The democracy of fame?

 
Jake Halpern
FAME JUNKIES
The hidden truths behind America’s favorite addiction
226pp. New York: Houghton Mifflin. $23.
978 0 61845 369 6

In 1961, Daniel Boorstin defined a celebrity as someone “who is known for his well-knownness”. Fame, Boorstin believed, was no longer meritocratic, earned by talent and accomplishment; instead, it had come to accrue mostly to hype and exhibitionism. In the years since, we have seen some twists on Boorstin’s theme. It is, for example, now possible to become well known for not being well known, as was made plain in the American Express “Do You Know Me?” television commercials of some years ago. “Do you know me?”, asked the former US treasurer Francine Neff, indicating that although her signature appeared on every US bill minted in the mid 1970s, she needed her American Express card to be recognized. Numerous social theorists have observed since Boorstin that while celebrity may have become no more meritocratic, at least it has become more democratic, more widely distributed. Thanks to the blogosphere and YouTube, ever more of us are able to call attention to our obscurity, and use our very lack of well-knownness as a springboard to fame.

In Fame Junkies, Jake Halpern pours cold water on the idea that fame has become meaningfully democratized. He focuses on the world of entertainment, yet innovatively shifts our gaze from celebrities themselves to three sub-cultures of celebrity in America. The first comprises parents who spend big money to send their children to trade shows to parade in front of talent agents, in the hope of signing an acting or modelling contract. The second consists of personal assistants to celebrities; here, Halpern follows thirty-two-year-old Dean Johnson, who impulsively quit his marketing job in South Carolina, travelled to Los Angeles, and became an aide to a succession of minor celebrities on a career path leading nowhere. Finally, Halpern turns to fans such as Marcy Braunstein, whose Pittsburgh home features a room-sized shrine to Rod Stewart, a few paces from the bedroom she shares with her unaccountably tolerant husband.

In a true democracy, those lower down can elect, interact with, identify with and enter the elite. Halpern’s focus on celebrity aspirants, assistants and fans allows him to assess how democratic the world of celebrity is by these standards. The capacity for fans to control who becomes a celebrity by electing them has, recently, become something of a cultural phenomenon, especially in what Halpern calls “the ultimate competition for celebrityhood” – American Idol – and other shows such as Rock Star. And yet, in all of these cases, the celebrity judges ensure that they retain a decisive say in the matter. On American Idol, they unilaterally narrow the options available to the voters; on Rock Star, they determine which of the public’s least-preferred alternatives will be jettisoned.

Do fans interact with celebrities in a democratic fashion? Far from it. Halpern notes that our relationships with celebrities can easily become uniquely, even weirdly, “para-social”. We daydream about giving our favourite pop singer a new song idea or coo at the television stars on the screen; but, Halpern says, they don’t hear us. It is only we who hear them, via the mass media. Even if we cannot really communicate with celebrities, democratic norms say that we should at least see ourselves in them. The point behind the US Weekly feature “Stars! They’re Just Like Us”, which shows celebrities grocery shopping or filling up the car, is to establish (here Halpern quotes the Editor, Janice Min) that the “distinction between us and them no longer exists”. The implication is that the more we understand that celebrities are ordinary, the more content we will be with the democratic fairness of life. But, as Halpern shows through his portraits of star-struck would-be child models and their frustrated parents, the more you identify with celebrities, the more you will wonder why they’re the celebrities and you’re not. Finally, in real democracies, for every person who attains a position of democratic leadership, someone else has to relinquish it. There must be genuine circulation. But even if (thanks to the blogosphere and YouTube) more of us are fledgling celebrities than ever, we still find the old ones sucking up the oxygen. Even if some of us ascend, most of them do not yield ground by descending; there is, Halpern says, “no expiration date on celebrityhood”. “Seemingly every single person in the country”, Halpern says, is “lining up to become famous.” They have to line up, because the way is clogged. Halpern writes with verve and insight, but because of his focus on aspirants, assistants and fans, he misses the possibility that the most democratic element in American celebrity might be lodged where we’d least expect it: within celebrities themselves. Many, in their selfpresentations, suggest that when it comes to the us–them divide that Halpern chronicles they, too, see themselves more on the “us” than on the “them” side.

It is often noted that celebrities refer to themselves in the first-person plural. “For two years,” Garth Brooks recently told the Independent, “we couldn’t find anything that we wanted to be an actor in.” Other famous people have cultivated the habit of referring to themselves in the third-person singular: “I’ve been very careful that Deborah Norville does the right thing”, the TV personality Deborah Norville told the Seattle Times last year; “Deborah has been pretty clever about managing her associations”. The actor Richard Dreyfuss uses both the first-person plural and the third-person singular (possibly, one day, he will start referring to himself as “they”).

These usages seem elitist, but celebrities themselves offer a democratic explanation for them. The first-person plural acknowledges that a celebrity’s success is a team effort; the third-person singular modestly distances the celebrity from his or her own accomplishments. Undoubtedly, democratic explanations for first-person plural and third-person singular usages are often disingenuous. But even where they are, they show an awareness, on the part of the celebrity offering them, of the democratic legitimacy that comes from locating himself closer to us and further from himself: it demonstrates an eagerness to pay deference to democratic norms.

Jake Halpern offers an insightful corrective to the hoopla surrounding the perceived democratization of fame, showing that the realm of celebrity remains very much an elitist one. Even so, behind what seems to be their elitist hauteur, celebrities might be haltingly, half-consciously, trying to reassure themselves, and us, of their democratic credentials.

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Andrew Stark teaches Management at the University of Toronto.