Can our consumption and surveillance of celebrity news and gossip ever really be justified? If not, at the very least rationalized?
The first column I ever wrote for the Minnesota Daily called into question our odd parasocial relationships with celebrities, who are, functionally, brand mascots. When broken down, the construction of these cultural icons is ridiculously derivative and formulaic.
Yet, we take the bait every time.
While I still stand by my point that authenticity is commodified in Hollywood and among public figures in general, there are nuances here to be explored.
Despite criticisms of vapidity and lack of substance, celebrity news prevails. Why do large sectors of the population care so much about what a minute subset of artists, movers and shakers get up to in their free time?
It seems there are two camps under which consumption of such content falls: those who make attempts to intellectualize this preoccupation and those who embrace it as a guilty pleasure.
These are less disparate categories and more of a Venn diagram or spectrum. Anyone who encounters, interacts with, or consumes celebrity or pop culture news operates somewhere between intellectual and cultural criticism and guilty pleasure, or train-wreck sadism.
Where we’re getting it wrong is the mutual exclusion of these two lenses through which we peer into the lives of these figures.
Privy to Elle Woods’ increasingly glorified sensibility of fusing high and low culture and feminizing academia, I grew up watching video essays. These YouTube videojournalism pieces dissected the sociological implications of the Kardashians, “Love Island,” Megan Fox and, of course, Britney Spears’ conservatorship, among other hot-button issues.
These major pop culture events were and are lightning rods for public debate. They’re ripe for repeated, accessible dissections of academically inclined concepts under frameworks we may not have otherwise been made aware of.
Many individuals lived to read Perez Hilton’s scathing remarks toward Spears, and then his half-hearted apology, as well as Fox’s re-emergence into the limelight following her harsh treatment by the press.
Through these deconstructions, we can parse through the layers of context that inform our society in unduly prescient ways.
We use these happenings as case studies, as we watch the dynamics of our time unfold in front of us. Baby’s first sociology, if you will. We’re pushing Barbie Dolls together and pulling them apart, manufacturing and reacting to drama using these unreal figures that are celebrities as a proxy.
Ruth DeFoster, an assistant professor who teaches media and popular culture at the University of Minnesota, said she’s observed fascinations with celebrity figures throughout history and in most civilizations.
“I think there’s a core human fascination with celebrity that we’re just drawn to,” DeFoster said. “Whether it’s a wealthy king, whether it’s the landed gentry and the noble classes, whether it’s the gladiators or Olympians, we’ve always been drawn to those people as opinion leaders. So it just seems to be something that humans just do.”
It’s voyeuristic and surveilling in a way that feels cathartic to us. How we regard these figures as unreal makes it not only morally justifiable, but morally imperative that we dig beneath the surface to understand what they’re up to.
They personify beauty, excess, success and aspiration.
Maggie Hennefeld, professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University, said we use the unreal quality of celebrities, as well as their extreme adherence to societal ideals of personhood, to negotiate and wrestle with our place in the world.
“I think it’s a way of negotiating some kind of ambivalence about where we fit in relation to that larger fantasy, like, do we identify with these celebrities?” Hennefeld said. “Do we want to destroy them because they model ideals that are, to some extent, completely impossible? I think both at once. It’s also so easy to exploit that kind of mass volatility regarding our relationship to these celebrities.”
What we take note of in celebrities is a good indicator of where we are societally, whether that be on a purely aesthetic or behavioral level or a deeper moral interrogation. A niche example of this is the wane of Anne Hathaway’s popularity in the early 2010s, because of beauty standards reflecting the recession-era ideal of round-faced authenticity.
This can be extrapolated.
Maybe our fascination with the Kardashian-inspired plastic surgery trends of the 2010s reflects a greater reckoning with technology and its effect on society in one of its most visceral ways.
Maybe our reactions to Chappell Roan’s unique stance on performance and responsibilities of fame challenge our changing relationship with the workplace, or our generation gaps regarding twentieth-century-informed etiquette expectations.
Celebrity gossip gives us a framework through which we are once removed and able to witness the defining ideological battles that define our generation. Not without bias, but aware and able to fully go through the motions of why we think the way we do, using accessible, widely-proliferated case studies to examine ourselves from a view that’s closer to a bird’s-eye.
Through the social mores of our time, we may express competence in the moral battlegrounds that will come to define us in a greater historical context unconsciously. We may express competency without comprehending the true gravity of what we’re unlocking with our casual scrolls through the Daily Mail or our phone conversations with a friend.
Celebrity news provides all of this and more. Or, it can simply ease our sorrows, cure malaise and temporarily suspend boredom.
It’s a necessary distortion of the human condition, which in and of itself is complex and multifaceted.
