dance music songs with hip hop and reggae elements”), tend to act as a distraction from her core business of displaying the minutiae of a public life. Paris (. . . not France, to borrow the title of her recent documentary) builds her own and the family brand by offering the individual as tourist sight. In the passage quoted above Jameson goes on to claim that pornographic films are “the potentiation of films in general, which ask us to stare at the world as if it were a naked body” (1). Images of Paris may more reasonably ask that we devote at least some of our attention to her clothes. Nonetheless, as she makes the scene (to borrow a phrase from the prehistory of this particular media environment), images of Paris seem to advance the idea that the world around her would be less fascinating, more fully clothed, less emphatically visual without her in it. In this image, however, Paris’s body is naked. The image is taken from her first work of pornography, the home video made with her then boyfriend, Rick Salomon, and Underexposed Overexposure: One Night in Paris minette hillyer