So usually, when I’m stuck for a topic, I flip through a few celebrity magazines. By page 12, something completely ludicrous will stick out its airbrushed neck and say, “Please, oh please, Ryan, make-a da fun of me.” It’s a nice little shortcut I’ve picked up, and usually the celebrity world is only too happy to oblige me (albeit unwittingly).
Today, though…just can’t do it. Incapable of any form of satire. I think it spilled out on the floor at Culture Club along with that girl’s candy necklace. Instead, I’m in “must get this off my chest via writing” mode, so if you don’t like these types of entries, feel free to come back later in the week, or over the weekend, when my Video Music Awards breakdown will happen. (The lack of exact date of its publication is part of the angst over here.)
Anyways, don’t say you haven’t been warned.
Many trade publications this year have been making the distinction between “celebrity” and “star”. The two may at first seem really similar, and that’s sort of the point these publications were making: the line between the two is increasingly thin and blurry. Sorta like Sarah Michelle Gellar over the last two seasons of “Buffy”. “Star” implies a type of aura gained through a body of work in which one person’s reputation can tip a pop culture consumer off to a basic level of quality one can expect from a work to which they are attached. A “star” may also imply someone whose body of work commands a certain amount of respect and historical maintenance. Thus, we remember Bob Hope at his death not for his current drawing power, but for the cumulative body of work he accomplished, both onscreen and off.
A “celebrity”, on the other hand, is distinguished simply by their existence as a person living under public scrutiny. I initially typed “public eye”, but really, lately, the two are synonymous anyways, so let’s call a spade a spade. “Celebrities” are the “OK, why exactly are these people famous exactly” type of people. They are either famous by the sake of their looks (name any of a few dozen teen stars here) or have managed to insert themselves into the public arena long after anyone remembers why they were ever there in the first place (I’m looking at you, Charo). In a bizarre cycle, these people are famous because they are…famous. There’s no qualitative measurement here; they look pretty, therefore they are. (That’s Decartes’ lesser known theory of existence.)
We trash celebrities; we bemoan stars. There’s a difference there. In the latter case, it’s a variation of “Say it ain’t so, Joe.” Because we assign actual worth to our stars, it’s that much harder to see them in the middle of a drug/porn/klezmer music bust. We can be jealous of our stars while allowing ourselves to see, in some capacity, that they have earned a certain station in life. (One could talk about why any one person could be worth $20 million for 3 months of work, but I’m not here to argue about the distribution of wealth in the entertainment industry.) With celebrities, however, we revel in their shortcomings, since quite often we look at them and say, “There but for the grace of a $400 facial go I.”
There’s a flip side to this type of criticism, however. Tinged in most “Why on earth are THEY famous?” is the unspoken coda: “…and not me?” Now, you can take this coda one of two ways. One is the fairly benign, “Well, if they can be famous, I guess any schmuck without talent can” variation. In this case, we marvel at the fact that a person can command a salary on the basis of their cheekbone structure. On a more malign level, however, what’s going on in many cases is a “What can I do to get into those shoes?” We are simultaneously attracted and repelled by the figure of the “celebrity” by the proximity we assign ourselves to them. “Stars” we place on a pedestal high above us; celebrities are the people who won’t talk to us in line at Starbucks.
So, how does all of this fit into my initial few paragraphs?
Well, part and parcel of all celebrity watching is the anger/frustration at watching people fundamentally at leisure. Yes, they work, they spend long hours on a set, they travel and do press junkets. I’m not here to say all celebrities are lazy by any stretch of the imagination. I am here to say that they are in a privileged place of being paid, in general, fairly well to do something they love while simultaneously getting the type of attention most people crave. It’s easy enough for me to laugh off their incessant need for adoration. Then again, I write a blog.
I’ve written before here about blogging, and I don’t want to return to MetaLand exactly. I will say however that I envy celebrity culture in that I see people who get both fiscal and social recognition for the work they do. They also get to exclusively do that which they profess to love. (I’m guessing Ashton isn’t just riding this acting gig out until he achieves a life-long goal of becoming a CPA. I could be wrong though.) There’s no conflict between duty and desire for celebrities. For the struggling actor/writer/director/artist, the tension between duty and desire is omnipresent. Many celebrities in their past have likewise had this tension at one point, to be certain. However, their ability to somehow transcend this status into a desire-exclusive zone is to be both admired and envied. Can’t be any other way around it.
Roughly a year ago, I “hit it big” with a rundown of the Video Music Awards. It was my first taste of widespread readership, and the positive feedback I received basically transformed my blog into what it is today. So I know all too well, even in my miniscule version of celebrity, how intoxicating it can be, and why you strive towards it. Most celebrities, of course, dream of becoming stars. (There are very few people, I imagine, in Hollywood with the dream of eventually simply being a judge on “Are You Hot?”) Most hard-core bloggers, likewise, dream of something bigger and better than the occasional comment and (if you’re lucky) a donation on PayPal. We enjoy the comments (we're not writing in a vaccuum, after all), don't get me wrong. We enjoy the writing process, otherwise we wouldn't be doing this. Many would just prefer to do nothing but write all the time. However, we mostly sneak in a few hundred words whenever duty temporarily releases us.
My duty is to my job. My 9-5 (or 9-9, this week). It’s to my rent. My car payment. My two student loans. My Visa bill. My insurance. These are things that are necessary to sustain a quality of life which, if not laid back, still had my mind on my money and my money on my mind. It’s consistently in the foreground. I perform a job in which I take pride in a job well done, but mostly see it as “what I do to pay the bills”. I’m fortunate to work with a number of amazing people, but at the end of the day, I find myself amazingly frustrated that I might not be able to watch this year’s Video Music Awards live and be able to deliver a running commentary by 9 am the following morning. That’s my desire, but duty stands in the way.
I spent the weekend in NYC surrounded by people in some way, shape, or form in the same predicament as myself. In fact, I bet most people are in the same boat to some degree. As such, we can maybe understand the emerging importance and focus on a “celebrity culture” (as opposed to a “star culture”) as a simultaneous projection of our dreams and (currently) unmet hopes. We need this subculture for different reasons at different times. They provide us with pop culture catharsis: a way to both have a shining example of what we might achieve while an easy target for everything we have yet to become. A coffee shop employee/wannabe actor might mock Ben Affleck while making a latté, but 99/100 LA actors would have killed their mother to be cast in “Gigli” at the time that script was rolling around.
For most people, the celebrity culture represents that which we ourselves would like most: to do the work we want, when we want, without fear of want. For those of us in the blogging world, our words formulate our desires. They are at times the truest representations of us, even if the content itself is sometimes fictitious. However, duty often distracts or detains us from what we truly want to do. But we toe the line between desire and duty, hoping one day, if we work hard enough, the former can finally supercede the latter.
And on that note, it’s back to work for me...
Posted by Ryan McGee at August 26, 2003 10:25 AM