celebrity gossip, academic style

(Today’s Guest Post comes from Liz Ellcessor, a Ph.D. student in media and cultural studies at the University of Wisconson-Madison. Find her fantastic blog at Dis/Embody.)

The latest stage in the neverending, intertextual, multimedia, and much-maligned rise of the stars of MTV’s “reality” series The Hills has centered on Heidi Montag Pratt’s extensive plastic surgery. “10 Procedures at Once!” People, trumpeted, complete with a quotation from Heidi that she is “addicted” to plastic surgery – a believable claim, as this is at least the third set of procedures the 23 year old has had done since emerging on the celebrity scene (a nose job and bigger breasts preceded the most recent improvements).

There has been quite a bit coverage of the stars of The Hills during its 5 seasons. Castmembers including Heidi, her husband Spencer Pratt, Audrina Patridge, Stephanie Pratt, Whitney Port and Brody Jenner have been the subjects - and financial beneficiaries – of celebrity tabloids, particularly US Weekly. Hills star Lauren Conrad, has appeared on more “respectable” covers, as well, including Seventeen, Entertainment Weekly and Cosmopolitan. Heidi and her husband, Spencer Pratt, are largely excluded from these venues, where other co-stars sometimes appear, as well as from cast events that Conrad attends. Due to feud after the second season – involving Lauren, a sex tape, Perez Hilton, and some tasteless interviews by Spencer – subsequent seasons of The Hills largely kept the couple apart from the putative star of the series, cordoning them off in their own plots and excluding them from promotional activities that involved Conrad. Since Conrad’s departure from the show, the Pratts have had a more significant presence, but Heidi was still denied the “starring” role as narrator, a part given to Conrad’s Laguna Beach nemesis Kristin Cavalleri.

Yet, Heidi and Spencer are perhaps the most visible Hills cast members in contemporary celebrity culture. Through their Twitter accounts, Heidi’s music career and Miss Universe performance, appearances on I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here!, a boisterous public religiosity, interviews with David Letterman and a close relationship with Perez Hilton (plus their own hired paparazzi), Speidi are available for consumption at every click of the mouse, push of a button, and trip to the grocery store. Spencer attributes their pop cultural success to their willingness (particularly his) to play the part of the villain, engendering a love-to-hate-them response that carries an audience from outrageous fake Mexican wedding to outrageous fake LA wedding to multiple plastic surgeries.

While this villainous narrative is certainly a part of the plot of The Hills, particularly seasons 3-5, it is most certainly more directly applicable to Spencer than to Heidi – while his vitriol towards Conrad spewed forth, Heidi seemed to retain a desire to regain her friendship with Conrad, and seemed uncomfortable with some of Spencer’s more outré anti-social behavior. Having rewatched early seasons of The Hills recently, I want to suggest an alternative reading of the program and its extensions into gossip blogs and tabloid publications. Removing our focus from the aspirational elements and relatable themes of young women trying to make it in the big city, Heidi’s “character” – a version of herself and her star text - emerges as a potential tragic figure, undercutting the spectacle of the program and her own celebrity with a sense of impending doom.

During the first season of The Hills, Heidi was the second lead. Living with new best friend Lauren Conrad, attending school before beginning a new job, meeting a new boyfriend, and acting as a supportive friend to Lauren’s pathos, Heidi was charming. She was funny, she liked dogs, and while she may have seemed a little professionally unfocused, she carried a youthful optimism and was an important part of the show’s emerging dynamic. Yet, even in these early shows – and her brief appearance in Laguna Beach a retrospective view clearly illuminates what will become Heidi’s tragic flaw – like Macbeth’s, it seems to be ambition. In Heidi’s case, the ambition is not necessarily for a kingdom, but for attention and fame. Her runway kiss with Cavalleri, her desire for a music career, dropping out of college for a PR job, changing her appearance – all seem to point to a young woman eager to be popular, visible, adored.

As Shakespeare’s Macbeth killed the king, Duncan, with the encouragement of Lady Macbeth, giving his ambition full flower and leading to his downfall, Heidi’s ambition bloomed with her relationship with Spencer. In the context of The Hills, Heidi could never become the star – it remained Conrad’s show, and when Heidi moved out at the end of season two (to live with Spencer, whom Conrad disliked), it dramatically shifted her out of the central plots. Short of killing Conrad, what were an ambitious reality starlet and her celebrity hanger-on of a boyfriend to do?

By all appearances, Spencer used the time between seasons to take the text of The Hills well outside the borders of the MTV storyworld and tell the world a different story. Using Perez Hilton to get his message out to the public, Spencer asserted that rich-girl-next-door Conrad had made a sex tape with her drug-addicted ex-boyfriend. This attempt to tarnish Conrad’s image - complete with some extremely personal insults – could have utterly changed the direction of The Hills and Heidi and Spencer’s future success. Had it worked, had audiences turned on Conrad and MTV have released her to cut their losses, Heidi was still in a strong position as the second female lead – the show could easily have reoriented around her story. Though Spencer’s role in the sex tape rumor has been largely acknowledged, Heidi’s possible participation in or support is unclear – in an infamous scene, Conrad screams at Heidi, “you know what you did!”, but, in fact, we don’t know what Heidi did. Did she calculate that professional success, acclaim and attention were worth whatever falling out might ensue with her television friend? Did she turn herself over to a pernicious influence in the form of Spencer, her very own Lady Macbeth?

In the end, this ploy failed – Conrad and the boyfriend denied the rumors, MTV stood behind its proven star, and Heidi and Spencer were increasingly pushed to the periphery of the show. From this position, their newly chosen role as “villains” emerged, as Spencer continued to lambast “LC” and encourage Heidi to revel in the ended friendship. Within the show, Heidi’s discomfort with this was visible in her stated desire to reconnect with Conrad, in her desire for female friendships generally, in her dissatisfaction with her relationship with Spencer – even as they moved toward marriage, the couple fought openly and constantly. Additionally, though, Heidi’s on-screen presence lost its verve and charm. She seemed an increasingly wooden actress going through the motions, as she probably was, given the largely scripted or directed nature of the program. Was Heidi uncomfortable in this story, in this representation of self and image that would follow her outside the television screen?

The sex tape scandal is illustrative of the rise of Speidi outside The Hills as well, as it marked the moment when the extratextual, multiplatform, gossipy discussion surrounding the series became more interesting than what the dream-like reality soap opera could deliver. Suddenly, the “real” story of The Hills was always already happening – events transpired in the tabloids months before they aired, in edited form, on television. Here, then, Heidi and Spencer could shine – generating tabloid stories, staged photo opportunities, new music videos, and more, the couple found an alternative path to achieving a degree of celebrity notoriety. Ambition, then, was realized.

But, as Speidi’s antics evolve, this retrospective reading of Heidi as a tragic character primes us to wonder about her (inevitable?) fall. At what point will the ambition that drove her so far – ending relationships, losing status, staging PR stunts, releasing embarrassing music, getting extensive plastic surgery – begin to harm her? And at that point, what is the responsibility of those of us who watched her transformation from afar? Given the bodily extremity of Heidi’s latest news cycle, the tragic sense of doom seems all the more palpable, and the fall all the more imminent.