What is Celebrity, Who is a Celebrity?

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 19^th 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.