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CREDO CAFE - Celebrity Culture and Faith
There is no message tonight. There will be some questions asked but they are very loosely related to the theme. We will hopefully be able to share in some fun and fellowship with one another as well as possibly giving you something to think about.
A quote from Stephen Fry
'We live in a time where celebrity is very evident. Celebrities are people who are held in high regard. They are people who are said to be famous. So what then is fame?
Fame is a national/global obsession. It is considered a desirable human quality. It is however not a quality. It is not like courage, mercy, kindness, strength, beauty or patience; or laziness, dishonesty, greed or cruelty for that matter. What is different about fame, is that it is so contingent, that is to say that it is dependent on external factors. If you are tolerant or strong or wise, you are tolerant and strong and wise wherever you are on the planet that day. You don’t become bigoted, feeble and dim-witted the moment you cross a continent. Famous people however, can become entirely unknown the second they leave their homeland. Only the World Famous are famous everywhere, and there are precious few of them. They used to claim Mohammed Ali was about as well-known as a human could be, the same was said of Charlie Chaplin and Elvis. Who now? Osama bin Laden? Michael Jackson? Robbie Williams can walk around Los Angeles without being recognised.
Fame has this unusual property. It exists only in the mind of others. It is not an intrinsic characteristic, feature or achievement. Fame is wholly an exterior construct and yet, for all that it is defined by other people’s knowledge of a given person, they cannot dismantle or deactivate fame. We cannot, however much we may want to, make someone unfamous. We can make them infamous, unfashionable, notorious, despised or derided but the more we do so the more we actually increase their level of fame. Fame is a function of memory. I can’t impel you to forget Adam Sandler, for example, any more than I can instruct you to forget Jack the Ripper or the Jolly Green Giant. Simply in mentioning ‘Adam Sandler’ I have inflated his fame. It will only deflate, over time, if his name is never uttered.
For fame is not the same as reputation. Fame can outstrip reputation, but reputation cannot outstrip fame. For example, while Kipling’s fame has been great since his death, his reputation has wavered, one minute down in the cellar, the next back up to almost the height it attained in his lifetime. Likewise we could say the same about the reputation of Britney Spears or Amy Winehouse. Their reputations have very much fallen but they are arguably growing in fame because of this.
We can’t really then complain about people being famous for being famous as it is our perception of them that has made them to be like that. I can’t blame Jade Goody for the fact that I know her name. Many famous people may well be guilty of being ambitious for fame, but while I could be guilty of wanting everyone in Britain to send me ten pounds such an ambition is useless unless others are foolish enough to realise it for me. It is our curiosity, admiration, idolatry, envy, rage, resentment or obsession that privileges the famous with their fame and the only way we can take it away from them is by forgetting. Which is hard. The media institutions, the newspapers, television and indeed internet have a part to play but these are only fuelled by the curiosity of people generally.'
Benjamin Kepple:
What has come to be called ‘celebrity culture’ is one of the puzzles of the late 20th century. Many have dismissed it, taking the view that the stories which filled OK!, Hello, Entertainment Tonight, and countless so-called ‘women’s magazines’, were meaningless superficial news consumed only by the bored and brainless. Those who featured in the stories were as empty as those who read them, and it was all just an enormous con with the sole purpose of selling magazines and supporting the entertainment industry
One of the trickiest aspects of understanding celebrity is recognising that we don’t have to admire celebrities to enjoy consuming stories about them. Many celebrities pursue a trajectory that has them going from being admired and adored by the general public to being regarded as a complete fool. Think Michael Jackson, in a career that has taken him from being the much-loved child star to being the butt of jokes about his alleged relations with children; or think Tom Cruise, after he fires his long-time agent and is released to the media on his own recognisance, leaping around the couches on Oprah, and generally giving Scientology a bad name. The fact that we are happy to adopt quite contradictory positions as we pursue our interest in celebrities does tend to undermine any idea that this interest might have any coherent social or cultural function.
Interest in celebrity is driven by the desire to find out what these prominent people are really like. For the celebrity to feed that desire, there has to be more than just a catalogue of successful professional activities – hit movies, successful albums or a TV show. There must also be some element of an invitation to investigate their private life: a hint at the existence of another, usually more ordinary and familiar, persona beneath the public face. One of the defining features of celebrity, then, is the capacity to sustain interest in their private life. When the audience for a prominent person becomes more interested in their private life than in the activities which made them prominent in the first place, then that person has become a celebrity.
There has been plenty written by academics about the way that celebrities such as Diana provide opportunities for people to do what has been called ‘life work’: that is, to think about their own behaviour, ethics, and relationships through a continuing engagement with the narrative of their favourite celebrity’s life. Others have pointed to the usefulness of celebrity gossip as a form of common social currency in communities where personal connections are reduced or attenuated. Still more have pointed to the changing structure of communities today, where social networks seem to be less cohesive and where the circle of friends and relations may well have shrunk as the extended family becomes a less common component of everyday life. In all of these accounts, the celebrity becomes a kind of proxy for earlier and now less available forms of social relations.
The great value of celebrities for someone who enjoys making use of them as provocations for thinking about their own lives, or the lives of others, is that they are so excessively available. They can be accessed at will, we can say what we like about to them to our friends without any danger of it getting back to them, we can play around with our views on their lives without much in the way of a social penalty.
So why are things different now? It could be argued the focus on celebrities we see today is the direct result of alienation among people -- alienation that exists among all economic classes and people of all social backgrounds. It is much easier to focus on trivial matters because the stakes are so small. After all, one's life is not going to change tomorrow if one's favorite actress dyes her hair green, or one's favorite quarterback gets caught fighting dogs. Thus it is much easier to be interested in such things.
It is also worth noting this inordinate focus comes as people move away from the traditional support structures this society has offered its people -- the Church, the family, the Government. When people turn away from those support structures, they inevitably look for something to fill the void and the celebrity culture fits the bill. We can see how the celebrity culture has risen even as religiosity, family bonds and trust in Government have waned.
This trend is also apparent in certain aspects of our celebrity culture, which is much different than in the pre-war and post-war periods in terms of the aspirations people have.
Back in the Fifties and early Sixties, as various scholars have noted, people aspired to act like the rich, who were well-regarded in society. Thus, people read literature and took an interest in classical music and generally worked to get on board with what society deemed proper. Today, on the other hand, popular culture is very much a reflection of the various troubles affecting the poor: glorification of the street life, glorification of violence and criminality, glorification of consumption and petty decadence. Back in the day, stars were rich and they acted like it. Today, stars are rich, but do not necessarily take on the responsibility that comes with that. Thus the only aspiration for regular folks is economic – they want to be rich for the ease that comes with financial security.
So if people don't have faith in their own situation, don't have faith in themselves, don't have faith in God, don't have faith in their jobs, and don't have faith in the Government, they turn to the one place where they can have faith, or something that does a fair enough job of approximating it: their favorite stars. They feel they can depend on them because they have nothing else on which to depend. I would also argue people with an inordinate interest in celebrities also probably are lacking in conviction about themselves.
This view comes from an American writer by Benjamin Kepple who is a comentator on American politics. He strongly believes that the increasing interest in celebrity in America is as an exact result of other more laid down institutions not meeting people’s needs.
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