are just part of an undifferentiated herd.
Celebrities offer a fantasy of escape from this dehumanization. They don’t wait in line, they can bend the rules and be treated as special individuals, they possess a singularity denied by large-scale bureaucratic enterprises. Most of us have to go to nine-to-five jobs where we are told what to do; we have to watch what we spend; we don’t get to marry and divorce beautiful new people every three years; we are not supposed to be “difficult” or “high maintenance.” Celebrities don’t have to play by any of these rules. They get a pass. They don’t have to rein in their various appetites (except, for women, hunger). For the most part, they get to escape from these confines.
Many celebrities in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were self-made individuals—inventors, singers, actors, industrialists—who achieved their wealth and fame not by being born into them, but through their talents and hard work. Thus they provided living testimony to the possibility of upward mobility. They also held out the fantasy of one day breaking free oneself, of being seen as a distinct, special individual who merits recognition and admiration. Celebrities then and now embody “self-expression over conformity” and “hedonism above responsibility.”15 They are heightened examples of individual achievement, which transform and challenge the rigidity of class-based societies, representing the potential for everyone to transcend them.16 By the 1920s, with the Hollywood star system firmly in place, celebrity stories in the new fan magazines emphasized the glories of the stars’ wealth and fame, which, if handled properly, ensured even further elevation from the tedium and indignities of the bureaucratized life. During the Great Depression, as Karen Sternheimer reports in Celebrity Culture and the American Dream, gossip pages and the number of photos expanded in fan magazines, which served both as “a distraction from the faltering economic system” and as reassurance “that it was still possible to become rich in America, even during the Depression.”17
There is a paradox at the core of this, because celebrities are often seen has having “charisma”—exceptional, unique, and magnetic qualities that set them apart from others—yet somehow lure us ordinary, possibly noncharismatic spectators into the reverie that we can break out from the pack as well.
Celebrity Culture as a Form of Religion
Another explanation for the purchase that celebrity culture has gained in our society is that it is similar to religion, and even a substitute for it. As Chris Rojek notes in his book Celebrity, in increasingly modernized, consumerist societies, where the acquisition of goods and status are emphasized and the centrality of religious institutions to everyday life wanes, people still need and look for some meaning, bigger than themselves, to admire and aspire to. Celebrity culture fills that need by providing, in a kind of macroreligious manner, a “cluster of human relationships in which mutual passion typically operates without physical interaction.”18 Appearing on elevated stages or large movie screens, beautifully lit or photographed, stars can seem like deities, bigger than we, above us. The celebrity becomes “the precious other.”19 In the magical world of celebrities, everything seems possible. By publicly defying the boundaries of ordinary human life, “celebrities take themselves and their fans higher,” notes Rojek, “They are the ambassadors of the celestial sphere.”20 As with gods, we can project intensely positive, even worshipful feelings onto celebrities, and this connection can “compensate for feelings of invalidation and incompleteness elsewhere in their lives” and provide a path “into genuinely meaningful experience.”21
According to this argument, religions have rituals, sacred sites, saints, gods or martyrs to deify and worship, and reliquaries—repositories for or relics from saints like a shock of their hair or things they possessed—and that celebrity culture has all these as well. People do worship actors or musicians; red carpet events and awards shows are annual rituals where the deities are venerated; the faithful flock to the Hollywood Walk of Fame to place their hands beside the imprints of those of the stars’, forever cast in stone. Fans have collected celebrities’ autographs or pictures, and those with money have sought to acquire their possessions, creating their own celebrity reliquaries, which help bring them closer to the stars and validate a connection to them.22 In the magical world of celebrities, everything seems possible—death and rebirth, when an actor who was a “has-been” makes a comeback—and even immortality—a star like Marilyn Monroe will live forever in her movies, or photographs or recordings.
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
