The Trial of Paris

Let me start off by saying this: I don’t see Paris Hilton as an ink-blot pattern for analyzing much of anything, least of all a nation of 300 million. Whatever the symbolic import of life so far, it has not been realized directly through media spectacle.

Commentary on her legal imbroglio has been something of an auto-critique. Hilton is famously shallow, the storyline goes, her spot in the public eye a curious, unfortunate byproduct of the family hotel empire. This was the storyline spun by everyone from Glenn Beck to Anderson Cooper, from Fox News to MSNBC, and no doubt by hundreds of local columnists who, for better or worse, have no real point of reference for understanding the rich. The amount of attention paid to Hilton stories is less amusing than its essential sameness, source to source.

Implausible as it seems, Paris Hilton is a tragic figure in the high literary tradition: the high-born, the Oedipuses and the Hamlets, are the ones destined to suffer most dramatically, falling to their depths from such original heights. That the heiress’s name is now synonymous with lack of consequence is beside the point – the accuracy of the association is her tragedy, not her tragic flaw.

Consider that Hilton is a high school dropout and GED holder. With thirty looming on her not-too-distant horizon, the woman probably could not cut it at a halfway decent community college. This is not a slight against the undereducated in general, but against those who should at least be able to buy their way out of that demographic. Nothing would have prevented Hilton from attending, say, Harvard – that is, if she had taken the course she should have, according to the media commentators, or at least the one she might have, with the funding and blessing of the world’s largest hotel chain.

She had a choice, in other words, according to Conventional Wisdom. Like her mythic namesake, Hilton was all but literally presented the entire world from which to select her fate. And out of all that near infinity of possibilities, she chose to become her own vision of Helen of Troy: waif skinny, coquettishly blank, and disinterestedly tied up in a host of side projects that are, for mere mortals, callings of a lifetime.

I don’t believe she did have a choice. As Oedipus’s glory blinded him to his true identity, the cheap glitz surrounding Hilton must be the sort of distraction that dulls a person to her own possibilities. A talk show guest or two was willing to admit that Hilton in fact had made much of her own money, as a model and a reality-TV star. In fact, unlike the freakish beauties most often discovered in grocery store lines or on Brazil’s beaches, Hilton created her own modeling career. There is something poignant in that self-invention. A person who is willing to squander – hundreds of thousands? – on the illusion that she, too, is one of those freakishly blessed by genetics supposedly realizes the illusory nature of her creation.

“That’s the best thing a girl can be in this world, a beautiful little fool,” as Daisy tells Nick, without much irony, in the opening of The Great Gatsby.

And what would anyone else have become, in Hilton’s overpriced and useless shoes? What would any of us have done, from a family like hers, at a time and in a place like the ones she finds herself?