Celebrity. Andrea McDonnell
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may be expressionless or even scowling, lost in thought. But as soon as she knocks on the door and hears the friend approaching, she will put on a big smile and become animated as she attempts to control the impression she is making. Of course, the person answering the door now must perform as well, as the two participate in what Goffman called the “definition of the situation,” the agreed upon roles they should each play given the nature of the interaction. Each one is an actor, even though they are friends, each managing the impression they give.
Various crucial rules operate in most interactions—meetings, dinner parties, job interviews. Goffman noted that there is the impression that we give (the one we seek to control) and the impression we give off (the one we might not control so well), and they might be quite different. Some of the worst things that can happen during an interaction are what Goffman called unintended, ungovernable acts, behaviors that can disrupt our performance and that we must control, like yawning, rolling our eyes, looking past the person you’re talking to (to someone else) at a party or conference, burping, sweating, or having your voice crack. We can’t lose muscular or facial control, or belch, trip, stutter, appear nervous, gulp, forget what we were saying, or, god forbid, fart. These can be especially disastrous for celebrities. Actors “lose face” when they fail to perform their roles in a way that meets social expectations.
Thus, the “front stage” self, the version of our identity that we perform for others and allow people to see, may conceal the work that we do “back stage,” behind the scenes, in order to maintain the version of self that we present to the world. This is true for private individuals, but especially salient for public persons, who may perform cynically, not meaning what they say or concealing certain facts in order to enhance their status, present a glorified version of self, or win admiration or sympathy. We are often especially suspicious of these “front stage” presentations of politicians.
Because we know that most people—and especially those in the public eye—seek to present themselves in the most favorable light, we often “use what are considered to be the ungovernable aspects” of a person’s expressive behavior “as a check upon the validity of what is conveyed by the governable aspects.”8 If a candidate for a job expresses enthusiasm for the position but then yawns during the interview, the ungovernable act will betray what the candidate is trying to convey. It is these unguarded actions or gestures, as opposed to the performance the person presents, that we feel are the true indices of what a person is really like.
We—and the paparazzi, gossip magazines, and bloggers—use similar observational strategies when watching celebrities to determine how genuine and likeable they are. In interviews, do their facial expressions, body language, and gestures match what they are saying? When they are out in public, can they be caught doing something they have failed to control or govern, something that suggests their public image is a lie? Hugh Grant, the charming, clean-cut, British boy-next-door actor who had shot to fame for his performance as a diffident and lovelorn patrician in Four Weddings and a Funeral, had his image seriously tarnished when, in 1995, he was caught in his car having sex with a prostitute: the opposite of clean cut. “When we discover that someone with whom we have dealings is an impostor and out-and-out fraud,” Goffman observed, “we are discovering that he did not have the right to play the part he played, that he was not an accredited incumbent of the relevant status.”9 It’s these unintentional moments, the impressions we give off, as opposed to the impression we deliberately seek to give, that seem to convey the true essence of who the person is.
Because we are performers and have to cultivate dramaturgical skill, we have what Goffman famously identified as a front region or front stage and a back region or back stage. These are often marked by physical and aural boundaries and blockades between us and our audience: the back stage of a kitchen in a restaurant versus the front stage of the dining area, for example. In the front region, we need to appear to believe in the part we’re playing, to appear sincere, and the setting, our appearance, and manner should all cohere. In a classroom, for example, the successful professor will appear to be enthusiastic about her topic, dedicated to student learning and in command of the class. She should also be dressed like “a professor” and not, say, like a nightclub performer. But students have to inhabit a front stage here too: whether they like the class or not, the successful students will take notes, appear respectful, not talk to others, text throughout the lecture, or fall asleep in class. The front must have “dramatic realization” and should display what Goffman called “sacred compatibility”: that there are ideal motives for acquiring the role we inhabit. The teacher does so because he loves to teach, the doctor chose her profession because she wants to save lives, or the actor chose her profession because she has loved acting since the age of three, for example. We as performers in life must constantly adjust to new settings—the workplace, a friend’s party, an interview—and modulate our performances accordingly to remain liked and even admired.
These regions don’t just involve individuals, they include “teams,” groups of people who must collude in a performance, like the wait staff in a restaurant who seek to make you feel welcome and important. In the dining room they must be solicitous, friendly, helpful, and agreeable; “I’m Jan and I’ll be taking care of you today.” But in the kitchen, the façade can come down, especially if they find a customer to be overly demanding or entitled. So teams decide how they will treat the audience to its face, but behind the audience’s back can derogate and even mock them. They just can’t get caught doing so. Thus, teams, as well as individuals, must also work to avoid embarrassment. When such back-stage derision of the audience is exposed it can be very damaging. That’s why when a waiter surreptitiously recorded Mitt Romney at a private fundraiser during the 2012 campaign saying that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent on the government, believe they are victims … [and] pay no income tax,” so Romney’s job “is not to worry about those people,” it collided with his front-stage image as running for president of everyone and did significant damage to his candidacy.
Goffman’s schema helps us unpack and appreciate a successful or unsuccessful celebrity performance and what the celebrity must do to convey sincerity. Celebrities who, in interviews, seem too scripted, evade questions, or give obviously clichéd or pandering answers come across as phony or as hiding something. Those who are overeager with the interviewer or don’t govern their behaviors—as when Tom Cruise in 2005 famously jumped up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch proclaiming his love for Katie Holmes—can seem not in control of their performances and even unhinged. (And the thought that Cruise actually might have planned such a stunt was an equally troubling view into his back region.) That episode seriously damaged Cruise’s public image. When back-stage episodes become public, like Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant in 2006 against a police officer who stopped him for drunk driving, they can ruin a star’s career, as this episode did for Gibson, because it suggested that his true, unscripted self was a hate-filled bigot. But celebrities are members of teams, too, who work to maintain their successful performances. An allegedly happily married celebrity couple, for example, should not be seen fighting in a restaurant or bar. If one of them says in an interview how happy they are, the other one better say so too. And when a celebrity grants an interview, he or she will work hard to enlist the journalist as a team member as well, striving to have the interviewer convey the best possible image of the star.
Most celebrities, of course, seek to protect their back stages, to maintain some privacy, and not to have back-stage comments or behaviors cross the boundary into the front region. But at the same time, many celebrities understand that their fans want access to the back stage, and this has become more true and more possible with the explosive increase in the number of paparazzi in the early twenty-first century and the rise of social media. So increasingly stars, or more usually someone on their staff, use Facebook and especially Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter to present a managed view of what seems to be the back stage. In addition, social media have provided easy-to-access technological platforms that allow initially nonfamous people to create a marketable persona—a self to present to a broader, unknown public—that has led to a rise of various social-media-based celebrities.
Celebrities and the Emergence of the Mass Audience
While there have been, for millennia, people who rose to fame, the production and proliferation of celebrities in the United States really takes off in the mid-nineteenth