Celebrity, Fantasy, Identification

In considering the idea of celebrity a while back I mentioned the view some have that the fascination with celebrity is, for some at least, a matter of vicariously living through the rich and famous who at least appear to have everything they do not have--respect, comfort, security, freedom, pleasure and all the rest.

This seems to me to plausibly account for a significant part of the phenomenon--but also that this kind of fantasy is rather a delicate thing, with the arguable decline of celebrity bespeaking people finding it harder than before to do what engaging in such "vicarious living" requires, namely identification with someone they have never met and whose situation is not at all like theirs, precisely because those others have everything they do not.

After all, this is an age in which the distance between the truly privileged and everyone else just keeps growing; and, for all the talk of "social mobility" the way up to that very small space at the top, always so narrow and slippery as to make the struggle to get there an extreme longshot, seems ever more narrow and slippery; while just getting through the day as a "nobody" seems ever tougher, and more painful. Thus is it the case that, between student debt and housing costs and health insurance premiums and the rest the children of people who called themselves "middle class" increasingly realize that anything that can be called middle classness is likely to prove beyond their reach.

All of this makes the feat of imagination required in such identification ever harder--for when even a marginal, pedestrian, middle classness is only a dream, what is the glamour of society's heights?

It doesn't help that the celebrities are endlessly making themselves harder to identify with.

Thus do we see more than the usual attention to something that has never been a secret, namely the way in which Hollywood's upper reaches are the preserve of an "in-marrying caste" of people born into the business (or failing that, from some sort of adjacent privilege that made entrée possible)--and at the same time also see the beneficiaries of such birth, scornful of those who point out such facts, whine in the same unimaginative way as other overprivileged idiots about others not appreciating their "hard work" as if they were merely reaping the conventional rewards of toil (never mind how it compares to that of the people who really make the world go round), and contemptuously fling their advantage in the public's faces (one such actress all but shouting her identification as a beneficiary of nepotism on the red carpet outside one of the awards show which give prizes to people to whom life has already been ridiculously generous).

Thus do we see celebrities who have a reputation for self-absorption, narcissism and snobbery that fans once upon a time took in stride prove more divisive figures--and respond to the criticism by doubling down on their foolishness. ("I am who I am," one Oscar-winning actress said, which meant that the Oscar-winning actress "can't pretend to be someone who makes $25,000 a year"--and then as a pandemic was shaking the world to its foundations struck an arrogant pose and smirking smile on the cover of a famously snobbish glossy magazine declaring in text positioned alongside her feet that she accepts our apology, as if we are just supposed to know what the hell they are talking about, and indeed ashamed of whatever it was we supposedly did, rather than see this as a stupid provocation at an absolutely inopportune moment that must have made everyone who had cared enough about her doings to "misjudge" her in the way the magazine claimed they did was really right all along.)

And thus is the highlight of an ever-less watched Oscar night a far-past-his-career-peak performer who, after just publishing a memoir in which he purports to share the "wisdom" he gained in his obscenely cushy life (but, to go by the tidbits with which the media afforded yet another crappy celebrity bio the world doesn't need ample free publicity, mostly leave the impression he hasn't grown one iota as a human being since the days when he began a feud with a certain actress playing a certain aunt), slap the host of the ceremony on live TV.

Identify with these people? It's a wonder that any sane person doesn't look away as soon as they appear in front of them--and indeed, far from doing any wonders for the fascination of celebrity they seem excellent additional reason for anyone who cares for their own sanity to keep their distance from a media that trafficks in gossip about their idiocies as much as ever it did, as if compensating for the declining importance of a stratum whose members so often show themselves to be fools and vulgarians by treating them instead in accord with their self-importance, as devoted courtiers ever do their kings.