There are, as in many religions, ceremonies of ascent and descent. The new star is discovered and rises up, through performances, appearances on talk shows and red carpet events, magazine profiles and reviews. But then some stumble—they get too fat or too thin, are caught getting drunk or abusing drugs or cheating on their partners, or are involved in other scandals—and descend into the hell of public humiliation, excoriation, rejection, and even personal disappearance.23 Yet those who have stumbled in this way can also be redeemed and work their way back into the hearts of their fans. They are resurrected.
Celebrity Culture and Capitalism
Some theorists have maintained that celebrity culture has become an essential feature of capitalism—an often efficient and successful economic system—whose biggest failure, nonetheless, is its inability to distribute its blessings fairly: it produces societies that allow for great wealth but also permit abject poverty. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, unions, activists, journalists, reformers, and some politicians exposed, especially through large-circulation newspapers and magazines, the growing disparity between rich and poor and the negative consequences of monopoly control, in so many industries, for workers and consumers. These exposés and the reform movements they prompted occurred just as celebrity culture was consolidating and expanding even further.
Thus, the argument here is that elites need everyday people to be distracted from the persistence of structural inequality in the United States. In addition, celebrity culture serves to legitimate disparities in wealth and fame—it makes hierarchies thrilling—while also affirming often elusive, but system-sustaining, myths, like the bromide that anyone can make it to the top if she or he has talent, determination, and grit. Often mixed into this argument is that people have become narcotized dupes, preoccupied and seduced by celebrity culture: they have been trained to and want to be distracted from the realities of inequality as well.
In their famous and scathing 1944 essay on “The Culture Industries,” the German intellectual émigrés Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer were especially critical of popular culture and its potential influence. They argued that the media relay stories and interpretative frameworks consonant with the interests of the ruling classes and that their mission is to secure “obedience to the social hierarchy.” Media audiences “fall helpless victims of what is offered them,” which results in the “stunting of the mass-media consumer’s powers of imagination and spontaneity.”24 While movie stars, for example, and the movies they’re in might seem distinctive on the surface, they were simply part of Hollywood’s mass production process, which cranked out a standardization of media forms and audience tastes, through patterned, predigested, and endlessly recycled cultural entities. This they called “pseudo-individuation,” in which “every tenor voice comes to sound like a Caruso record, and the ‘natural faces’ of Texas girls are like the successful models by whom Hollywood has typecast them.”25 Such “worn grooves” in the production of stars and media fare is so numbing that in the end it thwarts people’s ability to imagine anything different, in art or indeed in political and economic relations. This, they argued, was extremely helpful to the powers that be, who relied on a docile, distracted, and nonquestioning public to preserve an unequal status quo.
The Rise and Functions of Celebrity Profiles
The rapid urbanization and industrialization in the United States in the early twentieth century and the increased geographical and social mobility they produced meant that growing numbers of people lost their moorings from their families and the communities they grew up with and knew. The “first impression,” touted as crucial in self-help books and in countless ads especially for personal care products, now mattered enormously for many trying to get a job, locate housing, make friends, and find love. Celebrities—how they looked, dressed, and behaved, as presented in their own performances and articles about them—provided the scripts to follow, the looks to try to imitate, for impression management and the presentation of self in everyday life.26
In a famous essay from 1944, “Biographies in Popular Magazines,” which analyzed magazine profiles of famous people between 1901 and 1941, Leo Lowenthal argued that what he labeled “idols of production”—self-made men, captains of industry, political leaders—had after World War I given way to “idols of consumption”—primarily entertainers and sports heroes who were often elevated by “lucky breaks.” The former were active agents, doers, while he saw the latter—at least as profiled in popular magazines—as passive; things happened to them. The article was noteworthy because it laid out an important turning point in unpacking the depiction of celebrities as both just like us yet not like us at all, a framework still very much with us.
Lowenthal’s main question asked about the reason for this turn, noting that “there must be a social need seeking gratification by this type of literature.”27 He concluded several things. Celebrity biographies provide “unbroken confidence in the opportunities open to every individual,” with the life stories of others serving as “educational models” one can envy, but also try to emulate.28 Yet with the idols of consumption, the reader enters a “dream world” that focuses on the private lives, behaviors, and personal preferences of the hero (as opposed to what actually got them to the top) and provides instruction on consumption and how to spend one’s leisure time, but not necessarily on how to actually succeed in life.29
The profiles let us into stars’ personal spheres; we learn who likes to be “the life of the party,” who drinks and who doesn’t, who likes “Brazilian cigars,” who likes to cook “Viennese dishes.”30 They urge us to judge celebrities according to their behaviors toward their tasks—if they work hard and are energetic and capable—and their behavior toward others. Are they generous, friendly, and cooperative? Do they moderate their own emotions—are they restrained, or have they succumbed to being thin skinned, irritable, or humorless? The behavioral judgments meted out provide normative codes about how we ourselves should act with others.
Yet in all of this Lowenthal emphasized the persistence of passivity in the heroes of consumption and found an odd brew of luck mixed with predetermination as explanations for their success. On the one hand, the profiles emphasized the stars’ parentage and background: for example, Clark Gable’s “stubborn determination” was derived from his “Pennsylvania Dutch ancestors,” as if Gable himself bears little responsibility for his character traits; he simply inherited them. “The individual himself appears as a mere product of his past.”31 As children they were “midget editions” of their future selves, because they were just born with talent or predilections and always knew what they wanted to do. An athlete is described as having “been born with a love of the game”; a businessman has “an instinct” for promotion; a movie star knew she wanted to be an actress “from the time she could walk,” and so they were “rubber stamped” from birth for their future careers.32 Thus, while there was, in these biographies, an emphasis on early travails, hard work, and coming up “the hard way,” there was almost always the “lucky break” of being discovered, so these celebrities were not really responsible for their own success except for how their instincts or personalities helped them. Success “merely happens,” usually by chance, so it is “an accidental and irrational event.”33 There is a fatalism here, where some people become rich and famous because it was meant to be, and the rest of us don’t. But we can vicariously enjoy their success through reading about them and trying to emulate how they behave and what they consume. By consuming like they do, we can become a little like them.
Industrial Production of Celebrities
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