Christian Bale remixed

By now you've surely heard or heard about the "Dark Knight" star having a four-minute, ripely foul-mouthed diva fit on the set of "Terminator Salvation" -- the incident occurred last summer but after TMZ.com broke the audio two days ago, it proliferated like headlice across the internet. (You can follow the TMZ link or listen to it at one of the many youtube'd versions; clear the room of small children and animals first).

Clearly, modern pop culture now lies in wait for something like this -- famous person goes nutzoid, revealing "real self" beneath smooth corporate exterior of celebrity persona -- and then mutates it into a million technological pieces. What's notable about the Bale thing, even more than similar rips in the star matrix like Mel Gibson's roadside meltdown, Alec Baldwin's cellphone parenting techniques, David O. Russell's on-set tantrum, Vanessa Hudgens' photo mishap, Tom Cruise's scientology recruitment video, etc., etc., is the dizzying speed with which the Bale iterations poured out of the interweb, each seized upon and reported (much as I'm doing here) in a fractal daisy-chain of mass schadenfreude.

So within 24 hours of the TMZ scoop, Urban Dictionary had coined the term "bale-out," Jimmy Kimmel had taped a parody version for his show, and there appeared a club remix of the rant by L.A. knob-twiddler RevoLucian. I'm sure there are more; feel free to post them in the comments section.

The impulse behind all this is simple: Ooh, fresh meat -- how can we play with it? Simply emailing a link to the original celebrity misbehavior to your friends is no longer enough; you now either have to create something new from the pieces (club remix, Youtube movie to go with the audio, whatever) and then ship it out to be forwarded and judged by the world at large. Or, at the very least, you must acknowledge your own up-to-the-nanosecond hipness by linking to the new versions (um, much as I'm doing here).

This is how stardom has changed in the 21st century: it's now a technological cargo cult in which we own any and all chunks of a celebrity not controlled by the official machine. There's an element of revenge to this, of revelation, of taking back what's ours from the publicists and handlers and studios (because, at bottom, we always believe movie stars belong to us and us alone). There's also a dark delight in seeing the grotty underside of celebrity, because it confirms so many things for so many people: that stars are just like us, or (more interesting) that stars are worse than us and should never have presumed to climb on that high horse of fame.

But that part's nothing new: The complicated cultural love/hate we have for our mass idols goes back to the Fatty Arbuckle scandal and before. What is new is that we have the tools to speak to it, to play with it, and to gain a measure of borrowed stardom for ourselves.