Celebrity Culture and the American Dream

Stardom and Social Mobility

Karen Sternheimer

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9781138023956
• eBook ISBN: 9781317689676
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, Second Edition considers how major economic and historical factors shaped the nature of celebrity culture as we know it today, retaining the first edition's examples from the first celebrity fan magazines of 1911 to the present and expanding to include updated examples and additional discussion on the role of the internet and social media in today's celebrity culture. Equally important, the book explains how and why the story of Hollywood celebrities matters, sociologically speaking, to an understanding of American society, to the changing nature of the American Dream, and to the relation between class and culture. This book is an ideal addition to courses on inequalities, celebrity culture, media, and cultural studies.

1 THE AMERICAN DREAM Celebrity, Class, and Social Mobility

DOI: 10.4324/9781315776170-2

Have you ever felt the urge to click on a story about a celebrity wedding or break-up? Lingered on TMZ for just a moment while channel surfing? Read gossip magazines in a waiting room or in the grocery check-out line? There is something tempting about tuning in to celebrity gossip and the ongoing personal sagas of famous people. The car wreck cliché works well here—it can be hard to look away, even if what we see also disgusts us. On the surface, these stories might seem to be just in fun, but as we will see throughout this book, celebrity stories in the past and present provide many sociological insights.

Critics might seek out the negative side of the ubiquitous celebrity stories. It is not unusual for a reporter to ask me whether celebrity excesses have negative effects on children, or why kids seem to look up to celebrities. Critics parse their life choices and wonder what effect they might have on the rest of us. Do they make us hate our bodies? More self-centered? Materialistic? Disdain marriage? More likely to abuse drugs or alcohol? These questions just scratch the surface, though, and presume that the importance of celebrity is simple—that because people watch them those people must admire and copy them.

It's not so much that we simply see celebrities as role models—often we love judging and condemning them as much as, if not more than, aspiring to be like them—but their importance serves as a useful window into better understanding American society.

Rather than just having personal influence over individual behavior, talk about celebrities reveals central sociological issues within American society, one of the most central being the promise to allow its members to rise from obscurity to fame and fortune. The American Dream, which shifts and mutates with changes in the economy and the political and social backdrop, seems very real when we see the plethora of people who have entered the realm of celebrity.

The meaning of celebrity seems to be stretched thin; it does not now (nor has it ever) only apply to people with measurable talent or skill. Opportunities to be part of this world have never been greater than now, with the advent of reality television, YouTube, and the internet in general. For the purpose of this book, I define a celebrity as anyone who is watched, noticed, and known by a critical mass of strangers; in short, they are people we want to know more about. (I use the terms celebrity and fame interchangeably in this book, while others have drawn important distinctions between the two.) We can think about celebrity culture as the atmosphere swirling around celebrities, the public and private conversations we have about them, the lifestyles celebrities unwittingly promote through coverage of their private lives, and the products that become part of this lifestyle. Ultimately, celebrity culture is amorphous and means different things to different people. Much like perfume that takes on a slightly different scent with each wearer, consumers make different meanings of celebrity culture, as sociologist Joshua Gamson found in his study of celebrity audiences. ¹

When I started this project, I set out to explore how and why celebrities’ personal lives have become so public and to trace what I first suspected was a progression from little to enormous coverage of celebrities’ personal lives over the last several decades. Fan magazines seemed like the best way to get a good historical picture of any changes over time. I have the good fortune of being on the faculty at the University of Southern California with access to its Cinematic Arts Library, which boasts a large collection of old movie fan magazines, as does the nearby Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Margaret Herrick Library. While celebrities come in many varieties well beyond Hollywood (athletes, musicians, writers, and politicians, to name a few), most of this book will focus on movie stars covered in fan magazines. The last three chapters provide more discussion of athletes, musicians, politicians, business executives, and those “famous for being famous.” As traditional movie magazines broadened their coverage in the 1960s and eventually went out of print, the magazines that replaced them included more than movie stars. The last two chapters rely on analysis of People magazine, which rose in popularity as the old movie fan magazines’ circulations waned and which offers broad coverage beyond movie and television actors.

The first movie fan magazine, Motion Picture Story Magazine, began publication in 1911, with several others starting in the decade following that. As I discuss in Chapter 2, these magazines began with the explicit intention of promoting the industry and featured stories often written by studio publicists, or at least with the studios’ significant cooperation. Film historian Anthony Slide describes this practice as “an incestuous relationship built on trust and mutual necessity.” ² Rather than independent journalists covering a growing industry, fan magazines served as advertising copy, first for the movies and eventually for their stars. The earliest magazines focused mainly on describing the plots of “photoplays” to generate interest in seeing more movies. The magazines resembled literary journals of today, with lots of text, few photos, and practically no gossip. At least not at first.

Movie stars’ private lives intrigued audiences as much then as now, based on letters sent to the magazines. The stars’ names have mostly faded into obscurity, but the fans’ interests were remarkably similar to ours today: Is she married? Does he have children? Where is she from? What does she like to do in her free time? By reading just a few issues of fan magazines, it became clear that interest in celebrities’ personal lives is nothing new, only that the information now travels quicker and through many more channels compared with a century ago.

That was the end of my initial hypothesis. But I didn't want to stop reading the old magazines. There was something alluring about them, and I couldn't quite figure out what kept drawing me in. It took many months of reading, reflecting, and writing to realize that, among other things, the old fan magazines offered the promise of a better life. The stories about the movies and their new stars not only attempted to sell the industry, but sold the idea of the American Dream itself.

What the dream looked like at any given time changed—from hopes of a middle-class life, the promise of wealth, and hope during dark times to the promise of suburbia and affluence. All of these dreams are reflected in a century of fan magazines, which provide glimpses into what the American Dream looks like when realized. Celebrity culture seems to provide a continual reaffirmation that upward mobility is possible in America and reinforces the belief that inequality is the result of personal failure rather than systematic social conditions.

The Sociology of Celebrity

Examining celebrity culture more closely provides a window through which we can better understand American society. This book uses celebrity coverage as a tool in order to illuminate sociological phenomena within American life. So while I use many examples of celebrity stories in fan magazine articles as examples, the purpose of this book is to use the familiar concept of celebrity culture to explore issues central in sociology, such as class and social mobility, social change, gender, race, marriage, and relationships.

Gender, Race, and Upward Mobility

We cannot really understand American social mobility over the last century without looking at the unique opportunities for female mobility, particularly with the invention of Hollywood. Women appeared on movie fan magazine covers far more often than men, and women were more likely to be the subject of magazine features. The industry not only provided women with careers and the chance to make lots of money, but women are the primary consumers of celebrity culture sold through fan magazines today. Female writers could find steady work writing for fan magazines during a time when journalism offered women few opportunities. From the 1910s, fan magazines offered examples of women who had become independent and financially successful. And yet failed relationships comprise a major focus of celebrity morality tales. The centrality of the family in America's agrarian history and the historical suspicion of people—especially women—who live outside the family's confines reverberate throughout American history in celebrity coverage. These stories of female mobility came with many warnings and were far from feminist texts. Women who seemed greedy, who appeared to manipulate men, or who otherwise failed to conform to conventional notions of gender and beauty served as morality tales for female readers. Since the publication of the earliest fan magazines, stories scrutinized female celebrities’ romantic relationships as if taking a continual pulse on whether their financial success would be tempered by relationship failure. Rather than providing a singular message about women's mobility, celebrity stories reflect conflicting ideas about women: at some times promoting their independence—particularly during World War II—and at other times emphasizing more traditional roles, as many stories did after the war ended.

Just as the magazines focused on predominantly female readers, until the 1960s celebrity stories all but ignored performers of color and seemed to presume a white audience. In the 1910s and 1920s especially, fan magazine ads and articles might reference exotic beauty products of the Orient, clearly defining nonwhite, nonwestern people as “other,” sometimes looked upon with enchantment and sometimes with fear. References to Africans or Native Americans as savages were not unusual, and African Americans were all but ignored until the 1940s, when any coverage tended to rely on stock racist caricatures. Latino performers often changed their names, or would serve as “fiery” Latin lovers from exotic locales south of the border in fan magazine coverage. The American Dream characterized in movie fan magazines was an explicitly Anglo dream for the better part of the twentieth century, reinforcing the idea that nonwhites were outsiders in this fantasy until the mid-1960s. Whiteness became conflated with normality within these texts, and tales of upward mobility predominantly emphasized oppor tunities for whites. Those characterized as “other” were largely regarded with amusement at best and disdain at worst in the pre-civil rights era magazines.

Thinking Sociologically about Celebrity

Just as gender and race are ever present in fan magazine texts, sociology's central paradigms can also help us understand the nature of celebrity culture. Celebrity stories can help us make sense of our identities—not simply by telling us how we should look, feel, think, or act, but through a social process of negotiation. Symbolic interactionists view identity construction as not just an individual experience, but one based on our interactions with others. Talking about celebrities, whether we express admiration, sympathy, or condemnation for them, offers us a framework through which to construct our social selves. For instance, criticizing a celebrity's behavior offers the critic a chance to position themselves as holding superior morals or values. We might take cues from these discussions about how best to manage the impressions we give off in public as well in both our “front stage” and “back stage” performances of self. ³ Part of the allure of hearing about celebrities’ private lives is it gives us a glimpse of “back stage,” even if these revelations are carefully planned and edited for our consumption. Even those whose celebrity is based on sharing their private lives are not immune from attempts to pull back the curtain and reveal things they would rather others not know. Magazines that show celebrities’ physical imperfections—a bit of cellulite, a wrinkle, or a frumpy outfit—provide the thrill of seeing them “back stage,” as do shots of stars without makeup.

Reading about celebrity life events can also help us make meaning of our own. For instance, the meanings we project onto a celebrity breakup could serve as an opportunity to reaffirm our own thoughts about relationships. Check out any comment section of an online story about a relationship in trouble and you will see a number of assumptions about the former couple, based on what the commenter thinks he/she knows about them and relationships more generally. For instance, in 2014 Tori Spelling and Dean McDermott aired their marital troubles on a reality show, which was frequently updated on various websites online. Comments varied from supporting Tori (Dean had cheated on her) and appreciating their openness on their show to criticisms that doing so was a mistake for their children and warning “once a cheater always a cheater.” These comments provide insights not just into opinions of commenters, but are in effect a social interaction. The need to share support or disparaging thoughts highlights how these meanings are created through interactions with others.

As sociologists Kerry O. Ferris and Scott Harris explain, celebrities are important because they are part of the way that people create meanings through interactions with one another. They describe how onlookers’ analysis of celebrity behavior is often related to Goffman's concept of “civil inattention,” the way in which we purposely choose not to interact with others in public in some circumstances. Celebrities who behave badly in public and draw attention to themselves violate this unwritten rule, thus talking about someone's drunken night out or reckless driving incident is at least in part about their failure to keep attention from themselves. ⁴

Celebrity culture also provides a window into broader, macro-level social processes. Applying the concept of functionalism, we can interpret celebrity stories as providing common ground for interactions within a diverse society. Functionalists view social cohesion and stability as central for maintaining a healthy society, noting that various parts of society have a purpose, or function. Celebrities create a shared set of characters for us to talk about and often give us the chance to reinforce shared values when a celebrity is involved in scandalous behavior. When billionaire Donald Sterling, owner of the Los Angeles Clippers, repeatedly made racially insensitive remarks in 2014, the headlines and discussions it generated served in part as a chance to reinforce that such stated beliefs are outside of the current boundaries of acceptability. Just as sociologists Daniel Dayan and Elihu Katz wrote that media events like inaugurations, royal weddings, and state funerals create social integration and shared rituals, celebrity stories might do that as well, albeit on a much smaller scale. ⁵ While we might not know many of the same people as our coworkers or people in the check-out line at the grocery store, we are probably familiar with many of the same celebrity stories, giving us mutual people to talk about. As in a small community, where people at the hair salon might talk about others they all know, celebrity magazines that line the waiting area give us a topic to connect over.

One of celebrity culture's central functions is to provide continual examples that the American Dream of rising from the bottom of the economic ladder is real for those willing to work hard. Functionalists would view this message as one that promotes common values, productivity, and, ultimately, social stability. Hearing about an actor on a hit TV show who lived in his car five years earlier, as Grimm actor Damien Puckler apparently did, reinforces the idea that you can go from being homeless to television, if you work hard enough. Puckler was once a kickboxer and has worked as a trainer, maintaining his extremely buff physique in order to get a foot in the door in Hollywood. ⁶

However, conflict theorists could read this same message as profoundly troubling, even providing a sense of false consciousness and encouraging people to ignore the barriers to wealth many people face. Puckler's story is inspiring, but many homeless people have likely faced years of limited access to health care, and are too physically debilitated to be future action stars. Rather than view celebrity stories of working hard to attain stardom as promoting the smooth functioning of American society, conflict theorists would challenge that this message enables inequality to continue by ignoring structural factors that help explain why, for instance, people in poverty have a hard time experiencing upward mobility. Drawing on the conflict approach, critical theorists such as Herbert Marcuse, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor W. Adorno (known collectively as the Frankfurt School) even viewed popular culture as a form of propaganda, distracting the masses from their economic interests and ultimately duping a susceptible public into ignoring the domination of the elite.

Likewise, Italian sociologist Francesco Alberoni referred to celebrities as the “powerless elite” in a 1962 essay. ⁷ While present-day commentators wonder whether celebr...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title Page
• Series
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• LIST OF FIGURES
• PREFACE
• ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
• CHAPTER 1 THE AMERICAN DREAM: CELEBRITY, CLASS, AND SOCIAL MOBILITY
• CHAPTER 2 BEYOND SUBSISTENCE: THE RISE OF THE MIDDLE CLASS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY
• CHAPTER 3 PROSPERITY AND WEALTH ARRIVE: BOOM TIMES AND WOMEN’S SUFFRAGE IN THE 1920S
• CHAPTER 4 PULL YOURSELF UP BY YOUR BOOTSTRAPS: PERSONAL FAILURE AND THE GREAT DEPRESSION
• CHAPTER 5 WE’RE ALL IN THIS TOGETHER: COLLECTIVISM AND WORLD WAR II
• CHAPTER 6 SUBURBAN UTOPIA: THE POSTWAR MIDDLE-CLASS FANTASY
• CHAPTER 7 IS THAT ALL THERE IS? CHALLENGING THE SUBURBAN FANTASY IN THE SIXTIES AND SEVENTIES
• CHAPTER 8 MASSIVE WEALTH AS MORAL REWARD: THE REAGAN REVOLUTION AND INDIVIDUALISM
• CHAPTER 9 SUCCESS JUST FOR BEING YOU: OPPORTUNITY IN THE INTERNET AGE
• SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX