In tragic Greek theatre, the thing every protagonist has in common is social status. Since the genre depends on the notion of a fall, it's typically better that this fall occurs from a great height. It was one of the requirements Aristotle specified for tragic drama, "that its suffering subject be a person of worldly importance." Like many, Jenny Diski sees a connection between tragic drama and postmodern celebrity:
Maybe with gossip we have settled for Schadenfreude in place of catharsis: thank heavens the pointlessly fortunate Kim [Kardashian] has cellulite, and that we can watch her more-than-human status crumble on her thighs. Yet, on the other hand, there is a case to be made for such domestically scaled disasters – as being a commonplace version of tragedy writ small, and more suitable for the home-based intimacy of television, newspapers, magazines and internet-linked iPads on the breakfast table, rather than the grander scale of the Theatre of Dionysus. The loss of youth and beauty, from whichever social stratum you view it, is a universal experience, pointing to entropy and our common end. Just being young and becoming old was not tragic enough in itself for the Greeks, but death was, and in observing the decaying body that is what we must at some level become aware of. In present, less reverential times, when we can look at the great and the good and imagine ourselves more directly, perhaps we understand better the power and implications of apparently smaller sadnesses more generally suffered.
The death of kings and the appearance of cellulite in young women might not be so incommensurate if the critics are right that part of the function of Greek tragedy was to display the misfortune of the great as catharsis for the populace. Most people won’t accidentally marry their mothers but we are all going to get older. Knowing that Kim Kardashian (rich, deluded, narcissistic, attention-seeking and -receiving) has cellulite speaks truth to more of us than the fall of Oedipus (unless you bring Freud’s wacky interpretation of the myth rather than the tragic drama into the equation). While gossip seems to belittle tragedy, it also (for better or worse) democratises it –who’s to say that the shiver of inevitable ageing and death felt at the first sign of cellulite is too trivial a signifier of mortality?