Yes, that's right - the question is why, not what? We know what they are, and the media shove them at us, incessantly.
The sudden burst of publicity and curiosity about contestants on international shows like Survivor, illustrates this curious situation rather well. Contestants on a traditional game show such as Temptation or Weakest Link are watched, but reveal relatively little of themselves in their brief exposure to the viewers. Within weeks, nobody can remember their names or details. Their renown is very brief. But in the reality TV shows, we get to know them in much more personal detail, even if what we actually see is a form of caricature of the real person. They do, i
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ndeed, become a celebrity, at least for a while.
A famous person is famous for what they have done very well - for their reputation as a great leader or statesman, writer, musician, artist. They need to have done great things, regularly enough to have become widely known for the consistent high quality of their work. Celebrities have often done very little, and quality is just not their hallmark. They are well-known for being well-known. They are considered remarkable, because they get remarked upon.
Celebrity is the fast food of history
The more people "know" them - or think they do - the more of a celebrity they are. Fame is not a numbers game, it's a quality one, and your reputation can endure for centuries without being recognized by very large numbers of people at any one time. Fame is enduring; celebrity is the fast food of history - readily available, tasty, empty and brief, easily replaced. Like the apocryphal Chinese meal, it's not ever satisfying; you feel hungry again within an hour. Like the salty peanuts provided at a bar, the celebrity gossip is provided to make you thirsty enough to keep buying.
Old celebrities usually seem tacky and definitively un-cool, and after at most a decade or so, they become again almost as unknown as the rest of us. Stale celebrities sell no better than stale bread does, and are less useful. Skilful and persistent PR can create celebrity, but not fame. It can make a famous person celebrated, but not vice versa.
There have never been as many celebrities as there are at present. It is a very major and profitable industry. Without celebrities, many magazines would have to close down, and newspapers would be thinner. The E! Entertainment Channel (which isn't about Entertainment as all, but about Celebrity) would be doomed.
Hence my question - why are celebrities? What function do they have, that they get paid so hugely for doing so very little? Most workers produce something - they dig coal, build houses, bake bread, deliver babies. Though some celebrities are actors or singers, the quality of their apparent performances is mostly due to the skill of the producers, editors and directors who construct what we see, rather than to any unique talent. And there's something clonal about them, a tendency to produce multiple close replicas of whoever and whatever has been successful lately. They are manufactured so as to start at the top, rather than to work towards it. Little girls after their first recording are proclaimed a "Diva"; boys in their first film are called a "star".
Why do they seem to be valuable, even when they have no inherent or enduring value?
The cult of celebrity is a secular religion
As religion has lost so much of its former role, for so many people, as a means for achieving a sense of transcendence, in a very real sense celebrity fills that void. Once people endured a dull and miserable life by means of having faith that they could eventually reach a marvellous afterlife. Now far fewer people truly believe in a reward to come their way eventually.
Celebrities bring the promise of a heavenly (though highly materialistic) life available right here and now; of something beyond the hum-drum lives we lead. Though the enormous majority of us won't get it, the very ordinariness of the celebrities suggests that any of us might get it.
The values they represent are not at all the eternal values of religion. It's not about goodness and mercy, right and justice. It's very worldly indeed, and it's about stuff - money, houses, jewels, cars, luxury and loads of bling.
Ordinary celebrities represent hope
To those who feel they have never been celebrated by anyone, the ordinary celebrities prove that we might get this. The pop industry suggests that we can get there as a singer; and contests such as Idols confirm how very many people are seriously deluded about either how much talent they have, or about how very little talent is needed to become a pop star. As celebrity far beyond the actual area of their talents is given lavishly to the successful in sports, politics, and even crime, celebrity itself seems to become the primary aim of all other activities.
But reality TV is much better, as its underlying message is that almost at random, contestants can be selected to become instant celebrities. Reality TV is a very powerful counterpart to the medieval morality play, and acts out the legend of the proper path to glory. Nonentities are selected, and after a series of public ordeals and scrutiny, achieve widespread celebrity.
The presence of a secular saint
People behave oddly in their presence, as we see when contestants meet their doting public. There's a surreal sense of something dizzyingly odd, like the presence of a secular saint. You are supposed to see celebrities up there - on a cinema or TV screen, in the tabloids - not down here, amongst us, within touching distance.
They're insiders now, who give us outsiders a promise that we might get inside, too. Yes, one person wins a million at the end of the series, but all of them get something better - they become known, watched, even admired, however ordinary they are. But this celebrity doesn't last. They're replaceable and replaced, far more quickly than they expected. We see the sad spectacle of some former contestants eagerly entering other contests, seeking to revisit their renown.
They have an oddly co-dependent relationship with us. They need us to celebrate them; we need to celebrate them, to prove that in time we could be celebrated, too. If they are watched, they must be important. If they are like me, then I might be important, too.
(Professor M. A. Simpson, Health24 CyberShrink, October 2006)
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