I had occasion to drive past the aftermath of the red carpet premier of the movie Australia in George Street Sydney last night and I couldn’t believe my eyes at the size of the red carpet. It was at least as wide as 3 lanes and who knows how far its length extended into the distance. Just goes to show how many big budget movie premiers I’ve been to, but I always thought they were about the size of a hall runner in a very long house. I guess the bigger the carpet, the more important the event, the leader, the dignitary or the celebrity walking on it. The red carpet phenomenon also applies to what you look like when you walk on the carpet. Look at the pictures of our celebrities who go to great lengths to be exquisitely coiffed and outfitted in a manner befitting royalty when the carpet calls.
Some quick research into the red carpet phenomenon takes us beyond movie premiers and back to 485BC and Aeschylus, a Greek playright. Aeschylus created a character called Agenemon whose wife deceives him into walking onto red carpet which was intended for the gods. Fast forward to the 1820s and we see the red carpet rolled out for a US President and in 1902 red carpet is used in ceremonial fashion to welcome guests to a classy train journey.
It’s interesting to see how the “red carpet” treatment evolved from our respect and reverence for “the gods”, to dignitaries and rulers, to ceremony and now to celebrity. Inviting someone to the red carpet is like placing them on a pedestal above the ordinary citizen for a period of time, to acknowledge and perhaps celebrate their leadership or achievement in a particular field (notwithstanding Australia’s pedestals which are more often than not used as a national pastime to shoot people off and bring them down to size).
It seems to me that the red carpet is changing again.
Is the bar being raised? It wasn’t long ago that our red carpet standards seemed to be quite different. Britain’s Sir Winston Churchill was regarded as a formidable prime minister during world war II, yet he was previously sacked from the military for incompetence, and is known to have arrived drunk while serving in his political office. Today, we not only send our leaders in business, politics or governance to post graduate education to earn the right to assume positions of leadership, we are now more often punishing them for incompetence or breaches of our trust and integrity. We have also created the expectation that celebrity status automatically equates with a leadership position on issues of national or global importance.
Perhaps these trends are because our standards are rising and perhaps it is also because the media and the internet have given us a new access to probe and judge our leaders and celebrities lives.
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