Celebrities…why are we so fascinated with them? Beyond the bling and the hype provided to them by the infotainment machine, what makes them so special?
Because of the recent election, I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between the U.S. and the UK, and bothering my friend over there about it as well. At some point we got to talking about the influence of religion on politics in America (I probably did this; ABC News has been running a special series (sweeps you know)) and my friend asked, in all sincerity if I thought it was odd that in the UK they had a monarch who was head of the country’s official church and yet, they were a more secular society. My flip reply was to ask if it was odd that the UK had an actual royal family and yet, the U.S., which claims to be a place where anyone can become rich (ie: upper class) does its best to create royals in place of ones we don’t actually have.
Talking of the competition for attention and TV’s fixation on flogging one story endlessly until it moves to the next big news “event” Howard Kurtz wrote in The Washington Post this past Sunday:
Every TV executive has a wall of monitors to track what the competition is doing. If one cable network cuts to the latest crime scene, with live pictures delivered by satellite, the pressure is intense to throw up a “breaking news” logo and do the same, and the broadcast networks and print outlets follow suit. The problem with this speeded-up news cycle is that it leaves little time for digging and double-checking, and all too much time for blather and guesswork. And if someone’s life is hanging in the balance — bingo! That’s the jackpot.
Kurtz goes on to discuss a litany of recent media “events” and how news coverage hopped from one event to the next like a frog and so many lilly pads. What caught my attention, though, was this massive assumption and rationalization:
But at least the Gloved One, the Lakers scorer and the onetime “Baretta” star are celebrities, so there’s an understandable interest in their trials and tribulations. That was hardly the case with Terri Schiavo, the brain-damaged Florida woman whose fate became the focus of an hour-by-hour death watch because of a family battle over whether to remove her feeding tube. Does anyone seriously believe Congress would have passed a law affecting only Schiavo had television not assaulted us with the endless loop of her in a hospital bed?
Wait, back up…there’s an “understandable” interest in Robert Blake, a man who, before he was accused of killing his wife hadn’t been in a major motion picture in five years? A man who, before he became CourtTV’s favorite kewpie doll was doing nothing but getting fat at his broken down house in suburban LA? And then it came to me in a flash: we idolize celebrities because they’re all living the lives that we wish we could be living.
And it’s not the clothes and the cars and the parties and how pretty they all are either, no matter how much we try to convince ourselves that it’s the bling that we really want.
Celebrities don’t really have to work.
Think about this for a minute: Sarah Michelle Gellar (late of The Grudge) and Freddie Prinze, Jr. (last seen in Scooby Doo 2: Monsters Unleashed) are married. Before The Grudge, she hadn’t worked since they did the Scooby Doo movie together, and we haven’t seen him yet. It takes about a year to make a movie so you figure that if something comes out in 2004, the actors actually worked on it in 2003, right?
OK, so riddle me this: who can afford to take a year off work? Celebrities. They live the lives we all wish we could: work a year, take a year off. Work a couple of years, take a couple off. None of this getting up every damn day and going to work and Starbucks and staff meetings crap for them. No, they get to have hobbies.
So who wouldn’t want to live that life, even vicariously? And who wouldn’t feel a certain schadenfreude when folks living the life you want have a bit of trouble?
And can we really blame the media for giving us what we seem to want?
“It’s to Laugh (or Cry) About: Tragedy or Farce? Either Works for TV,” Howard Kurtz, The Washington Post, Sunday, May 8, 2005; B01
Interesting theory. Probably some truth in it. Of course it involves our seeing only the ‘up’ side, but no one said our view of celebrities is realistic.
Another factor – celebrities represent for many people a different world – a realm that is numinous and almost magically attractive, as though they were some utterly different sort of being than we ordinary folks. And it feels like some of this would rub off on us if we could just connect with them.
It’s like the smell of gasoline (at least to those like me who love it) – delicious, desirable, addictive, and totally unsatisfactory. There’s nothing really there.
There was a study done on chimpanzees that relates to this topic. I think it was in National Geographic that I read about it. Chimps like to look at the pictures of powerful/successful chimps, even those from other chimp groups. What does this say about our need to watch celebrities?