Figures · the people holding the sphere

Who does the holding

Every parasocial bond needs something on the other end, whether or not it can hold anything back. These are the ones that keep turning up, from a sculptor to a face on a webcam.

c. 600 BC

Pygmalion

MYTH

Fell in love with his own sculpture. The statue was never the point - the work was. Two thousand years before anybody called it anything.

1438

Margery Kempe

HISTORY

Performed a self in public until it held: white clothes, loud weeping, a whole town watching. The founding document of this entire site, and the reason I did my master's thesis on her.

1927

The Maschinenmensch

FILM

The robot in Metropolis, built to look like a woman called Maria and set loose among the workers. The children cannot tell the difference, and neither can the men she is sent to inflame. A machine played a person to a room full of people and was believed, which is the whole problem in one scene.

1981

Pee-wee Herman

Paul Reubens built the character, and the character's whole point was that you could tell when it was off. A children's TV host who is a performed self, performed by a person who could stop.

1963

Dionne Warwick

MUSIC

Received fan mail by the sackful and answered it by name for years. The first celebrity whose relationship with the public was genuinely reciprocal, which makes her the exception that proves the rule.

1999

Charlie Kaufman

FILM

Sat in a chair on a talk show and said he was worried that people could not tell the difference between television and their own life. He was describing the mechanism, on television, to the audience of the mechanism.

2014

A Twitch emote

INTERNET

A face on a streamer's webcam, given a name, given feelings, and now used by strangers to express things they cannot say to anyone they know.

Want the argument for the whole thing? The history course → · The ten sections →