The growth industry of the nineties has been the culture of celebrity. Never have so many people been famous for so little. Never have so many people been interested in others just because they are famous for more than 15 seconds. Never have we been so preoccupied with the private lives of those whom we elect to be public figures. And who shall we ask to explain all this? Who can tell us about why and how this is happening?
Shall we ask Madonna, who once sang “I traded fame for love” and now decides “I’ve changed my mind”? Shall we ask the recipient of that prestigious award, Sunglasses-Wearer of the Year 1998, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson, what it’s all about? How did she, a friend of the royals, give Charles a peck on the cheek while kitted out in tight ski-wear and thus manage overnight to become, in her own inimitable words, “a personality type-thing”? Shall we ask Maureen Rees, a cleaner who couldn’t drive very well in a docu-soap but ended up opening supermarkets and making records because she was just so ordinary?
Should we go to Emma Noble, famous for wearing very little and marrying the ex-prime minister’s son, what she feels about the society of the spectacle? Or will we fall back on the familiar line that an obsession with celebrity is irredeemably a bad thing, the sign of an emotionally impoverished way of life, that shows we are all dupes, passive consumers of the celebrity industry?
I, too, would like to carp from the sidelines. I would like to say that we are all too preoccupied with the shallow and the frivolous, that this is terribly unhealthy, that I have never been drawn to Hello! or OK magazine, where A tells us how she has risen above her troubles, B and C present their new baby son, D and E are fantastically in love in their beautiful new home. I would like to be above or beneath all this. I would like to say that I have never been impressed by being in the same room as X,Y and Z.
I would like to be pure.
However, I no longer believe – if I ever did – that there are any sidelines from which one can merely observe the cult of celebrity. The fantasy of purity is just that – a fantasy. You may dismiss Hello!, you may dismiss the tabloids and Hollywood and all of TV. You may, if you like, dismiss much of the media and imagine that if you stick to your serious newspapers you can avoid the crassness of everyday life, that you don’t know Gary Glitter or Hugh Grant , that you have never heard of Liz Hurley or Charlie Dimmock, that you couldn’t care less.
But you wouldn’t be telling the whole truth, would you? For we are all stakeholders, to a smaller or larger degree, in this celebrity business. Our interest, our appetite, our desire sustain it, create it, pay for it.
There have always been famous people. But the growth of the mass media, particularly in the past decade, has produced an unforeseen worship of the famous that is deeply troubling. One might suggest that the culture of celebrity is one of the most unremarked aspects of this thing called globalisation, that as the world becomes a more uncertain and fragmented place, celebrity culture provides some strange form of social glue which holds us together. Naomi Campbell fawning over Nelson Mandela shows us that everything can somehow be connected, everything brought together.
Yet the way we understand the new world order of celebrity is resolutely old fashioned. Critics always talk of celebrity as the new secular religion. Robert Hughes spoke of the “poor, depleted souls” who gathered together to try and buy Jackie O’s paraphernalia as being like “13th-century peasants trying to touch the withered bones of some saint”.
The standard old left dismissal of those who mourned Diana amounted to little more than a rerun of the “opium of the masses” argument. Why, they wailed, could we not see that the death of an over-privileged woman did not warrant such emotion? Why could we cry over someone we didn’t know when so many other bad things go on in the world? Humanity, emotion, subjectivity are banal compared to political analysis. We suffered from false consciousness – as anyone who picks up Hello! and bitches about the decor of Posh Spice’s home presumably also does.
The left has always liked to think that those it deemed basically stupid were easily manipulated. The worship of saints and the worship of celebrities amount to a huge and essentially feminised activity that can never provide real sustenance.
Yet our relationship to celebrity is not so easily reduced. We don’t all like the same stars. Indeed we like to know about certain celebrities simply so that we can slag them off. Tara, the raddled coke/sex/party addict, exists so that we can talk about the vacuity of fame. We recognise the difference between those who are famous because of a respected talent and those who are famous because they are desperate. We envy the lifestyles of the rich and famous. Sometimes this envy turns to visceral hatred and those that we have created are those we take great delight in destroying. We see how they are just like us, only famous, and not like us at all because they are famous.
The famous themselves tell us over and over again how fame is not the same as happiness or fulfilment, that public adulation is a form of love that cannot be translated into or feel the same as personal love. We like nothing better than when our unhappy stars – Paula Yates, Geri Halliwell, Robbie Williams – who appear to have everything tell us that they feel empty. We imagine that they take our risks for us, that they have more lovers, more drugs, more money than we will ever have and that as a result of all these risks they are still lonely. This, we feel, is a fair price to pay.
For we are not innocent any longer. We see the machinations of fame. Whole industries boomed in the nineties to do nothing else. What is PR, after all, but a way of selling us people and things we can well live without? We know about hype and spin and the parties that celebs are paid to attend. We know about lies.
We don’t know how Geri Halliwell and Chris Evans really feel about each other but we think we do. We think that celebrity mating is always suspect. We think we know better, you see, because we don’t take it all literally. This is because celebrity culture is a visual culture – another reason it is so distrusted by the traditional left.
We may gaze at the revolting furniture of some piece of Eurotrash in Hello! and we may read the text about how lovely their lovely life is, but the pictures are what really count. It is no surprise that the original Hello! started in Spain, from a Catholic culture in which signs mean more than words, and images count above all. (The Spanish version of Hello! even has pictures of famous corpses in it – but this has not yet caught on here.)
Those who do take the images of celebrity seriously are those who go quite mad. They who cannot tell the difference between image and reality become stalkers, sad obsessives who take literally the fantasy that the connection with a star is an intimate one. The rest of us are merely fans, discriminating in our tastes, picking and choosing, shopping between the different brands on offer.
It is this consumerist aspect of celebrity that makes it different from any religion. We don’t all believe the same thing at all. And we don’t have to believe anything to partake in the rituals. If celebrity is simply a by-product of accelerated consumerism then it is also subject to the same laws of supply and demand. There is always someone new and better and we tire quickly of the familiar brands.
If this is a symptom of our poor inner lives then the only route back is itself a form of spiritual regeneration. We must replace the culture of celebrity with deep and meaningful relationships. We must become born again.
Certainly this is the tone of the most perceptive writer on celebrity, Brett Easton Ellis, whose fascination with celebrity and its accompanying lifestyles is mistakenly regarded as his endorsement of it.
Would a world shorn of celebrity mean an unheard-of form of equality? I doubt it. Would people get on with their own lives instead of getting others to lead their lives for them? Is celebrity only ever a force for bad? We always like to think of the time that we live in as excessive, as a time when we went too far. Perhaps we have much further to go. Perhaps a culture that feeds on unreality will produce yet more new and exciting ways in which we are taken away from the dreariness of our own lives.
Cultural pessimists want us to go back to basics, to a time when we were not so easily distracted. When was that exactly?
The cult of celebrity reminds us time and time again in glossy close-up of the many ways in which we are all equal but some are more equal than others. During the nineties this has been turned into a fine and pleasurable art. To stop it, one would have to destroy the entire media industry (and I’ll wager whoever managed that would become famous for a little longer than 15 seconds). To stop it would be to destroy the faulty products that we use to imagine how life could be – on the grounds that life is not like that.
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