Eccentric Flower:201004/Celebrity

I've been doing a little thinking, today and yesterday, about the phenomenon of celebrity.

I've said several times over the years that I believe celebrity fixation is a sign of a corrupt and fatally flawed nature, and while I do have my fun dialing up the rhetoric (today I described it as yet another symptom of the downfall of humanity, for example), I'm at least partially serious.

We love celebrities in America. We love to turn people into celebrities. We love to compulsively follow people and events and phenomena. We also love tearing them apart. Sometimes we seem to be making someone a star just so we can be there when they make a misstep, so we can revel at their downfall.

I don't think this is especially healthy and I don't think it's especially sane, and I don't know what impulse makes us do this.

I feel that, if we were healthy, we wouldn't need to concern ourselves with the activities of a pack of public-facing strangers. Sure, we could go see their films and watch their television shows and so forth, but it would stop there. I've never particularly wanted or needed to know about the lives of most of the people whose entertainment output I've enjoyed; in fact, there have been times I've wished I could know less; so that, for example, I could unabashedly enjoy the films of Harrison Ford without knowing that he's an asshole whose midlife crisis led him to leave his smart and capable wife of twenty years for an odious, anorexic, talentless thing half his age; so that I could listen to Beck recordings without my conscience giving me heartburn; so that I could see a film containing Mel Gibson again; and so on and on and on.

Let's face it: Most celebrities turn out not to be sterling people. Many actors, for example, even the ones who play smart roles, turn out to be disappointingly stupid or obnoxious; and almost all of them turn out to be too full of themselves. People don't get anywhere in the entertainment business without having a certain egotism; it's apparently a necessary element not just in being a successful public performer but also in being able to claw one's way to recognition in a business where everyone's a wanna-be. Which is fine, but I don't want to know about their flaws; I want them to keep their mouths shut.

Comedians are all insane. Comedians are insane in the Batman sense: In order to do what they do, to become what they become, they have to have suffered some kind of major mental damage somewhere along the line. I don't want to know about their crazy. I just want them to be funny.

Normal people aren't any great shakes either. Writers, who get to be closer to normal because they don't do their work in a public spotlight, are as a rule some of the most difficult and cantankerous people on earth. All writers have something a little bit wrong with them. I cannot personally speak to the personalities of composers, musicians etc as I don't know nearly as many of those as I do writers. Every visual artist I know is an utter flake. (I love some of them dearly, so don't take that as hostile; the plain fact is, I have never met an artist in a visual medium who is remotely prepared to interact with the real world except after many hard-learnt lessons. I think it just is part of the package, like comedians being damaged goods. To be that kind of artist apparently your brain has to be wired in a particular way which also happens to be bad at things like remembering to pay your taxes and so on.)

Any normal person who suddenly gets thrust into celebrity - say, those poor deluded people who go on reality shows or "American Idol" - has a better than 75 percent chance of revealing themselves as a truly odious person under the surface treatment. (For "Survivor" the rate is closer to 90 percent, as you have to be an asshole to win.)

The really good people, the stable and sane ones, would never go on one of those shows - and this gets me to my first key point which is that I believe seeking celebrity is slightly abnormal behavior. Looking for fame, looking for a spotlight, however brief - to me that kind of means something is wrong with you. Maybe minor. Maybe not hazardous. As I say, Broadway wouldn't exist without people wanting the spotlight, and that would be a shame. But it means that the kind of people who do things that are in the public eye are pretty much guaranteed to be the same kind of people whose off-camera lives and personalities I would rather not know about.

This is one of several reasons why I tend to favor British entertainers, because, on the whole - possibly because they are British - they shun overt publicity. There is no danger I will find out that the beautiful, witty, sexy, and talented Helen Mirren is actually hell-on-wheels when off-camera because - mirabile dictu! - in general when she's off-camera you don't hear about her. She turns up at an awards show every now and then and looks fabulous, and that's about it. She makes movies, and they are good movies, and the rest of her life is more or less private. There are very few American celebrities, particularly in the film industry, who can say the same.

(The Brits also seem to put more of a premium on talent than physical attractiveness, which is the other major reason why I'll take a British actor over an American one any day: Your odds are better.)

(Third reason: British actors are not sent to The Logan's Run Home For Retired Entertainers when they turn forty, or lose the ability to pretend to be forty. But I digress.)

Thing is, as was pointed out when I was grousing about the popularity of Oh No They Didn't today, I do read - religiously! - a site making fun of the clothes celebrities wear in public. And I have been following the saga of the downfall of Tiger Woods with some glee. And I do admit an occasional, unhealthy fascination with "What stupid thing will Stupid Celebrity A do/say next?"

But, you'll notice, these are all fundamentally negative phenomena. I don't have nearly as much of a problem with the tearing-celebrities-to-little-pieces aspect of our celebrity neurosis as I do with the fan-worship portion. Even though I realize that, in its way, the negative celebrity behavior is just as unhealthy as the positive side, I'm more willing to tolerate the negative stuff because I believe that the celebrities deserve it. And why do they deserve it, even if they don't do or say or wear anything particularly stupid or obnoxious (which is quite rare)? Why, they deserve it simply for wanting to be celebrities.

I believe in the ideal of modesty above all. When I encounter a person who very clearly has had the spotlight thrust upon them, who seems genuinely uncomfortable with being a celebrity, who just basically wants to be left alone to make movies or whatever, then I am wholly intolerant of anyone picking on them. They're doing it right; leave them alone. But on the whole, funny thing: Those people who really would prefer not to have publicity are also the ones who don't actually do much to find fault with. The Helen Mirrens and the Judi Denches and the Sigourney Weavers of the world, who just do their job quietly and fade out when they're not working, tend also not to have a lot of off-camera vices or missteps for the Perez Hiltons of the world to exploit.

I really do think these two facts are linked. Again: I think seeking the spotlight is slightly aberrant, and if you're aberrant there, you probably have one or two other bad habits as well. Even if it's just wearing scary clothes in public.

So, with someone like Tiger Woods, who showed signs years ago that he was way, way too full of himself, I can applaud his inevitable downfall. To me it falls in the same category as the fundamentalist preacher who is revealed to have a bad hooker habit, and so forth. If Tiger had tried harder to discourage his cult of celebrity - if he had refused all the lucrative ad contracts and so forth and just concentrated on playing golf and gone home and been utterly off-radar whenever not golfing (like VIRTUALLY EVERY OTHER GOLFER WHO HAS EVER BEEN ON THE PRO CIRCUIT), then I wouldn't be cheering his comeuppance.

But, to me, the act of wanting to be a celebrity is in and of itself sufficient reason to root for you to fail.

Under the circumstances, it will not surprise you to know how deeply uncomfortable I am with the concept of being a fan/follower of a celebrity. But, carefully here: I don't mind someone being a fan of the celebrity's work. This is an exceedingly important distinction.

Suppose I suddenly, magically, become a semi-well-known writer in an obscure corner of SF/fantasy somewhere - let's say I actually get a book published and a modest handful of people read it and like it. Maybe they like it a lot. And I turn up at an SF convention, and someone recognizes the name on my badge and says, "Hey, are you the same ___ who wrote ____? I loved that book!" and I say "Well, thanks very much" and try not to be uncomfortable, because that is a reasonable dialogue and there is nothing unreasonable about 1) their liking the work or 2) wanting to tell me so, and my love/hate relationship with my own self-worth is my own problem. Point is, any neuroses there are mine. The fan is not acting neurotically.

But I think it is also highly unlikely, in that particular scenario, that the fan would then go on to show interest in my marriage, my family, my private life, my taste in desserts, etc ... because, as a rule, SF/fantasy fans are pretty sane about that distinction: I like your books; that doesn't mean I need to know about the rest of your life.

This is the border I don't understand people crossing. If you are a fan of David Tennant's work, great! If you are enough of a fan that you would like to stay informed about his future projects and/or speculate on them, understandable! If you happen to think he's cute/sexy, well, that's your business and it's excusable behavior. He is a public figure, after all. But when you start getting interested in his private life and/or his off-camera activities, something is a wee little bit wrong with you.

I am okay with people being a fan of my work. I would love it if more people were fans of my work. But being a fan of my work is not the same as being a fan of me (and frankly, if you are a fan of me, you really should rethink that). It definitely does not mean being a fan of my life. These are very separate compartments! My friends may very well be interested in me and my life, and vice versa. But a friend is not the same thing as a fan, and being a fan does not necessarily make you a friend, nor should it.

In America it seems like this border, this distinction, has almost been wholly lost. I don't want to understate the fault of the media in playing up to this. It seems now like the default assumption is that if we are interested in someone's movies we must also be interested in who he's sleeping with; that if we like the films of Sandra Bullock (and, alas, there are some who do) then we must also be interested in the sordid matter of her exceedingly poor taste in men. I do not like these assumptions.

And although the media do feed this problem, they wouldn't feed it if there weren't a market for it. Where and why did we get this bad habit? When did it start? And most importantly, how do we break it?