The Culture of Celebrity
Gitlin, Todd
A FEW YEARS AGO I visited the champagne cellar of Piper-Heidsieck in Reims, a city in eastern France. At the entrance there is a plaque proclaiming that the cellar had been dedicated by Marie...
...We are not only enamored of celebrities, but fascinated by the means by which they become and remain celebrated...
...The emotional glue that binds us to those we love to hate is not unrelated to the glue that binds us to those we love to love...
...Another peculiar thing about the age of diffuse celebrity is exhibited by Paula Jones, who claimed in court that President Clinton's alleged come-on had, among other things, damaged her reputation...
...The fans who mob the star are not only transfixed in a state of admiration, they are also committing aggression—a punishment for the star's superior power, and a consequence of the fans' unacknowledged envy...
...But the fans felt ennobled by what they knew, or thought they knew, of the stars...
...Are they perhaps members of today's royal houses...
...In 1974, not long after the general mass-circulation magazines—Life, Collier's, and the Saturday Evening Post— folded, Time Inc...
...Of course not...
...They guarded their secrets...
...Bill Bradley toasted the Rev...
...The irony, of course, is that, as an uncelebrated person, she had little reputation to start with...
...Many of the photos showed icons simultaneously mocking and indulging their icon status —thus Brian Wilson as a berobed prophet on the beach, surfboard under his arm...
...This is evident in the world of People and on newsmagazine covers...
...In the world of People magazine, we have celebrities galore, but above the celebrities, glorying in their transcendent light, the stars still shine...
...This distinction holds in politics as well...
...The premise of the exhibit is unmistakable: Hollywood stars are the royalty of this century...
...Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers would not have posed that way, nor would the Andrews Sisters...
...Warhol himself has been famous for far more than his fifteen minutes, much more than fifteen years, in fact, and who would bet against the longevity of his reputation...
...But during the last two centuries, a special status has been reserved for those who embody glamour—a distinct power to inspire awe, amplified by love or hate, and thereby to fill up cultural time and space...
...DISSENT / Summer 1998 83...
...Prestige and its shadow twin, notoriety, accrue to those whose existence is magnified in the form of media images and names...
...It works on emotions...
...I'm not going to wash my hand for a week" is a fan's tribute to that presence, yet at the same time an acknowledgment of its transitory quality, since if the presence were ineradicable, washing would scarcely threaten it...
...In some sense, fans find themselves in the starlight, by stepping out of themselves...
...April 1998's White House Correspondents Association dinner included—one wants to say "featured" —Michael Douglas, Sharon Stone, and Warren Beatty along with President and Mrs...
...We are curious to know how they fabricate their images...
...Consider the Jenny Jones Show guest who revealed that he was in love with another man, who then, in a homophobic panic, shot him to death...
...The sixties ushered in a glamour of antiglamour, and it is still with us...
...THE DIFFUSION of celebrity can bite back on the diffused celebrity...
...Doomed Marie should only have dreamed of such popularity...
...They were wannabes, dressing up to type...
...Whatever "it" is, the stars are those who have it...
...This cultural power is secular, distinct from any power to kill, to tax, or to enslave...
...Stalin, twelve...
...Hitler made seven covers of Time...
...so was Louis Farrakhan...
...At the entrance there is a plaque proclaiming that the cellar had been dedicated by Marie Antoinette...
...Billy Graham, Sharon Stone toasted Betty Friedan, Tom Hanks toasted John Glenn...
...Braudy goes on to say that the audience that is intimately involved in defining its idols is "an audience that is willing to be manipulated but eager to convey how that ought to be done more expertly...
...Time celebrated its consolidation of politics and celebrity in a March 3 cavalcade of self-celebration at Radio City Music Hall on its seventy-fifth anniversary...
...To single out a few human beings for special attention is nothing new...
...Their audiences did not know—perhaps did not aspire to know—what they ate for breakfast, or even, to the current degree, with whom...
...It is experienced as a force with visible and tangible dimensions—thus do we speak of stars, possessed of the bright light...
...Stars touch some photosensitive areas in the multitude and strive to manage that multitude, while intermediate institutions spring up to keep the relationship dynamic—impresarios, celebrity magazines and biographies, ballads...
...In their various ways, Samuel Johnson, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Jenny Lind, Tom Thumb, Charles Dickens, Walt Whitman, Mark Twain, Oscar Wilde, and Enrico Caruso were stars in the contemporary sense...
...began to publish People, where stars bled into humdrum celebrities, or flavors of the week (a term that became current to acknowledge, and mock, the proliferation of novelty personalities...
...But one should not simplify the bonds that DISSENT / Summer 1998 81 tie people to their celebrities...
...The celebritymaking machinery capitalizes on this, and dissolves values in an acid bath of fame...
...At the end of the tour, one steps into a small museum consisting entirely of photographs of famous people drinking champagne...
...The media today throw open the sluices of celebrity, offering cameo parts to the multitudes —appearances on the tabloid talk-andsquawk shows...
...There is admiration in varying degrees and intensities, and, at the high end, love and surrender—a love of surrender, in fact...
...Here were seated Mikhail Gorbachev between Sophia Loren and Kevin Costner, Joe DiMaggio beside Henry Kissinger, Ted Kennedy beside Muhammad Ali, Tom Cruise beside Walter Cronkite...
...in public, at least, they were never "off...
...There are so many of them...
...They flocked to make personal contact, where possible...
...TODD GITLIN is the author of The Twilight of Common Dreams, The Sixties: Years of Hope, Days of Rage, and a novel to be published next year, Sacrifice...
...Economic titans...
...John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan (they were of the same generation, astoundingly enough) were old-style...
...In the realm of celebrity, the fallen share center stage with the glorious, the evil with the good...
...Nobel Prize winners...
...Celebrity has some striking new features in the age of entertainment glut...
...For one thing, stars are familiar...
...Presidents or prime ministers of great nations...
...To speak of a culture of celebrity nowadays is nearly to commit a redundancy...
...Warhol's apothegm perfectly expresses the faux populism of our era...
...The way is clear for the false, but famous, report of a semen-stained dress...
...Other societies have held up for admiration, emulation, and fear the likenesses of exemplary shamans, priests, generals, kings, saints, and political leaders...
...Stardom has been banalized, in a way...
...What the on-screen presence said may not be remembered, but the fact that one appeared before the camera is memorable...
...Fans, short for fanatics, named children after their heroes...
...But they have it because fans have given or lent it...
...News is, increasingly, anything that happens to newsworthy people...
...All the culture industries, including news, capitalize on the star power that binds fans to their celebrities...
...There were, and are, elements of ecstasy—literally, coming out of oneself—in the relationship...
...They seek a laying on of hands and gifts, tokens of starlight...
...When she goes out in public, she switches on her performing self...
...Superstars feel amused by the very condition of celebrity...
...For Rolling Stone, for example, she shot the five members of the rock group Fleetwood Mac clowning around in bed...
...In the realm of public performance, the meltdown of boundaries between politics and celebrity is virtually complete...
...With the encouragement of photographers, stars frequently step aside from their glamour and comment (often ironically) on it...
...It was only in the course of going to court that she established a reputation: heroine-victim in the eyes of the right, spoiler-bitch for Clinton supporters...
...I once heard Jane Fonda joke about saving her toenails for the benefit of adoring fans...
...A historic opportunity was missed when these two weren't seated together to compare notes on million-man marches...
...There is a world of difference between the movie star who revels in glamour (an institution by no means dead, as we see in the run-up to every year's Academy Awards) and the rock star who mocks stardom by camping it up or muting it but—wonderful paradox— doing so in public...
...The 1989 coffee-table 82 DISSENT / Summer 1998 book Rolling Stone: The Photographs depicted a wasted Keith Richards, a fetally coiled John Lennon in Yoko Ono's arms, Tracy Chapman with her head slumped on her folded arms...
...Those who live in the spotlight can die in the spotlight...
...And who are these worthies...
...The old-style star is selfreverent in the face of her power to transfix...
...At such spectacular moments, politics and entertainment, never as distinct as purists imagine, converge under the sign of celebrity...
...Clinton (and on the other side of the room, Paula Jones, who had said for legal purposes that the very sight of the president upset her beyond words...
...Yet in the contemporary era, when celebrities are not only relatively accessible but often not conspicuously more talented than their admirers, envy is also in play...
...We like to see the curtain rise on the Wizard of Oz manipulating his machine...
...The celebrity and the audience collaborate in this faux intimacy...
...The new-style star winks at her own performance and sends out cues that she is far too hip to be revered (and, because she knows this, deserves respect for her honesty...
...According to Time president Bruce Hallett, "What better way to celebrate every Time than to honor the men and women who have enlivened our pages with their valuable contributions in this century...
...Bill Clinton is new-style...
...The stars are, in their different ways, incarnations of some mysterious quality that makes their every activity a matter of interest at least, fascination at most...
...A certain kind of fame has been banalized, downgraded to middling status, and something else has been elevated above it: megafame, gigafame, the real thing...
...Ever since then, the institution of stardom has held on to this dialectic of stardom and fandom...
...Leni Riefenstahl was there...
...S0 MANY Americans have been depicted in the unending torrent of media images that it is easy, but false, to assume that celebrity has been equalized—that we are already living in that onrushing future of which Andy Warhol famously spoke: "In the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes...
...As Leo Braudy argued in a superb book, The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, it was the eighteenth century that ushered in "an audience that, instead of passively responding to its idols, takes an active role in defining them...
...Had Time's staff a sense of humor, they could have seated accused Air Force adulterer Kelly Flinn with Dick Morris, Anita Hill with George Wallace, Donna Rice with William Ginsburg...
...Imelda Marcos canceled at the last minute...
...Obviously, celebrity need not be admirable, merely spectacular...
...The photographer Annie Leibovitz excels at getting celebrities to relinquish their personae—if only for a moment...
...They are movie stars, and almost all of them are American—Marilyn Monroe to Clint Eastwood...
...On television, he answered a young person's question about the kind of underpants he wears...
...At least we like it up to a point...
...Celebrity is what the global village has in common, to gossip about...
...But the world of rock music is where we see antiglamour arise most conspicuously...
...The dialectic of stardom and fandom is not exactly new...
...The fan hopes to walk away with traces of the magic—autographs, locks of hair, smudges left by fragments of the True Presence...
...It borrows its force from the realm of the spirit...
Vol. 45 • July 1998 • No. 3
