celebrity gossip, academic style

A curious link crossed my Facebook feed the other day, as curious links seem to do. And because it had the words “celebrity” and “Idaho” in it, I obviously clicked. The link to led a page — officially “If Celebrities Moved to Oklahoma,” variously renamed “If Celebrities Moved to Missouri,” “If Celebrities Moved to Idaho,” “If Celebrities Moved to Alabama” — whose premise was stunningly simple.

The page design itself is straight out of 2001, but the photoshop work is masterful. The faces are those of recognizable celebrities, but the bodies (and situations) are those of the clearly poor and/or working class. The states may change, but the suggestion is the same: what would it look like if celebrities were poor?

Here are a few, but there are about a dozen in total on the site:

People play with Photoshop all the time, but there’s something particularly uncanny about this set of photos. And I think it has everything to do with class signifiers and, more importantly, the “labor” of celebrity these photos illuminate.

Class signifiers are the visual keys that signal that someone is poor. These visual keys can be divided into two categories: the physical body and the things that surround that body (clothes, jewelry, backgrounds, food items, etc).

In this picture of “Poor” Hilary Duff, for example, the body isn’t entirely visible, but we do see her hair, which is limp, poorly cut, and poorly styled. Not all poor people have limp, poorly cut, or poorly stylized hair (nor do all middle or upper class people have nice hair) but those three things signal a lack of funds for expensive (flattering) haircuts and expensive (flattering) hair product.

“Poor” Hilary Duff is also wearing fake pearls and an unfashionable blazer that doesn’t fit her frame, and knock-offs and poor tailoring = cheap. (Ill-fitting clothes can also signify that the item was a hand-me-down, or that it was purchased at a second-hand store). Again, lower-class.

Then there’s the matter of the background — cluttered, Precious Moments figurines, drawers that look like they might be for scrapbooking. All the opposite of an upper-class aesthetic and upper-class hobbies. These are small details, but they combine to thoroughly class this body, no matter the face on it.

But the class elements aren’t always so obvious. Take Michael Douglas and Catherine Zeta-Jones: Zeta-Jones has been inflated a bit (fatness is a ready signifier for lower class) and Douglas has a bad haircut/weird dye job. The clothes aren’t all that bad, although the suit jacket/tye look cheap. More than anything, it’s the setting for the photo, which is clearly that of traveling professional photographer (usually for a church, but can be for another organization) who poses couples and families in front of a drab-colored background (sometimes it’s autumn leaves, sometimes it has sweet laser beams). We all know these companies — I think the one for my church was Olin Mills. They’re like the skeezy step-brothers of the photography companies that take pictures of school kids, and the photos are never entirely flattering, the posing is always awkward, and the lighting is rarely good.

But most importantly, the photos are cheap. But in order for the price of the photo packages to remain low, the photographer can’t spend time on things like posing and lighting, doing editing in post-production, or changing settings. People with means get professional photographers who take shots of babies in the magic hour with natural light and multiple clothing changes; people without those means still want pictures of their family looking nice, and they get them from Olin Mills (or from Sears, or Wal-Mart, or whatever else is cheap).

And what about this picture of Poor Tom Cruise? Sure, the jeans look cheap, and the v-neck is oversized. But what else makes it so clear that this body is a classed one? I’m not entirely convinced on this one, but I think there’s two things going on: 1.) He’s doing something totally awkward and 2.) It’s so clearly a a crappy snapshot. Because here’s the thing: Tom Cruise does awkward, cheesy, trying-to-be-funny things all the time. But with the veneer of wealth — and the gloss of paparazzi photography — he doesn’t look nearly as foolish. Wealth provides a veneer that distracts from and masks awkwardness. Take the wealth away, and you have a guy in ill-fitting clothes pushing his pelvis out Steve Urkel style.

As for Poor Johnny Depp — there’s the face bloat, of course, and the limp hair. Out-of-date hairstyles and clothing are automatic markers of ruralness and poverty, as the distance from “fashion centers,” both economically and physically, mean that fashion either arrive late or never leave. (See the mullet above, which is clearly not ironic). There’s also the suggestion of some sort of ethnicity — Depp is meant to be either part Hispanic or part Italian, it’s unclear — with the earrings and the hair, and clear signifiers of ethnic subgroups suggest low class. (Think of the Chola’s hairstyle and lip color).

Now, to be clear, I don’t think that all people who look this way are poor, or that all people who don’t look this way have money. But we make judgments about people based on the clothes they wear and the way their bodies look, and these signifiers — earrings on men, bad facial hair, outdated haircuts, pictures from Olin Mills, Precious Moments figurines — are markers that we use to sort people into categories. Those who have money, those who do not. Those who are sophisticated, those who are not. Those who are in our own class, those who are not. Those who can be ridiculed, and those who we admire and emulate.

Those who could be celebrities, those who could never be.

And that’s where it gets sticky, because what these photos emphasize is that any face can be celebritized. Just look at the Poor Version of John Travolta:

Doesn’t “real” John Travolta actually look quite similar? It’s a thin line, readers, but that line is made of money. Any face — and any body — can be celebritized. But the amount of capital necessary to turn a low-class body into a high-class one is tremendous. You need a wardrobe of clothes, of course, and appropriate accessories, but you also need training in how to take care of your body, how to eat in order to maintain a unnaturally slim figure, how to comport yourself in public, how to use language that makes you sound educated. You need facials and pedicures and microderm abrasions. You need expensive hair coloring, and you need it every other week. You need at least an hour to do your own hair, or at least an hour for someone else to do your hair. You need your skin lightened if you’re a person of color and your skin bronzed if you’re white. You need hours upon hours to devote to a photographer who will not only light and pose you in the most flattering way possible, but then hand your photos off to a professional retoucher who will erase any signs of imperfection, a.k.a. things that don’t look high class.

The power of these photos, then, is the way that they illuminate the amount of capital it takes to make bodies not look like this. Celebrities weren’t born looking gorgeous and sophisticated. They are created; they are the product of capitol. That process is elided, in part because the allure of the celebrity is the effortlessness with which he or she appears. But it’s absolutely crucial for us to remember, if only to recall that bodies are never automatically “trashy” or “classy,” “famous” or “poor,” including our own.

Ask yourself: what marks you as a certain class to those walking down the street? And what type of clothing, behavior, accessories, and speech suggest class most strongly to you? Americans love money, but hate talking about class — in part because the clear divisions between classes are so antithetical to what America supposedly stands for. I’m not saying that class signifiers should go away, or that we should get rid of celebrities. But we should be thoughtful about class, especially the images and ideas in pop culture that are used as short-hand for class, as they silently structure our lives and the divisions between us.