I'm With This Dummy

In an era of virtual theme parks and high-tech circuses, Madame Tussaud's is a puzzling anachronism. Using a technology little changed since the French Revolution saw Madame Tussaud herself making wax death masks, it remains the most popular attraction in England, drawing over two million visitors a year, most of whom wait in hour-long queues to get in. While the Tussaud's Group has developed half a dozen other projects in recent years, including Rock Circus, and is currently preparing a wax museum for New York's remodelled 42nd Street, the original Madame Tussaud's has endured as a camp constellation in the Western imagination, a place of secular faith where visitors can cut in on immortality for the price of a ticket.

On the surface, Tussaud's allure seems simple enough: as an unabashed shrine to celebrity, it caters to our modern obsession with fame. 'We have no religious or political bias', I was told by a PR woman. 'We reserve our freedom to show only the famous.' Yet any attraction this popular must appeal to people for more than one reason, and I think an enormous part of Tussaud's allure is sustained by its particular institutional wit - a paradoxical brand of humour that places us in the remarkable position of always being in on the joke, even when the joke's on us.

The principal house gag is a point-and-shoot affair. Visitors to Tussaud's come not only to see celebrities, but to be close to them, ideally to touch them, and above all, as the ads suggest, to be photographed alongside them. As crowds pour into the 'Garden Party', the first of seven themed exhibitions, individuals race to line up beside their favourite figures, posing proudly as if the owner of a brand new celebrity. Instead of the historical figures found elsewhere at Madame T's (which range from Henry VIII to Lenin, from Benjamin Franklin to Jack the Ripper), the 'Garden Party' introduces us to the kind of people we want to meet - those we normally get to see only on TV. In this respect, it is a bit like a 3-D edition of People magazine: a heterogeneous mix of contemporary celebs (entertainers, sports figures, a few politicians) casually posed across an utterly sterile patio area, replete with fake trees and flowering plants.

But the 'Garden Party' is far more exciting than any magazine, because we actually occupy the same space as characters we have only known as images. Former union boss Arthur Scargill is left to watch from the patio perimeter, but we more privileged guests mingle with the famous. No longer merely spectators of a glamorous reality from which we are excluded, we are free to compare heights with our favourite stars, to examine them from front and back, check out the cut of their clothes, inspect their bald spots, pock marks, moles, and exact eye hues (which are assiduously hand-coloured by Tussaud's craftspeople). We can, in so many words, ascertain that these immortals are in fact merely human, the same as us.

Only they're not human, of course.

But in photographs, it turns out, wax figures look deceptively life-like, and the whole set-up here is geared around the ritual of the photo opportunity. Film is sold at several conveniently-located kiosks to facilitate the visitors' orgy of snapshooting, and for those wishing for an official portrait, house photographers are on hand: they will steer you to a likeness of Arnold Schwarzenegger, possibly the most famous movie star of our time. You can tug on Arnold's massive arms or squeeze his massive buns, then smile for the camera and wonder which of you will look more real when the photo's developed. Does it even matter? Fame, like many an illness, is contagious, and a picture showing you standing with Arnold, or sitting at a table with Gerard Depardieu, is worth something, even if they are only wax stars.

You might wonder what kind of glamour, in all seriousness, can be derived from transparent fraudulence. Indeed, isn't there something slightly pathetic, if not desperate and absurd, in the spectacle of tourists clamouring around waxworks of the famous, as if in our excitement we had failed to notice that they were only moulded hunks of painted wax? Yet in more ways than one, the joke at Tussaud's is played at the expense of celebrities. It is they, after all, who appear dumb and paralysed, condemned, like characters in Greek mythology, forever to hold some ludicrous posture: Boris Becker, frozen in an eternally obscene squat, waits to return a serve that never comes.

Waxen and embarrassingly stiff, Tussaud's common-or-garden variety celebrities are not even remotely intimidating; posing for portraits with them is at once an act of reverence and a form of mockery. Many visitors exact a droll revenge in their snapshots: when I last visited the museum, I witnessed a young Czech woman with pink hair posing for a photograph kneeling and praying at the feet of a wax Lech Walesa. She was clearly not making fun of Walesa's saint-like posturing; faced with dummy celebs at Tussaud's, we can make fun of our own proclivity to worship the famous, satisfying ourselves that we can still maintain an ironic distance from our slavish fascination.

The visitor's more sardonic impulses are reined in by the museum's sober contention, expressed in numerous wall texts as well as brochures, that its wax figures are not just common dummies. Many are created from personal sittings: not only Dudley Moore and Michael Jackson, but Yasser Arafat and Nelson Mandela have subjected themselves to the callipers of Tussaud's sculptors, who measure everything from nostril width to the size of facial moles to ensure that their work bears a faithful semblance to its source. Some of those portrayed also enthusiastically donate their own clothing; in other cases, 'authentic copies' (as the house literature puts it) are created - Fergie, for instance, sports the only official replica of her wedding dress, created for Tussaud's by its original designers.

So it is no mere artistic interpretation that we confront in the museum, but something more akin to a shroud or death mask, a representation modelled directly from an actual body. The indexical link is thus stronger than that of a photograph, and we are led to feel that here we are one step closer to the real thing. Perhaps, then, our picture-taking shenanigans are not so absurd - a snapshot of a Tussaud's figure may be the nearest thing to a celebrity portrait we will ever manage. Besides, it is only in the photograph of ourselves posing next to a wax celebrity that we enter the time zone of the famous. Surrounded by figures we know only as images, it makes a certain sense to pull out our cameras so that we may re-present ourselves as images too.

Our relationship to photography inflects the Tussaud's experience on numerous levels; indeed, the wax figure, as an historical medium, can be seen as a kind of Ur-photograph. At least this is the impression one gets from reading up on the museum's own history. As the story goes, when Jean Paul Marat was assassinated by Charlotte Corday, Madame Tussaud was called to the scene of the crime. Commissioned by an appropriate sub-committee of the Revolution, she was charged with documenting the tragedy. Since there were no cameramen for this particular revolution, a lifelike diorama was the most realistic medium for freezing the moment and preserving it for the edification of future generations. Tussaud, in effect, was to serve as the Weegee of waxworks, a forensic photographer working with neither film nor camera.

The flipside of the coin, of course, is that - as any photographer will tell you - most portrait subjects can be made to look like wax dummies with the right lighting and exposure. Indeed, in photographs we all take on a certain cadaverous stiffness, and so the line can blur between the lifeless and the living. Which makes possible one of the more wicked spins of humour at Tussaud's: a wax Gerard Depardieu, with his watermelon-sized Gallic head and real-life Agnès B outfit, may end up looking more realistic on film than the two mousey teenagers wanly primping for the camera at his side.

This disconcerting phenomenon provides part of the interest of Hiroshi Sugimoto's portraits of wax exhibits. His photograph of the St. Albans Poisoner - an exhibit from Tussaud's 'Chamber of Horrors' - conveys a charisma that few people possess in person. Smoothing over the cruder touches of Tussaud's craftsmen, Sugimoto's delicately-toned black and white print invites the viewer to linger over haunting details: the figure's slumping shoulders, a crippled-looking hand, the fly that's not quite zipped up.

Such pictures make it clear that the stationary quality of waxworks is not, ultimately, a drawback, but a large part of their appeal. This is why Tussaud's 'Spirit of London' ride, where visitors travel in a 'time-taxi' past a horde of animatronic characters ranging from Elizabeth I to an 80s punk rocker is such an anti-climax. The museum hails it as a breakthrough, the first wax exhibit with moving and speaking characters, but visitors know we can find this kind of entertainment at Disneyland. The unique appeal of Tussaud's more traditional exhibits is that its static celebrities are imbued with the uncanny stillness of the spellbound.

And from time to time, we seem to possess the power to revive them. In both the 'Garden Party' and the 'Georgian Grand Hall' - which is populated by historical figures and contemporary world leaders - most of the waxworks are placed out on the floor or on unobtrusive pedestals, so that they blend in with the crowd of bodies pressing around them. From across a teeming gallery, it's easy enough to mistake a visitor for a wax dummy - especially if the visitor is holding still for the camera - or vice versa. Madame Tussaud's plays on this potential for confusion with its famous statue of a tourist sleeping on a bench, which is regularly touched by visitors anxious to make sure it is only wax. Another house gag is the wax policeman who stands near the exit: parents tell their children to go and ask the bobby for the time.

We take great delight in these momentary confusions of reality and artifice. For an instant it seems that the immutable laws of the real have been breached and the impossible has occurred, and so perhaps, after all, our own impossible wishes might not be bound by the gravity of the everyday. It's a fantasy that practically defines childhood play, and is found in all kinds of stories and myths about statues, mannequins and dolls coming alive, from Pygmalion to a slew of contemporary horror films. What is noteworthy about the Tussaud's experience is the crowd's essential role in igniting these flashes of fantastical life. It is not only due to our imagination, but also to our role as performers, that these uncanny instants occur. In other galleries at Tussaud's - as at most wax museums I have visited - the exhibits are set back from the crowd, either roped off or set upon high pedestals. But in the Grand Hall and the Garden Party, visitors become extras in a theatrical enterprise, commingling in the same space as the wax figures, and making possible this kind of confusion in which the living and the not-living briefly trade places.

Tussaud's is thus a kind of haunted house for adults, where we are not only the haunted, but may also appear as spooks, haunting others. This topsy-turvy experience exemplifies the Mannerist humour of this institution, which is also reflected in the way celebrity is presented here as a form of embalming. This is comically evident in those waxworks depicted with open-mouthed smiles, rictus grins that, along with the sallow translucence of the wax, inevitably calls to mind the made-up, ready-to-view corpse. The equation is inadvertently underscored by Tussaud's oft-repeated PR shot, which features a newly-inducted celeb posing beside their freshly-minted effigy; inevitably, we are left to ponder the negligible difference in their appearances.

Not only death, but also the idea of murder seems to hover over every wax museum, as if the wax figure - cadaverous surrogate that it is - suggests that somehow, somewhere, a spirit has been stolen and snuffed out. Perhaps it is no accident, then, that almost every wax museum has a 'Chamber of Horrors', a routine feature since the 18th century when it was called the 'Separate Room'. Following in that tradition, Madame Tussaud's 'Chamber of Horrors' occupies an isolated dungeon-like area that is separated from the other exhibits. It includes several gruesomely detailed scenes of murder, as well as authentic artefacts such as the guillotine blade that severed Marie Antoinette's head. Yet curiously, few visitors flash their cameras here, probably because the spectre of violent death, rather than being sublimely riveting, seems almost redundant in a wax museum.

By comparison, the stage show at Tussaud's Rock Circus, which opened in 1989, is far more macabre. While (sadly enough) there's no Chamber of Rock Horrors featuring Brian Jones floating face-down in his pool, Kurt Cobain with shotgun in hand, or Sid Vicious poking himself into oblivion, the 'audio-animatronic' entertainers in the Revolving Auditorium Theatre are a truly ghoulish crew. Created from latex and computer-controlled robotics, rock stars from the Beatles (in Sergeant Pepper's garb) to Bruce Springsteen and David Bowie perform hit songs amid a coloured storm of laser lighting. Instead of conveying youth and edgy vitality, however, their jerky, palsied movements evoke those of 'living dead' zombies. In the end, its failure is an unwitting tribute to Madame T's original formula, where visitors provide their own sense of movement.

It's not always easy to take on that animating role outside Tussaud's, where the daily bombardment of celebrity images is a never-ending reminder of who is, and who isn't, considered worthy of attention in our society. In the wax museum, however, we find temporary recompense: here we are the powerful and the quick, while the famous are transformed into motionless zombies whom we can examine at our leisure, as if inspecting chattel. And so for a moment at least, we may seem not quite so insignificant ourselves, regardless of whether our faces will ever adorn a magazine cover.

So Tussaud's appeal is, paradoxically, at once democratic and hierarchical. The museum sets up an experience in which our sense of importance is playfully inflated and mocked at the same time, in which we can entertain childish fantasies while indulging in a knowing laugh at the impulses behind them. In inviting us to participate in the dominant media rite of the 20th century, it reaffirms our sneaking suspicion that life itself is a photo-op - that the world is not something we participate in, but exists mainly as a backdrop for our personal dramas. And if our friends don't look too closely, they might believe we once really were cheek-by-jowl with Arnie.