comes through buying the right stuff: being a persistent and shrewd consumer, not just of goods but also of services, like gym memberships, financial advice, and private health care. Neoliberalism relies crucially on consumerism, and vice versa. The media—whether The Oprah Winfrey Show, Judge Judy, or Keeping Up with the Kardashians—have been full of advice about how to govern, discipline, and reinvent oneself, and provide a road map for how to be a successful subject of the market fundamentalism ethos.44 And celebrity gossip magazines, with their features on how you can get the same look, go on the same diet, get the same furniture, buy the same baby clothes, all drive home that copying celebrities’ consumer choices can be a central component of your own success when, indeed, it’s all up to you.
At the same time, most celebrities who gain a certain level of visibility and respect feel they need to be involved in at least one charitable organization. Some, like Elton John or Annie Lenox or Ellen DeGeneres, have donated to over forty organizations.45 Although many celebrities are genuine about and often deeply invested in their concerns—Michael J. Fox and his Foundation for Parkinson’s Research, for example—they also understand that not being philanthropic, especially given the amounts of money some of them make, will hurt their image. But widespread celebrity support of charities as diverse as the Breast Cancer Research Foundation or Feeding America or Make Poverty History—all completely noble causes—also emphasize the necessity of private funding to combat social problems in the face of government inaction. If we have so many celebrities giving to or championing private foundations or nongovernmental organizations, do we really need government programs to support the sick and the needy?
Fandom and the Pleasures of Celebrity Culture
While scholars like Josh Gamson, Paul McDonald, and others have emphasized that we have such an overblown celebrity culture because it is a huge business with a constant need for new raw material, they and others have also explored the consumption side of the equation. Why do we as individuals pay attention to them, even need them? Being a fan of one celebrity or another has become an utterly routine part of everyday life now. We use their biographies (however invented) as guideposts for our own lives: By what age did they do such-and-so, and can I do that too? We want their relics—the towel they used, the glove they wore, the pen they held—to somehow shorten the distance between us and them.
Early writing about fans—drawing from the word “fanatic”—mostly dismissed them as “obsessed individuals” or members of a “hysterical crowd” (think images of young women in the 1960s gripped by Beatlemania). This drew, in part, from late nineteenth and early twentieth century anxieties—based on large-scale immigration, rapid urbanization, and the explosion of popular entertainments—as working-class people, having enjoyed a degree of improvement in economic, living, and labor conditions, sought opportunities to savor the newly created weekend. As new pastimes emerged and people flocked to the boardwalks, amusement parks, and movie houses, so, too, did concerns surface about the emergence of irrational and impressionable “masses.”
In the 1940s, communication scholars working in the Marxist, Frankfurt school tradition, Adorno and Horkheimer, mentioned earlier, were deeply skeptical of the impact of new media—from recorded sound to film and radio programs to magazines—on fans’ abilities to see the world, especially power relations and inequality, clearly and critically. They lamented mass culture’s standardization and dilution of culture and argued that passive consumption of such content served as a form of ideological manipulation. Scholars such as Paul Lazarsfeld, influenced by socialism but not a Marxist, also took a paternalistic attitude toward the audience, worrying whether or not radio listeners were tuning in to “serious” broadcasts—folks of lower economic and educational achievement, it turned out, were not. Even as radio researcher Herta Herzog’s study of nonelite, female radio listeners pioneered the gratifications approach—a method that emphasizes a desire to understand the rationale and meaning-making process of audiences—Herzog nevertheless argued, from a Freudian psychoanalytic position, that the uneducated listeners were primarily motivated by a compensatory desire to fulfill their own personal lack; that is to say, a sense of resentment toward those who were more educated than themselves.
Social critics saw the “masses” as passive consumers, the dupes of popular culture, feminized and highly vulnerable to its seductions. For example, when the silent movie star and matinee idol Rudolph Valentino died in 1926 at the age of thirty-one, and his hundreds of thousands of mostly female fans went into a highly emotional state of mass mourning, the phenomenon simply corroborated the notion of fandom as “excessive” and “bordering on deranged behavior.”46 In this view, fans were inept, socially isolated individuals (and typically women), and fandom served as psychological compensation for “the absence of ‘authentic’ relationships in their lives.”47 Yet while fandom could make up for low self-esteem, lack of friendships or community, and a dull, boring life, it was also seen as “a risky, even dangerous, compensatory mechanism.”48
In time, scholars began to raise, in earnest, critical questions about the nature of fandom and the desires and motivations of audience members. A notable shift occurred in the 1980s in media studies, when various scholars, while not denying the power of the mass media or celebrity culture, began to take issue with the image of media audiences as passive dupes, accepting whatever was presented to them. Stuart Hall, one of the field’s most eminent media studies scholars, and director of the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies in the United Kingdom, proposed a model for how audience members might make meaning from the media they consume. His famous and highly influential “encoding-decoding” schema argued that some people do, indeed, take the dominant or preferred meaning of a media text at pretty much face value. Others, however—people who think all the news is biased, or hate television on basic principle—typically engage in “oppositional” readings of media texts, rejecting their premises, values, and storylines. Most people, however, engage in “negotiated” readings; they bring to bear their own knowledge and experiences when watching television or a film or reading a magazine, and accept some elements of the text while questioning or rejecting others.49
Other scholars began both testing and extending Hall’s work, and this applied to conceptions of fandom as well. In his book Claims to Fame, Josh Gamson interviewed fans themselves, as well as analyzing the celebrity production system, and developed a detailed typology of fan types. He laid out the three broad interpretive strategies that celebrity watching audiences use, depending on how aware they are of the production process, how much they believe in the veracity of the celebrity text, and how much they engage with celebrity culture. On one end of the spectrum are “Traditionals” who see fame as a recognition of internal gifts, believe most of what they read and hear, and have minimal knowledge of the actual apparatus of celebrity production; this is the stereotypical, gullible fan. “Second-order traditionals,” in the middle of the spectrum, appreciate a more complex narrative about the star in which publicity mechanisms play a role in producing his or her fame, but this knowledge does not undermine the fan’s esteem. This kind of fan is not ignorant of the publicity system but takes it into account.
On the opposite end of the spectrum is what Gamson labeled “postmodernist/antibelievers,” the total skeptics. They are interested in the techniques of artifice in and of themselves; they know about celebrity manufacture and seek out its evidence and its details, rejecting the story of the naturally rising celebrity as naïve and false. Their belief in celebrity gossip (and in the legitimacy or authenticity of celebrities) is minimal, and their awareness of and cynicism about the production process is high. This is a form of engaged disbelief, and the revelations of the celebrity-production techniques feeds rather than undermines their interest. For example, when Jake Gyllenhaal began dating the pop star Taylor Swift and then quickly broke up with her, a skeptic might wonder whether he and his publicists were trying to keep him in the headlines to help promote his latest film Southpaw.
This shift in thinking about the way audiences actively use media provided for additionally nuanced understandings of fandom. Rather than think of fans as passive consumers whose lack of taste drives their choices, John Fiske argues that fandom is denigrated precisely because it is typically
