Charlestown, Md.

MY love for our picked-on ninth planet is deeply, perhaps embarrassingly, personal.

I took my first public stand on Pluto’s taxonomical fate when I addressed the Forum on Outer Planetary Exploration in 2001 (don’t ask why a cartoonist was addressing astronomers — it’s a long story).

I informed the assembled scientists that, first of all, no way was I or anyone else about to un-memorize anything we’d already been forced to learn in elementary school. More important, I felt sure that, as former children, we all instinctively respected the principle: no do-overs.

Planets, like Supreme Court justices, are appointed for life, and you can’t blithely oust them no matter how eccentric, skewed or unqualified they may prove to be. If they could kick out Pluto, I warned, they could do it to anything, or anyone.

I admit: it’s a highly emotional issue and maybe I got carried away in the heat of debate.

Even I was a little abashed last week when the International Astronomical Union tried to protect Pluto’s status by proposing an absurdly broad definition of planethood that encompasses moons, asteroids and trans-Neptunian objects — in other words, pretty much any half-formed hunk of frozen crud that can pull itself together into a ball long enough to get photographed by the Hubble.

For longtime Pluto partisans, there was something almost punitive about this proposal: happy now?

I guess I always knew, in my heart, that Pluto didn’t “belong.” Pluto is idiosyncratic — neither a dull, domestic terrestrial planet nor a surly, vainglorious gas giant. It’s mostly ice. It’s smaller than our own Moon, and has an orbit so eccentric that it spends 20 years of its 248-year revolutionary period inside Neptune’s orbit. It’s tilted at a crazy 17-degree angle to the ecliptic, and its satellite, Charon, is so disproportionately large that it’s been called a double planet.

Pluto is what my old astronomy textbook rather judgmentally called a “deviant,” and I’ve always felt a little defensive on its behalf.

I’ve long regarded Saturn’s misty tantalizing moon Titan as the Homecoming Queen of the solar system, courted and fawned over, stringing us along with teasing glimpses under her atmosphere, while Pluto was more like the chubby Goth chick who wrote weird poems about dead birds and never talked to anybody. Still, I just can’t stand by and watch as the solar system’s Fat Girl gets pushed down into ever-more ignominious substrata of social ostracism.

All I really wanted was a little velvet-rope treatment for Pluto. I didn’t expect them to throw open the doors to all this Kuiper Belt riffraff.

It’s like that point when your party’s grown out of control and you look around and ask: Who are these people? Sedna? Xena? Ceres? Ceres is an asteroid, for God’s sake. Why not just make 1997 XF11 or Greenland or Harriet Meiers a planet?

And I am second to no one in my respect for Charon, but come on: it’s obviously Pluto’s moon.

Now they’re proposing to designate it a “large companion,” which sounds like the sort of euphemistic legal status the court might grant to Oliver Hardy and can’t be doing Charon’s self-esteem one bit of good. “Longtime companion” would have been more dignified and validating.

The solar system is a mess.

The situation this seems most similar to is the inextricably tangled social nightmare that is inviting people to your wedding. You truly want to invite your distant and eccentric but dear old friend Pluto, but this necessarily means inviting his horrible girlfriend, too, plus then maybe you’re obliged to invite all the other people you were both friends with in college, friends he’s still in contact with who will be offended if he’s invited and they’re not but who, frankly, are now boring people with whom you no longer have anything in common.

Some would suggest we just have to be harsh about this and not invite any of them, Pluto included. But these people are forgetting that we already sent Pluto an invitation, 76 years ago. Pluto has rented a tuxedo.

The astronomical union is to vote on Pluto tomorrow. But even as astronomers squabble, I remain confident that this whole wonky state of affairs will not be permanent. Eventually we’ll get it all sorted out.

For the record, I would accept a separate (but equal!) class of dwarves or planetoids, including Sedna and Xena. After all, the childhood mnemonic is easily amended: My Very Energetic Mother Just Served Us Nine Pizzas, Sans Xenophobia.

But what I really wish is that we’d just grandfather Pluto in and then close all the loopholes. Let’s do it, not for scientific reasons, but for sentimental ones.

As a friend of mine at NASA said, “It would prove our humanity to let Pluto stay in.” It would be like that moment when the doorman is about to escort you out of a private party where you don’t, arguably, belong, but then someone who knows you taps him on the shoulder and says, “Wait a minute, I know this guy. He’s O.K..”

Tim Kreider, a cartoonist, is the author of “The Pain: When Will It End?” and “Why Do They Kill Me?”

Money and power are handy, but millions of ambitious people are after something other than the corner office or the beach house on St. Bart’s. They want to swivel necks, to light a flare in others’ eyes, to walk into a crowded room and feel the conversation stop. They are busy networking, auditioning, talking up their latest project — a screenplay, a memoir, a new reality show — to satisfy a desire so obvious it is all but invisible.

“To be noticed, to be wanted, to be loved, to walk into a place and have others care about what you’re doing, even what you had for lunch that day: that’s what people want, in my opinion,” said Kaysar Ridha, 26, of Irvine, Calif., a recent favorite of fans of the popular CBS reality series “Big Brother.” “It’s strange and twisted, because when that attention does come, the irony is you want more privacy.”

For most of its existence, the field of psychology has ignored fame as a primary motivator of human behavior: it was considered too shallow, too culturally variable, too often mingled with other motives to be taken seriously. But in recent years, a small number of social scientists have begun to study and think about fame in a different way, ranking it with other goals, measuring its psychological effects, characterizing its devoted seekers.

People with an overriding desire to be widely known to strangers are different from those who primarily covet wealth and influence. Their fame-seeking behavior appears rooted in a desire for social acceptance, a longing for the existential reassurance promised by wide renown.

These yearnings can become more acute in life’s later years, as the opportunities for fame dwindle, “but the motive never dies, and when we realize we’re not going to make it in this lifetime, we find some other route: posthumous fame,” said Orville Gilbert Brim, a psychologist who is completing a book called “The Fame Motive.” The book is based on data he has gathered and analyzed, with the support of the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.

“It’s like belief in the afterlife in medieval communities, where people couldn’t wait to die and go on to better life,” Dr. Brim said. “That’s how strong it is.”

The urge to achieve social distinction is evident worldwide, even among people for whom prominence is neither accessible nor desirable. In rural Hindu villages in India, for instance, widows are expected to be perpetual mourners, austere in their habits, appetites and dress; even so, they often jockey for position, said Richard A. Shweder, an anthropologist in the department of comparative human development at the University of Chicago.

“Many compete for who is most pure,” Dr. Shweder said. “They say, ‘I don’t eat fish, I don’t eat eggs, I don’t even walk into someone’s house who has eaten meat.’ It’s a natural kind of social comparison.”

In media-rich urban centers, the drive to stand out tends to be more oriented toward celebrity, and its hold on people appears similar across diverse cultures.

Surveys in Chinese and German cities have found that about 30 percent of adults report regularly daydreaming about being famous, and more than 40 percent expect to enjoy some passing dose of fame — their “15 minutes,” in Andy Warhol’s famous phrase — at some point in life, according to data analyzed by Dr. Brim. The rates are roughly equivalent to those found in American adults. For teenagers, the rates are higher.

Yet for all the dreamers, only one or two in 100 rate fame as their most coveted goal, trumping all others, the data collected by Dr. Brim and others show.

“It’s a distinct type, people who expect to get meaning out of fame, who believe the only way to have their lives make sense is to be famous,” said Tim Kasser, a psychologist at Knox College in Galesburg, Ill. “We all need to make meaning out of our lives, and this is one way people attempt to do it.”

Therapists and researchers, including Dr. Brim, have traced longing for renown to lingering feelings of rejection or neglect. After all, celebrity is the ultimate high school in-group, writ large. It appears a perfect balm for the sting of social exclusion, or neglect by emotionally or physically absent parents.

In her memoir, “In the Shadow of Fame,” Sue Erikson Bloland, daughter of the renowned psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, writes, “He had the kind of charisma that made people hungry to know him — to become privy to what he was thinking and feeling and writing about.”

Dr. Erikson’s dogged pursuit of recognition, she writes, was partly due to a sense of abandonment: he never knew his biological father, who disappeared before he was born. Decades later, Dr. Erikson still sought comfort and guidance from others, “but his pursuit of reassurance was not simply the charming humility it was generally interpreted to be,” she writes. “It expressed a persistent and tormenting self-doubt.”

Another factor may also be at work in many people who are preoccupied with becoming famous, one linked to a subconscious but acute appreciation of mortality. In recent experiments, psychologists have shown that, when reminded that they will one day die, people fixate on attributes they consider central to their self-worth.

Those who value strength squeeze a hand grip with more force; those who prize driving ability, cooking skills or physical appearance intensify their focus.

“Given this awareness of our mortality,” said Jeffrey Greenberg, a psychologist at the University of Arizona, “to function securely, we need to feel somehow protected from this existential predicament, to feel like we are more than just material animals fated only to obliteration upon death.

“We accomplish that by trying to view ourselves as enduringly valuable contributors to a meaningful world. And the more others validate our value, the more special and therefore secure we can feel.”

The odds of achieving some measure of notoriety — a Nobel, an Oscar, a plaque in the Curling Hall of Fame — are so remote that it is no surprise when unrealized ambition curdles into psychological struggle.

In a 1996 study, Richard M. Ryan of the University of Rochester and Dr. Kasser, then at Rochester, conducted in-depth surveys of 100 adults, asking about their aspirations, guiding principles, and values, as well as administering standard measures of psychological well-being.

The participants in the study who focused on goals tied to others’ approval, like fame, reported significantly higher levels of distress than those interested primarily in self-acceptance and friendship.

Surveys done since then, in communities around the world, suggest the same thing: aiming for a target as elusive as fame, and so dependent on the judgments of others, is psychologically treacherous.

Freud might have agreed: he is said to have fainted only twice in his life, both times when he perceived a threat to his legacy.

What of fame-seekers who actually slip through the looking glass and make it? Few celebrities confess to their fame-yearnings, and few if any have consented to anything like a psychological study of motivation and psychological well-being. And someone at the center of a scandal has an experience different from a beloved writer of children’s books.

Many prominent novelists, actors, writers and musicians find lasting satisfaction in seeing others moved by their work. And the limos and V.I.P. seating and private beach parties cannot be too difficult to endure.

Still, scholars, psychologists and some celebrity memoirists seem to agree that, for all its rewards, fame can also eat its own — as the historian Leo Braudy has written, “lurking behind every chance to be made whole by fame is the axman of further dismemberment.”

Public recognition can bring a heightened focus on the self. Mark Schaller, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia, studied the careers of Kurt Cobain, Cole Porter and John Cheever.

In their works, Dr. Schaller found, all three of these artists began referring to themselves more frequently after they became famous. The increase was slight in the case of Mr. Cobain, the rock star who committed suicide in 1994 at age 27. It was far more pronounced in Mr. Porter’s songs, and in the stories of Mr. Cheever, who also reported drinking more heavily after receiving wide acclaim.

These three artists are hardly a representative sample, and each probably had some self-destructive tendencies before achieving popular success. But increased self-consciousness can plunge almost anyone into rumination over soured relationships or lost opportunities, psychologists find. And famous people in particular are forced to judge themselves against ideals set by others.

“If you or I hear our own voice on tape, or see ourselves on camera, we might say: ‘Wait a minute, I’m a doofus. I’m not the sharp guy I thought I was,’ and we can cope with that, we can try harder,” Dr. Schaller said. “But it’s a little different if you’re a Bruce Willis or somebody. The ideals others have for you are crazy. It’s virtually impossible to meet them, and you can’t escape this heightened self-awareness.”

None of which may dissuade a single soul from grabbing for the ring if given a chance — or from longing and half-expecting lightning to strike. Because who really knows? Fame is fickle, sometimes random, and its effect on any one person is not predictable. Perhaps that is the source of its catnip fragrance: the unknowns, the secret horrors and joys, the private alchemy revealed only to those for whom the door swings open.

In compiling his research, Dr. Brim, 83, thought much about how an intense desire to reach this unknowable, alluring state of being might affect older people’s behavior, if the motive did not fade.

“I concluded that several things could happen, and one of them is to find another source of approval,” he said. “That might be a great love, if you’re lucky. Or perhaps it is a deepening belief in God. But I think many people suffer with realization that they are not going to be famous and there’s nothing they can do to solve it.”

Of all the things Rufus Hannah regrets — discovering alcohol at age 14, living homeless for 12 years — it is his notoriety that haunts him. Every time someone recognizes him, he told me recently, he feels “so ashamed.” Hannah, known to his fans as Rufus the Stunt Bum, is one of the inadvertent stars of a DVD series called “Bumfights.” Filmed on the streets of suburban San Diego and Las Vegas, the videos portray homeless people fighting one another, being pushed down hills in shopping carts and jumping off buildings into Dumpsters. What unfolds looks like a cross between “Jackass,” MTV’s stunt-based show, and a cinéma vérité portrait of the homeless as addicted, crazy and desperate enough to, for a little cash, light their hair on fire, pull out a tooth with pliers and have “Bumfights” tattooed on their bodies.

Hannah, who is 51 and an Army veteran, became involved with Bumfights more than five years ago, when Ryan McPherson, a high-school student and aspiring filmmaker, offered him $5 to run headfirst into milk crates stacked in the parking lot of a grocery store in El Cajon, Calif. “He told me he was doing a video for his economics class on what it was like when you don’t have a job,” Hannah said. “I just wanted some money to get drunk, so I did what he told me to. I never had any idea the stuff he was filming would become what it did.”

What it became, according to the film’s producers, was the “fastest-selling independent video series.” Released in 2002, the first “Bumfights” sold for $19.95, mainly through the Bumfights Web site. Soon after, McPherson and his fellow filmmakers sold the rights for $1.5 million to two Las Vegas producers, who have since churned out sequels. Sales, initially modest but steady, exploded after Howard Stern featured the video on air. Within six months, revenues neared $600,000.

After the media attention, McPherson and the original filmmakers were charged with conspiracy to stage an illegal fight, a misdemeanor. They pleaded guilty and were ordered to do community service. (McPherson was recently sent to jail for failing to complete his community service.)

Many homeless people in the video seem drunk, stoned or mentally ill. Hannah said he was never sober during filming and participated for the money (at most $10 per stunt). In one recurring segment called “Bum Hunter,” a young man in safari clothes sneaks up on sleeping homeless people. He binds and gags them, then “marks” them by writing a number on their foreheads.

The National Coalition for the Homeless, calling the films “degrading” and “sickening,” began a campaign against “Bumfights” soon after its debut. The coalition approached retailers and asked them to “stop selling hate.”

Myra Mendible, a professor of cultural studies at Florida Gulf Coast University, says the films reflect a trend. “Reality television has created an audience that is not only desensitized to images of human suffering but also has acquired an appetite for them.” McPherson, who is unapologetic, says “Bumfights” was “fresh and new” and simply filled the demand for more shocking material.

The homeless coalition says it fears that the films have contributed to teenage violence against the homeless, especially because viewers are encouraged to submit “ruckus” footage of their own. According to law-enforcement officials, a number of young people have videotaped themselves attacking homeless people, including four teenagers in Melbourne, Australia, who killed a man by setting fire to his tent; five in Alberta, Canada, who assaulted a homeless man with bottles and a club, then urinated on his face; and four young men near Cleveland, who crept up on homeless people and shocked them with a stun gun.

Hannah, who says he has been sober for three years and is employed and no longer homeless, recently settled a lawsuit with the filmmakers. They agreed to an undisclosed amount in damages and to not use his image in future videos. He is also working with the homeless coalition toward legislation that would make violence against the homeless a hate crime. Meanwhile, the current “Bumfights” producers have just released “Bumfights 4.”

Aimee Molloy is the author, with James Yee, of “For God and Country: Faith and Patriotism Under Fire.”

I’m watching a French film in an arthouse theater in Beverly Hills. And I’m feeling good about the world and my place in it. Seriously, check me out: does human existence get any fancier or more sophisticated than getting to hang in an air-conditioned theater during a heatwave and seeing Charlotte Rampling deliver a deadpan verbal thrashing to another character in French in a movie theater with an actual 90210 zip code? If I were drinking my fountain Coke from a silver tea service and sharing my popcorn with Yves Saint Laurent maybe, but still, in this moment I’m close to the top rung of awesome.

The ugly world is locked outside. I’m temporarily separated from the social depravity of my chosen home, Los Angeles. That is, I’m separate until the old man to my left begins chatting to his viewing companion in a barking voice I can only politely call a Not Whisper. And then the old woman a row in front of me begins to text-message someone. I didn’t know old people knew how to text. I give the old man my best sssh. He waves me off with a crusty “Ehh!” So I bark back, “Look, mister. You’re old enough to know how to behave in a movie theater. So shut up and do it!” I win this battle of wills.

I have to see “John Tucker Must Die,” the weak teen battle-of-the-sexes revenge comedy. It’s my job, that’s why. And I have to go on opening day to file my review. I choose a local mall called The Grove, the most banal, awful place I can find to see it, in the hope that I’ll have an authentic teen experience — the last time I could do that and still call myself youthful was when “Sixteen Candles” was in its debut summer at theaters — and all of my expectations are met.

The pre-show clip requesting cell-phone silence is ignored. It’s the modern equivalent of a “don’t-freak-out-on-LSD” educational film starring Sonny Bono. They might as well save their production money. No one cares. No one’s allowed to tell anyone what to do. Phones ring and sing their presence for the entire 100 minutes of “John Tucker Must Die.” Text-messages glow like a dozen little flashlights. A woman in front of me with six young children at the PG-13 film allows the tiny monsters to climb all over the seats and run in the aisles. I just watch and observe, counting the tiny blue screens and different types of ringtones, numbed by the onslaught of bad manners.

Driving in cars with sociopaths
I’m driving my used Mazda in the Valley. A guy in a Hummer behind me starts honking because I’m not making my left turn fast enough for him. He’s already on my hate-list because he’s in a Hummer. And now he’s honking at me too? I flip him off. And soon I learn that this is a mistake. He barrels through the light after me and begins to chase me. He pulls up on my right and slows down too, neck and neck, yelling at me. He wants to fight now. What if he has a gun? He already drives a Hummer, so it’s not like he’s not a sociopath. I should have thought that part through first. At the next available left turn I swerve into it and lose him. But I’m a little shaken up. And I come to a decision: it’s better to stay alive than be right.

Of course that feels like giving in. Ceding ground to the creeps. Just telling everyone to live it up, cut in line, talk during movies you arrived late for, treat waiters and oppressed minimum-wage employees like dirt, check your email at the funeral. But I’m through swimming against the rogue wave of rudeness that’s capsized public life. It’s too depressing to fight anymore. But I’m not through blaming the instigators: celebrities.

Celebrities reign in the art of rudeness
Lindsay Lohan is as good a place to start as any, really, so why not? Now that her formerly behind-the-scenes misbehavior has come to light — and I’m not talking about rampant partying, either. She’s 20, for crying out loud. It’s her job to party. I’m talking about professional disregard for others on sets and reports of her treating nightclub employees badly — in the form of an open letter from the producers of her latest film, we can use her as a lesson in what we’ve all become.

Not that she was the first. She learned at the feet of her pal (former pal? It’s so hard to keep up) Paris Hilton. Who was merely the latest Jennifer Lopez, herself a neo-Faye Dunaway. And don’t think for a second that women are the leaders of the jackal pack. I witnessed with my own eyes a despicably-behaved Tommy Lee Jones at a Texas film festival once back in the ’90s, not believing an Ivy League-educated man could be so ill-mannered. I was naïve then. That was before I moved to Los Angeles and came to realize that the city’s biggest cultural export isn’t popcorn movies, it’s boorish behavior.

Hollywood has finally steamrolled over everything, making everyone in America want to be rich and famous by any means necessary. I mean, yeah, we’ve always wanted to be rich and famous, but there was a time, before I was born — and I’m 42 so this was a long time ago — when wanting to be rich and famous also meant wanting to be “classy” and at least fake-refined. The not-rich aspired to be perceived as well-bred, even if they knew they’d never have truckloads of money.

Heiresses weren’t running around with their own TV shows devoted to how ugly they could behave on camera or to the pursuit of mocking as many working-class people as would sign release forms. But now, after decades of conditioning, we’ve consumed the priorities we were told to consume and fed them to our children on top of that. The numbers of people wanting to study science and math at universities? Down. Guess what’s up? That’s right, the number of people moving into my neighborhood who want to be stars.

The culture of entitlement
And because celebrity news is maybe the only thing we all have in common now, and because celebrities-behaving-badly is the most fun version of that news, and because in the media grinder it all winds up weighing and tasting the same, we get used to it. And getting used to it means eventually enjoying the taste. To aspire to be Halle Berry, to desire the glamorous life, to live above your station, is also to aspire to be alpha dog, to be first in line, to not have to pay attention to anyone else’s rules. To do whatever you feel like doing as long as you get your way. It now goes hand-in-hand with being able to walk into Barney’s and not check the pricetags.

It’s a stupid trap and we all fell for it. But there’s a way out. My run-in with the possibly murderous Hummer jerk — who wasn’t famous but whom I’ll call Busta Rhymes because Busta recently publicly mistreated a gay fan for no good reason — convinced me to start on a new path, one advocated by syndicated columnist Judith Martin, aka Miss Manners: be the politeness you wish to see in the world. It’s the least I can do.

I’m not going to run around trying to fix the awful people, upbraiding wrongdoers like a one-man clean-up crew. No more righteous indignation, no more flipping off selfish drivers, no more yelling at old guys bugging me while I’m trying to get my art-film-snob on in Beverly Hills. It’s bad for my blood pressure. And it only serves to make the Lindsays of the world more angry and likely to drive head-on into you.

So I’m going to observe the speed limit, I’m going to alert the usher, I’m going to say “Oh by all means, you go first,” when very important nobodies barge into line at the supermarket, yammering into their Motos about all the important nothing they have to say. I’m going to quietly resist the culture of entitlement but I won’t let it get me down anymore. I’ve got too much classy living to do.

Dave White is the author of “Exile in Guyville,” a memoir about learning to love everything wrong with Los Angeles. Find him at www.imdavewhite.com.

DID Mel Gibson mean it?

Did he mean it when he said, according to a sheriff’s report of his arrest on suspicion of drunken driving, that “The Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world”? Or when he asked the arresting deputy, “Are you a Jew?”

In the first of his serial apologies afterward — the one that did not mention the anti-Semitic nature of his rants — Mr. Gibson called what he said “despicable” and that he made statements “that I do not believe to be true.”

In a follow-up apology that dealt directly with his comments about Jews, he said, “I am in the process of understanding where those vicious words came from during that drunken display.”

So where, exactly, did those words come from? (And not just the anti-Jewish comments, but also the less-noted crude aside about the anatomy of a female officer?) Was this alcohol-fueled soliloquy an ugly insight into Mr. Gibson’s character — in other words, in vino veritas? Or was it just the tequila talking?

Science, as it happens, has been hard at work trying to understand the how and the why of what everyone at a college mixer learns: alcohol can make people do, and say, stupid things. But does it make people say things that they do not believe at all, that are, as Mr. Gibson insisted in his statements, antithetical to one’s own views and faith?

Experts generally suggest that the answer is “Nope.”

When asked where those vicious words came from, Dr. Kevin J. Corcoran, a psychology researcher who has studied the effects of alcohol on perception and judgment, replied, simply, “his mouth.”

Dr. Corcoran said comments do not spring from nothing; for example, Dr. Corcoran said, he himself would not make anti-Semitic statements under the influence of alcohol.

“I say other outrageous things when I’m drunk,” he said.

He added that Mr. Gibson “may not fully believe” his statements about Jews, “but they were waiting to be delivered,” once his inhibitions were lowered and he was subjected to the stress of being pulled over by the police.

“We all have things that we might think or feel or even be attracted to that we know are wrong,” said Dr. Corcoran, who is also the dean of arts and sciences at Northern Kentucky University. For example, he said, people are likelier to look at pornography when they drink than when they are sober; alcohol reduces inhibitions, for good or ill.

Alcohol suppresses the prefrontal cortex and the cerebellum regions of the brain, said Dr. Nora D. Volkow, the director of the National Institute on Drug Abuse, who declined to comment specifically on the Gibson case.

The cerebellum governs motor coordination, which explains the drunk’s weaving walk and iffy driving skills. The prefrontal cortex “is normally making an assessment of the appropriateness of your acts,” she said, modulating desires and urges. After a couple of drinks, Dr. Volkow said, suppressing such impulses becomes much harder.

“Alcohol brings you back into adolescence and childhood,” she said, the time before the prefrontal cortex is fully developed.

This leads to a condition that researchers call the “alcohol myopia effect,” in which someone who has had too much to drink reacts to immediate cues without regard to consequences or the broader social context. G. Alan Marlatt, director of the Addictive Behaviors Research Center at the University of Washington, said that psychologists often focus on the difference between “traits and states.” Inebriation is a temporary state, but it might unleash one’s deeper and more permanent traits, he said.

Nonetheless, Mr. Marlatt said that he had encountered people who, under the influence of alcohol and other drugs, do completely uncharacteristic things or say things that are not true. He recalled a case of a man coming out of anesthesia — alcohol is an anesthetic, after all — and babbling about having an extramarital affair, even though he apparently had done nothing of the sort. Even in this case, however, Dr. Marlatt said that he wondered whether the patient’s words sprang from a desire to have an affair, whether there had been one or not.

In Robert Louis Stevenson’s “Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde,” Dr. Marlatt noted, the evil Hyde was no stranger to the good Dr. Jekyll; he sprang from within.

Which is why the best explanation for Mr. Gibson’s comments may come from the exquisite Italian phrase for misspeaking. Instead of saying “oops,” they say “mi è scappato.”

It means, literally, “It escaped from me.”

Weegee, the great tabloid photographer of the 1940’s and 50’s, took a remarkable picture of Veronica Lake. The legendary movie star and pinup model is shot from behind, so only her fur-coat-covered back and neatly coiffed hair can be seen. The picture’s real focus is a group of fans staring at her, their faces unsmiling, and more than a little menacing.

The image is part of “Unknown Weegee,” a gripping exhibition at the International Center of Photography. Weegee’s classic film-noir style is represented in black-and-white pictures of blanket-draped corpses on sidewalks, and more elegantly chilling fare, like the picture of a fashionable young woman covering her face with black-gloved hands, entitled “Irma Twiss Epstein, Nurse Accused of Killing Baby.”

The most intriguing photos, though, are the crowd shots, like “Veronica Lake,” that capture people on the street gazing too intently at celebrities, accidents and crime scenes.

Weegee’s photography is credited with helping create American tabloid journalism, paving the way for The National Enquirer and TV shows like “America’s Most Wanted.” But the crowd shots are a reminder that in the process, Weegee also helped turn America into a nation of gawkers.

Arthur Fellig, a Polish-Jewish immigrant who grew up on the Lower East Side, got his big break when he was hired by PM, a crusading left-wing newspaper. He acquired his famous nickname because of his Ouija-boardlike ability to find his way to a good photographic scene. The first photographer to have a police radio in his car, Weegee was almost invariably the first one to show up after a body hit the pavement.

Weegee’s brilliance at capturing the seedy underbelly of mid-20th-century New York is on full display in “Unknown Weegee.” There are perp walks and car crash victims, and a wide array of pictures of untimely death, including one titled “This Screaming Girl Has Suddenly Realized That the Body Lying Under the Blanket Is That of Her Mother.”

Weegee had a gift for highlighting the unexpected, stylish and even humorous aspects of dark scenes. The subject of “Mrs. Anna Sheehan ... Accused as Murderess,” with her fine fur-collared coat and elegant hat, looks as if she is on her way to a swank nightclub. A photo titled “Cop Who Looks Like Gary Cooper Books Blind Man for Murder” is precisely that.

The cover of the exhibition catalog features “Faces in the Crowd,” a stark picture of people looking straight ahead, and an essay inside underscores the attention Weegee paid to the “city of eyes, joined together by curiosity.” This emphasis is appropriate. Weegee’s endlessly curious crowds — in photos like “Looking at the Body of Salvatore Sutera, Murder Victim” and “At an East Side Murder” — are in many ways as fascinating, and as unsettling, as the sensational scenes they are taking in.

Weegee manages to make his movie fans look just as disturbing as his crime scene oglers. “Everyone Enjoys the Show,” a photograph of a theater audience, focuses on a woman whose inordinate delight makes her appear more than a little grotesque. The young boys peering in through the windows in “Woman Signing Autographs in Car” look as if they might be planning to beat up a schoolmate after the car pulls away.

Weegee’s photographs allowed hundreds of thousands of newspaper readers, in the privacy of their own homes, to join these mesmerized crowds. His tabloid photos have, since then, been supplanted by cable television and the Internet, which allow Americans to be part of the 24-hour media circuses that endlessly rehash the legal sagas of people like Michael Jackson and Scott Peterson.

Living as we now do in a tabloid culture, it is hard not to identify with Weegee’s ravenously curious onlookers, but it is also hard not to feel a bit wistful, and even worried, about what Weegee has wrought.

In his book “Amusing Ourselves to Death,” the cultural critic Neil Postman warned that the “age of show business” is not only degrading the culture but also undermining democracy.

While some people worry about America becoming an Orwellian dystopia, the nation as totalitarian prison, the greater threat, Mr. Postman argued, is Aldous Huxley’s, from “Brave New World,” of America becoming a mindless burlesque. No good can come, he cautioned, “when cultural life is redefined as a perpetual round of entertainments, when serious public conversation becomes a form of baby-talk, when, in short, a people become an audience and their public business a vaudeville act.”

As the nation struggles in an Iraqi quagmire, the economy sputters, and the world turns more intently against us, the American viewing public — the direct descendants of Weegee’s inquisitive street crowds — is growing ever more fascinated by “CSI”-style criminal procedurals and celebrity babies.

If a fraction of the people who instant messaged their votes for “American Idol” had called their congressmen to demand a minimum wage increase, we would not have gone nearly a decade without one.

The most alluring images in “Unknown Weegee,” like “Ermine-Wrapped Patron Caught in Gambling Den” or “Virginia Ornmark, Gun Girl,” are hard to turn away from. That is their genius, and their peril. Looking at Weegee’s shots of transfixed crowds, caught in the spell of the lurid, one cannot help but share their fascination — and wonder if it wouldn’t have been better if a policeman had shown up to say, “Move along, there is nothing to see here.”