Celebrity Audiences

Martin Barker, Su Holmes, Sarah Ralph

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781138690776
• eBook ISBN: 9781134998500
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Media Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The study of audience relations with star / celebrity culture has often been marginalised in Star/Celebrity Studies. This book brings together new research which explores a range of audience encounters with celebrities, moving across social media, royal weddings, national identity to questions of age, gender and class. In doing so, the essays illuminate the complex and negotiated nature of audience investments in celebrity culture, collectively questioning the often simplistic and dismissive judgements that are made about audience/ celebrity relationships in this regard. The book provides a dedicated space to showcase a range of current work in the field, seeking to both consolidate and stimulate what is a vibrant and crucial aspect of studying celebrity culture.

Celebrating with the celebrities: television in public space during two royal weddings

Andreas Widholm^a, ^b and Karin Becker^b

^aDepartment of Journalism and Economics, Södertörn University, Sweden;

^bDepartment of Media Studies, Stockholm University, Sweden

The recent emergence of an increasingly participatory media culture has opened up new ways for audiences to collectively negotiate the cultural meanings surrounding celebrities. Public screens are one such phenomenon, where people gather to witness the live broadcast of celebrity events. Taking our point of departure in two recent royal weddings in the UK and Sweden, we explore the performative displays that public viewing affords, as participants interact with the event on screen, with other participants, and with media representatives in the venue. This article provides a fresh analytical perspective on how audiences engage with royal celebrities in such mass-participatory consumption contexts, illuminating a little-studied area of celebrity culture.

Introduction

Media have always played a central role in the construction and reproduction of celebrity culture. Movie stars and athletes, as well as royals, all gain much of their cultural power and status from a media environment centralised around the global distribution of audiovisual narratives. The recent emergence of an increasingly participatory media culture has opened up new ways for audiences to collectively negotiate the cultural meanings surrounding celebrities. Public screens are one such phenomenon, where people gather to witness the live broadcast of celebrity events. In this article, we explore the social and cultural engagements with royal celebrities that arise in connection with the mediatised rituals of the marriage ceremony, a key narrative of royal celebrity. Particularly when a member of the royal family marries a commoner, the wedding ritual opens a liminal space and the possibility of closer identification with the royal celebrity, which may in turn be expressed by participants in the public celebration. We take our point of departure in two such events – the weddings of Crown Princess Victoria and Daniel Westling in Stockholm in 2010, and of Prince William and Catherine Middleton in London in 2011 – both of which were broadcast on large screens in public spaces where thousands of people gathered as the (new) royals said their vows.

The aim of this article is to provide a fresh analytical perspective on how audiences engage with royal celebrities in mass-participatory consumption contexts, illuminating a little-studied area of celebrity culture. We address the performative displays that public viewing affords, as participants interact with the event on screen, with other participants, and with professional media present in the venue. While we expected many parallels between the mediated representation of the royal celebrity weddings in England and Sweden, we were also interested in how differences between the British and Swedish publics’ responses could provide depth and nuance to our analysis. Of course the worldwide public for the broadcast of the British wedding exceeded by many millions the number watching the Swedish wedding. More relevant in this context, however, are the different histories of the two nations and their royal families, the relationships they have with their respective subjects, and the significance of media coverage and the national press in forming their celebrity status. Although we are not conducting a strict comparison between public response to the British and Swedish weddings, we are sensitive to how factors such as the British public’s inclusion of participants from commonwealth nations and former colonies, or scandals involving members of the royal family, may be reflected in the ways people engaged with the specific wedding celebration. How did people in the public venues participate in these celebrations? Can we see members of the public identifying, in their dress and behaviour, with the royal celebrities? Can we identify supporting as well as oppositional positions to the events and to these forms of celebrity, as expressed through cultural symbols and performances? Finally, to what extent can these celebratory forms of participation be explained by the public venue of the big screen?

The sites selected include, for the Swedish wedding, the public viewing area established in the King’s Garden in downtown Stockholm, and for the British wedding, Hyde Park in London, an established site for public viewing in connection with a variety of events. We also include references to other quasi-public settings where the weddings could be viewed on large screens, as well as to postings via social media by participants located in these different sites.

The study is situated at the intersection of two strains of media research: first, the small but growing body of research into the reintroduction of screen-based media into public spaces and their impact on social practice (McQuire 2008, 2010); and second, the far longer and more fully developed (and critiqued) study of media events, understood as ceremonies that interrupt the routines of daily television programming and bind together the audience in the live common experience of a historic event (Dayan and Katz 1992). The literature on media events includes many that focus on royalty, including coronations, weddings, and funerals, explaining how these events are constructed and narrated, and the media’s capability of placing itself at the very centre of events (Dayan and Katz 1992, Wardle and West 2004). Yet when this research considers the audience, it has assumed a public situated in domestic space. Further, few studies address the concrete ways in which people actually respond to the integrative discourses that flourish; especially during royal ceremonies, and most notably in public settings.

Methodology

While media are in many ways central to contemporary constructions of celebrity, it is important to avoid a media-centric approach to these phenomena (Krajina et al. 2014). Therefore, while our point of departure is the large public screen erected for the live broadcast of the event, our investigation does not focus on the screen itself, but on interactions in response to events on the screen, in relation to other forms of expression and interaction taking place in front of the screen, and where other media technologies and personnel were often involved.

Drawing on prior experience in ‘intersectional ethnography’, during a study of spatially-situated media practices in a shopping centre (Fornäs et al. 2007) and further developed for a study of public viewing areas during major sports events (Becker et al. 2014), we address simultaneously many different aspects of public screen venues as contemporary ‘mediascapes’ (Appadurai 1996). As our current research has found, audiences who gather in these venues engage with the expanding range of what Friedberg termed ‘screen practices’, drawing variously upon the movie screen, the TV screen, and the computer screen, ‘at the same time that the types of images one sees on each of them are losing their medium-based specificity’ (Friedberg 2003, p. 346, Becker and Widholm 2014). Our methodological interests are therefore aligned with contemporary visual researchers who, although coming from different disciplines, have a common interest in relationships between image content, social context, and the materiality and agency of images, as seen in our concern with the materiality of the public screen itself and its affordances. These researchers also share a commitment to reflexivity and collaboration, to which many of them find visual methods particularly amenable (Pink 2003, p. 179).

The fieldwork was confined to the day of each wedding, and involved participant observation and visual and audio documentation, as well as traditional field notes. We worked separately, with Becker carrying out the fieldwork in Stockholm and Widholm conducting the fieldwork in London.¹ We subsequently shared our field observations and documentation, which has enabled us to draw comparisons between the two weddings. Photographic investigation and documentation was particularly useful. Our ‘visual field notes’ made comparisons more tangible and also, following Anna McCarthy, helped us ‘to grasp the very concrete and tangible forms that institutions and cultures of the public screen take in social space’ (2001, p. 20).

We each began our observation outside the viewing area several hours prior to the ceremony, as people began to gravitate toward the city centre. Inspired by previous ‘multi-local’ ethnographic research characterised by the mobility of participants (Wulff 2000), we noted the different behaviours of participants in the celebration as they converged on the location of the screen itself. We photographed extensively, attending in particular to the boundaries and entrances to the viewing areas, the commercial and public activities taking place, the range of participants, including members of the public, vendors, security, and media personnel who were present, as well as the screens themselves at different times during the event. We were also attentive to how participants placed themselves in relation to each other and to the screen, and the particular activities that they engaged in, such as toasting, cheering, embracing each other, and taking pictures, and noted at what points in the wedding ceremony these responses occurred. When the wedding broadcast began, we located ourselves in the crowd in front of the screen, after which we started moving through the viewing area to gain different perspectives.²

Sharing our visual field notes enabled us to make many more comparisons between the two weddings, including similarities and differences between the structure of the sites, the positions of the screens, the presence of professional media and participants’ behaviours. New insights also arose as we returned to the photographs months and even years after these events, in an additive and oscillating process, as we incorporated additional theoretical perspectives and as our research into public screens expanded to include other events.³ The visual documentation was therefore central to the abductive research method on which this study was based.

In our investigations of other celebratory media events, we have found that people continue to use their portable media, following as much as possible their established routines to interact with individuals in their digital social networks (Becker et al. 2014). These practices become even more tangible, as people are urged by event organisers to ‘perform’ their own participation in the event through interaction on social media sites and blogs. In order to understand the cultural significance these interconnected media practices have for people gathered to watch these royal weddings, we complement the field-work with a few tentative examples of social media postings by participants in these venues.

Monarchy and celebrity culture in transition

Celebrities, and not least members of royal families, live their lives in the limelight of comprehensive and constant media attention. In a unique historical comparison of three Swedish royal weddings (in 1888, 1932, and 1976), media scholar Kristina Widestedt (2009) traced a shift in the media’s participation in the construction of the symbolic meanings of these national rituals. She argues that the myth of the mediated centre (Couldry 2003), whereby the media provide the public with primary access to and interpretations of ritual events, is a twentieth-century phenomenon, with visual access in the form of images as a critical component. In 1976, with the present King’s marriage to Sylvia Sommarlath, the enormous media coverage and visual representation of the event contributed to re-establishing the centrality of the monarchy during a time of political conflict in Swedish society. Widestedt underscores that by this time the media had attained a self-evident position in the symbolic process, resulting in a ‘naturalisation’ of the myth of the mediated centre.

Traditionally, royalty has been important to processes of constructing and maintaining ideas of national belonging (Smith 1994), and the royals are also folded into specific celebrity frames in the news media, partly as a result of their own media performances. For the modern self-identity, which is characterised by anxiety and doubt over traditional forms of belonging, royal symbols may provide senses of security and continuity in a time marked by increasingly global rather than national or local cultural flows. There is no doubt, however, that royalty also can be seen as typical examples of ‘blended’ constructions of celebrity, whose status and discursive meaning vary depending on context and media specificity (Redmond 2013). In Sweden, we have seen this in the recent media scandals regarding, for example, gossip about the king’s playboy life during the 1970s and 1980s, and controversies over statements about the queen’s father’s involvement with the Nazi party. A couple of decades ago, this kind of public critique would have been unthinkable in Sweden, as journalistic institutions usually have supported the monarchy through predominantly positive and obsequious forms of reporting (cf. Jönsson and Lundell 2009a). Scandals have also worked as a common celebrity frame in UK media, as was evident for example in the journalistic shame procedure following publication of a picture showing Prince Harry at a private masquerade party wearing a Nazi uniform.

Although royal institutions represent and uphold traditional values and ideals, modern monarchies have undergone significant changes, not least regarding their relationship with social structures such as class. In the evolving sphere of celebrity there has been an increasing association with ‘ordinariness’ and the everyday (Becker 1992/2007, Blain and O´Donnell 2003, p. 163), as seen, too, in the representation of royal celebrities. This is evident in the loosened conventions regarding royal marriage in the UK as well as Sweden. Until recently, it has been crucial for members of the royalty to find their future partner in royal families abroad or at least in the highest aristocracy of their home country (Church Gibson 2011). Prince William’s decision to marry Catherine Middleton, a middle-class girl raised among ‘ordinary’ people, clearly broke with these traditions (in the same way as Prince Charles did when he married Diana). Crown Princess Victoria of Sweden, who chose to marry her personal trainer Daniel Westling, born and raised in a small Swedish town under modest conditions, is another example of the ongoing transformations of the modern monarchies in Europe.

Like other celebrities, monarchs have become increasingly enfolded into discursive frames that involve an illusion of intimacy (cf. Holmes and Redmond 2006). Jönsson and Lundell (2009, p. 9) see this relation between monarchy and media as an example of the tendency within modern celebrity and media culture to focus on the private and intimate aspects of the royalty. They argue that the intensified media coverage of the lives of royalty ‘constitute telling examples of how the media relentlessly try to make well-known, yet distant, figures of prominence more familiar and closer to the common man’ (Jönsson and Lundell 2009, p. 11). The British Crown’s relation to media may be an exception to this trend, however. Whereas in most European countries the media have got closer to the monarchy in increasingly complex relations, in Britain the Crown has rarely been required to justify itself as contributing to political modernity (Blain and O’Donnell 2003).

The focus on ‘transformation’ in contemporary celebrity culture (Marshall 2010) is evident in the royal domain. The transformation from ordinariness to royalty was a common theme in both British and Swedish media prior to the two weddings. UK tabloid The Mirror, for example, joyfully announced that ‘It is official – Kate Middleton has more coal miners in her family tree than Arthur Scargill!’ (Bennett 2011). Similarly, Swedish media repeatedly reported about the Swedish King’s worries about his daughter’s new ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Citation Information
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction: Audiences for stardom and celebrity
• 1. Celebrating with the celebrities: television in public space during two royal weddings
• 2. Using stars, not just ‘reading’ them: the roles and functions of film stars in mother–daughter relations
• 3. ‘Cristiano Ronaldo is cheap chic, Twilight actors are special’: young audiences of celebrities, class and locality
• 4. Celebrity culture and audiences: a Swedish case study
• 5. Wrestling with grief: fan negotiation of professional/private personas in responses to the Chris Benoit double murder–suicide
• 6. ‘I love you, please notice me’: the hierarchical rhetoric of Twitter fandom
• 7. Swivelling the spotlight: stardom, celebrity and ‘me’
• Index