In her recent book On Not Being Able To Sleep: Psychoanalysis and the Modern World, Jacqueline Rose provides a great definition for what constitutes celebrity in contemporary society (in an essay originally published after the death of Diana) that is worth sharing here: I’m using it to think about Tom Cruise’s recent media hi-jinx in the lead-up to the release of War of the Worlds. Firstly, Rose acknowledges the paradoxical, impossible relation of celebrity, providing a source of entertainment that is able to provoke mixed feelings of love and hatred that can become intertwined with the viewer's subject-self identification. More than this, she posits that one of the deeper reasons for the cult of celebrity is a somewhat perverse need for the star’s ruin:
“Celebrity is often a ritual of public humiliation. Indeed, in relation to celebrity, shaming often appears to be the point.”
So, no matter how beloved the celebrity figure may be depicted in the media, we still feel that repressed desire for scandal, decline, and the fall from paradise – indeed, how low can a star fall? Culturally, it is one of our favourite literary motifs. With Tom Cruise, we can see the curse of celebrity as ritual of humiliation by his playing the role of hyperactive performing monkey on Oprah. Because of his sheer enthusiasm to the studio audience, Cruise appeared kinda scary because he broke a number of typical conventions of the Hollywood celebrity: stars are not supposed to court or enjoy their fame, it is a burden that must be endured (Jacqueline Rose again: “a celebrity is someone all too close who also stages something in the nature of a magical disappearing act.”). High, low; there, not there; present, absent: the paradox of celebrity means that for a moment Tom had kind of sunk to the level of a reality television star. Which is fitting, considering that he was on Oprah, after all, which in its hey-day was a locus in which the “ordinary” person could become (almost) famous.
But the intensity of the subsequent reportage in the world media presages a major source of anxiety toward Cruise’s talk show performance. The general view expressed is that Tom Cruise is not acting enough like a real star (reading MX on the way home the other day, I read that one late-night comedian in the US has recently said something like “OK, Tom, we’ll go and see War Of The Worlds, just please stop all of this madness!” as if it were simply too much for Tom to be sinking to such a low level). It seems unbefitting for the sheer magnitude of his celebrity, but analysing this through Rose’s psychoanalytic reading we can see that he is absolutely fulfilling the other half of the celebrity contract by making himself the object of mild shame! Just as long as he can resurrect his position and oscillate between the two spheres of admiration/humiliation: I would argue counter to Rose that it is the movement between the two that is the point.
Rose offers a final definition for celebrity:
“Celebrities are the people required by us to embody or to carry the weight of the question: who are we meant to be performing to, or what are we doing when performing to an invisible audience? We should never assume that because an audience is present, visible, that there isn’t an invisible one, hidden but present too. Among other things, public celebrity might be an elaborate diversion from the complex, often punitive audience, inside the mind (one narcissism as a diversion from another).”
The “weight” mentioned here lies in the sense of temporality – status quo is tantamount to eternity. How does the reality television star fit into this definition of celebrity that Rose lays out? Obviously we are looking at an inferior breed of celebrity, although the reality TV celebrity is someone “all to close” to us, which is always compelling, reality television stars do not embody the classical celebrity of Rose’s definition because:
1. They unembarrassedly seek fame.
But real stars can do this too (witness Cruise) so more importantly
2. There is a recognition that their subsequent fame will be fleeting and soon lost.
Rove’s contempt for the latest Big Brother evictee that I reacted to last week was bound into this acknowledgement of the ephemeral nature of her fame. I think a sense of shame is the point here too, but add to this a sense of betrayal that Rove taps into: you do not come close to embodying any of the questions that I ask of you.
The mythological figure that best describes the true celebrity: Atlas. Like Atlas, Tom Cruise needs to bear the weight for a life-time, to do anything less would be profoundly dissatisfying.
“Celebrity is often a ritual of public humiliation. Indeed, in relation to celebrity, shaming often appears to be the point.”
So, no matter how beloved the celebrity figure may be depicted in the media, we still feel that repressed desire for scandal, decline, and the fall from paradise – indeed, how low can a star fall? Culturally, it is one of our favourite literary motifs. With Tom Cruise, we can see the curse of celebrity as ritual of humiliation by his playing the role of hyperactive performing monkey on Oprah. Because of his sheer enthusiasm to the studio audience, Cruise appeared kinda scary because he broke a number of typical conventions of the Hollywood celebrity: stars are not supposed to court or enjoy their fame, it is a burden that must be endured (Jacqueline Rose again: “a celebrity is someone all too close who also stages something in the nature of a magical disappearing act.”). High, low; there, not there; present, absent: the paradox of celebrity means that for a moment Tom had kind of sunk to the level of a reality television star. Which is fitting, considering that he was on Oprah, after all, which in its hey-day was a locus in which the “ordinary” person could become (almost) famous.
But the intensity of the subsequent reportage in the world media presages a major source of anxiety toward Cruise’s talk show performance. The general view expressed is that Tom Cruise is not acting enough like a real star (reading MX on the way home the other day, I read that one late-night comedian in the US has recently said something like “OK, Tom, we’ll go and see War Of The Worlds, just please stop all of this madness!” as if it were simply too much for Tom to be sinking to such a low level). It seems unbefitting for the sheer magnitude of his celebrity, but analysing this through Rose’s psychoanalytic reading we can see that he is absolutely fulfilling the other half of the celebrity contract by making himself the object of mild shame! Just as long as he can resurrect his position and oscillate between the two spheres of admiration/humiliation: I would argue counter to Rose that it is the movement between the two that is the point.
Rose offers a final definition for celebrity:
“Celebrities are the people required by us to embody or to carry the weight of the question: who are we meant to be performing to, or what are we doing when performing to an invisible audience? We should never assume that because an audience is present, visible, that there isn’t an invisible one, hidden but present too. Among other things, public celebrity might be an elaborate diversion from the complex, often punitive audience, inside the mind (one narcissism as a diversion from another).”
The “weight” mentioned here lies in the sense of temporality – status quo is tantamount to eternity. How does the reality television star fit into this definition of celebrity that Rose lays out? Obviously we are looking at an inferior breed of celebrity, although the reality TV celebrity is someone “all to close” to us, which is always compelling, reality television stars do not embody the classical celebrity of Rose’s definition because:
1. They unembarrassedly seek fame.
But real stars can do this too (witness Cruise) so more importantly
2. There is a recognition that their subsequent fame will be fleeting and soon lost.
Rove’s contempt for the latest Big Brother evictee that I reacted to last week was bound into this acknowledgement of the ephemeral nature of her fame. I think a sense of shame is the point here too, but add to this a sense of betrayal that Rove taps into: you do not come close to embodying any of the questions that I ask of you.
The mythological figure that best describes the true celebrity: Atlas. Like Atlas, Tom Cruise needs to bear the weight for a life-time, to do anything less would be profoundly dissatisfying.
2 comments:
I think fame is different from celebrity. Can't quite recall how, though. I read up on this shit last year when writing about Russell Crowe's hobby band. I can give you the paper if you want.
There was also an interesting article about Tom Cruise in New York magazine, which suggested that rather than humiliating himself, he's 'acting himself'.
Glen - I can think of a cinematic reference to John Travolta and his earlier fame during his "fallow" period - in Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing , (made in 1989?), JT is youthfully immortalized in the Italian-American photographic hall of fame in Sal's Pizzeria, if you've seen the film these photos becoming one of the narrational pivots for questioning the ethics of racial representation (i.e. Travolta, a shameful figure indeed). The use of these old black and white photographs in the pizzeria reminds me of the way that Benjamin writes about the cult value of photography...ok, I'm going to look up the quote now... he writes about the "melancholy, incomparable beauty" of the human countenance in photographs where the people may be loved or dead, and in DTRT it is an obviously old portrait, a referent to JT's current status as obsolete. I suppose what Rose calls upon in her phenomenology of fame is this rupture between the actual performativity of celebrity and its symbolic function. So, although it has been said (famously!) that it is far better to burn out than to fade away, perhaps the proper acknowledgment of the faded star is where the revolutionary potential lies for undoing the enterprise of fame as a vehicle for the machinations of the culture industry, which the affective construction of fame attempts to cover over through the recuperative oscillation around humiliation.
Mel - I think I've read something once about the differences between fame and celebrity too, is it in that book Fame Games? I don't know, it's certainly not an area of speciality for me!
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