American celebrity culture has become exhausting There are simply too many stars demanding our attention Matt Purple
https://spectatorworld.com/book-and-art/american-celebrity-culture-has-become-exhausting/
How was your Super Bowl party? I spent mine investing all my money in crypto and then blowing it on Peacock subscriptions.
For once it was the commercials that were the most memorable part of the game — not Matthew Stafford’s lightning arm, not even 50 Cent entering the halftime show upside-down like a bat. And that was because every ad was a broadside of celebrities. Not a fan of Bud Light Seltzer? Wait until it’s pitched to you by Guy Fieri and a race of Eloi-like doppelgangers (spoiler: you still won’t be a fan of Bud Light Seltzer). And how can I not order Uber Eats after watching Gwyneth Paltrow smell her own vagina candle while Trevor Noah eats deodorant?
I’m old enough to remember when movie stars starred in movies; now they’re hawking Doritos and cheap flights to Istanbul. Welcome to the most annoying feature of modern American life: everyone is a celebrity now. Well, not everyone. Maybe just half the country — 165 million out of 330 million sounds about right. Either way, the days when we quaintly referred to “celebrity culture” are past; it’s just “culture” now.
The United States has always had an appreciation for fame. George Washington was arguably our first real celebrity, the beloved hero of the Revolution, the man who could have been king if he’d wanted. Before him, Benjamin Franklin had achieved fame of a sort thanks to his epigrammatic Poor Richard’s Almanack, one of the most popular books in the American colonies. Afterward came Andrew Jackson, who rode into the White House on his reputation as the hero of the Battle of New Orleans.
You may have noticed something about these men: they all had very real and laudable accomplishments to their names. The same might be said of later American celebrities. Edwin Booth was one of the most famous men in nineteenth-century America, and not just because his brother happened to have murdered Abraham Lincoln. Booth was by all accounts a superb Shakespearean actor, with some critics naming him as the greatest Hamlet of his time. Americans, as the Irish still do, also used to revere their writers, with Twain, Dickens, Wilde, Hemingway and Poe all ringing bells. And while John F. Kennedy was a celebrity president, he was also an author, a senator and a war hero.
American celebrity used to have at least a whiff of the meritocratic about it. You had to do something before people would know who you were, even if that something was harmful, like robbing banks. And even then, you were hardly ubiquitous. When Oscar Wilde came to the US, Americans crowded theaters to see him precisely because he wasn’t beamed into every living room in the country. The newspapers could run their transcripts and impressions but if you wanted the real deal you had to show up yourself.
What’s changed? For one, this context has disappeared. The legendary American composer John Philip Sousa hated recorded music, worrying that it would both mechanize its composition and, importantly, tear it out of the setting of the concert hall where it belonged. Today, the TV, DVR, iPhone, and YouTube have done just that a million times over across all forms of entertainment. Seeing your favorite artist is no longer a matter of going to a show; you can just Google her name and cast her onto the 65″. It’s as though Cardi B is in the room with you. (Imagine Sousa watching the “WAP” video.)
Celebrities are unavoidable now. And if fame used to follow accomplishment, the ubiquity of celebrity has made it so that fame is its own accomplishment. Enter the Kardashians, jiggling and screeching their way across our screens, famous for being famous, as the infamous tautology goes. Want to be a celebrity? Just pull in enough Insta followers. You might get literally only fifteen minutes of fame before creative destruction incinerates you in favor of the next model. But then you just pick yourself up, get several collagen injections, and try again.
This is why the most depressing place in the known universe is the “Stories” section on the Snapchat app. Have you seen it? It’s a veritable gushing river of postmodern celebrity, X-Men stars and left asscheek models and dudes with tattoos on their incisors all whizzing past your head. “Bella Poarch shuts down fatphobia!” blares one item. “Jake Paul won’t recover from this!” pronounces another. A third says simply: “Lu.” And that’s just it. I don’t know who in the hell Lu is. Yet I feel like I should know who Lu is, like I must know in order to be properly acculturated, in order to meet Snapchat’s demanding expectation.
Such is the pressure that our glut of the rich and the famous has created. We’re supposed to keep up with the Joneses except that the Joneses keep multiplying and trying to sell us T-Mobile plans.
American celebrity culture has become exhausting. There are simply too many of these people and not enough warehouses to lock them all in. That isn’t to write off celebrities entirely, of course: I’ll still show up for a lights-out performance by Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg. Yet as for the rest of it, wake me up when Bella Poarch publishes an almanac.
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