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Theories of Celebrity

Why, exactly, do we have celebrities and, now, so many of them? What needs do they fulfill, in our culture and our economy, even in our politics? But, also, what needs do they fill in us? Why do we as individuals pay attention to them, talk about them, adulate them, or, alternatively, hate them? What pleasures do they offer us and how has that contributed to the sheer numbers of celebrities, including “everyday people,” who have become famous, especially in the twenty-first century? How are we to think about and make sense of this phenomenon? Here we address these questions, examining the work of scholars who have considered both the broader sociological and historical explanations for the rise of celebrity and the more individual and psychological analyses of our engagement with people we will never meet or know. And it is important to emphasize that many of these theories are not mutually exclusive, but can work together to help us appreciate why this has become such a salient feature of modern life.

The Importance of the Audience

As previously noted, the rise of celebrity is made possible through the individual’s relationship to a mass audience, a public. The role of the audience is, therefore, crucial in the production and maintenance of fame. Indeed, as P. David Marshall argues, it is the public, the celebrity’s “followers,” who empower the construction of celebrity itself.1 “The historical emergence of the celebrity sign,” Marshall points out, “coincides and correlates with the rise of the audience as a social category,” adding that “Celebrity is an acknowledgement of the public’s power.”2 It is the attention of the public, our fascination and adulation, which make celebrity as a phenomenon possible. So at the heart of celebrity culture was, and is, a contradiction. Celebrities are seen as unique and elevated people, above the masses, yet are absolutely dependent on the good will and admiration of those masses for ongoing recognition and success. Thus, the twin pulls on our desire that celebrities be special and transcendent yet also regular people and “just like us.”

Francesco Alberoni offers similar observations about the power of the audience, suggesting that stars, despite their influence and success, are in fact powerless, at the mercy of the public. It is the public’s judgment of the famous that allows the elite to maintain their position. One of the ways in which this judgment functions is through the public’s perpetual affirmation and reaffirmation of social codes vis-à-vis celebrity actors. Celebrities, Alberoni notes, play a critical role in maintaining social standards and cohesion in large-scale society. As regularly (sometimes constantly) “observable” and “knowable” individuals, celebrities are available to be evaluated, loved, or criticized by their audience.3 The lives of celebrities, Alberoni writes, especially their social relationships, can be “a benchmark for positive or negative evaluation” by us, and a source both of identification and a projection of the needs of a mass audience. They are also “a living testimony to the possibility of achieving a rise in personal status.”4

Celebrities and Presentation of Self

The connection between celebrity and fan is a symbiotic relationship, fulfilling mutual needs and offering benefits to both. It builds on a deep and fundamental aspect of everyday interaction between people: when we engage with others, especially in public, it is a performance. We don’t often think of our interactions this way, as we like to think of ourselves as genuine, as not faking it or putting on a role. But in each culture there are rules about how to perform—in the classroom, at work, in a restaurant, even bumping into a friend on the street—that we learn in unspoken ways starting in childhood. And since most of us want to be liked, to be thought of as an admirable and attractive person, we try to conform to these rules and not violate them.

These rules form the foundation, the building blocks, of successful celebrity. So to understand what makes some stars admirable and others not, what makes some seem genuine and others fake and manufactured, we need to first review how performance in everyday life affects who we like, respect, even love, and who we don’t.

We all know that feeling of sitting in a restaurant or bar, say, and the person at the next table is talking too loud, bragging, acting like a know-it-all, and being obnoxious to the wait staff: we think right away, “what a jerk” (or something more unprintable). The person has transgressed the taken-for-granted mode of performance we have come to see as acceptable; the impression he gives off undermines the impression he is seeking to give. Anyone who has worked in retail, or a restaurant, knows there are often very specific rules about how to perform—what to say, how to say it—with the customers. Even walking across, say a campus, there are different modes of greeting for those you know only slightly versus those with whom you are very close, and if you mix them up, your performance seems odd.

So like us, but even more so, stars and their handlers need to devise and preserve a public persona that seems authentic and likeable. The increasing emphasis in our media-saturated culture and digital environments for all of us to craft effective, convincing performances, while stars seek to seem genuine and not manufactured, has led scholars analyzing celebrity culture to turn to the groundbreaking work of the sociologist Erving Goffman in his 1959 book The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.5 Unpacking and revealing these often unspoken yet precise rules of how we present ourselves to others was at the core of his book. Goffman examined the sociology of how people present themselves, and the nature of interpersonal interaction and influence.6 This work has become foundational to our understanding of celebrity performance and culture.

To conduct his study, Goffman traveled to a most unlikely research locale, the remote Shetland Islands off the northeast coast of Scotland, and observed, often in minute detail, the face-to-face interactions of the people there. His major insight was to view human interactions in theatrical terms, through a dramaturgical lens, noting how all people must perform in everyday life, to present a convincing, idealized image of ourselves. People can either perform their identity sincerely or with cynicism (not truly meaning what we say), or flip back and forth between the two. And a person tends to “conceal or underplay those activities, facts, and motives which are incompatible with an idealized version of [self].”7

In one example, Goffman describes someone walking up to a friend’s house for a visit. Approaching the house, the person may be expressionless or even scowling, lost in thought. But as soon as she knocks on the door and hears the friend approaching, she will put on a big smile and become animated as she attempts to control the impression she is making. Of course, the person answering the door now must perform as well, as the two participate in what Goffman called the “definition of the situation,” the agreed upon roles they should each play given the nature of the interaction. Each one is an actor, even though they are friends, each managing the impression they give.

Various crucial rules operate in most interactions—meetings, dinner parties, job interviews. Goffman noted that there is the impression that we give (the one we seek to control) and the impression we give off (the one we might not control so well), and they might be quite different. Some of the worst things that can happen during an interaction are what Goffman called unintended, ungovernable acts, behaviors that can disrupt our performance and that we must control, like yawning, rolling our eyes, looking past the person you’re talking to (to someone else) at a party or conference, burping, sweating, or having your voice crack. We can’t lose muscular or facial control, or belch, trip, stutter, appear nervous, gulp, forget what we were saying, or, god forbid, fart. These can be especially disastrous for celebrities. Actors “lose face” when they fail to perform their roles in a way that meets social expectations.

Thus, the “front stage” self, the version of our identity that we perform for others and allow people to see, may conceal the work that we do “back stage,” behind the scenes, in order to maintain the version of self that we present to the world. This is true for private individuals, but especially salient for public persons, who may perform cynically, not meaning what they say or concealing certain facts in order to enhance their status, present a glorified version of self, or win admiration or sympathy. We are often especially suspicious of these “front stage” presentations of politicians.

Because we know that most people—and especially those in the public eye—seek to present themselves in the most favorable light, we often “use what are considered to be the ungovernable aspects” of a person’s expressive behavior “as a check upon the validity of what is conveyed by the governable aspects.”8 If a candidate for a job expresses enthusiasm for the position but then yawns during the interview, the ungovernable act will betray what the candidate is trying to convey. It is these unguarded actions or gestures, as opposed to the performance the person presents, that we feel are the true indices of what a person is really like.

We—and the paparazzi, gossip magazines, and bloggers—use similar observational strategies when watching celebrities to determine how genuine and likeable they are. In interviews, do their facial expressions, body language, and gestures match what they are saying? When they are out in public, can they be caught doing something they have failed to control or govern, something that suggests their public image is a lie? Hugh Grant, the charming, clean-cut, British boy-next-door actor who had shot to fame for his performance as a diffident and lovelorn patrician in Four Weddings and a Funeral, had his image seriously tarnished when, in 1995, he was caught in his car having sex with a prostitute: the opposite of clean cut. “When we discover that someone with whom we have dealings is an impostor and out-and-out fraud,” Goffman observed, “we are discovering that he did not have the right to play the part he played, that he was not an accredited incumbent of the relevant status.”9 It’s these unintentional moments, the impressions we give off, as opposed to the impression we deliberately seek to give, that seem to convey the true essence of who the person is.

Because we are performers and have to cultivate dramaturgical skill, we have what Goffman famously identified as a front region or front stage and a back region or back stage. These are often marked by physical and aural boundaries and blockades between us and our audience: the back stage of a kitchen in a restaurant versus the front stage of the dining area, for example. In the front region, we need to appear to believe in the part we’re playing, to appear sincere, and the setting, our appearance, and manner should all cohere. In a classroom, for example, the successful professor will appear to be enthusiastic about her topic, dedicated to student learning and in command of the class. She should also be dressed like “a professor” and not, say, like a nightclub performer. But students have to inhabit a front stage here too: whether they like the class or not, the successful students will take notes, appear respectful, not talk to others, text throughout the lecture, or fall asleep in class. The front must have “dramatic realization” and should display what Goffman called “sacred compatibility”: that there are ideal motives for acquiring the role we inhabit. The teacher does so because he loves to teach, the doctor chose her profession because she wants to save lives, or the actor chose her profession because she has loved acting since the age of three, for example. We as performers in life must constantly adjust to new settings—the workplace, a friend’s party, an interview—and modulate our performances accordingly to remain liked and even admired.

These regions don’t just involve individuals, they include “teams,” groups of people who must collude in a performance, like the wait staff in a restaurant who seek to make you feel welcome and important. In the dining room they must be solicitous, friendly, helpful, and agreeable; “I’m Jan and I’ll be taking care of you today.” But in the kitchen, the façade can come down, especially if they find a customer to be overly demanding or entitled. So teams decide how they will treat the audience to its face, but behind the audience’s back can derogate and even mock them. They just can’t get caught doing so. Thus, teams, as well as individuals, must also work to avoid embarrassment. When such back-stage derision of the audience is exposed it can be very damaging. That’s why when a waiter surreptitiously recorded Mitt Romney at a private fundraiser during the 2012 campaign saying that 47 percent of Americans are “dependent on the government, believe they are victims … [and] pay no income tax,” so Romney’s job “is not to worry about those people,” it collided with his front-stage image as running for president of everyone and did significant damage to his candidacy.

Goffman’s schema helps us unpack and appreciate a successful or unsuccessful celebrity performance and what the celebrity must do to convey sincerity. Celebrities who, in interviews, seem too scripted, evade questions, or give obviously clichéd or pandering answers come across as phony or as hiding something. Those who are overeager with the interviewer or don’t govern their behaviors—as when Tom Cruise in 2005 famously jumped up and down on Oprah Winfrey’s couch proclaiming his love for Katie Holmes—can seem not in control of their performances and even unhinged. (And the thought that Cruise actually might have planned such a stunt was an equally troubling view into his back region.) That episode seriously damaged Cruise’s public image. When back-stage episodes become public, like Mel Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant in 2006 against a police officer who stopped him for drunk driving, they can ruin a star’s career, as this episode did for Gibson, because it suggested that his true, unscripted self was a hate-filled bigot. But celebrities are members of teams, too, who work to maintain their successful performances. An allegedly happily married celebrity couple, for example, should not be seen fighting in a restaurant or bar. If one of them says in an interview how happy they are, the other one better say so too. And when a celebrity grants an interview, he or she will work hard to enlist the journalist as a team member as well, striving to have the interviewer convey the best possible image of the star.

Most celebrities, of course, seek to protect their back stages, to maintain some privacy, and not to have back-stage comments or behaviors cross the boundary into the front region. But at the same time, many celebrities understand that their fans want access to the back stage, and this has become more true and more possible with the explosive increase in the number of paparazzi in the early twenty-first century and the rise of social media. So increasingly stars, or more usually someone on their staff, use Facebook and especially Instagram, Snapchat, and Twitter to present a managed view of what seems to be the back stage. In addition, social media have provided easy-to-access technological platforms that allow initially nonfamous people to create a marketable persona—a self to present to a broader, unknown public—that has led to a rise of various social-media-based celebrities.

Celebrities and the Emergence of the Mass Audience

While there have been, for millennia, people who rose to fame, the production and proliferation of celebrities in the United States really takes off in the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as a result of several intertwined phenomena: the increased democratization of society, the evolution of the United States into a much larger and more impersonal society, the rapid growth of national markets and cultures, the rise of an emerging middle class and urban, white-collar workers, the spread of popular entertainments, and the gradual rise of bureaucracies to manage businesses and the government. Increased urbanization, fueled in part by rising immigration, meant there were growing and concentrated audiences for popular culture fare. The success of the “penny press” in the 1830s and beyond, geared to everyday people and not just elites, provided venues for advertising concerts, performances, and other events. A new kind of public sphere was emerging as well, one that was more participatory and less governed primarily by white, property-owning men.

It was in the nineteenth century that the term “celebrity” emerged.10 Unlike the top-down fame of kings, queens, or prominent religious leaders, celebrities and their creators and managers needed fans. And the rapid growth of the population and profound changes in the way people lived created them. In 1790, 95 percent of Americans lived in rural areas; only 5 percent lived in cities, and only a few, like New York and Boston, had more than 15,000 people. By 1890, industrialization and the rise of the factory system had led to a major growth in the number and size of cities, with now 35 percent of Americans living in urban areas. Between 1870 and 1920, the number of Americans living in cities grew from ten million to fifty-four million. And immigrants and their children were the major source of this growth. Between 1880 and 1920, more than twenty million people migrated to the United States, most of them moving to cities. By the 1920s, more people lived in cities than in the country, a major shift in American life.11 The increase in the number of jobs, improvements in transportation, and, of course, the lure of public entertainments all made the city magnetic.

The rise in leisure time was also crucial to growth in public entertainments and the stars featured in them. Some estimate that in the early to mid-1800s, many people worked seventy hours or more a week. In manufacturing jobs in the 1870s and 1880s, a sixty-hour workweek was typical, and workers began organizing in the 1870s for an eight-hour workday.12 By the turn of the century, various industries had gone to an eight-hour day, freeing many people up to attend vaudeville shows and go to the movies and amusement parks. By the 1840s, cities like New York, despite religious and moral opposition among the educated elite to the potential corruptions of theatergoing, had a robust theater culture with known actors. Thousands of new theaters, especially in cities, were built between 1850 and 1900.13 By the 1880s, vaudeville was the most popular form of commercial entertainment, featuring anywhere between twenty and thirty acts, each performing for about fifteen minutes; an estimated 15 percent of all city dwellers attended a show at least once a week.14

During this approximately eighty-year period, between 1840 and 1920, the phenomenon of the celebrity begins to take hold. And, since then, the role and impact has only increased. Why? Of course there was simply the increased ability to produce them, through the building of “museums” and theaters in cities and towns, and the development of promotional apparatuses through newspapers, broadsides, and later magazines. An increase in economic wealth in the United States, and the gradual expansion of leisure time, fought for primarily by unions, helped enlarge an audience for entertainment and its stars, as did rapid technological change—the invention of the camera, phonograph, motion pictures, and then radio.

One obvious reason for the rise of celebrities during this era comes from the production side: as owners and producers of urban-based entertainments like the theater and vaudeville sought to maximize profits, they used the expanding press and techniques of modern advertising to create known name performers—stars—to attract an audience. But other explanations for the rise of celebrities come from the consumer side of the phenomenon. Of course people wanted diversion, escape, and entertainment, but there was, and is, more to it.

Celebrity Culture as a Response to the Rise of Bureaucracies

This period saw the rise of bureaucracies, especially in the post–Civil War period, to manage large-scale organizations like governments or businesses. These were characterized by their hierarchical structures, impersonal rules, emphasis on rational principles of organization, and the specific allocation of duties to specific job descriptions, which typically involved delimited tasks and spheres of influence in the workplace. As the sociologist Max Weber noted, while bureaucracies were in many ways an excellent and highly functional form of administration, they depersonalized both those who worked in them and those they served. Individual cases or exceptions that don’t conform to the rules, individual ideas or initiatives not in your job description, just can’t be accommodated. Just think of how we feel waiting for our number to be called at the Division of Motor Vehicles or trying to reach an actual human via a voicemail menu. Those waiting in lines to be called or served, those sitting at their desks doing their same routine jobs over and over, can feel their individuality thwarted, that they are just part of an undifferentiated herd.

Celebrities offer a fantasy of escape from this dehumanization. They don’t wait in line, they can bend the rules and be treated as special individuals, they possess a singularity denied by large-scale bureaucratic enterprises. Most of us have to go to nine-to-five jobs where we are told what to do; we have to watch what we spend; we don’t get to marry and divorce beautiful new people every three years; we are not supposed to be “difficult” or “high maintenance.” Celebrities don’t have to play by any of these rules. They get a pass. They don’t have to rein in their various appetites (except, for women, hunger). For the most part, they get to escape from these confines.

Many celebrities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were self-made individuals—inventors, singers, actors, industrialists—who achieved their wealth and fame not by being born into them, but through their talents and hard work. Thus they provided living testimony to the possibility of upward mobility. They also held out the fantasy of one day breaking free oneself, of being seen as a distinct, special individual who merits recognition and admiration. Celebrities then and now embody “self-expression over conformity” and “hedonism above responsibility.”15 They are heightened examples of individual achievement, which transform and challenge the rigidity of class-based societies, representing the potential for everyone to transcend them.16 By the 1920s, with the Hollywood star system firmly in place, celebrity stories in the new fan magazines emphasized the glories of the stars’ wealth and fame, which, if handled properly, ensured even further elevation from the tedium and indignities of the bureaucratized life. During the Great Depression, as Karen Sternheimer reports in Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, gossip pages and the number of photos expanded in fan magazines, which served both as “a distraction from the faltering economic system” and as reassurance “that it was still possible to become rich in America, even during the Depression.”17

There is a paradox at the core of this, because celebrities are often seen has having “charisma”—exceptional, unique, and magnetic qualities that set them apart from others—yet somehow lure us ordinary, possibly noncharismatic spectators into the reverie that we can break out from the pack as well.

Celebrity Culture as a Form of Religion

Another explanation for the purchase that celebrity culture has gained in our society is that it is similar to religion, and even a substitute for it. As Chris Rojek notes in his book Celebrity, in increasingly modernized, consumerist societies, where the acquisition of goods and status are emphasized and the centrality of religious institutions to everyday life wanes, people still need and look for some meaning, bigger than themselves, to admire and aspire to. Celebrity culture fills that need by providing, in a kind of macroreligious manner, a “cluster of human relationships in which mutual passion typically operates without physical interaction.”18 Appearing on elevated stages or large movie screens, beautifully lit or photographed, stars can seem like deities, bigger than we, above us. The celebrity becomes “the precious other.”19 In the magical world of celebrities, everything seems possible. By publicly defying the boundaries of ordinary human life, “celebrities take themselves and their fans higher,” notes Rojek, “They are the ambassadors of the celestial sphere.”20 As with gods, we can project intensely positive, even worshipful feelings onto celebrities, and this connection can “compensate for feelings of invalidation and incompleteness elsewhere in their lives” and provide a path “into genuinely meaningful experience.”21

According to this argument, religions have rituals, sacred sites, saints, gods or martyrs to deify and worship, and reliquaries—repositories for or relics from saints like a shock of their hair or things they possessed—and that celebrity culture has all these as well. People do worship actors or musicians; red carpet events and awards shows are annual rituals where the deities are venerated; the faithful flock to the Hollywood Walk of Fame to place their hands beside the imprints of those of the stars’, forever cast in stone. Fans have collected celebrities’ autographs or pictures, and those with money have sought to acquire their possessions, creating their own celebrity reliquaries, which help bring them closer to the stars and validate a connection to them.22 In the magical world of celebrities, everything seems possible—death and rebirth, when an actor who was a “has-been” makes a comeback—and even immortality—a star like Marilyn Monroe will live forever in her movies, or photographs or recordings.

There are, as in many religions, ceremonies of ascent and descent. The new star is discovered and rises up, through performances, appearances on talk shows and red carpet events, magazine profiles and reviews. But then some stumble—they get too fat or too thin, are caught getting drunk or abusing drugs or cheating on their partners, or are involved in other scandals—and descend into the hell of public humiliation, excoriation, rejection, and even personal disappearance.23 Yet those who have stumbled in this way can also be redeemed and work their way back into the hearts of their fans. They are resurrected.

Celebrity Culture and Capitalism

Some theorists have maintained that celebrity culture has become an essential feature of capitalism—an often efficient and successful economic system—whose biggest failure, nonetheless, is its inability to distribute its blessings fairly: it produces societies that allow for great wealth but also permit abject poverty. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unions, activists, journalists, reformers, and some politicians exposed, especially through large-circulation newspapers and magazines, the growing disparity between rich and poor and the negative consequences of monopoly control, in so many industries, for workers and consumers. These exposés and the reform movements they prompted occurred just as celebrity culture was consolidating and expanding even further.

Thus, the argument here is that elites need everyday people to be distracted from the persistence of structural inequality in the United States. In addition, celebrity culture serves to legitimate disparities in wealth and fame—it makes hierarchies thrilling—while also affirming often elusive, but system-sustaining, myths, like the bromide that anyone can make it to the top if she or he has talent, determination, and grit. Often mixed into this argument is that people have become narcotized dupes, preoccupied and seduced by celebrity culture: they have been trained to and want to be distracted from the realities of inequality as well.

In their famous and scathing 1944 essay on “The Culture Industries,” the German intellectual émigrés Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were especially critical of popular culture and its potential influence. They argued that the media relay stories and interpretative frameworks consonant with the interests of the ruling classes and that their mission is to secure “obedience to the social hierarchy.” Media audiences “fall helpless victims of what is offered them,” which results in the “stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity.”24 While movie stars, for example, and the movies they’re in might seem distinctive on the surface, they were simply part of Hollywood’s mass production process, which cranked out a standardization of media forms and audience tastes, through patterned, predigested, and endlessly recycled cultural entities. This they called “pseudo-individuation,” in which “every tenor voice comes to sound like a Caruso record, and the ‘natural faces’ of Texas girls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood has typecast them.”25 Such “worn grooves” in the production of stars and media fare is so numbing that in the end it thwarts people’s ability to imagine anything different, in art or indeed in political and economic relations. This, they argued, was extremely helpful to the powers that be, who relied on a docile, distracted, and nonquestioning public to preserve an unequal status quo.

The Rise and Functions of Celebrity Profiles

The rapid urbanization and industrialization in the United States in the early twentieth century and the increased geographical and social mobility they produced meant that growing numbers of people lost their moorings from their families and the communities they grew up with and knew. The “first impression,” touted as crucial in self-help books and in countless ads especially for personal care products, now mattered enormously for many trying to get a job, locate housing, make friends, and find love. Celebrities—how they looked, dressed, and behaved, as presented in their own performances and articles about them—provided the scripts to follow, the looks to try to imitate, for impression management and the presentation of self in everyday life.26

In a famous essay from 1944, “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” which analyzed magazine profiles of famous people between 1901 and 1941, Leo Lowenthal argued that what he labeled “idols of production”—self-made men, captains of industry, political leaders—had after World War I given way to “idols of consumption”—primarily entertainers and sports heroes who were often elevated by “lucky breaks.” The former were active agents, doers, while he saw the latter—at least as profiled in popular magazines—as passive; things happened to them. The article was noteworthy because it laid out an important turning point in unpacking the depiction of celebrities as both just like us yet not like us at all, a framework still very much with us.

Lowenthal’s main question asked about the reason for this turn, noting that “there must be a social need seeking gratification by this type of literature.”27 He concluded several things. Celebrity biographies provide “unbroken confidence in the opportunities open to every individual,” with the life stories of others serving as “educational models” one can envy, but also try to emulate.28 Yet with the idols of consumption, the reader enters a “dream world” that focuses on the private lives, behaviors, and personal preferences of the hero (as opposed to what actually got them to the top) and provides instruction on consumption and how to spend one’s leisure time, but not necessarily on how to actually succeed in life.29

The profiles let us into stars’ personal spheres; we learn who likes to be “the life of the party,” who drinks and who doesn’t, who likes “Brazilian cigars,” who likes to cook “Viennese dishes.”30 They urge us to judge celebrities according to their behaviors toward their tasks—if they work hard and are energetic and capable—and their behavior toward others. Are they generous, friendly, and cooperative? Do they moderate their own emotions—are they restrained, or have they succumbed to being thin skinned, irritable, or humorless? The behavioral judgments meted out provide normative codes about how we ourselves should act with others.

Yet in all of this Lowenthal emphasized the persistence of passivity in the heroes of consumption and found an odd brew of luck mixed with predetermination as explanations for their success. On the one hand, the profiles emphasized the stars’ parentage and background: for example, Clark Gable’s “stubborn determination” was derived from his “Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors,” as if Gable himself bears little responsibility for his character traits; he simply inherited them. “The individual himself appears as a mere product of his past.”31 As children they were “midget editions” of their future selves, because they were just born with talent or predilections and always knew what they wanted to do. An athlete is described as having “been born with a love of the game”; a businessman has “an instinct” for promotion; a movie star knew she wanted to be an actress “from the time she could walk,” and so they were “rubber stamped” from birth for their future careers.32 Thus, while there was, in these biographies, an emphasis on early travails, hard work, and coming up “the hard way,” there was almost always the “lucky break” of being discovered, so these celebrities were not really responsible for their own success except for how their instincts or personalities helped them. Success “merely happens,” usually by chance, so it is “an accidental and irrational event.”33 There is a fatalism here, where some people become rich and famous because it was meant to be, and the rest of us don’t. But we can vicariously enjoy their success through reading about them and trying to emulate how they behave and what they consume. By consuming like they do, we can become a little like them.

Industrial Production of Celebrities

As celebrity culture has continued to metastasize in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, some scholars have turned their attention to the even more intensified, amped up production of celebrities, while others have explored the more individual, psychological explanations for the enormous appeal of celebrity culture. As Josh Gamson and Paul McDonald have emphasized, celebrity production is an industry—in fact, a quite elaborated one that can often look like mass production—that has relied increasingly on a growing cadre of workers: managers, talent agents, press agents, publicists, personal stylists, trainers, and the like. Both scholars see contradictory explanations for celebrity. On the one hand, it cannot be totally manufactured—its potential in a person can be spotted and nurtured, based on hard work, talent, and charisma, but not just anyone can become a star. On the other hand, fame is obviously manufactured, the stars’ images tightly controlled, and, as we have learned through reality TV, almost anyone can indeed become famous. In fact, these are the two stories about fame today, that it is earned and related to achievement and talent and yet that it is cynically produced through public relations and publicity that churn out the worthy and unworthy alike.34 Of course, there is truth to both of these stories.

Both Gamson and McDonald trace this escalated production of celebrities to the collapse of the Hollywood studio system in the 1950s when television made significant inroads into movie attendance. In Hollywood during the 1930s and 1940s, most stars were bound to one of the five major studios, which, for the most part, produced and owned the stars. With the erosion of the studios’ power, stars had to become “‘proprietors of their own image,’” which meant, in part, mastering the image of being unique and apart from the crowd while also, of course, being “just like us.”35 Thus, the need in the 1950s, and beyond, for agents, managers, publicists, and the like to manage image control, with celebrity production becoming an increasingly elaborated and extensive business.

In the 1970s, with the success of People magazine and its imitators, and a growing number of television shows profiling famous people, especially movie, television, and singing stars, the industrial production of celebrities ramped up even further. By September 1981, the first movie actor to become president would be shot by John Hinckley Jr., who was bizarrely trying to impress another celebrity, Jodie Foster, while a new, syndicated TV show Entertainment Tonight premiered. Americans began to get a sense that celebrity culture was assuming a much more commanding role in their culture. By the late 1980s, when Dan Rather included accounts of problems in the marriage of Robin Givens and boxer Mike Tyson on CBS Nightly News, we knew we had come a long way from Walter Cronkite, the “most trusted man in America” who had steered the country through the John F. Kennedy assassination, the civil rights movement, and the Vietnam War. When Britney Spears shaved her head in February 2007 it was a lead story for two days on CNN, “the most trusted name in news.”

New networks and cable channels were emerging to challenge the big three—ABC, NBC and CBS—on TV. As the “national market” gave way to market segmentation and niche marketing, competition for viewers increased. Channels needed to “brand” themselves, and to produce shows that would attract specific demographic niches of interest to advertisers. Cooking channels produced “celebrity chefs,” while channels on finance and investing produced celebrity financial advisers and celebrity CEOs. And with the rise of twenty-four-hour cable news channels and their ever-needy news holes to fill, celebrity scandals, crimes and trials, or crimes and trials that turned unknowns into celebrities, further broke down what was once a solid wall between “the news” and entertainment. Because the problem now was there weren’t enough celebrities—true “A-list” actors or rock stars and the like to fill the need for all this programming. Reality TV, which had the advantage of being very cheap to produce compared to scripted programming, could get and hold an audience and produce its own celebrities.

The radiation of the tentacles of celebrity culture has been driven further by the media consolidation of the 1980s and beyond, as the octopi conglomerates have bought up publishing houses, news outlets, movie theaters, production studios, amusement parks, record companies, television stations, cable systems, and the like and insisted on “synergy” and maximum profits from them all. And twenty-four-hour cable television, with all its competing, insatiable programs, needs to be constantly fed; celebrities are the fodder. New profit-maximizing alliances within these media behemoths mean that all kinds of cross-promotions can be launched that seem utterly natural or spontaneous when they are anything but. Thus, the winner of CBS’s Survivor was immediately booked on CBS’s Late Night with David Letterman, those “fired” by Donald Trump on NBC’s The Apprentice ended up on The Today Show, and so forth. A story in Time-Warner’s People can also serve as a story or interview on Time-Warner’s CNN. When The Bachelor was launched on ABC in 2002, the network’s parent company Disney also had a 50 percent stake in Us Weekly. Thus, the magazine played a central role in promoting the show, its contestants, and the drama among them, turning many of them into celebrities, however briefly. (Wenner media, which also publishes Rolling Stone, bought back Disney’s stake in 2006.) Each media mastodon has multiple ways—and a pressing need—to promote its own celebrities, adding to the glut. Of paramount importance is ratings, sales, buzz, profits. Celebrities, whether adored or reviled, triumphant or mired in the tar pits of scandal, deliver these.

Thus we began to get what Gamson has called “industrialized celebrity production.” Along with it, there has been a kind of democratization of fame. And what comes with such proliferating opportunities is an increased desire among many to gain the spotlight, however briefly. With this kind of fame, merit and talent no longer mattered particularly. People, as the cliché goes, became famous for being famous. As David Schmid has noted, there has been something of a collapse of the difference between fame and notoriety. “Recognition and self-exposure,” he rightly observed, “are now believed to be absolute goods in themselves.”36 Ironically, while “it has never seemed easier to be famous just for being you, and possibly get rich in the process,” as Karen Sternheimer writes, “the gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of Americans has widened and wages remain stagnant.”37 So the desire to get on a reality TV show, or to promote yourself as a YouTube star or Instagram influencer, may be even more intensified in such an unequal economy.

Celebrity culture is then, in the twenty-first century, the result of an intricate, interconnected, and many-faceted industry targeted especially, although hardly exclusively, to younger people, especially women age 18–34.38 Celebrities are, or become, commodities used to attract us—consumers—to TV shows, movies, concerts, magazines, and the like. So they—their very identities—have to be marketed and have to fill certain market niches. They thus “operate as sources of capital” for various branches of the entertainment industry, as Paul McDonald notes, and “form a point of intersection between meaning and money.”39 Through various attention-getting devices—a breakout performance or outrageous behavior, backstories about adversity and crisis—the star first has to gain symbolic value as someone who appeals to people. Here they need to seem above us, yet we also need to identify with them, and they need to be seen as distinct, branded personalities—Sandra Bullock needs to be seen as different from Reese Witherspoon, for example. These specific traits—hair color and facial features, but also speech patterns, modes of behavior, how they present themselves, and stories about their rise to the top—if appealing to enough people combine to create their symbolic value as admirable individuals. As that symbolic value increases through publicity and marketing, the celebrity begins to gain economic value, which is the real mark of success.40 And, of course, when their symbolic value declines—the “has-been,” the “where-are-they-now” former celebrities, those who are caught in scandals or do or say offensive things, as Mel Gibson did—so does their economic value.

While certain celebrities remain stars for much of their lives, mostly because of their talent and achievements, but also because of very shrewd marketing and PR decisions, many others are “one-hit wonders,” or flash-in-the-pan child or reality TV stars, or were stars of formerly very popular television shows that have long been off the air. Thus, there is a pressing industrial need, especially in our overheated and highly competitive media market, to constantly find and produce new celebrities. Indeed, our contemporary media economy seems increasingly fixated on creating, promoting, and capitalizing on famous figures who, in turn, give audiences cause to turn on, tune in, and link up with a rapidly expanding array of media technologies.

Celebrity Culture and Neoliberalism

Yet another important explanation for the explosive rise in celebrity culture over the past several decades is the establishment in the 1980s and beyond of what scholars call “neoliberalism,” but might just as well be termed neoconservatism or small-government market fundamentalism. Advanced especially by the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher administrations, and fervently embraced by the Trump administration, this was a new common sense about limiting the role of government and the absolute centrality of individual responsibility to personal success. Neoliberalism attacked the general acceptance, which emerged during the Great Depression and was cemented in the post–World War II period, that the state has a responsibility to mitigate inequality, to provide basic services, and—through a combination of monetary and fiscal means—to even out capitalism’s boom-bust cycle.

Prior to the New Deal in the 1930s, there was barely any governmental safety net that protected those who had lost their jobs, were unemployed widows with children, or older people who could no longer work. The Great Depression, with a 25 percent unemployment rate in 1933 alone, drove home how brutal and untenable this laissez-faire approach was.41 With the New Deal, it now became a given that the state should focus on full employment, economic growth, and the welfare of its citizens, and that “state power should be freely deployed” alongside of or even intervening in market processes to achieve these ends. Thus, over a thirty-year period, we got Social Security, unemployment benefits, pension funds, and Medicare and Medicaid.

But in the wake of the various economic problems of the 1970s—“stagflation” (high inflation plus high unemployment), the OPEC oil embargo that limited oil and gas imports into the United States, soaring interest rates—and the election of Reagan here and Thatcher in England, market fundamentalism became the new gospel. This religion consists of the following core tenets: a belief in what was called “trickle down” economics (cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy will allegedly prompt them to produce more jobs, so that benefits “trickle down” to everyone) and efforts to limit or eliminate the government’s role in redistributing wealth, which rests on cutting taxes, especially for the wealthy. There is a complete faith that the market, not the government, is the best arbiter of wealth distribution. Thus, the government should stay out of providing services, especially for the needy, the poor, or retired people, because the state is allegedly less efficient, and more corrupt than, say, Wall Street or corporate America. To justify this, neoliberalism glorifies individualism and individual responsibility. As David Harvey succinctly put it, “All forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favor of individualism, private property, personal responsibility and family values.”42

How are we everyday people meant to internalize the market fundamentalism mantra? What persona must we assume here? And how is it related to celebrity culture? Neoliberalism insists upon and promotes the need for an idealized, productive citizen who must learn how to govern himself or herself. It is up to us to achieve self-mastery, and if we do we will control our own destiny and be autonomous and fulfilled. So our very selves must become an ongoing project, something we must work on, transform, and improve, so we can compete effectively and even succeed in this environment.43 In this worldview there are no structural, institutional obstacles that might thwart such choices for some or, conversely, offer opportunities and advantages that make them possible for others.

Celebrities, whether ones with genuine admired talent or those created through reality TV or Instagram, are such people. They personify the benefits of constant self-cultivation, self-monitoring, and self-transformation. The ones who seem to work hard, take individual responsibility for their careers and behaviors, and succeed are exemplars of—and role models for—the ideal neoliberal subject. More to the point, their prominent success as distinct, self-fashioned individuals legitimates neoliberalism as a system: they supposedly did it on their own, and definitely without help from any government or social services. Conversely, those celebrities who fail to take responsibility for fashioning a productive, individually responsible self are castigated and personify the dangers and humiliations of lacking self-mastery. In celebrity culture, there are no structural impediments to success and no need for governmental safety nets: it is all about individuals and individual agency.

In addition, for everyday people, self-actualization comes through buying the right stuff: being a persistent and shrewd consumer, not just of goods but also of services, like gym memberships, financial advice, and private health care. Neoliberalism relies crucially on consumerism, and vice versa. The media—whether The Oprah Winfrey Show, Judge Judy, or Keeping Up with the Kardashians—have been full of advice about how to govern, discipline, and reinvent oneself, and provide a road map for how to be a successful subject of the market fundamentalism ethos.44 And celebrity gossip magazines, with their features on how you can get the same look, go on the same diet, get the same furniture, buy the same baby clothes, all drive home that copying celebrities’ consumer choices can be a central component of your own success when, indeed, it’s all up to you.

At the same time, most celebrities who gain a certain level of visibility and respect feel they need to be involved in at least one charitable organization. Some, like Elton John or Annie Lenox or Ellen DeGeneres, have donated to over forty organizations.45 Although many celebrities are genuine about and often deeply invested in their concerns—Michael J. Fox and his Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, for example—they also understand that not being philanthropic, especially given the amounts of money some of them make, will hurt their image. But widespread celebrity support of charities as diverse as the Breast Cancer Research Foundation or Feeding America or Make Poverty History—all completely noble causes—also emphasize the necessity of private funding to combat social problems in the face of government inaction. If we have so many celebrities giving to or championing private foundations or nongovernmental organizations, do we really need government programs to support the sick and the needy?

Fandom and the Pleasures of Celebrity Culture

While scholars like Josh Gamson, Paul McDonald, and others have emphasized that we have such an overblown celebrity culture because it is a huge business with a constant need for new raw material, they and others have also explored the consumption side of the equation. Why do we as individuals pay attention to them, even need them? Being a fan of one celebrity or another has become an utterly routine part of everyday life now. We use their biographies (however invented) as guideposts for our own lives: By what age did they do such-and-so, and can I do that too? We want their relics—the towel they used, the glove they wore, the pen they held—to somehow shorten the distance between us and them.

Early writing about fans—drawing from the word “fanatic”—mostly dismissed them as “obsessed individuals” or members of a “hysterical crowd” (think images of young women in the 1960s gripped by Beatlemania). This drew, in part, from late nineteenth and early twentieth century anxieties—based on large-scale immigration, rapid urbanization, and the explosion of popular entertainments—as working-class people, having enjoyed a degree of improvement in economic, living, and labor conditions, sought opportunities to savor the newly created weekend. As new pastimes emerged and people flocked to the boardwalks, amusement parks, and movie houses, so, too, did concerns surface about the emergence of irrational and impressionable “masses.”

In the 1940s, communication scholars working in the Marxist, Frankfurt school tradition, Adorno and Horkheimer, mentioned earlier, were deeply skeptical of the impact of new media—from recorded sound to film and radio programs to magazines—on fans’ abilities to see the world, especially power relations and inequality, clearly and critically. They lamented mass culture’s standardization and dilution of culture and argued that passive consumption of such content served as a form of ideological manipulation. Scholars such as Paul Lazarsfeld, influenced by socialism but not a Marxist, also took a paternalistic attitude toward the audience, worrying whether or not radio listeners were tuning in to “serious” broadcasts—folks of lower economic and educational achievement, it turned out, were not. Even as radio researcher Herta Herzog’s study of nonelite, female radio listeners pioneered the gratifications approach—a method that emphasizes a desire to understand the rationale and meaning-making process of audiences—Herzog nevertheless argued, from a Freudian psychoanalytic position, that the uneducated listeners were primarily motivated by a compensatory desire to fulfill their own personal lack; that is to say, a sense of resentment toward those who were more educated than themselves.

Social critics saw the “masses” as passive consumers, the dupes of popular culture, feminized and highly vulnerable to its seductions. For example, when the silent movie star and matinee idol Rudolph Valentino died in 1926 at the age of thirty-one, and his hundreds of thousands of mostly female fans went into a highly emotional state of mass mourning, the phenomenon simply corroborated the notion of fandom as “excessive” and “bordering on deranged behavior.”46 In this view, fans were inept, socially isolated individuals (and typically women), and fandom served as psychological compensation for “the absence of ‘authentic’ relationships in their lives.”47 Yet while fandom could make up for low self-esteem, lack of friendships or community, and a dull, boring life, it was also seen as “a risky, even dangerous, compensatory mechanism.”48

In time, scholars began to raise, in earnest, critical questions about the nature of fandom and the desires and motivations of audience members. A notable shift occurred in the 1980s in media studies, when various scholars, while not denying the power of the mass media or celebrity culture, began to take issue with the image of media audiences as passive dupes, accepting whatever was presented to them. Stuart Hall, one of the field’s most eminent media studies scholars, and director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom, proposed a model for how audience members might make meaning from the media they consume. His famous and highly influential “encoding-decoding” schema argued that some people do, indeed, take the dominant or preferred meaning of a media text at pretty much face value. Others, however—people who think all the news is biased, or hate television on basic principle—typically engage in “oppositional” readings of media texts, rejecting their premises, values, and storylines. Most people, however, engage in “negotiated” readings; they bring to bear their own knowledge and experiences when watching television or a film or reading a magazine, and accept some elements of the text while questioning or rejecting others.49

Other scholars began both testing and extending Hall’s work, and this applied to conceptions of fandom as well. In his book Claims to Fame, Josh Gamson interviewed fans themselves, as well as analyzing the celebrity production system, and developed a detailed typology of fan types. He laid out the three broad interpretive strategies that celebrity watching audiences use, depending on how aware they are of the production process, how much they believe in the veracity of the celebrity text, and how much they engage with celebrity culture. On one end of the spectrum are “Traditionals” who see fame as a recognition of internal gifts, believe most of what they read and hear, and have minimal knowledge of the actual apparatus of celebrity production; this is the stereotypical, gullible fan. “Second-order traditionals,” in the middle of the spectrum, appreciate a more complex narrative about the star in which publicity mechanisms play a role in producing his or her fame, but this knowledge does not undermine the fan’s esteem. This kind of fan is not ignorant of the publicity system but takes it into account.

On the opposite end of the spectrum is what Gamson labeled “postmodernist/antibelievers,” the total skeptics. They are interested in the techniques of artifice in and of themselves; they know about celebrity manufacture and seek out its evidence and its details, rejecting the story of the naturally rising celebrity as naïve and false. Their belief in celebrity gossip (and in the legitimacy or authenticity of celebrities) is minimal, and their awareness of and cynicism about the production process is high. This is a form of engaged disbelief, and the revelations of the celebrity-production techniques feeds rather than undermines their interest. For example, when Jake Gyllenhaal began dating the pop star Taylor Swift and then quickly broke up with her, a skeptic might wonder whether he and his publicists were trying to keep him in the headlines to help promote his latest film Southpaw.

This shift in thinking about the way audiences actively use media provided for additionally nuanced understandings of fandom. Rather than think of fans as passive consumers whose lack of taste drives their choices, John Fiske argues that fandom is denigrated precisely because it is typically linked with the consumption and enjoyment of “cultural forms that the dominant value system denigrates.”50 If fandom had become, as Fiske noted, “a common feature of popular culture in industrialized societies,”51 then we should rethink its functions and, yes, its pleasures. While knowledge and consumption of official or what used to be called “high” culture (opera, fine wine, art) enhances our cultural capital, knowledge about celebrity culture has come to do that too. Fiske noted how fandom can fill a cultural lack by providing a community, and one based on having a specialized knowledge of and relationship to the star that enhances social prestige and self-esteem.

Fandom serves as a tie to others with the same passions, tastes, and affinities, and Fiske especially wanted to emphasize how fans work to produce meanings about celebrities through different modes of “productivity,” and thus elaborate on and produce our own extended meanings from the offerings of the culture industries. “Semiotic” productivity involves the ways in which fans use the stars they admire as resources to construct their own identities, often more empowered, often in opposition to prevailing expectations about appropriate behaviors. One example was when many Madonna fans in the 1980s drew from her defiance of norms around female sexuality to embrace their own desires for sexual agency as girls and women.

“Enunciative” productivity is one we all know: it is shared commentary, sometimes praiseworthy, sometimes condemnatory, between us and others, about a celebrity (or a performance he or she is in) that relates them and their behaviors to our everyday lives. Indeed, as Fiske notes, “much of the pleasure of fandom lies in the fan talk that it produces.”52 At the height of MTV’s Jersey Shore phenomenon, for example, people loved watching the show together and (typically) expressing shock or outrage over the latest excesses of the show’s stars. Viewers of The Bachelor (and The Bachelorette) often text or tweet with others while the show is on to comment, often derisively, about the comments and behaviors of those on the screen. Such enunciative productivity affirms a group’s core values, what it admires and disdains, and what values binds it together. “Textual productivity” is when fans create and circulate texts based on celebrities, TV shows, and movies, typically online, and often extend or utterly alter the characters and meanings of the original production to suit their own needs and desires. All of these forms of productivity rest, in part, on the notion that “stars are constructed by their fans and owe their stardom entirely to them” and serve central functions in constructing individual and group identities.53 Fiske’s work helps to outline how active fandoms, expressed both individually and in concert with other fans, allow audiences to benefit emotionally and socially while enhancing our cultural capital within the fan community.54 In a large-scale society, the enunciative productivity that Fiske outlines is made possible thanks to our collective access to a common cohort of actors whom we know and about whom we can engage in sociable conversation. Studies show that gossip, despite its trivial reputation and negative connotations, actually serves important social functions, such as encouraging bonding and camaraderie among friends and family members. It can also allow us to release stress, share ideas, and strengthen friendships.55

Indeed, scholars like Joke Hermes have noted how celebrity culture—and especially gossip about celebrities—serves as a kind of social glue within large-scale societies. In her study of gossip magazine readers, Hermes identified a series of pleasures associated with celebrity gossip, from the vicarious enjoyment of a world of wealth and glamour to the feeling that celebrities are a part of our own inner circles, a kind of extended family.56

Gossip has been typically associated with women, taken to refer to malicious talk about people not present and to reinforce a form of informal control over others. But the explosion in celebrity gossip has shown that it can also be highly pleasurable, and hardly only a female practice or domain. Nor is such gossip always mean-spirited; it can be admiring and friendly. Gossip about celebrities—their achievements, their marriages and divorces, their cheating scandals, their trips to rehab—draws people together to evaluate behaviors and to construe standards of shared morality, about what is and is not acceptable behavior. It serves to create in-groups and out-groups. So it helps establish solidarity, a sense of community, including a moral community that identifies and locates what we feel to be ethical, behavioral certainties. Unlike discussing politics or current affairs, for example, which can be contentious, or involve grasping esoteric policy problems, celebrity gossip allows us to make judgments without having to think too hard. Thus it provides a form of confident self-expression about famous, rich, and often powerful others. It is, for the most part, safe and easy commentary and can protect us from more serious engagement with each other.57

Hermes identified a series of other pleasures we get from celebrity gossip. It can enlarge the reader’s private world, where we can enjoy a vicarious world of glamour and can feel involved with celebrities who are richer and more famous than we are; they are brought into our circle of family and friends. Through what she calls the “extended family repertoire,” which relies on a highly personal mode of address to the reader, we can develop a strong emotional connection to the stars. We can gain what can seem like “secret” knowledge about them and their lives that may “confer an imaginary sense of power over the rich and powerful,” but also over others because you’re in the know and they are not.58

Some of these are emotional pleasures, but Hermes notes there are cognitive ones as well. When we read about a rumor or speculation about a celebrity, especially because we know some of this gossip is false or exaggerated, we engage in puzzle solving, trying to ascertain what we think is true and what isn’t. There is a pleasure here, the fun of speculation in trying to “ferret out” the truth, because most of us have our doubts about the truthfulness of gossip magazines. Today, we can often fact check stories, compare sources, and even troll celebs’ social media accounts to learn the “truth.” We are ever more aware of the ways that celebrities “fake it”—from Photoshop to plastic surgery to strategically placed paparazzi and leaked tidbits. Such reading may involve the intellectual activity of hypothesizing about relationships, where we rely on our intuition and previous experiences with similar stories.59

Another pleasure of course is schadenfreude, relishing the misfortunes of others. With celebrities, we often love judging them, denouncing them, and ridiculing them as much as we love admiring them.60 And when they fail or are exposed as phony or superficial, it can be consoling to those of us who never made it into the spotlight.61 Kathie Lee Gifford, as the cohost of the highly popular Live with Regis & Kathie Lee in the 1990s, constantly bragged about her fantastic marriage and that her husband, Frank, was a “human love machine.” Then in 1997, Frank was caught having extramarital trysts with a female flight attendant at New York’s Regency Hotel. To those irritated by Kathie Lee’s superior, smug, self-satisfied presentation of her allegedly perfect marriage, there was great satisfaction here in her humiliation. More recently, in 2013, when nineteen-year-old Justin Bieber was arrested for speeding through a Miami neighborhood, driving under the influence, and resisting arrest, and later egging his neighbor’s home, those who envied his massive success at the young age of fifteen took great delight in this tarnishing of his image. A massive—and to some deeply satisfying—fall from power was the disgrace of Harvey Weinstein, who not only had reportedly harassed and assaulted women for years, but had verbally and publically humiliated men as well.

But are we all, then, just nasty people? Why do we find glee in this kind of schadenfreude? The pleasure we find in celebrities’ pain is actually quite rational. First, when stars fail, their failure reinforces our own, perhaps preexisting, sense that the standards of beauty, wealth, and success that the celebrity industries embody are unrealistic, even for those who appear to have “made it.” Second, when we judge celebrities and find fault in their actions, we have the opportunity to affirm our own moral codes, or punish deviance, thus creating and reinforcing boundaries around our own moral frameworks.62

While we may criticize stars in ways that bolster normative values (e.g., oh, she got too heavy, he is a cheating dog), we may also actively disagree with those moral codes, standards of conduct, and rigid demands of physical perfection. Indeed, much of the pleasure of celebrity gossip may actually lie in subverting these codes. When we tell a friend how Bono spent nearly two grand to have his favorite hat flown to him or how P. Diddy bought his son a $340,000 car for his sixteenth birthday, we take pleasure in the raised eyebrows and scornful looks that we share.63 These moments let us know “we are the same, we are normal. These people are not.” In these moments, we reaffirm our own values and beliefs, often in rejection of those that celebrity culture deems ideal.64

Gossip that is critical, or that rejects the codes of the celebrity universe, may be seen as an expression of what Alison Jaggar calls outlaw emotions. Jaggar argues that subordinated individuals may pay a higher price for disagreeing with the status quo and therefore become frustrated, fearful, or even angry when faced with so-called norms. Rejections of socially sanctioned identities and behaviors, in this theory, may serve as a mode of resistance.65 Young women, for instance, who have been told that they have to be supergirls in order to “have it all,” may take pleasure in scoffing at the impossible, paradoxical standards that make it compulsory to be white and heterosexual, standards that remain dominant across much of celebrity media. Gossip that seems catty may actually be a rational response to the claim that, for women, independence and success are possible, but totally tenuous, at risk of being ripped away at any moment due to some minor perceived inadequacy or failure to measure up.66 Talking back may be a way of rejecting conformity to the standard conventions of successful femininity. Expressing these types of outlaw emotions, especially in concert with other like-minded people, can be deeply satisfying.

It is a kind of pleasurable subversion. We enjoy the opportunity to engage in a form of confident self-expression about famous, rich, and often powerful others. We flex the public’s ideological muscles, as if to say, “You may be wealthy, gorgeous, and all the rest, but we still get the final say.” While these moments can be mean-spirited, they are more centrally about our ability to affirm social norms in concert with other like-minded people. We judge celebrities not only to make ourselves feel better about our own place in the social landscape but also as a means of picking and choosing which values we adhere to and which we reject.

Because celebrities’ lives are publicly enacted, through what Hermes calls the “repertoire of melodrama,” which rests on sentimental and sensational language and narratives, their miseries, dramas, and feuds also become our own. We use celebrity life as a way of considering our own experiences, and stories about the private lives of the rich and famous reaffirm a sense of basic human equality.67 But as we also wallow in the misery of the privileged few, we may feel somehow righteous; we can imagine a cosmic (if not a political or structural) justice being exacted. We learn the price paid for daring to rise above others (the shame) or for squandering fame through ego or excess or overindulgence. These narratives remind us that even wealth and success do not free us from sorrow, and such tales of stars’ suffering can impart a sense that in the end we’re all equal with our crosses to bear, despite disparities in wealth and fame. Grief is democratized. Joys and sorrows are common.

Obviously many of us do not read celebrity gossip “straight,” taking it at face value. We know that celebrity gossip is trashy, and to appear sucked in by it makes us look like gullible dupes of the media, so by indulging in it while, at the same time, distancing ourselves from it, we can assume an ironic stance toward it, laugh at it, and make it clear that we know how bad it is. We can even boast of reading the Enquirer or clicking through TMZ as a way of being campy and immersing ourselves in low taste. Celebrity texts now anticipate our critical gaze, presenting content with a wink and a sly nod to our own skepticism so that even the most jaded can enjoy. That way we can enact (through enunciative productivity) that we are inoculated against it.

The Psychology of Fandom

A number of theories have emerged to explain the psychology of fandom and our relationships to celebrities. Today, we take for granted that the media and the celebrity culture it sustains have created new forms of publicness, through which we might have intimate relationships with people we have never met. As Richard Schickel wrote in Intimate Strangers: The Culture of Celebrity, one of the first, key books written about the cultural study of fame, thanks to media technologies we are brought ever “closer” to the famous, allowing us to enjoy an illusion of intimacy with them. “To a greater or lesser degree,” we have internalized celebrities, “unconsciously made them a part of our consciousness, just as if they were, in fact, friends.”68 He continued that celebrities take up “permanent residence” in our inner lives as well, becoming central to our “reveries and fantasies, guides to action, to sexuality, to ambition.” Now, indeed, celebrity culture can be “permanently insinuated” into our sensibilities, as many of us carry them, their traits, and our relationships with them around as part of our “mental luggage.”69

Media representations, including those of celebrities, can foster in us a sense that we actually know and may understand famous figures as though they were a part of our everyday lives, like friends or family members. When we experience these feelings toward a media figure, this is called a “parasocial relationship.” Such relationships, in turn, produce “parasocial interactions” (PSI), which occur when audience members respond to media figures as if we were with them in a face-to-face social relationship, talking to or feeling empathy for that individual as though he or she were a personal acquaintance.70 Examples include when we might yell at a newscaster, or someone featured in a news story on TV, as if they could hear us, or when we know a character is about to walk into a dangerous situation and yell “Don’t do it!”

Initially, as with early thoughts about fandom, some scholars saw parasocial relationships as a form of mental lack, a compensation for loneliness or deficiencies in one’s social life. As David Giles has noted, “The implication that PSI is ‘imaginary,’ or ‘pseudo-social,’ pathologizes viewers who form strong parasocial attachments.”71 Other work has disputed these claims, and examined the affective functions of this phenomenon. For example, our one-sided interactions with media figures (real or fictional) allow us to use and assess their behaviors and attitudes as ways of understanding and measuring our own lives, and this may be especially true for adolescents as they seek to use celebrities as role models for their own identity formation. In these ways, PSI can be seen as “an extension of normal social cognition.”72 Research has shown that PSI can be especially robust if our attraction to the media figure is strong and the program or film in question is especially realistic. Indeed, perceived similarity between the media figure and the audience member, otherwise known as identification, can be a very important factor in the strength of the parasocial relationship. Physical similarities, taste in dress, or shared hobbies and passions can make audiences feel that famous figures really are “like us.” And for parasocial relationships to be sustained, we need to believe that the celebrity is not so very different from people in our own social circles.73

Giles sought to identify different types of relationships we might form with famous unknown others, which can help us understand why we might connect to some celebrities and not others, and to connect with them in different ways. First there is identification, when we recognize some characteristics in the media figure that we feel we share. Yet while we might identify with a star, we may or may not engage in PSI with him or her. There is also wishful identification, where we desire to emulate the figure with whom we identify, and affinity, where we like the media figure without necessarily identifying with him or her.

But the kind of media figure the celebrity is, and how we are addressed, can shape our levels of parasocial interaction. Direct address to us—by talk show hosts, comedians, newscasters—can especially evoke strong PSI. The mode of address in celebrity gossip magazines is also intimate and direct: the magazine is your best friend with the latest insider, confidential info, talking to you, with headlines like “The Joan Rivers You Didn’t Know” seeking to lure us in. Unlike the New York Times, which would not have headlines like “What Was Andrew Wiener Thinking? His Secrets Inside!,” the questioning titles seek to engage you and immediately turn you from a passive recipient of information into an active adjudicator of the moral issues involved. And with each question, betrayal, triumph, or crisis, a judgment is required; it is a given that you are an authority on such matters and will bring your own social knowledge and moral compass to bear on the topic at hand. You are hailed as having every right to evaluate these rich and famous people, and to speculate about their futures.74

Jackie Stacey interviewed female fans and she too found that they had various, often powerful, relationships with movie stars, from worshipping and adoring them to identifying with them. Some identified with stars with whom they felt some similarity, either in appearance, values, or behavior, and some used the stars—how they looked, dressed, and behaved—as resources for their own behavior, as a way to transform themselves, to play with identity, or to craft for themselves a mode of successful femininity. Others, however, loved losing themselves when watching a film as they imagined themselves taking on the role and identity of the star in the movie. There was a pleasure here for viewers in this “temporary loss of self” and of “sharing emotional intensity with the star.”75 Stars “serve a normative function,” providing “ideals of feminine attractiveness” but also ideals around self-confidence, self-assurance, strength, and sophistication that some viewers sought to emulate.76

Melanie Green and her colleagues have called this type of escape “transportation.” Green et al. conceptualize transportation as a distinct mental process that melds our attention, media imagery, and feelings. Their concept, known as “transportation theory,” seeks to specify how it is that audiences take pleasure in the feeling of escape and loss of self that media texts may provide and the ways in which those texts facilitate transportive experiences.77 Their work on the mechanisms of media enjoyment also helps explain why celebrity culture and gossip can be so absorbing. Transportation is, they argue, a desired state; we want to be taken into alternative universes (we all know that feeling of disappointment when we can’t “get into” a book or TV show). We enjoy the feeling of being taken away from our mundane reality into a story world. Many audience members are eager to escape from their everyday lives into another realm, in part to leave our worries, stresses, and self-consciousness behind. We connect with media characters, and through transportation may temporarily inhabit or even adopt their thoughts, goals, emotions, and behaviors, developing an illusion of intimacy with them.

Transportation expands our horizons, opens up new information, and provides us with opportunities for identity play. We can try on different personas, attitudes, and behaviors, and explore other possible selves with minimal real world costs. So we can use characters’ situations and experiences to understand our own lives and, at the same time, use criteria we typically apply in our own lives to evaluate characters’ actions and behaviors. Transportation is not always pleasurable in obvious ways; when we watch horror movies, or action films where the hero nearly dies multiple times, or desperate tearjerkers, transportation can be extremely scary or deeply upsetting. Yet these media experiences allow us to explore our ability to tolerate unpleasant emotions such as rage, fear, and sadness, and we may even seek out transportive opportunities to engage such emotions. In this way, there is “enjoyment from traveling to the Dark Side.” The delight in immersing ourselves in such narratives is their relative safety—by contrast, our real world is safe and nonthreatening, and if the hero survives the risks, so do we. “These safety modalities,” the authors argue, “interlock to banish the terror of death or failure.”78

While Green et al. focused primarily on fictional narratives like novels or films and that feeling of being “lost” in a story, we can be transported into nonfictional narratives as well, and it is that powerful sense of being transported that enables us to identify so powerfully with certain celebrities. Transportation via years-long narratives—starting in 2005, for example, the ongoing “Brangelina” love triangle and divorce saga, later the endless Kardashian dramas—allow us to “get to know” and develop a sense of intimacy with their famous protagonists through our narrative immersion. So when we open a celebrity magazine, with shots of stars in sunny Southern California in features about them being “just like us,” we can be transported, however fleetingly, into this balmy and privileged world ourselves. And just as we enjoy the highs, we also can take pleasure in the lows; when we read an in-depth profile of a celebrity, particularly one who has been through a recent triumph or tragedy, we can inhabit their feelings and relate their experiences to our own, creating a sense of pathos and shared experience.

Celebrity and Identity

Our ability to relate to and identify with celebrities also allows us to use stars as a way of considering our own identities, values, and beliefs. In our media-saturated world, being a fan is often integral to our own self-formation. Teens, in particular, may be fascinated by stars, as they manage their own ideas and expectations of self and adulthood, a connection that may help to explain why young adults are major fans and followers of celebrity culture, pop music, and individual idols.79 Indeed, we all have to develop a story about who we are, what we care about and stand for, what we hope to do with our lives, and what we do not want to be like. The vast arsenal of celebrity profiles, successes, and disasters provides raw material, resources we can try on, weave in, or reject as we construct our self-identity.80

But the lessons that celebrity narratives teach us about which personal characteristics and values are celebrated, and which are punished, are often problematic, especially when it comes to issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Stories about celebrities have, since the nineteenth century, shaped notions of admirable, even enviable identities and warned us about those to be avoided. Today, in the United States and Britain, celebrity narratives continue to emphasize stars who are white, heterosexual, and female, despite the fact that fans identify across lines of gender, race, and sexuality. In addition, young women continue to be the main subject of celebrity gossip, and its target audience.

Nonetheless, there are major pleasures for female consumers of celebrity gossip. As Andrea McDonnell has argued in Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines, here “women take center stage”—especially women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, with the magazines investigating and celebrating “women’s triumphs and challenges, all narrated from a female point of view.”81 Unlike the mostly male political public sphere, where government policies and current events are debated, this female-centered intimate public sphere foregrounds what is marginalized as unimportant elsewhere in the news: marriage, relationships, childbirth, motherhood, divorce.82 Celebrity culture offers an alternative realm to the mostly male-dominated news in the mainstream press. Women and girls are absolutely central to this world—they matter symbolically and economically. Women—which ones are to be admired and which ones loathed—are the drivers of celebrity journalism. They are the ones who propel the magazines off the racks. Corporate profits rest on them. Take the Kardashians: they challenge the patriarchal family; it’s the mother and the sisters who run the show and keep the dollars flowing in. Unlike schoolteachers, daycare workers, or secretaries, these women are not paid less than they’re worth, but more than they’re worth. And unlike in the precincts of Congress, families and children are of utmost importance. Women in this realm work long hours and are still able to have families because they have the support to do so.83

For young women in the early twenty-first century who have been told that they have to be supergirls, celebrity gossip magazines and sites serve as important primers. How to be sexy but not overtly sexual? How to have a career and a family? How to have success and male approval? In an age of collapsed courtship rules and “hooking up,” how to find a guy and have a long-term relationship? These are the questions about combining femininity and success that, week in and week out, celebrity gossip dramatizes. And who else to provide the right answers than female stars who seem to have cracked the code?84

But these pleasures come at a price. Because from the blogs and vlogs (video logs) to fashion and gossip magazines, the primary focus of these is not the famous female’s latest professional accomplishment, but rather her personal life, her appearance, emotions, and relationships: her life events. The central beat of celebrity journalism is emotion: love, hate, heartbreak, despair, joy. As McDonnell found in her analysis of celebrity magazines, the top five cover story topics, in order, were relationship troubles or breakups; pregnancy; stories about celebrities’ weight, bodies, or plastic surgery; weddings or engagements; and dating and romances.85

Celebrity magazines and their TV and online counterparts serve as persistent primers on what constitutes successful femininity, and what does not. Female celebrities are under relentless, withering, microscopic scrutiny. And their faces and bodies, as opposed to their talents, their smarts, and their inner lives, are where their true “selves” are located. Su Holmes and Diane Negra argue that when it comes to celebrity scandals, the media treat women differently and more critically than they do men. They see a persistent framework in which female celebrities are somehow poised between emotional and relational chaos and happiness, serenity, and control over their lives. Will this relationship, this marriage, this friendship work out this time or lead yet again to betrayal and heartbreak? “[We] are invited to play a ‘waiting game’ to see when their hard-won achievements will collapse under the simultaneous weight of relationships, family and career.”86 In this way, they personify most women’s struggles for work-life balance, especially when it comes to juggling having a job with raising a family. More to the point, when female celebrities fail, it legitimates the notion that, for women, achieving such a balance is in fact not possible. We see this push and pull activated in three main narratives that swirl around famous women: the quest for physical perfection, the adherence to norms of decorum and social acceptability, and the maintenance of idealized domesticity in the form of a heterosexual marriage plot and the attainment of selfless motherhood. If they don’t conform to—and bolster—the standard conventions of successful femininity, they will pay. They are the “train wrecks,” out-of-control women who fail to uphold, and even rebel against, traditional, even retrograde, gender norms.

As public figures, the bodies of famous women are constantly on display, extolled as the height of physical beauty and success. “Hot bodies” are a form of cultural capital that allow famous women to secure movie roles, magazine covers, and the attention and adoration of the public. Bodies that do not conform are singled out for ridicule. Women are supposed to be extremely thin and fit. With a few exceptions, being overweight is cause for derision. One magazine told Kate Moss (!) to “tone up her midsection,” while the National Enquirer sniped that “Rosanna Arquette has a beach ball for a belly,” and that “Queen Latifah doesn’t deprive herself—and it shows!” Reese Witherspoon, at the beach with her kids, was pictured with a yellow circle drawn around her stomach and a caption that tells her “it’s time to hit the gym!”

Being too thin is also bad, but a cause for shock and concern instead of ridicule. “Shocking Trend: Stars Flaunt Their Stick Figures” blares In Touch, with yellow circles drawn over the offending parts like “twig shoulders,” “bony back,” and protruding “ribs.” “Stars used to show off their cleavage,” complained the magazine. “Now they show off collarbones.”87 “SKINNY S.O.S!” brays the cover of the Star; “Star’s Scary New Affliction—Foodophobia and It’s Contagious!” “BARES BONES!,” the magazine screams, pointing out celebs whose “collarbones are more concave” and “stomach skin hangs looser.”88

Famous women also come under scrutiny for their actions, and no social taboo is too minor for ridicule or condemnation. Nothing is more important than self-regulation and serious self-monitoring—of your figure, face, hair, outfits, behavior, sexuality, and maternal practices. You also need to manage your career well, but that seems secondary to everything else. Ideal women here are both independent—they have their own professions, money, and sources of success—and yet completely reliant on the love and approval of men. And they get that approval because their economic independence is tempered by their hyperfemininity.89 So you better be a good judge of character, in potential boyfriends or husbands, and in friends, who are also crucial to success and happiness. If you chose wrong, you could end up with one of those numerous celebrity husbands who is discovered to be screwing your nanny on the side.

Proper consumption is of the utmost importance. Celebrity gossip magazines glorify consumerism and have become a showcase for various products, nearly all of them pitched to women. Product placement is ubiquitous and we learn which lipstick, workout clothes, low calorie snacks, nail polish, handbags, headphones, lamps, basinets, vacation resorts, and the like various celebrities swear by. Stars who know exactly which outfit to wear, which restaurant to patronize, and which smoothie to sip gain cultural capital and enhance their influence as marketers. Gossip narratives often revolve around products, presented as a solution to every possible woe. Social media stars, minor and A-list alike, make a living peddling everything from gadgets to sneakers to cosmetics. By purchasing what they love and recommend, you can be a little like them too. Ad pages seek to mimic such features, with banner headlines like “Hollywood Summer Trends” or “Fun in the Sun Celebrity Favorites” introducing readers to perfume, “high fashion” backpacks, and “interactive jewelry.”90

Some of these stories are geared at teaching middle-class people how to consume like the stars, but at a fraction of the cost, thus gaining access to the good life. Others, like Life & Style’s “Money I$ No Object,” present the good life as totally inaccessible, showing “diva” Mariah Carey sporting $1,500 Tom Ford sandals, a $5,600 minidress, and a thirty-five-carat diamond engagement ring estimated at $10 million.91 While these stories revel in conspicuous consumption and make hierarchies based on wealth seem perfectly legitimate, even exciting and deeply enviable, they also stoke our resentments about income inequality. Especially galling are the features about how much celebrities spend on clothes and jewelry for their infants and toddlers, who in a few months will completely outgrow their little Gucci leather jackets or Prada dresses. To avoid any potentially negative blowback from the trappings of wealth, famous women must also be polite, deferential, and friendly. Stars who are deemed “high maintenance” are condemned, for narcissism is a big sin; Life & Style regularly asks readers if stars are behaving like a “Diva or Down-to-Earth,” pitting celebs who pick up their own takeout against glamazons who won’t lift a finger to open a car door.

But celebrity narratives insist that the most important goal for famous women, no matter how wealthy, independent, or successful in their careers, is to find a loving, heterosexual relationship (ideally, with a “soul mate”) in order to be truly happy. Women must be in a romantic relationship, and these are always “blissful” and “perfect” until the nasty breakup.

Here’s where the men come in. The ideal catch is financially successful, caring, faithful, attractive, fun-loving, and supportive: an independent yet domesticated man. Cheating, drinking too much, or drug abuse are signs that the man is unable to restrain his appetites or control his emotions and behaviors. Depending on women for money is also a sign of weakness and failure. It was bad enough that former basketball star, and husband of Khloe Kardashian, Lamar Odom, nearly overdosed in a brothel. But that he “squandered large sums [of money] on booze, drugs and hookers” meant he would be “still going after Khloe’s money.”92 The worst crime, however, is domestic abuse. In this world men must protect their women.

A typically laudatory story noted that Romain Dauriac, husband of Scarlett Johansson, who was “exhausting herself” on the set of her latest movie, “[came] to the rescue” by renting a nearby house “so he could help care for her and their daughter [Rose, twenty-one months].”93 In a fake “world exclusive” cover story, Life & Style announced “A Baby for George!” (Clooney), implying that his wife Amal was pregnant. Inside, however, we learn they are supposedly planning to have a child in the next year or so because “Amal is ready to be a mom, and George is doing everything to make her dream come true.” But he was also “born to be a dad,” is “truly great” with children, and “he’ll make an incredible father.” In a sidebar (and in contrast to the ageism directed at women), we meet “famous dads” who “welcomed newborns at age 55—and older!”94 In Life & Style’s “Boyfriend Report Card,” swimmer Michael Phelps comes in for a world of hurt, earning a C–, because he’s been “slacking a bit on daddy duty” by not changing enough diapers.95 Kourtney Kardashian’s on-again, off-again boyfriend and party animal Scott Disick (and father of her three children) is regularly chastised for “dating a new girl every week,” for drinking too much and falling off the wagon, and for needing to get a job.96 The “runt of the Kardashian litter [and] f*ckup father of Kourtney’s three children,” a man “without any skills,” sniped GQ online, makes his money for doing nothing: appearing at clubs and agreeing to stay for one hour. For this and his other failings, he is “routinely mocked on national television.”97

While men’s appearance does not come under near the scrutiny that women’s do, these magazines have also started trashing men’s bodies, jeering at those with “man boobs” or who are “man blobs” or “beached males.” Rob Kardashian reportedly wanted his “moobs” (man boobs) reduced after losing fifty pounds so he doesn’t “have to run from the cameras” during his new reality TV show.98 Jack Nicholson has “flabby pecs,” Simon Cowell has “perky moobs,” and even former body builder Arnold Schwarzenegger was ridiculed by TV Guide for now having “boobs” and that his days of having a “rock hard body” are “long gone.”99

The culmination of the romantic relationship is inevitably the birth of a baby. So quickly do the stories jump from love to babies that coverage of celebrity weddings often promise pregnancy before the rings have even been exchanged. Thus, losing your man is a big tragedy, but remaining childless is even bigger. Two-inch headlines like “BABY NEWS” and “HOLLYWOOD’S BABY BOOM” are constantly recycled. Motherhood has now become nearly compulsory for female stars: they must have a baby to fulfill what is allegedly every woman’s innate dream to become a mother. Babies are cast as bundles of joy and life-changing blessings, never stressful. Julia Roberts was constantly hounded about having kids until her twins arrived. George Clooney, by contrast, was not badgered about when he would reproduce (although his wife Amal was).100 Women who opt out of motherhood are portrayed as tragic. Poor Jennifer Aniston has been prodded for over a decade because she did not have any children and supposedly was pining for them. Time and time again, the stories that heralded her alleged pregnancies turned out to be false.

This hypernatalism of celebrity journalism has led to a feature we never used to see, the rise of the invasive “bump patrol.” Ever since a nude and fully pregnant Demi Moore graced the cover of Vanity Fair in 1991, display of one’s belly has become less embarrassing and even glamorous. So telephoto lenses now zoom in on the midsections of scores of female celebrities accompanied by speculation about whether she’s pregnant or simply ate too much for lunch. The Star has featured its “Bump Brigade” and “How to Dress a Bump (and Not!)” that showcase stylish maternity clothes that are “HOT!” The bump patrol works to further police famous women’s bodies and sexualities. Through these narratives and images, the public is offered access to the most intimate details of a woman’s personal bodily changes and choices. Gossip magazines draw giant circles around stars’ stomachs, encouraging readers to comment and judge. Doting moms are celebrated while “bad” moms—think Britney Spears driving with her baby on her lap—are failures, not only as parents, but as women.101

With standards set so impossibly high, it is perhaps unsurprising that, in this world, successful women can’t get along with each other. Instead, they “clash,” “butt heads,” and “fight,” particularly over scarce resources: attention and decent men. The real or alleged feuds between celebrity women ask you to take sides, and usually the woman who lost her man to someone else is cast as more sympathetic than the one who stole him away. These are high school sensibilities at their finest. This was true in 1959 when Elizabeth Taylor “stole” Eddie Fisher from America’s sweetheart, Debbie Reynolds, and was clearly cast as the evil one, a story revived in the never-ending Jen-Brangelina saga, in which all-American Aniston was typically the victim, Jolie the vixen. Male relationships, when they are featured, are not cast in this catty light—they betray women, not each other. For women, sisterhood is not powerful; it is impossible.

When not fighting over men, women are battling over every detail of their appearance. Indeed, what is especially striking is the constant pitting of gorgeous women against each other. Gossip magazines and talk shows routinely provide visual lineups based primarily on red carpet photos, of women wearing the same or similar outfits and then judging who looked the best, typically based on the minutest details. In Touch and OK! feature “Who Wore It Better?,” US Weekly has “Who Wore It Best?,” and Life & Style “Who Wears It Best?” in which two celebs are juxtaposed against each other in the same dress or outfit. One gets a circle with a checkmark titled “she did,” the other a circle with an X, crossing out her efforts. The loser has worn shoes that are “too heavy (and just don’t match)” or her bust is “bursting out of the dress.”102

In “Red Carpet Ready?,” celebrities are actually made to compete against themselves. The same woman is seen in two different outfits at different events and in one she is labeled “ready” and the other “not ready.” Celebrity commentator Perez Hilton compares women’s current and previous hairdos; either the woman’s current self loses to her past self, or vice versa.103 The Enquirer has its weekly “fashion hits & misses” in which some women are exhorted to “Trash Your Stylist,” because the fashion blunders are deemed so egregious. Life & Style asks “Who’s Got the Best …” and focuses on women’s lipstick choices and hairstyles. Here we have women who on the one hand seem strong and independent, yet on the other hand are constantly shown to be inadequate in some way or another.104

Thus, celebrity narratives teach powerful lessons about the featured stars, who are primarily young, white, and heterosexual, and what constitutes success for such women. And given both the target market for such magazines, TV shows, and websites, and the notorious ageism of Hollywood, especially when it comes to women, older women are rarely seen in these precincts. There are three major exceptions: the star who has gained too much weight or is a victim of bad plastic surgery; the “tragic” allegedly sick or dying star, almost always cast as forgotten, possibly broke, and alone; and, even more rarely, the “hot” exception, like Helen Mirren. As Holmes and Negra point out, the “markers of ageing are relentlessly scrutinized and judged, with women variously castigated for the ‘sin’ of ‘letting themselves go,’ or mocked for displaying highly visible, or unattractive cosmetic surgery procedures.”105 Those who enjoyed fame in their youth are either scoffed at for not keeping up with their appearance or, like Goldie Hawn and Janice Dickinson, ridiculed for the vanity of plastic surgery.

One exemplar of these ageist beauty standards was forty-seven-year-old Susan Boyle, who became a star after belting out a killer version of “I Dreamed a Dream” from Les Misérables on Britain’s Got Talent. Her instant fame was propelled by the shock, expressed by both the show’s judges and the audience, that a conventionally unattractive forty-seven-year-old, slightly overweight woman with overly thick eyebrows and somewhat disheveled hair could actually have talent. When Boyle first introduced herself, stated her age, and said she wanted to be a singing star, the camera showed the judges smirking and audience members rolling their eyes. After the performance, the audience and the judges alike gave her a rousing standing ovation. Judge Piers Morgan exclaimed, “Without a doubt, that was the biggest surprise in my three years on this show”; what he didn’t say was that it was because of the contrast between her age, weight, and appearance and the stunning sound of her voice.106

Women of color may face less scrutiny in the world of celebrity gossip, but that’s because they are rarely featured. Studies show that white women are the most popular subjects of magazines and films and few Black, Latina, Asian, and Native women occupy the top tiers of the A-list. In 2016, Forbes listed Jennifer Lawrence, Melissa McCarthy, and Scarlett Johansson as the top three earning female stars.107 The only nonwhite actresses earning top dollar, Indian actress Deepika Padukone and China’s Fan Bingbing, are largely unknown to the Western media market. While some celebrities of color—Beyoncé, of course, and Jay Z, Kanye West (primarily because of his marriage to Kim Kardashian), Kerry Washington, and singers like Alicia Keys—are regularly the subjects of gossip, TV shows, and websites, it takes a major scandal or event, such as Beyoncé’s sister Solange attacking Jay Z in an elevator in 2014, and having it caught on surveillance tape, to have celebrities of color make it to the top headlines or magazine covers.

The same is true for LGBT stars. Much has changed since the 1990s in the acceptance and often sympathetic depiction of gay and lesbian celebrities. Think of Ellen DeGeneres, whose sitcom was cancelled in 1998, a year after she came out as gay on The Oprah Winfrey Show. Though People magazine covered Ellen’s marriage to Portia de Rossi, it was not until the early 2000s that Ellen returned to television and earned national adoration with her quirky dance moves and comical antics in a daytime talk show. And while we’ve seen more gay characters, even TV networks and YouTube channels aimed at queer audiences, few top stars have emerged from their ranks to break into the mainstream gossip press. Gay women continue to be regarded with suspicion. Stars like Michelle Rodriguez, Kristen Stewart, and Cara Delevingne have all been scrutinized for their choice of romantic partners; the idea that an attractive woman could want to be in a relationship with another woman continues to confuse the gossip press. Meanwhile, out gay men like Neil Patrick Harris, Anderson Cooper, and Ricky Martin have become media mainstays.

More recently, transgender stars have garnered public attention on reality TV shows and in the pages of tabloids. Since former Olympic athlete and Kardashian family dad Bruce Jenner’s 2015 revelation that he identified as a trans woman, changing her name and identity to Caitlyn, transgender celebrities have been the subject of fascinated and mostly supportive commentary; Jenner famously told her story in the July 2015 issue of Vanity Fair, where she became the first sixty-five-year-old woman to appear on the cover. The issue garnered 432,000 single copy sales, making it the highest-selling cover for Vanity Fair in nearly five years.108 Nevertheless, coverage of LGBTQ stars remains limited and compulsory heterosexuality continues to be a hallmark of celebrity coverage.

Considered together, these narratives reveal a limited framework of success and happiness that privileges a narrow range of identities, bodies, behaviors, and life choices while punishing or excluding those who don’t check all of the prescribed boxes, all of the time. It may be difficult to understand, then, how it is that audiences, especially those who do not fit the lauded models (i.e., 99% of us) can find pleasure in such representations. Why would I want to read about stars who seem nothing like my friends, my family, or myself?

Celebrity narratives provide us with the opportunity to consume vicariously, to indulge in a pleasurable escape to a world where money is no object. We enjoy the visual simulation of perfection and luxury that famous bodies, homes, vacations, and sports cars convey. We may temporarily forget our own financial constraints, our budgets, our rent payments. We may be seduced by the suggestion that, if we can buy some trinket that the stars love and recommend, our lives might be just a bit more glamorous. We are transported away from our workaday routines, our boring commutes, our ho-hum grocery lists, into a world of fantasy and fun.

While the pleasures of this type of transportation may be fleeting, celebrity narratives also promise us the potential for permanent escape. Stories that insist celebrities are “just like us” perpetuate the long-running tale that anyone can be famous; you, too, could live this life. Today’s digital platforms, where user-creators self-promote and brand themselves in an effort to attract followers and earn capital, both cultural and monetary, amplify the sense that we are all just a few well-conceived clicks away from Instafame. This fantasy of democratic access, of meritocracy and social mobility, may be especially appealing to audiences during our contemporary era, where inequalities between rich and poor, haves and have-nots, have widened and deepened.

As previously noted, celebrity news places women and girls at the center. The top-selling and most viewed magazine covers, TV shows, and Instagram feeds belong to women. Modeling and acting remain two of the few fields where women can actually earn more than men;109 here, the Kardashians earn millions just for Tweeting baby pics. And unlike in the precincts of Congress, where male politicians dominate and issues like women’s health care and child-care access are regularly ignored or fought against, in celebrity-world, Julia Louis-Dreyfus, Alfre Woodard, Gina Davis, and Robin Wright have all occupied the Oval Office as commander in chief. For many women, lacking political power and faced with much more logistically complex, and economically tenuous, situations, these stories offer an appealing reverie.

Celebrities as models for how to look and behave, embodying fantasies of rising above the herd and being seen as a distinctive individual, celebrity gossip as emotionally and cognitively satisfying puzzles to solve and, also, as a kind of social glue, celebrities as the inevitable result of the rise of leisure in capitalist systems, the media’s need for increasing numbers of celebrities to attract viewers and ad dollars, the role of celebrity culture in transporting us out of our everyday lives—all of these and more, when taken together, help explain why celebrity culture has exploded in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries.