Celebrity, Pedophilia, and Ideology in American Culture By Jason ...

concerned with the sexual abuse of girls, what we are concerned with here primarily is male sexuality. Along with the creation of Michael Jackson as a child star, media culture sexualizes children but denies this by denouncing pedophiles. Celebrities are worshipped as the highest human form, encapsulating the ideological truth of the age. Chapters 14 to 19 tackle interrelated issues, with Chapter 14 concentrating on the theological ramifications of one film that also includes aspects of child sexual abuse and Chapter 15 examining philosophical aspects of meaning and American Psycho as novel and film. Philosophical issues, and the worship of death, are also dealt with in an assessment of the hypnotic anti-Western Dead Man (Jim Jarmusch, 1995) in Chapter 16. What I am interested in is contemporary culture’s approach to American identity, and, quoting Sam Peckinpah, Jarmusch made the point that the “Western is a universal frame within which it’s possible to comment on today.”¹¹ The Western is the American film par excellence, but its global appeal is not due to specific geography or history, such as the attempted genocide of native peoples, but due to its mythmaking. Indigenous peoples in the white imagination were seen as being children of Eden, sinless and in a state of grace.¹² There was the same attitude toward children, with the belief that it was through them that salvation could be reached; and concurrently, indigenous peoples and children were thought to be unable to feel pain, to be in a metaphysical zone outside reality, with this belief only recently being challenged. Chapter 17 assesses the vagaries of memory as constructed through science fiction and theology, while chapter 18 deals with public rhetoric after the 11 September 2001 terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, the ideological implications of discourse, as well as their theological import, intrinsic to this analysis overall. Ideology, theology, violence, and the image are all examined. Chapter 19 assesses youth, celebrity, and violence, which bring us back to the issues explained in detail in Chapter 2, a desire for fame knowing no boundaries. We can see how our perception of childhood is paramount throughout these texts, and how this relates to our contemporary political reality. The core of our being, our ontological essence, is constructed through these forms of