Celebrity. Andrea McDonnell
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each other.57
Hermes identified a series of other pleasures we get from celebrity gossip. It can enlarge the reader’s private world, where we can enjoy a vicarious world of glamour and can feel involved with celebrities who are richer and more famous than we are; they are brought into our circle of family and friends. Through what she calls the “extended family repertoire,” which relies on a highly personal mode of address to the reader, we can develop a strong emotional connection to the stars. We can gain what can seem like “secret” knowledge about them and their lives that may “confer an imaginary sense of power over the rich and powerful,” but also over others because you’re in the know and they are not.58
Some of these are emotional pleasures, but Hermes notes there are cognitive ones as well. When we read about a rumor or speculation about a celebrity, especially because we know some of this gossip is false or exaggerated, we engage in puzzle solving, trying to ascertain what we think is true and what isn’t. There is a pleasure here, the fun of speculation in trying to “ferret out” the truth, because most of us have our doubts about the truthfulness of gossip magazines. Today, we can often fact check stories, compare sources, and even troll celebs’ social media accounts to learn the “truth.” We are ever more aware of the ways that celebrities “fake it”—from Photoshop to plastic surgery to strategically placed paparazzi and leaked tidbits. Such reading may involve the intellectual activity of hypothesizing about relationships, where we rely on our intuition and previous experiences with similar stories.59
Another pleasure of course is schadenfreude, relishing the misfortunes of others. With celebrities, we often love judging them, denouncing them, and ridiculing them as much as we love admiring them.60 And when they fail or are exposed as phony or superficial, it can be consoling to those of us who never made it into the spotlight.61 Kathie Lee Gifford, as the cohost of the highly popular Live with Regis & Kathie Lee in the 1990s, constantly bragged about her fantastic marriage and that her husband, Frank, was a “human love machine.” Then in 1997, Frank was caught having extramarital trysts with a female flight attendant at New York’s Regency Hotel. To those irritated by Kathie Lee’s superior, smug, self-satisfied presentation of her allegedly perfect marriage, there was great satisfaction here in her humiliation. More recently, in 2013, when nineteen-year-old Justin Bieber was arrested for speeding through a Miami neighborhood, driving under the influence, and resisting arrest, and later egging his neighbor’s home, those who envied his massive success at the young age of fifteen took great delight in this tarnishing of his image. A massive—and to some deeply satisfying—fall from power was the disgrace of Harvey Weinstein, who not only had reportedly harassed and assaulted women for years, but had verbally and publically humiliated men as well.
But are we all, then, just nasty people? Why do we find glee in this kind of schadenfreude? The pleasure we find in celebrities’ pain is actually quite rational. First, when stars fail, their failure reinforces our own, perhaps preexisting, sense that the standards of beauty, wealth, and success that the celebrity industries embody are unrealistic, even for those who appear to have “made it.” Second, when we judge celebrities and find fault in their actions, we have the opportunity to affirm our own moral codes, or punish deviance, thus creating and reinforcing boundaries around our own moral frameworks.62
While we may criticize stars in ways that bolster normative values (e.g., oh, she got too heavy, he is a cheating dog), we may also actively disagree with those moral codes, standards of conduct, and rigid demands of physical perfection. Indeed, much of the pleasure of celebrity gossip may actually lie in subverting these codes. When we tell a friend how Bono spent nearly two grand to have his favorite hat flown to him or how P. Diddy bought his son a $340,000 car for his sixteenth birthday, we take pleasure in the raised eyebrows and scornful looks that we share.63 These moments let us know “we are the same, we are normal. These people are not.” In these moments, we reaffirm our own values and beliefs, often in rejection of those that celebrity culture deems ideal.64
Gossip that is critical, or that rejects the codes of the celebrity universe, may be seen as an expression of what Alison Jaggar calls outlaw emotions. Jaggar argues that subordinated individuals may pay a higher price for disagreeing with the status quo and therefore become frustrated, fearful, or even angry when faced with so-called norms. Rejections of socially sanctioned identities and behaviors, in this theory, may serve as a mode of resistance.65 Young women, for instance, who have been told that they have to be supergirls in order to “have it all,” may take pleasure in scoffing at the impossible, paradoxical standards that make it compulsory to be white and heterosexual, standards that remain dominant across much of celebrity media. Gossip that seems catty may actually be a rational response to the claim that, for women, independence and success are possible, but totally tenuous, at risk of being ripped away at any moment due to some minor perceived inadequacy or failure to measure up.66 Talking back may be a way of rejecting conformity to the standard conventions of successful femininity. Expressing these types of outlaw emotions, especially in concert with other like-minded people, can be deeply satisfying.
It is a kind of pleasurable subversion. We enjoy the opportunity to engage in a form of confident self-expression about famous, rich, and often powerful others. We flex the public’s ideological muscles, as if to say, “You may be wealthy, gorgeous, and all the rest, but we still get the final say.” While these moments can be mean-spirited, they are more centrally about our ability to affirm social norms in concert with other like-minded people. We judge celebrities not only to make ourselves feel better about our own place in the social landscape but also as a means of picking and choosing which values we adhere to and which we reject.
Because celebrities’ lives are publicly enacted, through what Hermes calls the “repertoire of melodrama,” which rests on sentimental and sensational language and narratives, their miseries, dramas, and feuds also become our own. We use celebrity life as a way of considering our own experiences, and stories about the private lives of the rich and famous reaffirm a sense of basic human equality.67 But as we also wallow in the misery of the privileged few, we may feel somehow righteous; we can imagine a cosmic (if not a political or structural) justice being exacted. We learn the price paid for daring to rise above others (the shame) or for squandering fame through ego or excess or overindulgence. These narratives remind us that even wealth and success do not free us from sorrow, and such tales of stars’ suffering can impart a sense that in the end we’re all equal with our crosses to bear, despite disparities in wealth and fame. Grief is democratized. Joys and sorrows are common.
Obviously many of us do not read celebrity gossip “straight,” taking it at face value. We know that celebrity gossip is trashy, and to appear sucked in by it makes us look like gullible dupes of the media, so by indulging in it while, at the same time, distancing ourselves from it, we can assume an ironic stance toward it, laugh at it, and make it clear that we know how bad it is. We can even boast of reading the Enquirer or clicking through TMZ as a way of being campy and immersing ourselves in low taste. Celebrity texts now anticipate our critical gaze, presenting content with a wink and a sly nod to our own skepticism so that even the most jaded can enjoy. That way we can enact (through enunciative productivity) that we are inoculated against it.
The Psychology of Fandom
A number of theories have emerged to explain the psychology of fandom and our relationships to celebrities. Today, we take for granted that the media and the celebrity culture it sustains have created new forms of publicness, through which we might have intimate relationships with people we have never met. As Richard Schickel wrote in Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, one of the first, key books written about the cultural study of fame, thanks to media technologies we are brought ever “closer” to the famous, allowing us to enjoy an illusion of intimacy with them. “To a greater or lesser degree,” we have internalized celebrities, “unconsciously made them a part of our consciousness, just as if they were, in fact, friends.”68 He continued that celebrities take up “permanent residence” in our inner lives as well, becoming central to our “reveries and fantasies, guides to action, to sexuality, to ambition.” Now, indeed, celebrity culture can be “permanently insinuated” into our sensibilities, as many of us carry them, their traits, and our relationships with them around as part of our “mental luggage.”69
Media representations, including