What do you do with a celebrity? (or, I genuinely thought his name was Arnie Hammer)

If we can be atheist, can we be a-celebrity?

My ‘Medium’ reading is fraught at best, and click-bait titles were designed keeping people like me in mind. Anyway, I was not expecting to learn that Matthew Broderick, who is apparently quite a renowned name but whom I recognize mainly from a delightful ‘Modern Family’ episode as Phil’s accidental man-date, playing a sweaty and caricature-ish gay man (‘It’s not on him, all gay characters on that show were caricatures). Imagine my confusion when I learnt that the man was involved in a fender-bender in 1987 that took two lives, and got off on a fine that is lesser than what he perhaps spends on his clothes in a week.

But I was confused, not horrified. Part of the reason could be because as a young Indian woman I am not up-to-date with all the crime-and-time stats of Hollywood, and I am not enamored with these celebrities the way I am with my Hindi film hunks. Like, Timothee Chalamet is ‘meh’ but Varun Dhawan has my heart, so clearly my loyalties lie in my homeland. But the real reason is that it is an acceptable social fissure that the good looking people we see on screen do a bunch of things, some good and some bad, but for the most part pointless, and we are the forced bystanders held not by a physical compulsion but a hypnotic sway.

We want to be the best version of ourselves but we are the version instead that slacks on our dreams, is crippled with social anxiety and reads about stars with a truly astonishing blend of love and hate.

Can’t stand against it.

Can’t get off the teacup carousel.

Can’t quit the circus.

We want to be the best version of ourselves but we are the version instead that slacks on its ambitions, is crippled with social anxiety and reads about celebrities with a truly astonishing blend of love and hate.

This isn’t the only thing, either. As much as I was moved by ‘Call me by your name’, I am mildly horrified at the charges levied against Armie Hammer (I thought his name was Arnie), which seem to be piling like a tower of shit each day. Tepid rebuttals from his lawyers are making an appearance, while I am sure he’s wondering if all of this can just disappear. The crimes that he may have conducted will never disappear, but there’s a good chance they will get wiped clean from public memory; stranger things have happened. Cancel culture is in full swing and has been subjected to almost immediate criticism for being ‘too quick to judge’, but no one is demonstrating the same energy for verdicts and judgements against the powerful that take too long to be delivered. Everyone ‘cancelled’ seems to have a probationary period, usually slashed by an apology tweet or lip service to a cause. Think ‘early release on grounds of good behavior’. A fun lip-sync challenge or an Oscar worthy project and we are back to following them, cooing over their red carpet looks and how they just seem so sweet to the paparazzi. Ellen seems to be having a tough run of it, but it’ll pass. It always does, and maybe that’s the problem.

We’re regular people; we love celebrities. Yeah, we criticize them and call them whores for attention or are disgusted by their opinions, but we still love celebrities. It may harken back to a time when we revered the fittest, strongest, most influential ones from our tribe. Celebrities seem ageless, their transgressions unfortunate errors, they are an amalgamation of artistic abilities we either don’t have or were never encouraged to pursue, and capital as if they were businessmen. Plus, they are all fuckable, and are consistently measured for this quality above all else. The men have young wives, the women with stately, respectable men who seem to love them like it is their first day together. It seems like we just can’t catch a break; all the lucky breaks were given to the skinny, fair ones.

There was a time when movie stars could get away without making a single humble attempt to fraternize with the rest of us common folk. Instead, every move made was to create a barrier, silken on one side and hemp on the other, of how celebrities lived elevated, charmed lives while the rest of us lived akin to vermin, stuck in ordinary problems and leading an anonymous existence. They flew business class and kept a barricade of security to keep the mob away and cleaned their hands with alcohol wipes after a meet-and-greet. All this was fine, it was expected. Tabloids carried stories of their high-handedness, tantrums and fierce tempers like twisted tales of valor, tales which insinuate that it was their misbehavior that established them above us, better than us. To be humble and accommodating was for nobodies like us. And yet this behavior repulsed no one; instead it only enamored people. People worshipped these guys, called them ‘stars’ and still do. Like stars, they burned bright and far and lived largely for themselves but people drew from their light and orbited around them, stuck in loops of reverence and exasperation back to reverence, never escaping, until the star has burnt out.

The same things are somehow different now. Celebrities earn more than it was ever possible in the past, but they have stepped down from the heavens and endeavor to mingle with the common folk, through social media and endless interviews and Q&A’s and ‘What’s in my bag’ type of things. These efforts are transparent and indicate the obvious — they want to seem like ‘one of us’.

The high-handedness has gone out of fashion like the velour tracksuit and ‘Uggs’. Arrogance is out, humility is in. I would not be able to put my finger on the exact reason for this shift, but a certain ‘eat the rich’ mentality has come into being, and celebs became eager to distance themselves from the villainous persona that bragging about their personal wealth would get them. This idea has only intensified in the pandemic. It is clear that COVID required the cooperation of everyone, and it levelled the field like little else. Suddenly it didn’t matter if you were a celeb with a perfect body or an insured ass. You were a body, and that body could carry the disease, so that body had to park its ass home, no questions asked. The ones who didn’t were called out mercilessly, and it was then that the whispers of ending the toxic, baselessly reverent celebrity culture began to take form. (P.S. The link address contains the words ‘virus-celebrities’. It’s almost as if they knew.)

As society has progressed (or regressed, viewer’s choice) the delta between the ‘have nots’ and the ‘gimme more’s’ has cemented between us, traversing time to become a gaping hole with no bridge across it. The ordinary man has tried to touch the enigma of a celebrity, stalking and chasing and begging for a picture in coffee shops, standing outside their mansion for a blessed glimpse. Fans are rabid; the larger the celebrity, the greater the number of rabid fans they have. But this isn’t the only class of fans that exist.

Over time a new class of fans emerged — the discerning fan. She’s not rabid after you, hugging your picture from your dashing twenties even though you’re an alcoholic fifty year old with a sordid past of striking your girlfriends (more than one, thus more than once) in public. Ironically, female celebs seldom have rabid fans; women are replaced so swiftly in the corridors of fame that they do not stick around long enough before getting cancelled entirely for either getting old, or getting bold about their rights or the rights of others. This is a somewhat different conversation altogether, but inextricably linked with how much importance men give women vs how much importance women feel comfortable giving everyone. Case in point, women are pretty insane about Taylor Swift, but also about the Jonas brothers, while men will somewhat patronize ‘Queen’ and think everything else is ‘not real music’.

Discerning fans would be people who make conscious decisions about who they want to idolize, and a celebrity’s legitimacy is increased by a fandom mostly comprised of that. It implies that people with taste, who are some kind of woke, who usually lie on the right side of being ‘left’ and some inexplicable concoction of the features mentioned are a part of their clan. Think of them to be the kind of consumers that look for sustainable shopping alternatives — they’re pickier, slightly superior about their tastes and while maybe it is all a big dump of fast fashion and eyewash after all, they need their choices to at least pretend being better.

It is no longer enough to be a stellar looking, ultra rich star with garbage for opinions. The people expect more, and through the wholly capitalist endeavor of being loved enough that an audience base is formed that consumes your work, celebs no longer get a pass.

For instance, Donald Trump is supported by legions but his fanatics amplify his flawed rhetoric; they make it impossible to forget the views he holds and the harms he has caused. Through their relentless defense of his actions he becomes more unpardonable, not less. For a long time he was just a businessman with a total three marriages and a TV show, but as he took centerstage in the biggest reality show of America, the Presidential Election, he became increasingly unpopular in all circuits that determine popularity.

Is a celebrity going to save us?

It is clearly established that someone rich or famous is not obligated to care about us. In fact, there is more evidence that points to the contrary; you have to be a special brand of ‘no fucks given’ to go against the status-quo and stand for things that may not necessarily make you popular. This means not indulging in activism for the sake of it, but to genuinely care for a cause even when it loses its seasonal appeal. In a field which is essentially a popularity contest, the disrepute or worse, obscurity, has a deliberate impact on your paycheck, and no one is going to risk that, because pristine bathtubs are fucking expensive. But as we get more facetime with our beloved celebs we seem to want more from them — whether it is for them to be vocal about the injustices of the government or for them to drop contracts with brands which are revealed to be inhumane, wasteful or concertedly evil. We do this because we think we are owed this, that the love that we gave to the most beautiful and the brightest needs to be paid back by them being morally upright, all of the time, and stay upright while we sway.

To reach the top you need to have at least a foot on the ladder.

Sit with this thought for a moment. Public morality is like the Oklahoma weather — swinging frenzied, notoriously unpredictable. So we are giving ourselves the margin for ideological error while granting none to the people who we expect to stand for us. There are other, more problematic thoughts attached to this — that we make them who they are, or that they only reached where they did because of the support of the audience. Nothing could be further from the truth. In capitalist structures the ones with profound reach can go higher — arguably, to reach the top you need to have at least a foot on the ladder. The ones who built their own ladders, put the rungs together and motivated themselves through the harsh lows are few and far between, although these stories are often peddled to the common folk to make it all seem that much possible. The people you see on screen, on stage or on one among the fifty late night shows hosted by a Jimmy or a Seth are the product of a twisted corporate set up. If you think that activism and rebellion got them there, you’re not watching the right show.

What I am trying to say, is that these are different versions of the same thing. Your high and mighty 80s favorite with the jet plane and your current ‘down to earth’ favorite actress have the same things in common — that they are in a business that provides blessed respite from being common and they’re going to take it. That was kind of the whole point of them doing this. Today, hyper connectivity works — surprising a fan at their wedding or going on a date with them for a good cause. But if these things didn’t make money, directly or indirectly, these ideas would be scrapped at the meeting table itself. In the same coin there is no telling the evolution of both technology and the perception of the filthily famous. Aloofness could roll back in style, or social media may lose its appeal which might have a ripple effect, and stars might suddenly start getting paid more to be less accessible, to create the illusion of exclusivity. All of this is not to disparage celebs or capitalism — I’m sure there are other essays for that, some which I myself will have a hand in creating — but the lesson here is, you’re all you’ve got, you and the real people around you. I don’t know what you believe but Ellen DeGeneres did not weather the pandemic like you did. There is no denying that Priyanka Chopra Jonas has experienced racism but it is not comparable to the same level of violence or exclusion that hundreds of thousands of brown skinned people experience in USA every year, with nary an option to leave the situation, or fight back. Their stories can inspire, can make you feel more seen or more worthy, but never mistake the metaphor or the representation for the real thing. You are not there, and they are not here.

A lived experience is your own, textured and mottled with the blows of life richer than what a celebrity can provide you.

Stories keep us going, they entertain and comfort us, and we partake in the human ritual of indulging in stories created by people who are certifiably good at it, with the way people race to watch Oscar nominated material after ignoring it all year, or flop work that turns into a cult classic in the next twenty years. But the way yearning for stories leads to an obsession with a celebrity culture so drastic that it has dulled our fancy for our own stories simply won’t do. A lived experience is your own, textured and mottled with the blows of life richer than what a celebrity can provide you. Life is uncertain, and the confidence of those who seem to have made it, to their passion professions and the epic loves of their lives might seem like a decent substitute to live vicariously off of, but as a person who plunges ever so often in attempts to make shit happen in her own life, I can bet that this augmented fantasy pales to beige in front of the real thing, that is you.

The long and short of it essentially is — maybe there is someone with a camera and an itch to speak her or his truth who wants to tell a story, and then there are a bunch of good looking people who play out the story for us. That’s it. It is true that every inch of gap between the filmmaking process and the real life personas of actors or stars has been preciously bottled and commodified to make extra bucks for everyone involved, but just because something is being sold doesn’t necessarily mean you buy it. Let the overpromoted product of a star’s pointless personal tastes languish on the shelves while you take a moment for yourself.

Let giving a fuck about yourself be the revolution we need.

And don’t expect the system that creates these glittering distractions educate us about this — if something could honestly liberate us from the shackles of a meaningless existence, then the powers that be are going to try their hardest to keep it from us.

Yes, they are everywhere, the celebrities and the popstars, and we’ve never questioned when it became acceptable pass time to spend printer ink and convey to us when someone’s panties showed getting out of the car or if someone flipped off the press going to prison. It’s voyeuristic, electrifying, maybe bubblegum banal for when we’re looking to run from the stress of our real life, but we need an interlude from this interlude.

Your attention is the commodity. And given that we have a limited span of attention, dwindling by the day, you might want to conserve it for things that deserve your attention. What if we just didn’t care, held ourselves up to life goals and real recreation and did not give the tiniest fuck about the good looking stars who do some very very bad things? If we can be atheist, can we be a-celebrity?

A little DIY tip: If you’re so bored, maybe you could get your friends to click you getting out of a car with no underwear on a languid weekend, or start a twitter war with a famous chef, IDK. You do you.