Hollywood Held in Fleshless Hands

Hollywood was once an empire guarded by white teeth and platinum hair and the starvation of women beneath hot studio lights. There used to be something tangible to fear, a greasy-fingered producer with a comb-over lacquered across his bald spot, a man whose hand lingered too long on an actress’s waist. Evil once had a body. It sweated through silk shirts. It smoked cigars. It locked doors. Marilyn Monroe asking to be the only blonde on set feels less like vanity now and more like survival within a system that treated desirability as scarcity, whiteness as currency, and thinness as moral achievement.

Now the violence is ambient. Invisible. We no longer see the men behind the machine, only the clean interface of revenue streams and wellness branding and engagement metrics.

Fascism survives not through uniforms but aesthetics: the endless pressure for women to become smaller, cleaner, quieter, hairless, poreless, emptied out. The cult of health and wellness repackages white supremacy as discipline, green juice as virtue, Pilates as moral clarity, thinness as evidence of goodness. Bodies are optimized toward disappearance. Women shrink themselves algorithmically, carving away flesh until they resemble the impossible women that old Hollywood once manufactured by force.

But Hollywood itself is dead. The gates are gone. Celebrity has liquefied into content, distributed endlessly across phones held in bed at 2 a.m. Everyone wants exclusivity that no longer exists. Everyone wants to be the only blonde in a room flooded with Carolyn Bessette Kennedys. Social media democratized visibility so completely that stardom lost its scarcity value; there is too much supply and no demand.

We must become Impressionists rejected from the Salon again, painters shut out of the sanctioned rooms because they insisted sunlight looked different on actual skin than it did in academic fantasies. The Salon wanted polished mythology, idealized bodies, technical obedience. The Impressionists painted women with tired eyes, crooked postures, flesh touched by ordinary light. They painted movement before perfection. Life before approval.

Feed me the soul of a natural thing. Feed me peaches bruising on the counter. Oil paint beneath fingernails. A voice cracking mid-song because the body carrying it is tired and alive. The soul lives in irregular things. In softness. In appetite. In laughter too loud for elegance. Art that remembers the human body not as a product to brand but as something living enough to ache. Feed me the ugliest thing you can find; at least I will be able to taste it.

Andy Warhol, Marilyn Diptych, 1962, acrylic on canvas, 2054 x 1448 mm (Tate) © 2022 The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, Inc. (photo: rocor, CC BY-NC 2.0)