On Celebrity

This is an updated and edited version of a piece I had published in the zine Ben Is Dead originally written in 1998 and entitled, at the time, VARIOUS THOUGHTS ON THE ROLE OF CELEBRITY IN EVERYDAY LIFE


Celebrities serve a variety of functions in everyday life. They can be love objects, lust objects, hate objects, objects of ridicule, objects to be laughed at rather than with, and can signify as political icons, religious icons, hipster extraordinaires, or objects of a cult of personality. When they serve not so much as objects of mass consumption but rather as personally selected icons and as sources of idiosyncratic inspiration, they do so on a smaller and more intimate scale than that used to measure fame. As the idea of a scale used to measure celebrity success indicates, there are worlds of difference between cult and mass stardom. It is often the case, then, that cult stardom represents something like an avante-garde of fame, and that cult stars have the impact of lasting importance, in contrast to the hype strewn success of the more major stars.

The point is that the very notion of celebrity, and its place in our lives, runs deep. Sometimes when we are asleep, we have strange dreams about celebrities; and sometimes we dream that we ourselves are celebrities. Celebritydom is thus deep in our unconsciousness. But one context in which the unconscious fixation with celebrity comes to the surface is in the routine celebrity encounter, a moment in which reality imitates dream. For ordinary folks, such events, when they happen, take on a kind of deep significance. On occasion, as in the encounter between Howard Hughes and Melvin Dummar and its aftermath (celebrated in Jonathan Demme's film Melvin and Howard), a celebrity encounter can itself be celebrity conferring on the ordinary participant to the encounter.

We use celebrities to mark both space and time. I used to live in Boston, where the Revolutionary War heroes are memorialized in various parts of the city. Paul Revere is perhaps the biggest icon - his house is a main tourist stop, there are statues and paintings devoted to him, and there are actors who depict him in costume as part of the annual historical pageants. Sam Adams is a bit less sacred, having had his image appropriated by the Sam Adams Brewery, but is nontheless seen as a Bostonian, and a rather beloved one at that. Meanwhile, informed by Spin magazine, I learned that one of the buildings a few blocks from where I used to live was where Aerosmith used to live. Finally, in addition to mythologizing its revolutionaries (as well as its more colorful gangsters and politicos), Boston also mythologizes its Red Sox. Even Bill Buckner, who was run out of town with death threats after his blunder in the 1986 World Series, is remembered in great anecdotal detail.

Some celebrities seem only to be famous for being famous. I always wondered why they kept reappearing on game shows, TV talk shows or Love Boat episodes, since they seemed to display no noticeable talents whatsoever. Of course, the vacuity of such persons is fascinatingly post-modern.

Some celebrities are famous for their reclusiveness, which seems a bit ironic. Greta Garbo was the icon of this stance. So, too, is JD Salinger, hero of disaffected and literate high schoolers everywhere. The iconography of the reclusive celebrity type is such that stories have been published and filmed about the quest to meet such recluses.

John Lennon fell into a certain sort of reclusivity in the sense that he gave up on the things which had become part of his persona for the sake of some tranquility. Unlike most other millionaire rockstars, however, he avoided seclusion in a remote mansion; instead, he more or less just blended in with the crowd like the city fixture he had become and remained accessible.
But, the normative high level celebrity pattern seems instead to be more cyclical, involving roller coaster like highs and lows, with periods of cooling out. Part of this is market-driven, with fickle audiences continuously turning their attentions to the latest product. And partly, it is driven by celebrity need itself, and by a deep ambivalence about being famous. One could describe a dialectic, by which the audience is initially created through a seductive promise of mutual love and devotion. As the audience grows ever more demanding, and as it is both taken for granted by the established star and its coterie of advisors and seduced by up and comers, the star, torn between work and play, responsibility and hedonism, becomes gradually exhausted and then reaches a crash point. This provides a backdrop for the later triumphant come-back. There are exceptions to this pattern, just like there are exceptions to corporate greed, but it seems to be the established pattern.

One basis for celebrity seems to be the dichotomy of nobodies vs. somebodies: status-mindedness and status seeking are embedded way deep in our consciousness. Every regime, be it the movie biz, the music biz, the arts world, sports, politics, religion, and every high school on the planet, seems to have its high rankers, its promising talented types, its suck ups, its rebels, its weirdos, its fools, and its nobodies. Celebrity seems like an expression of this principle, only magnified.

The overlap between politics and show-biz should thus not come as any great surprise. From Reagan through Redgrave, celebrities have long used their fame as soap-boxes for pursuing pet projects, be it gun ownership or gay rights, anti-communism or support for the PLO, or have shown a great willingness to associate themselves, for a whole host of reasons, with holders of vast economic and political power; one great example is Grace Kelly, who went from stunningly beautiful upper class Philadelphia debutante to Hollywood star to European royalty, where she and her disturbed offspring were then brought down several notches as continuous tabloid fodder aimed at lumpenproletariat housewives (a social class about whom the various entertainment industries, particularly Hollywood, remain deeply confused). Today's Hollywood is filled with power seekers, particularly those operating under the guise of being known for supporting a key, and often chic, cause, be it Barbra Streisand's support for women's empowerment, Richard Gere's promotion of the Dalai Lama, or Mary Tyler Moore's hatred of animal experimentation. Politicians, likewise, have learned to imitate Hollywood celebrities as they seek to reach the masses by projecting images which are partially authentic and partially manufactured. Occasionally, politics can be used as the basis for great art - The Clash's Sandinista, Bikini Kill's first EP, Godard's Weekend, Tim Robbin's Bob Roberts, Woody Guthrie's leftist folk anthems, The Mekons' Fear and Whiskey, The Dead Kennedy's Fresh Fruit for Rotting Vegetables,

Public Enemy's It Takes A Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, Diego Rivera's Marxist murals, Michelle Shocked's Short Sharp Shocked all come to mind. (I show my class leveling, leftist-populist biases in these examples.) However, much of the more explicitly political art is crudely obvious and much less effective than it attempts, or pretends, to be. There is, perhaps, a fine line between attempting to inspire or to indoctrinate a mass audience.

The question of celebrities and politics raises interesting questions about the ownership of fame. Who does the celebrity belong to? If fame comes from the masses, does it belong, in a sense, to them? Or is this mostly a free enterprise relationship in which the celebrity (or his/her corporate sponsors) can own his/her own persona and can thus do whatever with it (and with the many privileges it accrues)?


Ultimately, it seems, celebrities are mirrors of the culture that produces and consumes them. They are of, though not necessarily for, the people. They serve artistic and entertainment functions, but also social and political functions of various sorts. Famous individuals may rise and fall, but the idea of celebrity is pretty well fixed in our minds and in our culture. In fact, it seems like the idea of fame itself is likely to become ever more famous as an accompaniment to global capitalism and global pop culture.