Screenshot: Array
Lighting is everything, Kim Kardashian once said about taking the perfect selfie. It’s a fact that celebrities and those who emulate them know well. Lights are not merely a way to optimize one’s appearance for the sake of keeping gazes trained. They’re a barometer for success. Stage lights, names in lights, the machine-gun blast of paparazzi flashbulbs. Or cop lights, flashlights, spotlights, strobe lights, street lights, as Kanye West rapped in “All of the Lights,” one of several luminescence-obsessed songs released this century, a golden age of paparazzi. Gaga sang about lights, of course. So did Justin Timberlake, and Lana del Rey.
Lights, very simply, signify power, which makes right now a particularly strange time to rest one’s eyes on the famous. In this quarantined world of ours, they are lit terribly, matte and overexposed, shadowy and bleeding into their backgrounds. Locking down has de-glossed celebrities virtually across the board. They are no longer flattered by intricate in-studio lighting rigs or by the glare of flashbulbs. The stay-at-home celebrity beams in via a makeshift setup. The imperfections of subpar lighting and nonprofessional lenses are the norm, even on broadcast television, which now mostly looks like YouTube.
What does it even mean to be a celebrity in a time when everyone is using more or less the same equipment to capture and broadcast their likenesses? The analysis of historian and social critic Daniel J. Boorstin is particularly useful for sorting this out. In his influential 1962 book The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, Boorstin famously described a celebrity as “a person who is known for his well-knownness.” Boorstin’s argument, somewhat myopically, did not account for art. He also did not contend with the way a celebrity’s artistic output affects his or her public image, or analyze fame as a byproduct of achievement in one’s medium. (Prince, for example, was a musician first and a celebrity second, although he did approach fame with the same virtuosity as he did any other of his instruments.) For Boorstin, a celebrity was a celebrity was a celebrity. He did not distinguish between those who are “famous for being famous” and those whose fame was more virtuously earned; it was all one class “made by all of us who willingly read about him, who like to see him on television, who buy recordings of his voice, and talk about him to our friends.”
And yet, Boorstin’s essentialism was prescient in its emphasis on public performance. This calculation has only intensified as a result of social media, something Boorstin had no concept of and yet effectively predicted. “Anyone can become a celebrity, if only he can get into the news and stay there,” wrote Boorstin. Even now, stripped of their teams, celebrities have more tools than ever to do so. At a time when people keep repeating the fallacy that “we’re all in this together” (class divisions ensure that could never be true), there is great satisfaction to be had in watching celebrities struggle with the mundane. That they are believed to be extraordinary renders their brushes with normalcy remarkable. A celebrity can never be too perfect nor too human, but when they have either quality in excess, I long to see the other. In its absence, I become bored.
In the past few months, writers have identified mass disillusionment with celebrity as part of the overall ennui of this cultural moment. And who can blame these thinkers for being fed up? It’s grating when stars remind us of the privilege that we’ve helped facilitate, and they’ve been doing a lot of that in the wake of the pandemic. On the at-home version of her talk show, a backlit Ellen DeGeneres compared quarantining in her mansion to jail. (She would probably consider staying at my Bushwick apartment to be a punishment along the lines of waterboarding.) Sitting in a bath among rose petals, Madonna called the coronavirus the “great equalizer” from whatever obscenely expensive property of hers she was holed up in. Writing about that excruciating video featuring celebrities singing “Imagine” that it seemed everyone hated, the New York Times’ Amanda Hess observed, the “Most of these people cannot even sing; their contributions suggest that the very appearance of a celebrity is a salve, as if a pandemic could be overcome by star power alone.”
Because luck and media-savvy factor so heavily into the celebrity’s acquired status, Boorstin portrays the public’s investment in those chosen few to be something of a mental gymnastics routine, an active and absurd process that requires faith if not delusion:
When we talk or read or write about celebrities, our emphasis on their marital relations and sexual habits, on their tastes in smoking, drinking, dress, sports cars, and interior decoration is our desperate effort to distinguish among the indistinguishable. How can those commonplace people like us (who, by the grace of the media, happened to become celebrities) be made to seem more interesting or bolder than we are?
Boorstin wrote this decades before Us Weekly developed its recurring feature “Stars—They’re Just Like Us,” a column predicated not on the belief that commonplace people transubstantiate into gods by sheer spectator will, but that our elected gods are capable of commonplace behavior, if only briefly. The “Stars—They’re Just Like Us” ethos does not invalidate Boorstin’s notion of our desperate efforts to venerate; instead, it works in concert, in a perpetual motion machine. We invest such belief in celebrities’ exceptionalism that signs of their mundanity become appealingly novel. This cycle is cousins with an old cliché about fame that even non-scholars can rattle off like their phone number: We build them up just to break them down. Once they’ve fallen from grace, of course, they’re eligible for underdog status; their vulnerability makes them so endearing that the temptation arises to build them up again, reentering them in the cycle. In favorite song about the doomed nature of fame, “For the Roses,” Joni Mitchell sings, “Oh the power and the glory/Just when you’re getting a taste for worship/They start bringing out the hammers/And the boards/And the nails.” The song ends with the lonely image of its narrator by herself in nature at night, the moon shining on black water “like an empty spotlight.”
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