Celebrity. Andrea McDonnell
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democratization of society, the evolution of the United States into a much larger and more impersonal society, the rapid growth of national markets and cultures, the rise of an emerging middle class and urban, white-collar workers, the spread of popular entertainments, and the gradual rise of bureaucracies to manage businesses and the government. Increased urbanization, fueled in part by rising immigration, meant there were growing and concentrated audiences for popular culture fare. The success of the “penny press” in the 1830s and beyond, geared to everyday people and not just elites, provided venues for advertising concerts, performances, and other events. A new kind of public sphere was emerging as well, one that was more participatory and less governed primarily by white, property-owning men.
It was in the nineteenth century that the term “celebrity” emerged.10 Unlike the top-down fame of kings, queens, or prominent religious leaders, celebrities and their creators and managers needed fans. And the rapid growth of the population and profound changes in the way people lived created them. In 1790, 95 percent of Americans lived in rural areas; only 5 percent lived in cities, and only a few, like New York and Boston, had more than 15,000 people. By 1890, industrialization and the rise of the factory system had led to a major growth in the number and size of cities, with now 35 percent of Americans living in urban areas. Between 1870 and 1920, the number of Americans living in cities grew from ten million to fifty-four million. And immigrants and their children were the major source of this growth. Between 1880 and 1920, more than twenty million people migrated to the United States, most of them moving to cities. By the 1920s, more people lived in cities than in the country, a major shift in American life.11 The increase in the number of jobs, improvements in transportation, and, of course, the lure of public entertainments all made the city magnetic.
The rise in leisure time was also crucial to growth in public entertainments and the stars featured in them. Some estimate that in the early to mid-1800s, many people worked seventy hours or more a week. In manufacturing jobs in the 1870s and 1880s, a sixty-hour workweek was typical, and workers began organizing in the 1870s for an eight-hour workday.12 By the turn of the century, various industries had gone to an eight-hour day, freeing many people up to attend vaudeville shows and go to the movies and amusement parks. By the 1840s, cities like New York, despite religious and moral opposition among the educated elite to the potential corruptions of theatergoing, had a robust theater culture with known actors. Thousands of new theaters, especially in cities, were built between 1850 and 1900.13 By the 1880s, vaudeville was the most popular form of commercial entertainment, featuring anywhere between twenty and thirty acts, each performing for about fifteen minutes; an estimated 15 percent of all city dwellers attended a show at least once a week.14
During this approximately eighty-year period, between 1840 and 1920, the phenomenon of the celebrity begins to take hold. And, since then, the role and impact has only increased. Why? Of course there was simply the increased ability to produce them, through the building of “museums” and theaters in cities and towns, and the development of promotional apparatuses through newspapers, broadsides, and later magazines. An increase in economic wealth in the United States, and the gradual expansion of leisure time, fought for primarily by unions, helped enlarge an audience for entertainment and its stars, as did rapid technological change—the invention of the camera, phonograph, motion pictures, and then radio.
One obvious reason for the rise of celebrities during this era comes from the production side: as owners and producers of urban-based entertainments like the theater and vaudeville sought to maximize profits, they used the expanding press and techniques of modern advertising to create known name performers—stars—to attract an audience. But other explanations for the rise of celebrities come from the consumer side of the phenomenon. Of course people wanted diversion, escape, and entertainment, but there was, and is, more to it.
Celebrity Culture as a Response to the Rise of Bureaucracies
This period saw the rise of bureaucracies, especially in the post–Civil War period, to manage large-scale organizations like governments or businesses. These were characterized by their hierarchical structures, impersonal rules, emphasis on rational principles of organization, and the specific allocation of duties to specific job descriptions, which typically involved delimited tasks and spheres of influence in the workplace. As the sociologist Max Weber noted, while bureaucracies were in many ways an excellent and highly functional form of administration, they depersonalized both those who worked in them and those they served. Individual cases or exceptions that don’t conform to the rules, individual ideas or initiatives not in your job description, just can’t be accommodated. Just think of how we feel waiting for our number to be called at the Division of Motor Vehicles or trying to reach an actual human via a voicemail menu. Those waiting in lines to be called or served, those sitting at their desks doing their same routine jobs over and over, can feel their individuality thwarted, that they are just part of an undifferentiated herd.
Celebrities offer a fantasy of escape from this dehumanization. They don’t wait in line, they can bend the rules and be treated as special individuals, they possess a singularity denied by large-scale bureaucratic enterprises. Most of us have to go to nine-to-five jobs where we are told what to do; we have to watch what we spend; we don’t get to marry and divorce beautiful new people every three years; we are not supposed to be “difficult” or “high maintenance.” Celebrities don’t have to play by any of these rules. They get a pass. They don’t have to rein in their various appetites (except, for women, hunger). For the most part, they get to escape from these confines.
Many celebrities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were self-made individuals—inventors, singers, actors, industrialists—who achieved their wealth and fame not by being born into them, but through their talents and hard work. Thus they provided living testimony to the possibility of upward mobility. They also held out the fantasy of one day breaking free oneself, of being seen as a distinct, special individual who merits recognition and admiration. Celebrities then and now embody “self-expression over conformity” and “hedonism above responsibility.”15 They are heightened examples of individual achievement, which transform and challenge the rigidity of class-based societies, representing the potential for everyone to transcend them.16 By the 1920s, with the Hollywood star system firmly in place, celebrity stories in the new fan magazines emphasized the glories of the stars’ wealth and fame, which, if handled properly, ensured even further elevation from the tedium and indignities of the bureaucratized life. During the Great Depression, as Karen Sternheimer reports in Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, gossip pages and the number of photos expanded in fan magazines, which served both as “a distraction from the faltering economic system” and as reassurance “that it was still possible to become rich in America, even during the Depression.”17
There is a paradox at the core of this, because celebrities are often seen has having “charisma”—exceptional, unique, and magnetic qualities that set them apart from others—yet somehow lure us ordinary, possibly noncharismatic spectators into the reverie that we can break out from the pack as well.
Celebrity Culture as a Form of Religion
Another explanation for the purchase that celebrity culture has gained in our society is that it is similar to religion, and even a substitute for it. As Chris Rojek notes in his book Celebrity, in increasingly modernized, consumerist societies, where the acquisition of goods and status are emphasized and the centrality of religious institutions to everyday life wanes, people still need and look for some meaning, bigger than themselves, to admire and aspire to. Celebrity culture fills that need by providing, in a kind of macroreligious manner, a “cluster of human relationships in which mutual passion typically operates without physical interaction.”18 Appearing on elevated stages or large movie screens, beautifully lit or photographed, stars can seem like deities, bigger than we, above us. The celebrity becomes “the precious other.”19 In the magical world of celebrities, everything seems possible. By publicly defying the boundaries of ordinary human life, “celebrities take themselves and their fans higher,” notes Rojek, “They are the ambassadors of the celestial sphere.”20 As with gods, we can project intensely positive, even worshipful feelings onto celebrities, and this connection can “compensate for feelings of invalidation and incompleteness elsewhere in their lives” and provide a path “into genuinely meaningful experience.”21
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