was immediately booked on CBS’s Late Night with David Letterman, those “fired” by Donald Trump on NBC’s The Apprentice ended up on The Today Show, and so forth. A story in Time-Warner’s People can also serve as a story or interview on Time-Warner’s CNN. When The Bachelor was launched on ABC in 2002, the network’s parent company Disney also had a 50 percent stake in Us Weekly. Thus, the magazine played a central role in promoting the show, its contestants, and the drama among them, turning many of them into celebrities, however briefly. (Wenner media, which also publishes Rolling Stone, bought back Disney’s stake in 2006.) Each media mastodon has multiple ways—and a pressing need—to promote its own celebrities, adding to the glut. Of paramount importance is ratings, sales, buzz, profits. Celebrities, whether adored or reviled, triumphant or mired in the tar pits of scandal, deliver these.
Thus we began to get what Gamson has called “industrialized celebrity production.” Along with it, there has been a kind of democratization of fame. And what comes with such proliferating opportunities is an increased desire among many to gain the spotlight, however briefly. With this kind of fame, merit and talent no longer mattered particularly. People, as the cliché goes, became famous for being famous. As David Schmid has noted, there has been something of a collapse of the difference between fame and notoriety. “Recognition and self-exposure,” he rightly observed, “are now believed to be absolute goods in themselves.”36 Ironically, while “it has never seemed easier to be famous just for being you, and possibly get rich in the process,” as Karen Sternheimer writes, “the gap between the wealthiest 1 percent and the rest of Americans has widened and wages remain stagnant.”37 So the desire to get on a reality TV show, or to promote yourself as a YouTube star or Instagram influencer, may be even more intensified in such an unequal economy.
Celebrity culture is then, in the twenty-first century, the result of an intricate, interconnected, and many-faceted industry targeted especially, although hardly exclusively, to younger people, especially women age 18–34.38 Celebrities are, or become, commodities used to attract us—consumers—to TV shows, movies, concerts, magazines, and the like. So they—their very identities—have to be marketed and have to fill certain market niches. They thus “operate as sources of capital” for various branches of the entertainment industry, as Paul McDonald notes, and “form a point of intersection between meaning and money.”39 Through various attention-getting devices—a breakout performance or outrageous behavior, backstories about adversity and crisis—the star first has to gain symbolic value as someone who appeals to people. Here they need to seem above us, yet we also need to identify with them, and they need to be seen as distinct, branded personalities—Sandra Bullock needs to be seen as different from Reese Witherspoon, for example. These specific traits—hair color and facial features, but also speech patterns, modes of behavior, how they present themselves, and stories about their rise to the top—if appealing to enough people combine to create their symbolic value as admirable individuals. As that symbolic value increases through publicity and marketing, the celebrity begins to gain economic value, which is the real mark of success.40 And, of course, when their symbolic value declines—the “has-been,” the “where-are-they-now” former celebrities, those who are caught in scandals or do or say offensive things, as Mel Gibson did—so does their economic value.
While certain celebrities remain stars for much of their lives, mostly because of their talent and achievements, but also because of very shrewd marketing and PR decisions, many others are “one-hit wonders,” or flash-in-the-pan child or reality TV stars, or were stars of formerly very popular television shows that have long been off the air. Thus, there is a pressing industrial need, especially in our overheated and highly competitive media market, to constantly find and produce new celebrities. Indeed, our contemporary media economy seems increasingly fixated on creating, promoting, and capitalizing on famous figures who, in turn, give audiences cause to turn on, tune in, and link up with a rapidly expanding array of media technologies.
Celebrity Culture and Neoliberalism
Yet another important explanation for the explosive rise in celebrity culture over the past several decades is the establishment in the 1980s and beyond of what scholars call “neoliberalism,” but might just as well be termed neoconservatism or small-government market fundamentalism. Advanced especially by the Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher administrations, and fervently embraced by the Trump administration, this was a new common sense about limiting the role of government and the absolute centrality of individual responsibility to personal success. Neoliberalism attacked the general acceptance, which emerged during the Great Depression and was cemented in the post–World War II period, that the state has a responsibility to mitigate inequality, to provide basic services, and—through a combination of monetary and fiscal means—to even out capitalism’s boom-bust cycle.
Prior to the New Deal in the 1930s, there was barely any governmental safety net that protected those who had lost their jobs, were unemployed widows with children, or older people who could no longer work. The Great Depression, with a 25 percent unemployment rate in 1933 alone, drove home how brutal and untenable this laissez-faire approach was.41 With the New Deal, it now became a given that the state should focus on full employment, economic growth, and the welfare of its citizens, and that “state power should be freely deployed” alongside of or even intervening in market processes to achieve these ends. Thus, over a thirty-year period, we got Social Security, unemployment benefits, pension funds, and Medicare and Medicaid.
But in the wake of the various economic problems of the 1970s—“stagflation” (high inflation plus high unemployment), the OPEC oil embargo that limited oil and gas imports into the United States, soaring interest rates—and the election of Reagan here and Thatcher in England, market fundamentalism became the new gospel. This religion consists of the following core tenets: a belief in what was called “trickle down” economics (cutting taxes on corporations and the wealthy will allegedly prompt them to produce more jobs, so that benefits “trickle down” to everyone) and efforts to limit or eliminate the government’s role in redistributing wealth, which rests on cutting taxes, especially for the wealthy. There is a complete faith that the market, not the government, is the best arbiter of wealth distribution. Thus, the government should stay out of providing services, especially for the needy, the poor, or retired people, because the state is allegedly less efficient, and more corrupt than, say, Wall Street or corporate America. To justify this, neoliberalism glorifies individualism and individual responsibility. As David Harvey succinctly put it, “All forms of social solidarity were to be dissolved in favor of individualism, private property, personal responsibility and family values.”42
How are we everyday people meant to internalize the market fundamentalism mantra? What persona must we assume here? And how is it related to celebrity culture? Neoliberalism insists upon and promotes the need for an idealized, productive citizen who must learn how to govern himself or herself. It is up to us to achieve self-mastery, and if we do we will control our own destiny and be autonomous and fulfilled. So our very selves must become an ongoing project, something we must work on, transform, and improve, so we can compete effectively and even succeed in this environment.43 In this worldview there are no structural, institutional obstacles that might thwart such choices for some or, conversely, offer opportunities and advantages that make them possible for others.
Celebrities, whether ones with genuine admired talent or those created through reality TV or Instagram, are such people. They personify the benefits of constant self-cultivation, self-monitoring, and self-transformation. The ones who seem to work hard, take individual responsibility for their careers and behaviors, and succeed are exemplars of—and role models for—the ideal neoliberal subject. More to the point, their prominent success as distinct, self-fashioned individuals legitimates neoliberalism as a system: they supposedly did it on their own, and definitely without help from any government or social services. Conversely, those celebrities who fail to take responsibility for fashioning a productive, individually responsible self are castigated and personify the dangers and humiliations of lacking self-mastery. In celebrity culture, there are no structural impediments to success and no need for governmental safety nets: it is all about individuals and individual
