celebrity gossip, academic style

1. What is your name, occupation, website (if applicable)?

Matt Thomas, PhD candidate in American Studies at the University of Iowa. I blog at http://submittedforyourperusal.com and tweet http://twitter.com/mattthomas.

2. What is your first memory of being drawn to a star or celebrity?

I wasn’t really into in any celebrities until I was a teenager, at which point I would clip magazine photos of, save newspaper articles about, and read books on the people who fascinated me. This was before the Internet, when researching your favorite celebrity required legwork. I got my celebrity news at the public library. As a kid, however, I was more into characters than celebrities. My first real introduction to celebrity was likely the moment I realized that Harrison Ford played both Han Solo and Indiana Jones. Also, as a kid I got told I looked like Fred Savage a lot, so I paid extra attention to Savage’s late-’80s oeuvre: The Boy Who Could Fly, The Princess Bride, Little Monsters, The Wizard, and The Wonder Years. Here was a kid, only a few years older than me, who was famous, who had a book called Fred Savage: Totally Awesome written about him. I wasn’t famous. No one had written a book about me. Not only did celebrities exist, I realized, but they were different from regular people.

3. Who are your heroes of contemporary celebritude, and why?

I admire celebrities who shun, in whole or in part, the limelight, yet despite this fact, or some cases because of it, they’re able to maintain their fame. I’m thinking here of people like Greta Garbo, Jackie Onassis, Thomas Pynchon (of whom not even a recent photo exists), and Stanley Kubrick. Even someone like Jack Nicholson, who’s seen regularly at Lakers games, but who seldom gives interviews, and hasn’t appeared on a late-night talk show since 1971, qualifies. As does anyone whose career is marked by gaps and elisions, but the moment they poke their head out from behind the curtain, the spotlight swivels their way, and the public greets them as if they had never left.

The best example I can think of here – though he probably doesn’t fit everyone’s definition of “celebrity” – is Terrence Malick, who took twenty years off between Days of Heaven (1978) and The Thin Red Line (1998), but as soon as he stepped back on the scene, every male star in Hollywood wanted to work with him. Celebrity is incredibly seductive, and it can consume, even destroy, people. Think Norma Desmond or Michael Jackson. I admire people who resist getting too caught up in it, people who focus instead on doing and making stuff that seduces the rest of us. That’s not only harder than it looks, but it requires a certain amount of courage, I think.

4. You can only be best friends with one person in all of celebritude, past and present. Who? How did you two meet? What’s your favorite thing to do together?

I’d want to be friends with Peter Bogdonivich so he could teach me how to ingratiate myself with Hollywood’s masters. I realize this is like asking the genie for unlimited wishes with my one wish, but I’ve always envied Bogdonivich’s ability to effortlessly strike up lifelong friendships with people he admired (e.g., Orson Welles) and would love to learn his secrets. We meet when I interview him. Our favorite thing to do together is watch movies.

5. You can only date one person in all of celebritude, past and present. Who? Where would your first date be? What would he/she get you for your birthday?

Elizabeth Taylor. I can’t tell you what we’d do. For my birthday, she’d pay for a vacation for just the two of us. Someplace hot. For her birthday, I’d buy her diamonds.

6. Who do you regard as the lowest depth of celebritude?

Anyone who clings desperately to the spotlight à la Heidi and Spencer. Again, see my answer to question three.

7. Name a celebrity that is:

a) Overrated: Lady Gaga

b) Underrated: Stefani Joanne Angelina Germanotta

c) Appropriately rated: Madonna

9. What is your favorite celebrity nickname and/or celebrity culture-related slang? (e.g., “Manslinger” for Kate Hudson)

“The Situation” is pretty good, and I’ve always found gossip-mag portmanteaus like “Bennifer” and “Brangelina” amusing.

10. What is the greatest/most bombastic moment of celebrity ever? (Example: A-Rod posing for a photo shoot as a centaur)

Prince changing his name to an unpronounceable symbol in 1993.

11. Where do you get gossip on your celebrities of interest? Explain more?

Mostly Twitter and entertainment news shows like Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood, Extra, TMZ, The Insider, and E! News, all of which, I’m semi-ashamed to say, I stop and watch when I stumble across them whilst channel-surfing. Now, if you had asked me this question a few years ago, I would have said gossip blogs like Perez Hilton, The Superficial, TMZ, et al., but I rarely go to any of those sites today, mostly because I feel like it’s too easy to spend the whole afternoon reading them, but also because Twitter does a pretty good job of keeping me abreast of celebrity news, even though I mainly follow academics. Magazines like People and Us Weekly have never been my thing.

12. How do celebrities and stardom relate to your own work/extra-work activities?

Professionally, and I suppose personally as well, I’m interested in American popular culture, particularly Hollywood cinema, of which celebrities are an inextricable part. Personally, and I suppose professionally as well, I’m interested in capturing and holding people’s attention, and celebrities offer clues about how to do that.

13. What is celebrity culture – and our attention, analysis, and discussion of it – important?

Not to get too grandiose, but celebrities symbolize the nation in psychodramatic form. To quote my former teacher Leo Braudy, author of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and Its History, “Modern fame is always compounded of audience’s aspirations and its despair, its need to admire and to find a scapegoat for that need. To dismiss the circus of contemporary notoriety with pat versions of Daniel Boorstin’s phrase, ‘a celebrity is someone who is famous for being famous,’ too easily allows us to ignore the importance of even celebrity in shaping the values of our society, not always for the worse.”