This is a question I’ve thought about a lot recently. Why do we find celebrities so fascinating? Why do we care what Gwyneth Paltrow named her daughter, or whether Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston are having marriage problems or trying to conceive? If someone said to me, “Your neighbor five doors down whom you’ve never met is leaving her husband,” my response would be, “So?” But Billy Bob Thornton and Angelina Jolie make national (and international) headlines. Why? We regularly start threads in Cafe Society about “Celebrities you’ve met,” and similar topics, and they quickly become multi-page threads.
I know that celebrity worship isn’t a new thing. It may be more prevalent now, if only because the Internet and television make it easier to know what a celebrity is doing at any one time. But it’s something that’s probably happened since the dawn of man. But it just flat out doesn’t make sense.
They eat, shit, snore, wake up with morning breath, have pimples and bad hair days, feel grouchy, feel lazy and unmotivated, and hate how they look/think/feel…just as do the rest of us. If I met someone mega-famous, I’d be somewhat overwhelmed initially. May even do the whole, “Guess who I met?” bit with friends. But if I became friends with that person, I’m sure they’d cease to be terribly fascinating to the level of “celebrity.” Instead they’d have little annoyances like all friends do, and would just be “a friend.”
So what’s the sociological reason behind why we care (if “care” is the correct word?
FTR, I love to read those “celebrities we’ve met”-type threads, and I’ve contributed my own meager posts from time to time (growing up in northeast Texas does not prepare one for a lifetime of meeting famous people). I know that Seth Green is 5’4" tall, that James Marsters has a kid, that Brad Pitt & Jennifer Aniston are reportedly trying to have a child. I know these things about complete strangers, and I have no clue why it should interest me the least little bit. And yet strangely it does.
Celebrities have more money than me, and therefore they’re better than me.
I learned all this, and more, from Mr. Show…
Well, okay, on a more serious note: It gives a sense of glamour, a sense of the grandiose, to follow the life of a celebrity. Some people do it, I imagine, to give themselves a sense of perspective… “Oh, look at this terrible thing that happened to this millionaire!” Or maybe in some cases it’s out of pure respect. I certainly have a huge amount of respect for Johnny Depp, Edward Norton, and Charlize Theron, primarily for their acting ability.
However, I imagine that most people are just gossipy assholes… and ten bucks says that they’d LOVE to hear about a scandal that happened to a neighbor (they wouldn’t ADMIT this, of course…)
Hm, you made me think of something. Maybe it’s that with celebrities, you only see “the good parts version.” Sort of how television shows and movies only show you the interesting parts of the lives of the characters. I mean, how interesting would it be if we saw ten episodes in a row of Buffy going to school, doing her homework, and going on patrol only to not find a single vampire? In reality, if such a thing as a vampire slayer existed, it would probably be “days of boredom followed by a few minutes of excitement.”
I would imagine that the life of a celebrity is much the same, or would be if people didn’t fawn over them so much.
Are you kidding? Celebrities are chased like dogs for any scrap of scandal. They’re hounded worse than politicians! Brad Pitt is famous today for the same reason Achilles was famous in Greece (nice tie-in, huh?) Or a favorite gladiator in Rome. They’re visible, humans are curious critters. We like seeing what the people we’re staring at are doing, whether they be characters from mythology, athelets, or soap stars.
It also gives people the ability to live life vicariously through them.
Interestingly, you see the same kind of behavior between soap opera housewives over (whoever) and history geeks over Rommel.
The gist is - we like a good story, and we like it better if it is true.
I talk from an amateur fan of human evolutionary aspects.
A lot of early human communication was about determining reliability of other tribe members. Afterall if you helped someone trustable you would get back your favor. This originated “gossip” and gossip helped develop language and politics and complex social structures.
As for celebrities, well primitive tribes would naturally keep a close eye on what was happening to the tribe leaders and their dirty laundry too. Leaders also had to have a mythical quality in order to have power. I think fascination and gossiping about celebrity comes from these early power structures. Or just that leaders generated more gossip material than other tribal members.
Human nature is the same as it was 50,000 years ago, at which time celebrity itself was impossible. Everyone in a tribe would know everybody else–period. Fame as we know it today was born when mass media came into existence in the late 1700s and early 1800s. Lord Byron, I have heard, was one of the first stars.
Today, however, the mass media have the power to project one person’s image and facts relating to him or her around the globe. Human nature was not developed in such an environment, and it was completely unpredictable as to how it would react to such a situation.
You never know what humans will do until you try something on them. Cocaine and heroin, at one point novel compounds, were addictive. So, it turns out, were magazines, newspapers, books, movies, TV, and the Internet–that is, mass media.
An evolutionary psychology answer (ripped from ev-psy at yahoo) is that, as Rashak suggests, we project onto famous people today the same emotions as we projected onto tribal leaders of the past. They are the people that everyone respects, their presence in the media serving as justification for same.
At any rate, the ape is still reeling before the TV.
I tend to analyze this from a social evoutionary point of view too. My take though is that people see these successful people, and follow they’re every move because at some level they are trying to learn what makes them a success, so they can be successful too.
It worked better in ansient situations, where you could possibly see how the successful tribe-mate found and gathered roots. Now, a 55 year old 300 pound man isn’t going to learn much on how to improve his success in life my reading gossip about J-Lo’s marriage-of-the-week. But perhaps the roots of the behaviour are the same.
Yes, but it’s less likely that The Star or one of the other tabloids would publish a 4-page spread of Brad Pitt mopping his floor, brushing his teeth, and doing his taxes. Those are boring, real-life things we all have to deal with (OK, I’m sure he doesn’t mop his own floors or do his own taxes, but there are some boring things a person still has to do himself). Watching him eat isn’t terribly appealing. Watching him eat while snuggled up to someone other than his wife is interesting (from the POV of the tabloids). So by “the good stuff version” I mean the stuff that seems at least somewhat exciting.
I also wonder if some of it has to do with the fact that in TV and movies at least, the characters they play are more exciting and likable than anyone alive (including the actors themselves). I mean, my day-to-day conversations don’t consist of heavily-edited lines that are funny, witty, and relevant. If it did, I’m sure my conversations would be a lot more interesting. The same goes for clothes, makeup and hair. If I had someone with an unlimited budget to dress me, apply my makeup, and fix my hair, I’m sure I’d look a whole lot better than I do now (says the woman in the gym shorts and baggy t-shirt) and would at least appear more interesting.
P.S. The July issue of Playboy has a fascinating article on the life of a paparazzi. Worth a read.
I’ll echo the social-evolutionary theory, but I’ll go further. All social primates are wired this way. Humans are no different from chimps, gorillas, baboons, and all the rest, except we additionally have a thin veneer of so-called rationality that has (in the words of Douglas Adams) provided us with vastly superior “twig technology.”
Seriously. Study a baboon tribe on the savannah. It’s extremely eye-opening.
Before that, it was the nobility who were the “stars” that everyone was talking about. Rumors and gossip about the court and who was sleeping with whom were as rampant as they are today. People would line the streets to cheer the Duke of Such-And-Such as he rode by in his fancy clothes, much as we cheer celebrities at a premier. (Autographs seem to have become popular around the Victorian era, from what I can gather-- probably due to low literacy rates previously.) Sometimes, at a royal wedding, the crowd would be allowed to cut up the carpet that the nobles had walked on to have pieces as souvineers. (Henry VIII once famously allowed the crowd to cut his clothes off of him.)
I love the old English gossip columns. They reported their items thusly: “The D_____ss of D________e has done this and that with L____y H_________e.” Of course, back then, everyone knew who’s name fit the blank, but it makes a little puzzle for the modern reader.
