What is Celebrity?
The signs of celebrity are all around us, but
they are not easy to characterize or analyze, perhaps because of their very
ubiquity. To the contrary, the meaning of ‘celebrity’, like celebrities
themselves – those on whom the informal title is conferred – seems to disappear
in one’s hand. It is a status conferred by no one and by everyone. If we think
of celebrity as a status, a number of questions arise: What exactly is a
“status”? Who confers a status and for what reasons? How long does it last? What
are the conditions of its conferral and of its removal? The truth is that no
one knows how long fame will last, once conferred, or what the requirements for
keeping it might be, though there is an army of PR functionaries whose job it
is to figure this question out.
We are of different minds when it comes to fame.
On the one hand, we would like to believe that fame belongs to the gifted, to
those who are not like us. We would like to believe, just as the Greeks
believed, that there are some among us who are different. If that is the case,
then the origins of fame are unknowable. It belongs to God or the gods or
nature or the supernatural. On the other hand, there is another, currently more
fashionable belief that anyone potentially could be famous, that it is a matter
of our talent being discovered, that celebrity is a matter of luck. These are
not mutually exclusive options, of course. The celebrity could be both special
and undiscovered, like Norma Jean before she became Marilyn Monroe. A third
option is that celebrity is entirely a fiction, that any one of us could be a
celebrity if only he or she had the right agent, if only we had the machinery
of stardom behind us.
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One thing you will notice as we go along is that
one of the tendencies in studying celebrity is to refer to specific
celebrities. It is hard not to speak in examples. It’s one of those areas in
which abstraction tends to slip into concreteness, not the other way around.
The danger in studying celebrity is that the
brightness of the star will blind us to where that light is coming from. In
this sense, the first obstacle to understanding the meaning of “stars” is the
word itself, for those whom we label stars would perhaps be more accurately
referred to as “moons” because the light that we see when we look at them
emanates from elsewhere and simply reflects off of them. Wouldn’t this be the
way that Durkheim views celebrity?
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Do charisma and celebrity designate the same
thing? Charisma is a word that, at least in its present form, refers to a
quality which some individuals possess. Celebrity is a more elastic term that
refers to the quality of the individual as well as to the individual him or
herself. It can be used in the plural, to designate a class of people, and can
be turned into a communal event (“celebration”) or the verb, “celebrate”, which
conveys the sense of a collective recognition of the specialness of an event or
person.
During the course of the semester, it will be
useful to be aware of such lexical differences to see what they might tell us
about the meaning of terms that we sometimes use interchangeably.
Who is a celebrity?
How do we determine who is a celebrity? There
is no formal register, the way back at the end of the 19th century
there was a “social register” demarcating who was and who was not a member of
the East Coast social elite. There is no such formal celebrity register, but
are there other, less formal indices?
As a thought experiment, lets consider
various candidates to see if the status of celebrity applies. How about Lady
Gaga? Clearly, she is a celebrity, but how do we know that? What about
President Obama? What about Osama bin Laden?
What is the difference between fame, celebrity,
and renown? It would be worthwhile to distinguish between these words, if only
to make sure that we are always talking about the same thing. Maybe the most
straightforward sets of words to distinguish are hero and heroism and celebrity
and, well, celebrity. A hero does something and is famous for doing that
something. That thing that the hero does is also something that society values.
The actions of the hero go beyond mere prowess.
Athletes, for example, can have prowess, but
a hero is someone who marshals his or her prowess towards a goal that society
deems worthy. And even then that action might not be enough. In the case of the
athlete, how many receive the designation of being a “hero”? This was probably
the case with Greek athletes who won laurels in the first Olympic games, but
that was because the games represented more than athletic competition. They
were rituals in honor of the gods. Among modern day athletes, whom would you
refer to as “heroes”? When I think back to my own childhood, I can think of
some athletes who would fall within the category of “hero.” People of my
parents’ generation might say that Ted Williams or Babe Ruth was a hero, and
probably they were, but is there any athlete today who is comparable? Jackie
Robinson was also before my time, but certainly he would be considered a hero,
but that was more because he overcame racial discrimination, so that much of
what he is admired for is performing well both on the field and off and not
being defeated by racism. I looked up to a few professional football players
and baseball players when I was a kid, but I’m not sure that the athletes I
looked up to would be categorized as heroes, and if they were, it was mostly in
the eyes of young boys like myself. Maybe young boys and girls still view
athletes as heroes, but my sense is that this is less common, that athletes are
admired, envied, celebrated, and debated. But who among them would we call a
hero – unless they had done something else, something “worthwhile” outside the
arena, that makes them admirable “as human beings”?
How about Special Olympians? I think that some
of us would call them “heroes,” and that might be sentimentality speaking. It also
reflects the fact that we admire those who overcome limitations (like Jackie
Robinson) and who work hard to achieve a goal. We identify with such people and
we admire them, not for their “gifts” but for their work ethic and for “making
society a better place”.
Who else is a hero? The classic model of the
hero is the warrior, but interestingly, in this day and age, warriors are often
anonymous. Consider the case of the Navy Seals who killed Osama bin Laden. What
are their names? We don’t know. Can they be heroes if we don’t even know their
names? In the days of the Greek warriors, heroism was all about renown, in
other words, about being known. One defied death in battle in order to be known
and in order for your name to live on, alongside the names of your ancestors.
Now that our warriors are anonymous, who are our heroes?
Isn’t it still the case that the hero must be
known, that an important component of being a hero is being recognized as such?
Are celebrities heroes? Maybe. Charles Lindbergh
was both a celebrity and a hero, and I’m sure that there are a few cases that
we could think of in which both terms apply (Neal Armstrong, Lance Armstrong before his fall from grace), but there is still no doubt that
we are talking about two separate (if sometimes overlapping) categories when we
speak of celebrities and heroes.
