Their blood-red fingernails encased in boxing gloves, the two working-class gladiatrixes took to the ring on Fox Television to duke it out for sums rumored to be around $35,000 and a last-ditch attempt to cling to fame, whatever the cost.
Pathetic! Poignant! Revolting! we pronounced.
Then we tuned in by the millions.
"Celebrity Boxing" averaged 15.5 million viewers - Fox's highest ratings since "Temptation Island" last year. Although there were two other matches, most viewers tuned in last Wednesday to see Tonya Harding beat the tar out of Paula Jones. The catfight in boxing gloves even won its time period against a rerun of the critically acclaimed "The West Wing."
In the days leading up to the highly publicized event, culture critics lamented the declining state of television - and civilization.
They're missing the point, said Neal Gabler, cultural commentator and author of "Life the Movie: How Entertainment Conquered Reality." "People like low-grade entertainment, and have for a long time, not because they are stupid, but because they realize this kind of behavior is transgressive," Gabler argued. "There is a real thrill to sticking it to the custodians of culture."
People watch shows such as "Celebrity Boxing" precisely because they are terrible, and because they are commentary on how we feel about celebrity. "No one took this seriously," Gabler said last Thursday. "What was going on last night was a giant wink to one another. It was a giant tweak to high culture. This was about saying, I'm hip. I'm cool. I get it. It's about irony."
Some scholars of ancient civilizations believe we are led to watch such spectacles by the same impulses that led crowds to the coliseums of the Roman empire to watch gladiators fight for their lives. Roman gladiators were "socially dead," said Margaret Imber, a classics professor at Bates College in Maine. Often despised in polite society, the fighters had few or no legal rights, she said. "Harding and Jones arguably are in a similar situation because they sought - despite their non-elite origins - to play on an elite stage."
(Olympic figure skating for Harding, American presidential politics for Jones).
Both Jones, 35, and Harding, 31, have been stereotyped in the media as low class. Harding gained notoriety in January 1994 over a botched plot to injure skating rival Nancy Kerrigan.
Jones entered the U.S. political arena in 1994 when she filed a lawsuit against then-President Clinton, claiming he made an unwelcome sexual advance in 1991 when he was governor of Arkansas and she was a state employee. She went on to pose nude for Penthouse.
"Ideologically, we try to suppress class distinctions," Imber said. "The reason these two are lightning rods is because they are from a lower socioeconomic class, and they came to social attention by crossing a boundary into an elite arena. That made it very highly charged." If you survived as a gladiator, you essentially got a nice fat retirement package and lost your servile status, she said. Though beyond the money they earned from Fox, the rewards for Harding and Jones are unclear.
Other scholars of the ancient world scoffed at such analogies.
"The spectacle thing is true in both (situations)," said Ian Worthington, a professor of ancient history at the University of Missouri, Columbia. "But this really is just a marketing thing."
No one would have wanted to see Harding and Jones humiliate themselves, Worthington said, if the women hadn't already been pathetic public figures, a step away from oblivion. In the evening's two other matches, 42-year-old Danny Bonaduce of "Partridge Family" fame pummeled 47-year-old Barry Williams, Greg of "The Brady Bunch," and Todd Bridges, 36, of TV's "Diff'rent Strokes" took down Robert Van Winkle, 32, the rapper once known as Vanilla Ice.
