The View of Celebrity in the 21st Century
The world of celebrity is a bigger part of popular culture today than it ever has been, with interest in both their professional and private life’s being at the forefront of a large amount of media coverage in various mediums. But why is this? Why since the turn of the 21st century has there been such a rapid rise in such interest? I will look to answer these questions by analysing the public’s fascination with celebrities and the identities that we relate to within them. I will look at a number of different media outlets to analyse how we the public identify with celebrities, including documentaries and the role that the internet has played in the increase in interest.
A celebrity is defined as being a “famous or well known person” . Generally speaking a celebrity is someone who is easily recognized with in a society or a culture, it is often the case that the people classed as celebrities show an extroverted personality and gain the Medias and therefore the public’s attention due to this.
There are a number of ways to make one’s self become regarded as a celebrity by both the public and the media. The main area that most people look at is the profession of somebody. Many celebrities tend to be, for example, film stars or members of the music industry. These careers are for a large percentage of people highly paid, highly exposed and relatively exclusive to become involved in and therefore are attractive to many members of the public who would strive to be in those positions. This is where you can begin to link the public’s increasing interest in celebrity. Other careers and industries that people who are generally regarded as celebrities tend to work in include sports, politics, artists, designers and models.
Whilst the world of celebrity as undoubtedly expanded rapidly over the last ten years it is by no means a new world. An example of the world of celebrity would be the ‘Star System’ used within the Hollywood Film Industry of the 1920s and 1930s. The Star System was a method of creating, promoting and, unfortunately rather often, exploiting young movie stars in Hollywood. The actors would often be given new identities and backgrounds so has to fit in with a certain expectation of the studio bosses but also the public who were enthralled with the actors. The Star System put more emphasis on image and promotion than it did acting talent and was known to pair up actors to go on ‘sham-dates’, the press would then be tipped off and the stars would be in the next day’s paper for the world to see and take interest in.
However we live in a different world now and the 21st Century has seen an insatiable appetite from the public grow regarding the life’s of celebrities with the rise of the massive scope and scale of the media industries enabling celebrities to be viewed more often and in more places than ever before.
However this new level of coverage of celebrities has been seen by a number of people as having an all together negative impact on popular culture, particularly with in Western cultures. Many social commentators have begun to describe society’s infatuation with celebrities as a mass media phenomenon or an emergence of the ‘Cult of Celebrity’. As I have said the increasing interest by both the media and the public has been viewed by many as a representation of the perceived dumbing down of Western Popular Culture.
This apparent ‘new wave’ of celebrity can be linked to the increase in the reality television format over the last ten years and also the ever expanding world of the internet. Indeed there are hundreds, possibly thousands of gossip magazines, websites and television networks that almost entirely focus on the promotion of the cult of celebrity. Examples of which include the Perez Hilton and TMZ websites which both regularly receives millions of hits a day, the UK publications Hello! And OK! Their American counterparts The National Enquirer and People and the television networks such as Entertainment!
This new approach to covering celebrities has seen a new breed of celebrity spawned with a number of reality television ‘stars’ receiving ever increasing attention from both the media and the public. However this new found attention has also created a new attitude from both the media and the public when it comes to how stars and celebrities are perceived.
Bob Greene expresses his disillusion with the new generation of celebrity by stating that “The new stardom doesn’t require spending any dues”. Going on to state that “For most of history people of talent would work to create something (music, art etc) that would be passed to the audience”. Greene suggest that due to the increasing promotion of the cult of celebrity audiences are now the creators of celebrity going on to add that “alleged stars of reality television have become famous for not doing but being”
Chris Hedge in his book ‘Empire of Illusion’ is even more scathing in regards to the effect of celebrity culture claiming that it is a world of “superficiality and cosmetic surgery” as well as creating a culture where “Human beings become commodities” .
Another way to look at it is that reality television has simply had a impact on allowing people their “15 minutes of fame” a phrase coined by the influential pop artist and shameless self promoter Andy Warhol. This is an interesting statement as Warhol believed that it is the media that has the power to make somebody famous, something that is becoming increasingly evident with in the current world of popular culture. Indeed since Warhol’s death there has evidently been a change in media markets as well as technological advancements that as allowed otherwise unknown individuals to gain widespread audiences in short periods of time therefore diluting the ‘statuses’ of celebrities.
The subject of celebrity within the documentary style of film making is an intriguing one as it is the area of film making that is supposed to involve the largest degree of reality within its body of work, something that celebrities are increasingly being exposed too. Indeed it can be argues that documentary film making is created in order to give a viewer a presentation of reality or in other words to “document” reality.
The famed Scottish documentary maker John Grierson argued in his essay ‘The First Principals of Documentary’ that documentary film making meant that ‘life could be exploited in a new art form, that the original actor and original scenes are better guides than their fictional counterparts’.
Grierson also, rather neatly, described the art of the documentary as being ‘creative treatment of actuality’.
I am going to analyse a number of documentaries that revolve around so called celebrities.
The first documentary is an interesting one directed by acclaimed director Todd Haynes called Superstar: The Karen Carpenter Story (1987). Whilst this may to some not be everyone’s idea of a traditional style documentary Hayes still manages to incorporate various elements of documentary film making in to the narrative of the film.
Superstar is a forty five minute film that covers the life of the pop star Karen Carpenter of the band The Carpenters, the film covers Karen’s life from her discovery within the music industry until her untimely death from anorexia aged thirty three. The film for me carries a quite open critique of the whole world of celebrity and fame with a large degree of its duration focusing on the increasing pressure that Karen felt to be seen as ‘perfect’ in an industry that is so focused on the impossible target of complete ‘perfection’ regarding its members image, an unobtainable requirement that is still often called upon even today if not more so.
Another documentary that is a personal favourite of mine and that I feel can be linked in with the Karen Carpenter documentary is one about the renowned cult musician Daniel Johnston entitled The Devil and Daniel Johnston. This 2006 film was directed by Jeff Feuerzeig and tells the story of the singer, songwriter and artist Daniel Johnston, a musician seriously affected by regular bouts of manic depression and illusions of grandeur, not caused by but certainly escalated by his work within the music industry. The film uses a much more traditional style of documentary making than that of the Todd Haynes film and features a large amount of footage ranging from current interviews, vintage performances, home movies and various discussions with the subjects family.
I feel that this film can be linked with the Karen Carpenter one as even though there was no way of Johnston ever reaching the commercial success of The Carpenters there was still every chance he would of made more of a breakthrough had he not been suffering the slings and arrows of mental illness (something that Karen was as well) and while they may of been polar opposites in terms of musical genre and taste they were still both effected by fame and celebrity in extreme ways and are fine examples of the darker side of celebrity culture regarding the way people perceive celebrities and people in the limelight to both behave and appear.
Two further documentaries regarding fame and celebrity and the damage that these worlds can cause their inhabitants are documentaries directed and produced by the acclaimed British film maker Nick Broomfield. The first a film about the life’s and marriage of the rock stars Kurt Cobain and Courtney in titled Kurt and Courtney. The second film looks at the life’s and deaths of the 1990s hip hop stars Tupac Shakur and the Notorious B.I.G, this film in a similar vein of the Kurt and Courtney documentary was named Biggie and Tupac.
The Kurt Cobain and Courtney Love documentary, whilst predominantly about the conspiracy theories surrounding Cobain’s suicide, the film also interestingly focuses on how contrastingly the couple sought out, and reacted to fame. Whilst both Cobain and Love always wanted to be successful musicians they both viewed success in an entirely different way, whilst Courtney Love thrived on being famous and the world of celebrity that comes with having a successful music career, Kurt Cobain began to despise that aspect of success which ultimately proved to be a factor in his infamous suicide in 1994. Broomfield does a good job at revealing the contrasting ambitions of this famous couple but the film also work as a fine example of the views of fame and celebrity that different people share.
Broomfield’s Biggie and Tupac documentary whilst, like the Kurt and Courtney film, mainly focuses on a different topic than fame and celebrity, in this case the rivalry between the East Coast and West Coast Hip Hop artists in America in the 1990s, a rivalry that ultimately cost both the stars their life’s when they were assassinated. Broomfield’s film attempts to investigate who was responsible for Biggie’s and Tupac’s deaths but also acts as an interesting insight into looking at how fame can affect people and their personalities. The film offers a clear contrast in the star’s characters from their beginnings, through to their successes and tragically their deaths.
These documentaries are all what you could call the ‘arty’ side of celebrity documentary making and were all made independently for presumably an independent audience but this is not always the case with documentaries surrounding celebrities.
Television, in the last ten years especially, has seen a sharp rise in the number of reality television shows that could be easily recognised and viewed as having documentary style themes to them but whilst also carrying an un-natural level of scripted reality.
The pioneering show of this kind of the last ten years is almost definitely that of The Osbournes. This television show gave the audience the opportunity to view Ozzy and Sharon Osbourne and their children Jack and Kelly away from the spotlight and inside their homes, a commodity not really used before but which has been repeated a number of times with variations of success.
One of the most famous of these new docu-reality shows was aired in the on the ITV2 network and ‘starred’ the model Katie Price and her husband Peter Andre. This documentary/reality programme revolved around following the life’s and relationship of the couple, mixing their celebrity lifestyle with the progression of their relationship and their home life. The show was a hit with fans and was a success with ratings. What is significant with about this show is that when the couple’s relationship ended and they parted ways ITV gave both Peter Andre and Katie Price their own television documentaries and played the two of one another to create some kind of rivalry between the two cultivating in the television programmes ‘What Katie Did Next’ and ‘Peter Andre: The Next Chapter’. These programmes pretty much followed the same format of their previous programme but in this case played on the couple souring relationship and used it as the marketing tool to bring in an audience.
Like their American counterpart shows such as ‘The Newlyweds’ and ‘Hogan Knows Best’, these documentaries over viewers an opportunity to see celebrities away from the limelight and in their homes and have become increasingly popular within television in modern times.
However in my opinion there is something rather low brow about this format of entertainment and I feel that they are a prime example of the representation of celebrities in today’s culture and society. With the latter era shows of this genre an increasingly mocking tone has began to creep in at the celebrities’ expense. An example of this would be the ‘Kerry Katona: Crazy in Love’. This television programme, which was aired on the MTV network, really played upon the public’s views and opinion on Katona and was edited in such a way that the audience really had the last laugh at Katona’s expense, even though it is well documented about her struggles with depression and other problems (although of course it could be argued that she did not have to participate in the programme).
These programmes and the documentary films that I mentioned before all have common elements that are recognisable within celebrity documentaries.
To create a sense of reality that all documentaries should carry a large number of celebrity documentaries tend to have a ‘warts and all’ element to them. This is significant as it remove the glitz and glamour usually associated with celebrities and instead exposes their demons, troubles or the darker side of their character, a contrast that we often don’t see. I feel this is a major factor in popularity of celebrity documentaries as they expose a world and side of those people that we often don’t see and this is what appeals to the audience, they feel that they are getting their own exclusive of the celebrities’ life that they normally would have had no chance of obtaining and this is why they watch and why this format has become so popular.
Whilst it would be inaccurate to say that the documentaries of the likes of Todd Haynes and Nick Broomfield affect the world of celebrity (it could be argued that their films have done more to expose the dangers of fame and the celebrity world to unsuspecting people) the more reality based documentaries I feel really run the risk of diluting the world of celebrity to the point where we feel that we need to be aware of every single aspect of their life’s, an aspect of our culture that has developed along with that of the celebrity culture.
Whilst not subscribing to nor having anytime for the celebrity culture that has become increasingly evident in the media and society today I do recognise that the overexposure has radically changed the way we perceive and look at celebrities but also the way in which the media covers their life’s, with an increasingly mocking tone aimed at the lower end of the celebrity scale.
I really feel that if this tone continues and are interest in the celebrity culture continues, along with the increasing desperation of some to be a part of that world then we could see a lot more Karen Carpenters in the future.