The Star and Celebrity Confessional

Sean Redmond, Sean Redmond

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781317982241
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this book the different manifestations, meanings, and processes of the star and celebrity confessional will be explored.
The confessional is taken to be any moment in which a star, celebrity, or fan engages in revelatory acts that are considered to be authentic, heart-felt, and honest. These confessional encounters can take place in an interview, through performance and presentation events, online, and in 'unscripted' encounters. A star may break down in tears, or reveal a previously unknown truth about their private life. However, this authenticity is often found to have been manufactured, or is timed to occur against a new release or product launch. Alternatively, the desire to confess may be seen to draw attention to the centrality of pseudo forms of emotion in contemporary culture and the obsessional behaviour it produces. In this book authors consider acts of confession by celebrities such as Tom Cruise, Michael Jackson, Jade Goody, Britney Spears, Sarah Jessica Parker, Tracey Emin, and Russell Crowe.

Stardom, celebrity and the para-confession

Barry King

School of Communication Studies, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

In this paper I situate the television talkshow in the historical context of the religious ritual of confession, tracing its vernacular developments in the mass media. Foucault’s work has been cited in support of the pervasiveness of a therapeutic culture on television. Although agreeing with this general point, I argue that television’s recasting of the confessional process has generated demotic and celebrity formats of self disclosure. The celebrity talkshow, unlike its demotic variant, is a controlled process of revelation that I term the “para confession” – a commercial rendition of repentance designed to display the star or celebrity’s persona from a position of persuasive authority. The paper concludes with a brief analysis of the Tom Cruise–Oprah Winfrey May 2005 interview and subsequent revelations. Cruise’s performances of self disclosure reveal the para confession in crisis, exposing the taken for granted pragmatics of the media confessional.

Contemporary television culture is obsessed with confession as a source of dramatic production values (White 1992). The pressure to confess, or at least to engage in self-disclosure, is a centrepiece of talkshows. Reality television shows, irrespective of theme or setting, are also constructed around confessional “crises” – those moments when stressed-out contestants disclose their “true” feelings. Moreover, if we follow the example of Mimi White and include the Home Shopping Network as another variant of self-disclosure (in this case of consumer preferences rather than sins, although these may be potentially sinful), then it seems we are dealing with a veritable cultural constant that transcends the vagaries of medium and form. Certainly the confrontation between pretence and “authenticity” and the hybrid logic of revelation, situated somewhere between the public confession and the intimate scenarios of psychotherapy, is popular with global audiences and, as such, is a slavishly copied production format. But pervasiveness and popularity acknowledged, the tendency to indulge in portmanteau formulations, such as White’s Therapy/Confession/Television, conflates a finer set of distinctions that lie beneath the publicity and hype. There is not just one form of confession – or, for that matter, just one mode of confessing – and this is what I intend to tease out in what follows.

Michel Foucault is routinely cited in support of the view that we live in a confessing culture and that contemporary “man” is a confessing animal. Yet Foucault’s account of the confessional process is more nuanced than the accounts of those who source him for studying television. For a start, his true object is not the spread of confession, but rather of confession as one of the modes of governmentality, alongside medicine, psychiatry and eugenics. Certainly, confession is one of the methods through which subjects are formed, normalised and through which a closely regulated direction is imposed on their desires. But Foucault makes a historical distinction between different regimes of confession (his term is “avowal”). In one, pre-modern, regime – and here the term “confession” evokes some of the sense of a profession of belief – the individual attests to his or her membership of a collective that is perceived as the taproot of identity. In the other, the regime emerging during the modern period, the confessional process is restructured to intensively examine and discipline the interior urgings and experiences of the individual. The latter process is connected to sexual essentialism – that the self is defined at core by its history of sexual proclivities and practices (Foucault 1979, 61–62). Intrinsic to the transformation of the moral tissue of the confessing self is a shift in the value placed on the anchoring of identity: sincerity, the suppression of the personal in the service of the performance of the self as defined by social position and social role, losing ground to an emphasis on authenticity, the open expression of private feelings (Sennett 1978).

These features recognised, it is still true that the requirement to make Confession, imposed on the faithful by the Catholic Church in the thirteenth century, played a key role in the formation of the modern sense of selfhood. For regardless of the vector of revelation – towards social role (sincerity) or towards the psychological niceties of individual experience – the confessional ritual established that the individual qua individual should be responsible for his or her actions and the acts of speech that lay them bare. The imperative to confess, to be truthful, might be regarded as the true heritage of the Church, even if what is to be disclosed and the norms of truthfulness that are deployed have differed over time (Brooks 2000, 5). Such an ideal would guarantee the sanctity of the confessional ritual and the solidity of absolution. So if confessional practices developed that moderated the stringency of the confessional ideal, these practices nonetheless recognised it as a guiding principle. So, too, the literal content of what was confessed has changed. Pastoral manuals of the Middle Ages, for example, link absolution with the minute and exact description of sexual acts that the modern sensibility would find prurient. Conversely, the confessional practices of the modern period place less emphasis on transgressive acts than on the full disclosure of the thoughts and illicit motives that underlie them. For Foucault, this shift in the detail of what is confessed ushers in new practices of normalisation and control in which an older ethic of self-cultivation or care of the self is discursively marginalised.

Regarding this deep structural constant from a strictly religious point of view, the ideal confession process would involve the following elements:

(a) To be forgiven, sinners have to feel sorrow at having lapsed.

(b) They must consistently make some explicit confession of their sins and sinfulness.

(c) They have assumed or had imposed on them some kind of penitential exercises.

(d) They have participated in some ecclesiastical ritual performed with the aid of priests who pronounce the penitents absolved from sin or reconciled with the communion of believers. (Tentler 1977, 3)

In order to situate contemporary television rituals of disclosure, it is useful to consider, albeit schematically, the genealogy of confession. As they have evolved, confession practices have been differentiated into a number of modes that still exercise the imagination of the present.

Canonical confession

Before the thirteenth century, confession was a public ritual undertaken before a priest and ecclesiastical authorities and in sight of the community. Canonical confession involved the induction of the confessing sinner into the social status of a penitent (a third class of Christians alongside the catechumens and faithful) and was manifested in wearing of sack-cloth and ashes, shaven heads (tonsure), and so on, the undertaking of arduous penitential exercises and publicly staged humiliations. The giving of absolution, or laying-on of hands, usually occurred at the point of death. In this mode of exomologesis, the primary function of the confession is the exercise of discipline and social control over the individual and the cure of the guilty conscience as a matter of salvation (Tentler, 13).

Private auricular confession

Following the Lateran IV Council in 1215, the Church decreed that all members of the faith must confess at least once a year, thus removing the uncertainties and, possibly, the urge to fabricate a confession in extremis. No small practical consideration here was the fact that those near death might expire before completing burdensome acts of penance or indeed be hastened on because they undertook them. Confession was henceforth to be a private process before a priest or, in other words, an organisationally designated confessor, empowered to grant absolution. Such a shift from public to private also introduced the possibility of a more direct engagement with God. In the confessional ritual, the priest–confessor was merely the vessel or instrument of the absolution that God would grant to the truly contrite. Contrition did not solely depend, as it does in the contemporary media, on admitting sins (God always and already knows them) but on a sincere and deep repentance (Brooks 2000, 92; Tentler, 22–23; Bossy 1975, 21–38).

Pietistic confession

Martin Luther, the major proponent of pietism, held that true penance should be manifested in the conduct of life, rather than within the Church-based ritual of confession. For Luther, the human condition is inherently sinful so a complete confession is impossible, but, more importantly, no ecclesiastical authority can grant a summative absolution. True contrition is manifested by a changed heart and a determination to sin no more (Tentler, 352–353). The confessant must assume the burden of a continuous process of self-monitoring and become a kind of secretary of his or her inner life, keeping a journal or diary in order to confront the self with its weaknesses and warn against temptation. In this development the injunction “Know thyself”, typical of Greek philosophy, was inextricably linked to protocols for an inward surveillance of the self. Eschewing sacramentalism in favour of direct faith in God’s word, as revealed in the Bible and other inspirational texts, the believer relied on a direct revelation from God and the power of prayer and belief as the way to construct a good life (von Mucke 2000, 13–15; Paden 1988, 74–75).

Luther was one of the first individuals in the West to conceive of the individual in a direct relationship with God without any necessary interposition from earthly (priestly) institutions. Under his influence the conception of human freedom was linked to purely inner experiences and their expression, outside the roles and institutions of society. This conception, at the base of modern notions of the self, later transpired into a secular Romanticism, a movement that downgraded sincerity – the matching of the self to social conventions – in favour of authenticity – the assertion of the self against the perceived constraints of social conventions. The romantic conception of the self that emerged – as a submerged “luminosity” revealed in peak experiences – was connected to the rise of the confessional autobiography as a literary genre. This genre was codified by Rousseau in his Confessions, where the demand for complete transparency – the abolition of all the veils between the auto-biographer and reader – is coupled with the flight from society as recurrent motif (Brooks 2000, 160). This grammar of the romantic self is quite at odds with the performative model of the self, as developed by Goffman, as a stream of situationally determined performances in which pretences are deployed so as to artfully manage the ongoing contingencies of role play to secure performative advantage (Brown 1987, 34).

Vernacular confession

Alongside the religious traditions of confession, and in part set against them, is an ancient vernacular tradition of gossip, premised on exposure of the faults and misdemeanours of others and connected to what Scott has termed a weapon of the weak – the ongoing muted criticism of established hierarchies and practices (Scott 1985). Such folk practices, passing through the filter of the Christian pastoral, focused more on humiliation and blame rather than absolution and, of course, are less concerned with salvation than with righting wrongs.

Essentially an oral tradition, the first media manifestation of the vernacular confession is inextricably linked with celebrity, as indicated by the very profitable book trade built on the eighteenth-century fad for the sensational biographies of actors and other assorted rogues (Wanko 2003, 23–50). But the consolidation of confessional discourse as a public media commodity dates from the early twentieth century in the United States with Bennar Mcfadden’s publication True Story Magazine – Truth is Stranger than Fiction. Read primarily by working-class women and ostensibly written by them in a first-person confessional mode, True Story Magazine provided a public variant of the auricular private confession, particularly centred on the violation by self or others of the prevailing sexual codes. In the classic case, an anonymous reader, hovering uncertainly between a particular and a stereotype, writes an account in which she unburdens herself of her “sins” before the readers, effectively sending a “message in a bottle” to anyone who cares to read it.

Such disclosures (concocted, it is suspected, by Mcfadden or his employees) worked through various and overlapping confessional registers:

• as a therapeutic discourse without a concretely defined confessor or confessant;

• as a didactic lesson in which the experience related firsthand (or commented upon by an “expert”) functioned as the media equivalent of a public shaming and a warning to others;

• as a personal testimony giving witness to the trials and tribulations, the dangers and temptations of romance and sexual love for working-class women (infidelity, unplanned pregnancy, abortion, trials of motherhood, weight problems, search for true love, beauty, poverty and so on). (Mandziuk 2001, 182–190)

True Story is an obvious precursor, along with newspaper advice columns, of contemporary talkshows from Oprah or Dr Phil through to Jerry Springer. But just as important as these thematic continuities is the fact that True Story develops some of the templates that govern the interaction between the source, an ostensive individual and a host (or editor) who manages the interaction. True Story, like talkshows, is an example (obedient to the limitations of the print medium) of semi-institutional discourse. Creating a simulation of naturally occurring conversation, semi-institutional discourse is marked by a number of interconnected practices and procedures that define the handling of a topic and the ongoing discussion. Such features as the nature of the control exerted by the host (or, as in the case of True Story, the editor); the discursive roles assigned to the participant speakers; their level of participation in the ongoing conversation; the relevance of the topics to each participant’s experience; and the nature of the feedback afforded to audiences have been identified (Illie 2001, 211). A salient feature of semi-institutional discourse is the preferential treatment of different kinds of guests. On a number of measures – self-selected interv...