celebrity gossip, academic style

First, a few links to a string of Antenna star/celebrity-based articles:

• “It’s a Bird, It’s a GaGa! It’s….Miley?” (Lindsay Garrison on the ridiculous new Miley video for ‘Can’t be Tamed. Sneak preview: She’s dressed as a GIANT BIRD)
• “I Don’t Give a Damn About My Bad Reputation: Glee Talks Back” (Sharon Ross, with a lively comments section)
• “Character Bleed, Or, What’s Lorelei Gilmore Doing with Nate Fischer” (Kristina Busse on the ways that television characters previous roles ‘bleed’ onto their new performances.)

Now onto the actual topic of the post…..celebrity pity.

This is the cover of last week’s US Weekly — the magazine’s counter to the People Mag Sandra Bullock bombshell. And while this cover isn’t nearly as compelling as Sandy with her baby giving the reader the ‘Don’t mess with my Mom’ look, it does touch on a sentiment that’s regained tremendous currency of late: namely, that these young women have been permanently damaged and distorted by fame….and it both is and is not our fault.

[Of course, this is no new phenomenon -- fame also ruined all the child stars of the 1970s and 1980s, just as it ruined Judy Garland. It's important to remember to historicize -- but I also think that what's happening with these celebrities -- and the very public and incessant cataloguing of their respective 'falls' -- is of a different intensity than that which has come before.]

The ladies of The Hills are in the spotlight because the show just began its final season, but the generalized sentiment (and its connection to tabloidization and reality TV in general) is by no means limited to Heidi et. al. US Weekly has participated in its fair share of blaming Kate Gosselin for ‘destroying her family’ through her quest for fame, while Jezebel recently published ‘In Defense of Lindsay Lohan,’ pointing to the ways in which Lohan’s current situation is the result of shitty, very public upbringing (and celebrity-hungry parents).

The Hills — and Heidi in particular — best represent this particular brand of destruction: the ideological work of celebrity is physically mapped on her body in the form of plastic surgery so drastic that it has made her back bow. She’s also unable to hug or run, and made her mother weep when she saw her. (For more on the tragedy of Heidi, see Liz Ellcessor’s fantastic guest post from a few months back comparing Heidi to Lady MacBeth).

The basic thesis of these pieces is that celebrities have been consumed by their fame — and that process of consumption has warped their ability to see themselves clearly, function in the real world, or follow the rules of society. They drive drunk, they do coke, they starve themselves, they post inappropriate messages on Twitter, they fight with their girlfriends in public, they spend tens of thousands of dollars on energy crystals. The thing about these celebrities that was compelling in the first place — the fact that they were beautiful but also mundane, living a life different than ours but also used the word ‘like’ every other sentence — is eclipsed by their transformation into entities wholly unrecognizable as a part of our daily existence. They turn from ‘just like us’ to ‘just like we never want to be.’ Indeed, it’s no accident that Lindsay Lohan is now so often compared to Gollum from Lord of the Rings: she’s no longer recognizable as human. They become freaks — physically and mentally distorted under the spotlight.

What’s fascinating to me, though, is the way that such articles elude to our participation, but evacuate the actual articles of any potential indictment, either of ourselves (as consumers of celebrity) or of the magazines/blogs themselves (as participants in the production of celebrity). Put differently, Heidi is destroyed by fame….but this destruction is (conveniently) discursively divorced from the fact that Heidi actually gained her current level of (in)fam(y) through a series of US Weekly covers two summers ago (and subsequent follow-ups).

US Weekly even ran a cover story about Heidi’s “Revenge Plastic Surgery” — effectively endorsing the fact that she used breast implants to get revenge (and find happiness).

Of course, gossip magazines are intended to make money — and the way they do so is by recycling stories, regurgitating details but framing them differently, making one party the villain and the other the victim….and switching the tactic the very next week. This worked brilliantly during the Jon and Kate maelstrom of last summer; it worked for Speidi the summer before that. And I’m not saying that US Weekly should suddenly turn hyper moral-/ meta-conscious and begin publishing editorials about the way in which it participates in the destruction of these women. That’d burst the illusion of celebrities simply occuring naturally — and illuminate the strings of production, which no one wants to think about. Most readers want to believe that celebrities simply exist…..and aren’t the product of a celebrity industrial complex. To acknowledge the production of celebrity is to acknowledge its hollowness.

What we should think of, however — especially as feminists — is the ways in which our participation as readers of these products does, indeed, contribute to this ‘destruction’…a destruction that afflicts female celebrities far more than their male counterparts. Even our pity for them — effectively allowing Heidi to think that her surgery was a great idea, as it managed to garner her more publicity — feeds that machine.

Which isn’t to say that we shouldn’t be interested in gossip, or that reading celebrity gossip blogs is akin to taking the knife to Heidi’s skin. That sort of blame and shame usually comes from those who are wholly critical and dismissive of celebrity and gossip in general; the people who tell you that by looking at the covers of magazine in the supermarket check-out line that you’re basically causing the end of the world as we know it. I’m neither that alarmist nor that condemnatory; obviously, I participate myself.

With that said, I do think it’s important for us, whatever our level of gossip consumption, to realize that the way that fame is destructive, and to acknowledge the fact that the industrial process that produces celebrity can’t function without readers. What’s happened to Heidi, Kristen, and Lindsay Lohan is what Lainey Gossip would call ‘sad smut’ — it’s the type of thing that we shouldn’t be pleasuring in. I may be disgusted by Heidi, but I also genuinely pity her.

When you pity someone, say someone you pass panhandling on the street, what do you do? Do you laugh at that person? Lecture her on the fact that she made decisions that led her there? Give her a paper you wrote on the fact that the structures of capitalism put her there? Probably none of the above. Usually you just avert your eyes and keep walking and try to forget. If anything, these US Weekly‘s are, somewhat ironically, forcing us to confront the result of fame — and our participation in it — on a daily basis. And while US Weekly is certainly part of the problem of profiting off of sad smut, it also provides a visual reminder that haunts the gossip blogs, the doctor’s office, the gym, the supermarket aisle, reminding us, if we choose to listen, of our participation.

And that’s the catch-22 and the delicate balance of celebrity gossip: it simultaneously produces and consumes celebrity….as it works to both encourage our consumption and make us feel shame for doing so.