Celebrity
Chris Rojek Reaktion Books, 208pp, £12.95
ISBN 1861891040
The main thesis of Chris Rojek's book is that our current obsession with Kylie, Becks and even Harold Shipman is the direct result of democracy's failure to deliver what it promises. In its American incarnation especially, democracy is predicated on the belief that everyone has the right to make something - something else, even - of themselves. But this dangled prize of specialness is particularly hard to achieve, given the levelling and dulling effect of living in a society that makes a mantra of everyone being equal. Out of the frustrated desire to rise above the common herd comes our indecent hunger to latch on to the handful of people who appear to have made "it", whatever and wherever "it" might be. (In Britain, where internalised class identities mean that we are less certain of our right to get above ourselves in the first place, celebrity culture is correspondingly muted.)
Given that most of us are apparently suffering from an alarming condition known as "achievement famine", we are not very fussy about whom we fasten our frustrated desires upon. Rojek has come up with a name for a subcategory of celebrity made up of people he calls "celetoids". Although they sound like the kind of creatures who were making Dr Who's life tricky around 1969, celetoids are actually of more recent origins. Rojek is referring to all those Lottery winners, streakers and novelty singing acts who dominate the papers one day and are completely forgotten the next. Apparently, we like them because they are a bit like us, only famous. Full-blown celebrities, by contrast, make us sad (and, in some cases, murderous) because we know that we can never get close to either being them or being with them. It might be fun to pick over the details of Gwyneth Paltrow's loves and looks, but deep down we accept that Judith Keppel, the woman who won Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, is probably the highest to whom we can aspire.
On an abstract level, Rojek's arguments are illuminating: they don't necessarily tell you things you hadn't thought before, but they do organise them coherently. Particularly useful is the section where he shows how different theoretical positions produce various ways of understanding celebrity. A structuralist approach, for instance, would explain the phenomenon in terms of totalising structures such as "the culture industry" or "capitalism". A post-structuralist reading would see celebrity as constructed by a whole nexus of historical, cultural and socio-economic contexts, constantly cutting across one another. A subjectivist approach would briskly put the whole thing down to talent: celebrities get to be famous because they are prettier, braver or more tuneful than the rest of us.
What is lacking in Rojek's analysis is much interest in empirical data, the nitty-gritty information about how this process of celebrity actually works. Apart from mentioning "Joanne" who, during sex, likes to imagine that her husband is Barry Manilow, we get little idea of what goes on inside a fan's head - or, indeed, inside a celebrity's. Rojek rehashes well-known case histories of stars who have behaved unexpectedly and then ascribes to them motives that suit his argument. Thus James Fox is breezily cited as "another example of a celebrity who became prey to addictive, self-destructive behaviour", when all he did, in fact, was take up community work - not generally considered to be self-destructive. It may well be that Fox believes his ten-year absence from acting was a dark and wasted period, but we need to hear it from him, not Rojek.
Celebrity is published in the "FOCI" (Focus on Contemporary Issues) strand from Reaktion Books. According to the blurb on the dust jacket, "these books are combative. They offer points of view, take sides and are written with passion." Celebrity is certainly confident in its own assertions: "existence is ultimately meaningless"; "every accountant will tell you that there is no gain without pain"; the 1990s were characterised by "hypocrisy and empty meretriciousness". However, much of the inflammatory impact of these statements is muffled by a jargony prose style that badly serves the text's intention. A typical example: "Staged celebrity refers to the calculated technologies and strategies of permanence and self- projection designed to achieve a status of monumentality in public culture." The chances are that if you can work out what that means, you're really not too bothered about Jennifer Aniston's hair colour.
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