#144: Why we can’t leave celebrities alone
Ariana, Taylor, Kendall, et al.
Good morning!
In my week away I engaged in the time-honored tradition of going online, and found that once again we as a culture were debating how to talk about celebrities. To me this conversation has always felt unsatisfying, so today I’d like to weigh in.
Why we can’t leave celebrities alone
A couple weeks ago, via a straight-to-cam TikTok post, Ariana Grande pleaded with her fans to stop speculating about changes in her appearance. “You never know what someone is going through,” she said, after stating that she’s healthy. “So even if you are coming from a loving place and a caring place, that person is probably working on it or has a support system that they are working on it with, and you never know.” Predictably, she received an outpouring of love and support from fans in response, which, also predictably, will soon be recycled back into the same fervor that inspired the speculation in the first place. This is a familiar deadlock. Celebrities and gossip are in a perpetual wrestle with each other that, from a certain angle, looks a little bit like fucking.
Evidence of this dynamic is abundant and constantly renewing. From recent memory: Taylor Swift fans telling other Taylor Swift fans to stop looking for hints about her breakup with Joe Alwyn “out of respect,” despite Swift’s creative output often being composed of such hints. Millie Bobby Brown fans telling everyone to stop commenting on her engagement as a 19-year-old, despite her announcing it on Instagram with comments open. The Love Is Blind contestants asking the public to stop opining about their love lives after agreeing to participate in a show that lets cameras follow their love lives. There is an elementary directive implied in this policing: If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all. Frankly, it will never work.
It doesn’t feel good to defend the public’s vulturous appetite for unpacking the intimate details of strangers’ lives, obviously. One of the more detestable but popular ways to do this is to claim that endless prying is the “price of admission” for being famous, as if anyone would knowingly sign on to never live in peace again (okay maybe some would…). I think a better, less cruel argument is that the partnership between fame and gossip is not causal, but fundamental. Hardness is not “the price of admission” for being a rock; it is intrinsic to it. Fame is literally the state of being known and talked about. So while the clarion calls to “leave celebrities alone” make an obvious moral sense, they present a paradox: A celebrity left alone is no longer a celebrity.
The modern celebrity exists not in spite of our gossiping, but because of it. Some people may believe they exist because they’re exceptional, but I don’t think that argument stands up to basically any scrutiny. This doesn’t mean celebrities are never exceptional; it only means their exceptionality wouldn’t be recognized if they weren’t also active traders in the currency of public interest. In other words, if they didn’t supply at least a little fodder for gossip, they’d cease to be famous (or in the case of the genuinely exceptional, be relegated to the civilized world of institutional renown). Few choose to make this sacrifice, because fame confers great social, economic, and legal privileges, grants influence and authority, and inspires, in some cases, near-religious fealty—extremely attractive perks. And none of those perks are unlocked, or sustained, without visibility: Interviews, paparazzi photos, social posts, performances, photoshoots, collaborations, publicity statements, “anonymous sources.” Celebrities know this attention ecosystem better than anyone, and have hired help to keep it thriving. It may be easy to get famous these days, but it takes genuine effort to stay that way. In return for that effort, we (the public) keep them famous by discussing them ad nauseam.
If you take celeb gossip at face value (what did Rihanna wear to dinner after announcing her pregnancy? What did Kendall Jenner just whisper in Bad Bunny’s ear? At what point in the Don’t Worry Darling production did Olivia Wilde fire Shia LeBeouf?), it’s easy to call it useless. Mostly it is. But in the same way that it’s useless to know, say, exactly how your coworker reacted when she found out her ex was pregnant—that is, not of tangible utility, but potentially interesting to judge and dissect among friends. As most of us have now established in our various defenses of feminine-coded communication, gossip serves a purpose beyond the accumulation of inane data. We use it to negotiate how we see the world and behave within it, to sharpen our understandings of ourselves and other people, to connect by agreeing or disagreeing on any of that, thereby establishing ourselves within groups or cohorts.
Whether celebrities happen to interest you as cultural bellwethers (I personally waiver) has little to do with their validity as such. In this way they’re not unlike politics or the changing of the seasons: rare plots of common ground in an increasingly fractured, globalized world. This is the true impetus of celebrity culture. Not hero worship, but gossip. So however much public figures bemoan their lack of privacy, I think we’re naive to assume they aren’t also personally invested in it. No one wants to be stalked or harassed of course, but speculation is not abuse, and even if celebrities begrudge their inability to perfectly control it, they know their status—their purpose, their relevance—crumbles in its absence.
In one sense Ariana Grande had a point. How we choose to gossip about celebrities tells us something about our values and preoccupations as a culture, however unhealthy. But our specific fixation with her weight isn’t a disease we can treat in any isolated sense. It’s a symptom of a much deeper wound. Gossip, then, is not an end, but a means, and it can’t be stopped. I don’t say that with pleasure. I think being a celebrity sounds genuinely and profoundly miserable; there’s a reason I willingly gave up the perks of intense public exposure a couple years ago. But our media literacy needs work if we think it’s actually possible to leave celebrities alone. If the culture surrounding fame strikes us as immoral, we’d be wiser to take aim at fame itself.
Last week’s 15 things “I Really Didn’t Want to Go,” by Lauren Oyler for Harper’s, a great addition and subversion to the writer-stuck-on-a-cruise subgenre. Last week’s 15 things also included jeans I won't take off, citrus pops, a Love Island realization, and more. The rec of the week was kitchen sink accoutrement—a rousing topic. Podcast is back on Tuesday!
Hope you have a nice Sunday,
Haley
Cover image by David Crotty for Getty.