Understanding Celebrity

Graeme Turner

• Publisher: SAGE Publications Ltd
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781446292716
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Cultura popolare

"An outstanding achievement... Graeme Turner writes with power and persuasion, and brilliantly explores what it is about celebrity today that should concern us all"
- Sean Redmond, Deakin University "A key touchstone for celebrity studies. Turner thoughtfully illuminates the variety of production and consumption practices through which celebrity circulates today, whilst remaining sensitive to the complexity of power relations in play. An essential read for students and scholars in the field"
- Sue Holmes, University of East Anglia "Cements Turner's status as the most important figure in celebrity studies... Turner's gaze fixes on developments in digital, social and global mediascapes, drawing media and celebrity studies into complex critical, political and cultural debates in his indomitable style"
- James Bennett, Royal Holloway, University of London "An extraordinary synthesis of research and theory... Understanding Celebrity remains the go-to text of celebrity studies"
- Joshua Gamsom, University of San Francisco

Where does the production of celebrity end and its consumption begin? Platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and reality TV allow us a previously unimagined engagement with the manufactured ?persona? of celebrity. Understanding Celebrity has become the go-to text for understanding the connection between the production and consumption of this ?persona?. The long-awaited second edition assesses the changing nature of this pivotal relationship in celebrity studies.

The book:

• Explains how social media is key in establishing an online presence for celebrities
• Critically analyses the changing nature of fan culture within the online environment
• Delves into a richer and more detailed account of the history of celebrity
• Examines in greater depth the increased role of reality TV
• Incorporates recent contributions from feminist scholars to the field

Enriched with new examples drawn from popular culture, this is a contemporary and incisive look at celebrity studies.

Understanding Celebrity is not only an essential text, but a stimulating read for students studying celebrity and popular culture across media studies, cultural studies and sociology.

Part one

Introduction

1	Understanding Celebrity

The familiar stranger is by no means unprecedented in history. People have long imagined a world populated by figures who were not physically at hand and yet seemed somehow present. What has changed, of course, is the magnitude of the flow, the range of characters that enter our world, their omnipresence, the sheer number of stories. Inevitably, today’s stories are but prologues or sequels to other stories, true and less true stories, stories that are themselves intermissions, stories without end. (Gitlin, 2001: 22)

CELEBRITY TODAY

What are the conditions of celebrity today? The contemporary celebrity will usually have emerged from the sports or entertainment industries, they will be highly visible through the media, and their private life will attract greater public interest than their professional life. Unlike that of, say, public officials, the celebrity’s fame does not necessarily depend on the position or achievements that gave them their prominence in the first instance. Rather, once they are established, their fame is likely to have outstripped the claims to prominence developed within that initial location. Indeed, the modern celebrity may claim no special achievements other than the attraction of public attention; think, for instance, of the prominence gained for short, intense periods by the contestants on Big Brother or Survivor, or even the more sustained public visibility of Kim Kardashian. As a result, and as the example of Kim Kardashian might suggest, most media pundits would argue that celebrities in the twenty-first century excite a level of public interest that seems, for one reason or another, disproportionate. While those who have studied this phenomenon might well argue that this excessiveness constitutes an intrinsic element of the celebrity’s appeal, it is also one reason why celebrity is so often regarded as the epitome of the inauthenticity or constructedness of mass-mediated popular culture (Franklin, 1997).

As the epigraph at the top of this chapter suggests, it is the pervasiveness of celebrity across the modern mass media that encourages us to think of it as a new development, rather than simply the extension of a long-standing condition. The exorbitance of celebrity’s contemporary cultural visibility is unprecedented, and the role that the celebrity plays across many aspects of the cultural field has certainly expanded and multiplied in recent years. We are still debating, however, what constitutes celebrity – how precisely to describe and understand this phenomenon. Properly assessing the scale and provenance of celebrity – as a discursive category, as a commercial commodity, as the object of consumption – is a process that is now well under way, but there are still many definitional issues to be clarified. In this chapter, I want to continue this process through a discussion of some key debates: around the definitions and taxonomies of celebrity; the history of the production of celebrity; and the social function of celebrity.

WHAT IS CELEBRITY?

Let’s consider some options. First, commentary in the popular media by columnists and other public intellectuals tends to regard the modern celebrity as a symptom of a worrying cultural shift: towards a culture that privileges the momentary, the visual and the sensational over the enduring, the written, and the rational.¹ Second, those who consume and invest in celebrity tend to describe it as an innate or ‘natural’ quality, which is possessed only by some extraordinary individuals and ‘discovered’ by industry talent scouts. For the popular press, the fanzines, the television and movie industries, the defining qualities of the celebrity are both natural and magical: journalists, feature writers and publicists speak of their ‘presence’, their ‘star quality’, and their ‘charisma’. Third, and in striking contrast to this, the academic literature, particularly from within cultural and media studies, has tended to focus on celebrity as the product of a number of cultural and economic processes. These include the commodification of the individual celebrity through promotion, publicity and advertising; the implication of celebrities in the processes through which cultural identity is negotiated and formed; and most importantly, the representational strategies employed by the media in their treatment of prominent individuals. The sum of these processes constitutes a celebrity industry, and it is important that cultural studies’ accounts of celebrity deal with its production as a fundamental structural component of how the media operate at the moment. In this section, I want to touch on aspects of these broad approaches to the nature and function of celebrity.

Daniel Boorstin is responsible for one of the most widely quoted aphorisms about celebrity: ‘the celebrity is a person who is well-known for their well-knownness’ (1971: 58). ‘Fabricated on purpose to satisfy our exaggerated expectations of human greatness’, says Boorstin, the celebrity develops their capacity for fame, not by achieving great things, but by differentiating their own personality from those of their competitors in the public arena. Consequently, while heroic figures are distinguished by their achievements or by ‘the great simple virtues of their character’, celebrities are differentiated ‘mainly by trivia of personality’. It is not surprising to Boorstin, therefore, that entertainers dominate the ranks of celebrity ‘because they are skilled in the marginal differentiation of their personalities’ (ibid.: 65).

Boorstin’s account was enclosed within a critique that accused contemporary American culture (the first edition was published in 1961) of a fundamental inauthenticity, as it was increasingly dominated by the media’s presentation of what he calls the ‘pseudo event’. This is an event planned and staged entirely for the media, which accrues significance through the scale of its media coverage rather than through any more disinterested assessment of its importance. The celebrity, in turn, is its human equivalent: the ‘human pseudo event’, fabricated for the media and evaluated in terms of the scale and effectiveness of their media visibility (ibid.: 57).

Drawing such a close relationship between the celebrity and the inauthenticity of contemporary popular culture interprets celebrity as a symptom of cultural change. Preceding arguments about postmodernity by several decades, but driven by the opposite of postmodernism’s reputed relativism, Boorstin describes a culture impelled by its fascination with the image, the simulation, and losing its grounding in substance or reality. While this concern is clearly genuine and shared by many, one has to recognise that elite critiques of movements in popular culture have taken this kind of stand from the beginning. Each new shift in fashion is offered as the end of civilisation as we know it, with the underlying motivation being an elitist distaste for the demotic or populist dimension of mass cultural practices. So, there is a limit to how helpful this is to those who might want to understand popular cultural forms and practices. John Storey reminded me, in his preface to Inventing Popular Culture, of Raymond Williams’ comment in Culture and Society that ‘we live in an expanding culture, yet we spend much of our energy regretting the fact, rather than seeking to understand its nature and conditions’ (Storey, 2003: xii). That seems to be an accurate reflection on the weakness of the tradition of commentary and analysis I have used Boorstin to represent, and the importance of investigating alternatives.

Boorstin’s is far from the only position, of course, from which we might read the modern celebrity as representative of a significant shift in contemporary popular culture. There is the more disinterested and less moralistic proposition that the modern phenomenon of celebrity reflects an ontological shift in popular culture. This constitutes a change in the way cultural meanings are generated as the celebrity becomes a key site of media attention and personal aspiration, as well as one of the key places where cultural meanings are negotiated and organised (Marshall, 1997: 72–3). In the more sociological accounts, this shift is evaluated in terms of a net cultural loss – customarily, a loss of community as human relations attenuate and fragment under the pressure of contemporary political and social conditions. As a result of such conditions, the argument goes, there is an affective deficit in modern life. Some of our closest social relations seem to be in decline: the nuclear family, the extended family and the withdrawal of the family unit from the wider suburban community, are among the symptoms we might name. The diminution of direct social relations is addressed by what has been called para-social interactions (that is, interactions which occur across a significant social distance – with people ‘we don’t know’), such as those we enjoy with the celebrities we watch and admire (Rojek, 2001: 52). Among our compensations for the loss of community is an avid attention to the figure of the celebrity and a greater investment in our relations with specific versions of this figure. In effect, we are using celebrity as a means of constructing a new dimension of community through the media.

Both Chris Rojek (2001; 2012) and John Frow (1998) suggest that the cultural function of the celebrity today contains significant parallels with the functions normally ascribed to religion. (‘Is Elvis a god?’ asks Frow, and on many of the criteria that he lists the answer has to be ‘Yes’.) Both have elaborated quite detailed comparisons of the qualities attributed to particular celebrities and to religious figures, as well as of the kinds of spiritual experiences provided for audiences of fans on the one hand and congregations of believers on the other. In his most recent book, Rojek links ‘the commodified magnetism’ that celebrities possess with a performance culture that routinely ‘trades in motifs of unity, ecstasy and transcendence’. In general, he argues in Fame Attack, ‘religiosity permeates the production, exchange and consumption of celebrity culture’ (2012: 121).

Viewed from such a perspective, the attributes of celebrity are held to be imminent in the individual concerned: Elvis’s celebrity, in such a context, is the popular recognition of the inherent qualities of this extraordinary individual. Here the discourses of religion seem to coincide with those of the media industries that produce celebrity. The popular view that celebrity is a natural, immanent quality to which the media industries give expression obviously legitimates the interests of the industries concerned as well as consoling those who consume their products as objects of belief, desire or aspiration. And yet, it is important to recognise that such a definition of celebrity is countervailed by equally popular media discourses that emphasise its phoniness and constructedness. While many stories of individual success might suggest that the individual’s ‘star quality’ has shone through, many others will insist that their achievements are simply the effect of blind good luck, and that ‘star quality’ has little to do with it. The appeal of such stories explicitly does not lie in the reader’s admiration or respect for the celebrity figure or for the process that produces them.²

It is increasingly clear that it is the detail that matters as we develop an understanding of the roles played by celebrities within popular culture. Richard Dyer’s work (1979; 1986) has been highly influential as a result of his close attention to the detail of the film star as a cultural text, and his concern with contextualising these texts within the discursive and ideological conditions that have enabled the specific star’s ascendancy. Dyer describes the film stars he examines as socially grounded, overdetermined by the historical conditions within which they are produced; conversely, he also gives due weight to the contingency and specificity of the meanings generated by the particular star in relation to their audiences. Dyer’s description of the semiotics of film stars found that their social meanings were not only deposited there by repeated representations and performances, but that they were also the product of complex relations between the kind of individuality the star signified and that valued (or, alternatively, problematised) by the society. As a result, the story Dyer tells about the meanings embedded in the image of Marilyn Monroe is not only a story of the professional cultivation of her persona as a star, but also of the discursive and ideological context within which that persona could develop.

Probably the next conceptual shift in the development of definitions of celebrity, and one which moves us a little closer to the contexts of its production, comes from Joshua Gamson’s Claims to Fame (1994). Gamson’s work is most significant for its focus on the workings of the industries that churn these products out, and for what he is able to tell us about the specific meanings and pleasures derived from them by particular groups of fans and their audiences. There is a wealth of empirical detail in his book too, of which we will be making more use in later chapters.

There was an increased concentration of interest in defining celebrity over the late 1990s and early 2000s, focused around a number of books which have been important in setting the terms for a celebrity studies that differentiated itself from the studies of the film star – that is, the kind of celebrity studies we most commonly see now. Celebrity and Power (Marshall, 1997), Illusions of Immortality (Giles, 2000), Fame Games (Turner, Bonner and Marshall, 2000) and Celebrity (Rojek, 2001) are among them. The common tactic here was to emphasise that celebrity is not ‘a property of specific individuals. Rather, it is constituted discursively, by the way in which the individual is represented’ (Turner et al., 2000: 11). For Rojek, celebrity is the consequence of the ‘attribution’ of qualities to a particular individual through the mass media (Rojek, 2001: 10), while for David Giles, fame is a ‘process’, a consequence of the way individuals are treated by the media:

The brutal reality of the modern age is that all famous people are treated like celebrities by the mass media, whether they be a great political figure, a worthy campaigner, an artist ‘touched by genius’, a serial killer or Maureen of Driving School [one of the participants in a British reality TV program]. The newspapers and television programs responsible for their publicity do not draw any meaningful distinction between how they are publicised. (2000: 5)

While we might protest that meaningful distinctions do remain – between, for instance, how stardom is constructed in the cinema, or how we understand the television personality (Bennett, 2011), or the notoriety of the serial killer (Schmid, 2006) – the general point that Giles is making seems to be a fair one. Politicians, television performers, pop stars and the latest evictee from the Big Brother house, all seem to be integrated into more or less the same ‘publicity regimes and fame-making apparatus’ (Langer, 1998: 53). Modern celebrity, then, is overwhelmingly a product of media representation; understanding it demands giving close attention to the representational repertoires and patterns employed in this discursive regime.

In practice, the discursive regime of celebrity is defined by a number of elements. It crosses the boundary between the public and the private worlds, preferring the personal, the private or ‘veridical’ self (Rojek, 2001: 11) as the privileged object of revelation. We can map the precise moment a public figure becomes a celebrity. It occurs at the point at which media interest in their activities is transferred from reporting on their public role (such as their specific achievement in politics or sport) to investigating the details of their private lives. Paradoxically, it is often the high profile achieved by their public activities that provides the alibi for this process of ‘celebritisation’. Conversely, the celebrity’s general claim on public attention can easily outstrip the public awareness of their original achievements. Hence we can have a journalist-cum-talk-show host such as Geraldo Rivera who is ‘famous for who they are instead of what they report’ (Shepard, 1999: 82), or an actor such as Lindsay Lohan whose mediatised notoriety is now out of all proportion to her professional achievements. Longstanding celebrities (even highly successful film stars such as Jack Nicholson) can outlive the memory of their original claims to fame as being famous becomes a career in itself.

None of this is simple, of course. The discourses in play within the media representation of celebrity are highly contradictory and ambivalent: celebrities are extraordinary or they are ‘just like us’; they deserve their success or they ‘just got lucky’; they are objects of desire and emulation, or they are provocations for derision and contempt; they are genuine down-to-earth people or they are complete phonies (or, in the case of Michael Jackson towards the end of his life, just plain ‘wacko’). The territories of desire explored by the representation of celebrities are complex, too. Our fascination with particular celebrities is on the one hand a fantastic projection, but on the other hand we can actually encounter them in everyday life. Gamson’s descriptions of the fans queuing up to watch celebrities arrive at red-carpet events, and Rojek’s discussion of the disruptive effect of the ‘out-of-face’ encounter (when we accidentally meet a celebrity in their everyday life, doing the shopping or crossing the street), suggest how these encounters with the object of one’s fantasy can inject significance, even desire, into our own everyday lives. As we will see in Chapter 3, this possibility is now dramatically enhanced by the capacities of social media, where the fan can indeed communicate directly with their favourite celebrity via, for instance, Twitter.

There is one point that largely gets lost in most discussions of celebrity, however. While it is reasonable to think of the discursive regime within which celebrity is represented as more or less the same across the range of media, it is necessary to recognise that the pleasures and identifications on offer to consumers of certain media products can vary markedly. The shock at Princess Diana’s death may well stem from an affection that is not dissimilar to that which we might feel for an actual acquaintance, and constitutes a form of empathic identification. The fascination with nude celebrities, exploited by such magazines as Celebrity Flesh or such websites as Hollywood Whores, is not like that at all. Sitting uncomfortably close to the porn sites merely one click away, the nude celebrity websites have rarely been the subject of any discussion or inquiry (although see K...