There are few genres of journalism I enjoy more than the profile: 2,000 to 10,000 words on a single individual. Sometimes this is a mega-famous celebrity, sometimes it’s an ordinary person, but the best profiles are of people who are well-known within certain circles, whose life and works are demonstrative of a larger trend in society, and yet who are unique and fascinating in themselves.
The Striking Detail
Much of the art of the profile lies in the striking detail; that one bit of elegantly-conveyed information that reveals so much. A proto-profile of underground English boxers written in 1822 by William Hazlitt displays an early example of frequent subject for striking details – that is, food:
The whole art of training (I, however, learnt from him), consists in two things, exercise and abstinence, abstinence and exercise, repeated alternately without end. A yolk of an egg with a spoonful of rum in it is the first thing in a morning, and then a walk of six miles till breakfast. This meal consists of a plentiful supply of tea and toast and beef steaks. Then another six or seven miles till dinner-time, and another supply of solid beef or mutton with a pint of porter, and perhaps, at the utmost, a couple of glasses of sherry.
The Expected vs. the Unexpected
But in the 200 years since Hazlitt’s pioneering piece of sports journalism, the form of the profile has hardened. Today it is expected that a profile of a celebrity will tell its readers what and where they eat; even when what and where they eat is excruciatingly ordinary. You can see an example of the regrettable trend in the opening sentences of Jay McIrney’s 1994 profile of Chloe Sevigny in the New Yorker:
It’s weird, this happens all the time. Chloe Sevigny is sitting at one of the outdoor tables at Stingy Lulu’s, on St. Mark’s Place just off Avenue A, absorbing a mixed green salad and devouring the just-out September Vogue. A black girl and an Asian girl huddle anxiously on the corner a few yards away, checking her out.
Everything about this passage is about what you would expect. A famous model eats salad, reads fashion magazines as soon as they are published, and is constantly spotted in public? What could be more matter of course?
Oops, You Forgot to Mention…
What if no striking details were available, you ask? Well, in the profile of Chloe Sevigny, that is certainly not the case; Stingy Lulu’s, the restaurant where she was eating, was famous for its drag queen waitresses. And yet, much to his discredit, McIrney neglects to mention this fact.
And in the hands of an exemplary journalist, striking details can be found just about everywhere. As in another article in the New Yorker; this one by Jon Lee Andersen written during the 2006 war in Lebanon:
On a deceptively peaceful afternoon in the last week of July, Ali Fayyad, a Hezbollah strategist, puffed on a cigar and spooned up a dish of ice cream. Three scoops: chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry. We were sitting in Lina’s Café, on Rue Hamra, in downtown Beirut.
The Ordinary vs. the Cliché
Strangely enough, these two passages demonstrate the difference between the ordinary and the cliche. The ordinary is simply the commonplace situations of our everyday lives. But the cliche, when it’s not simply a hackneyed phrase, is what we expect of fiction or artifice. Which is often the reverse of the ordinary. If these works of journalism were instead cliche works of fiction, the situations would be reversed. The Hezbollah strategist would be spotted by two unknown personages during a rendezvous at a Beirut cafe. And the famous model would be eating three scoops of ice cream, as both a sign of her suppressed childishness and as a willful flouting of dieting norms.
Of course, we would ideally get a journalistic report that began with a Hezbollah strategist eating at a restaurant with drag queen waitresses. But that scene is so far forthcoming.
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