Celebrity. Andrea McDonnell
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put the stars under surveillance, without having to respond, be clever, or expose ourselves to them.
Who becomes a celebrity and why? What is our role in celebrity production, in who gets to stay in the spotlight and who doesn’t? The book begins by reviewing the various theoretical approaches that have sought to explain the power and significance of celebrity culture, the ideological work it does, and the relationship between stars and audiences. Why do we even have celebrities, and why do they matter to us as individuals and as a society? In tracing the evolution of academic thought on the subject of fame and fandom, we may better appreciate not only the power of the stars themselves but also the scope and potential of the relationship between ordinary people and celebrities.
Fame and the Quest for Immortality
What is the allure, the pull, of fame? Why do some people actively seek it and others—many of us—fantasize about it? In the twenty-first century, being a celebrity seems to bring so much: wealth, of course, being known in a way others are not, being envied, being deferred to, having other famous friends who, presumably, are exciting and fun.
The desire for fame is nothing new; it has existed for millennia. It springs from another deep human fantasy, a longing: the desire for immortality. Fame seems to promise an escape from one of the basic inevitabilities of life—death. For certain celebrities, even years after they die, their presence continues to exist, living on in the images and recordings that made them famous. Posters of Marilyn Monroe and Audrey Hepburn still grace people’s walls, and images of celebrities as diverse as Elvis Presley, Johnny Cash, and Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz are “managed” by rights companies so that, decades after their deaths, they can still be used to sell products. They are gone, but still with us, in an uncanny mode of eternal life through media imagery. Like secular gods, the famous defy the rules of human existence while also providing us with aspirational models to worship. They continue to live on after their death through us, their fans. It is we who make the stars immortal as we worship and deify our favorite actors or musicians. Elvis’s Graceland has become a sacred site for his fans where people still leave flowers on his grave (some even believing he’s still alive). Fans collect autographs or pictures, or even possessions of their idols, documenting the existence of stars and possessing some modicum of their being, creating their own celebrity reliquaries.
Thousands of years ago, this quest for immortality, to be remembered by posterity, was restricted to a very privileged few. In ancient times, as Leo Braudy notes in his history of fame, with kings, like the pharaohs, also seen as gods, “fame meant a grandeur almost totally separate from ordinary human nature.” There was an “extraordinary exaltation of a single man” through art, his headgear and clothing, palaces, and through monumental tombs like the pyramids, all testifying to and asserting his power and immortality. The tombs of the Chinese emperors, Mayan rulers, and Egyptian pharaohs contained inscriptions, amulets, and objects that proclaimed the deceased’s singularity and influence. These relics showed the powerful individual imbued with godlike powers, their persona linked to mythic narratives and imagery through carvings, paintings, and decorations of the body.17
For the ancient Greeks, it was heroism, the “pursuit of honor,” achieved primarily through war and conquest, that allowed men—through the legends about them—to live beyond death. Epics such as the Iliad and the Odyssey immortalized heroic achievements and inspired the person Leo Braudy calls the “first famous person,” Alexander the Great (356–323 BC). Alexander did win fame through his wide-ranging conquests, but, as Braudy notes, “Nothing was ever enough for him.”18 He sought fame not through some predetermined, ascribed status, like being the son of a king or emperor, but through his achievements. He was determined to have these achievements, and his image, widely known and preserved for posterity. As Karsten Dahmen notes, “Much of Alexander’s importance lies in his posthumous fame.”19
Today, we may not think that we are participating in the reproduction of fame when digging around in our pockets for spare change, but in ancient societies coins played an important role in self-promotion. They were one of the earliest mass-produced technologies for circulating fame, and set the precedent for presidents and kings to have their faces on coins and later on bills. Alexander the Great imprinted his likeness on coins in order to make his image and authority known to his subjects, although it was after his death that Greek and Roman rulers promulgated most of the coins bearing his likeness in an effort to be allied with his empire-building.20 Widely circulated and able to withstand time and touch, coins allowed for the spread of the ruler’s face across wide swaths of territory. The power of the coin lay not only in its ability to provide a visual representation of a leader whom most subjects would never see, but also to couple that image with phrases and iconography that conveyed a sense of authority and gravitas. When new coins appeared, the person on the street knew there was a new government and a new leader. Alexander minted coins as he conquered, circulating his likeness to current and future subjects. In his monetary renderings, his features were blended with those of Greek gods and icons of mythology like Hercules. In this way, Alexander’s coins not only captured his likeness but also linked him with recognizable qualities and themes with which he wished to be associated.21 While Alexander died at the age of thirty-three, his fame lived on through the continued circulation of these coins.22
There were other representations of Alexander: paintings and mosaics (he had himself depicted “clad in panther skin,” which was normally associated with the gods),23 portrait heads and busts, and statues in stone and bronze.24 Sculpture also allowed for the public display of one’s face and body. The human figure carved in stone provided a lasting depiction of the subject’s entire body, and then positioned that body in the public space, for all to see. Imposing and grand, statues confronted the viewer with the presence of their subjects, a moment of poise, or of active heroism, frozen in time and publicly memorialized; the person had to be approached as a monument.25 The longevity and expense of the materials used to construct such works—bronze, marble, granite—suggest that its subject’s influence will extend well into the future, impervious to the changes of time.
With the spread of Christianity, especially after the fall of the Roman Empire, sculpture went into decline because of the belief that statuary verged on idolatry.26 One replacement was portraiture, which served to bring together the king’s “two bodies”—the mortal body that aged and died, and the symbolic body of the monarch. A tradition of deifying portraiture in order to establish and enhance a ruler’s fame and prestige dates back at least to medieval and early Renaissance artists who made similar connections by painting rulers in Christ-like poses.27
Kings and queens especially grasped the value of the portrait in affirming their importance, and thus a new profession arose, the “court painter” retained by royal or noble families. They often managed a group of assistants or apprentices, all of whom produced various forms of imagery—portrait miniatures, illuminated manuscripts, heraldic seals—to circulate and affirm the royals’ authority and fame. There was especial emphasis on the royals’ face. By the late 1500s and early 1600s, in England, for example, portraits of rulers from William the Conqueror to Henry VIII would be displayed, often in chronological sequence, in the grand homes of the aristocracy but also in civic buildings and educational establishments. These paintings could be inexpensively reproduced based on previous portraits and copied by artists.28 And they cemented and circulated the royals’ historic significance long after their deaths.
Until the Renaissance period and the emergence of early capitalism in the 1500s, fame had been restricted primarily to royal and religious leaders. But with the growth in trade and the rise of a moneyed merchant class, portrait painting emerged as a more portable, more accessible means of recording and displaying one’s individual likeness and his or her success. “Portraiture,” as Shearer West writes about the history of the genre, was “very important to celebrity, as the cultivation of celebrity depends to an extent upon the familiarity and dissemination of likeness.”29 As the number of public professions increased, those aspiring to importance realized how portraits could make them seem more symbolically valuable, more powerful.30 As Braudy notes, “Everyone who made a career in public—and the number of public professions was speedily increasing—was being made to realize how both art and printing could make him more symbolic, more essential, and more powerful.”31 In turn, as the demand for portraits grew, artists