relationships with movie stars, from worshipping and adoring them to identifying with them. Some identified with stars with whom they felt some similarity, either in appearance, values, or behavior, and some used the stars—how they looked, dressed, and behaved—as resources for their own behavior, as a way to transform themselves, to play with identity, or to craft for themselves a mode of successful femininity. Others, however, loved losing themselves when watching a film as they imagined themselves taking on the role and identity of the star in the movie. There was a pleasure here for viewers in this “temporary loss of self” and of “sharing emotional intensity with the star.”75 Stars “serve a normative function,” providing “ideals of feminine attractiveness” but also ideals around self-confidence, self-assurance, strength, and sophistication that some viewers sought to emulate.76
Melanie Green and her colleagues have called this type of escape “transportation.” Green et al. conceptualize transportation as a distinct mental process that melds our attention, media imagery, and feelings. Their concept, known as “transportation theory,” seeks to specify how it is that audiences take pleasure in the feeling of escape and loss of self that media texts may provide and the ways in which those texts facilitate transportive experiences.77 Their work on the mechanisms of media enjoyment also helps explain why celebrity culture and gossip can be so absorbing. Transportation is, they argue, a desired state; we want to be taken into alternative universes (we all know that feeling of disappointment when we can’t “get into” a book or TV show). We enjoy the feeling of being taken away from our mundane reality into a story world. Many audience members are eager to escape from their everyday lives into another realm, in part to leave our worries, stresses, and self-consciousness behind. We connect with media characters, and through transportation may temporarily inhabit or even adopt their thoughts, goals, emotions, and behaviors, developing an illusion of intimacy with them.
Transportation expands our horizons, opens up new information, and provides us with opportunities for identity play. We can try on different personas, attitudes, and behaviors, and explore other possible selves with minimal real world costs. So we can use characters’ situations and experiences to understand our own lives and, at the same time, use criteria we typically apply in our own lives to evaluate characters’ actions and behaviors. Transportation is not always pleasurable in obvious ways; when we watch horror movies, or action films where the hero nearly dies multiple times, or desperate tearjerkers, transportation can be extremely scary or deeply upsetting. Yet these media experiences allow us to explore our ability to tolerate unpleasant emotions such as rage, fear, and sadness, and we may even seek out transportive opportunities to engage such emotions. In this way, there is “enjoyment from traveling to the Dark Side.” The delight in immersing ourselves in such narratives is their relative safety—by contrast, our real world is safe and nonthreatening, and if the hero survives the risks, so do we. “These safety modalities,” the authors argue, “interlock to banish the terror of death or failure.”78
While Green et al. focused primarily on fictional narratives like novels or films and that feeling of being “lost” in a story, we can be transported into nonfictional narratives as well, and it is that powerful sense of being transported that enables us to identify so powerfully with certain celebrities. Transportation via years-long narratives—starting in 2005, for example, the ongoing “Brangelina” love triangle and divorce saga, later the endless Kardashian dramas—allow us to “get to know” and develop a sense of intimacy with their famous protagonists through our narrative immersion. So when we open a celebrity magazine, with shots of stars in sunny Southern California in features about them being “just like us,” we can be transported, however fleetingly, into this balmy and privileged world ourselves. And just as we enjoy the highs, we also can take pleasure in the lows; when we read an in-depth profile of a celebrity, particularly one who has been through a recent triumph or tragedy, we can inhabit their feelings and relate their experiences to our own, creating a sense of pathos and shared experience.
Celebrity and Identity
Our ability to relate to and identify with celebrities also allows us to use stars as a way of considering our own identities, values, and beliefs. In our media-saturated world, being a fan is often integral to our own self-formation. Teens, in particular, may be fascinated by stars, as they manage their own ideas and expectations of self and adulthood, a connection that may help to explain why young adults are major fans and followers of celebrity culture, pop music, and individual idols.79 Indeed, we all have to develop a story about who we are, what we care about and stand for, what we hope to do with our lives, and what we do not want to be like. The vast arsenal of celebrity profiles, successes, and disasters provides raw material, resources we can try on, weave in, or reject as we construct our self-identity.80
But the lessons that celebrity narratives teach us about which personal characteristics and values are celebrated, and which are punished, are often problematic, especially when it comes to issues of gender, race, and sexuality. Stories about celebrities have, since the nineteenth century, shaped notions of admirable, even enviable identities and warned us about those to be avoided. Today, in the United States and Britain, celebrity narratives continue to emphasize stars who are white, heterosexual, and female, despite the fact that fans identify across lines of gender, race, and sexuality. In addition, young women continue to be the main subject of celebrity gossip, and its target audience.
Nonetheless, there are major pleasures for female consumers of celebrity gossip. As Andrea McDonnell has argued in Reading Celebrity Gossip Magazines, here “women take center stage”—especially women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four, with the magazines investigating and celebrating “women’s triumphs and challenges, all narrated from a female point of view.”81 Unlike the mostly male political public sphere, where government policies and current events are debated, this female-centered intimate public sphere foregrounds what is marginalized as unimportant elsewhere in the news: marriage, relationships, childbirth, motherhood, divorce.82 Celebrity culture offers an alternative realm to the mostly male-dominated news in the mainstream press. Women and girls are absolutely central to this world—they matter symbolically and economically. Women—which ones are to be admired and which ones loathed—are the drivers of celebrity journalism. They are the ones who propel the magazines off the racks. Corporate profits rest on them. Take the Kardashians: they challenge the patriarchal family; it’s the mother and the sisters who run the show and keep the dollars flowing in. Unlike schoolteachers, daycare workers, or secretaries, these women are not paid less than they’re worth, but more than they’re worth. And unlike in the precincts of Congress, families and children are of utmost importance. Women in this realm work long hours and are still able to have families because they have the support to do so.83
For young women in the early twenty-first century who have been told that they have to be supergirls, celebrity gossip magazines and sites serve as important primers. How to be sexy but not overtly sexual? How to have a career and a family? How to have success and male approval? In an age of collapsed courtship rules and “hooking up,” how to find a guy and have a long-term relationship? These are the questions about combining femininity and success that, week in and week out, celebrity gossip dramatizes. And who else to provide the right answers than female stars who seem to have cracked the code?84
But these pleasures come at a price. Because from the blogs and vlogs (video logs) to fashion and gossip magazines, the primary focus of these is not the famous female’s latest professional accomplishment, but rather her personal life, her appearance, emotions, and relationships: her life events. The central beat of celebrity journalism is emotion: love, hate, heartbreak, despair, joy. As McDonnell found in her analysis of celebrity magazines, the top five cover story topics, in order, were relationship troubles or breakups; pregnancy; stories about celebrities’ weight, bodies, or plastic surgery; weddings or engagements; and dating and romances.85
Celebrity magazines and their TV and online counterparts serve as persistent primers on what constitutes successful femininity, and what does not. Female celebrities are under relentless, withering, microscopic scrutiny. And their faces and bodies, as opposed to their talents, their smarts,
