How Fame Works. . . . .
As we move through the season of the exaltation of the gods (i.e. famous people) I’ve been giving a lot of thought to fame, what it is and how it works. As we live in the wake of the Grammy’s and on the eve of the Oscars the collective attention of our society seems to be on “stars.” Stars can be a billion miles away from us and yet we can still feel their presence. That’s how it works with celebrities. That’s how fame works.
Here’s my working definition of fame: Notoriety or acclaim accruing to a person from beyond their neighborhood. It runs the gamut from small towns to HollyWood. American Idol positions itself as what Simon Cowell regularly referred to as a “singing contest.” In reality, it is a fame machine. Somebody, rather, a whole range of “nobody’s” will be famous before the season is over. It’s a guarantee. American Idol isn’t about the music. It’s about the fame. The music is merely the means to the end.
Have you ever seen someone on American Idol from your town or who was your friend or who was a friend of your friend of your friend. Chances are you eagerly let other people know about it. Why? Because somehow, that person’s fame accrued to you. It gave you a heightened sense of importance just to be connected to them. It gave others a heightened sense of importance because they knew you and they would readily tell others they had a friend of a friend who was on American Idol or who auditioned, etc. (This is how we get the six degrees of connection to Kevin Bacon).
This is how fame works. Fame works through a fascinating combination of distance and nearness. Importance and distance create a sense of awe (i.e. the stage). The stage creates a simulated transcendence. Images and details of day to day life create a sense of familiarity (i.e. the tabloids). Tabloids create a simulated nearness. They facilitate a type of voyeurism. But if I know the famous person and you know me and your friend knows you. . . . . . somehow and in some strange way, I become famous and you do too. I learned this most profoundly when I went to the Grammy Awards a couple of years back. More on that to come. . . . .
Good stuff JD! We talk a lot about this with out students. Isn’t the basis of all of this a desire for value?
Thanks for this – a great reminder. I am guilty and it’s “icky” when connected with voyeurism.
Somewhere in the last days I read that there is a difference between the wish that a life has meaning and the wish of being famous. The one is natural and good the other is a perversion of it. I guess it was in “Dreaming with God – Secrets to Redisigning your World through God’s creative Flow” of Bill Wilson. Found this very interesting…because in a religious way we often talk ourselves to be nothing…in some way we are indeed, but there also is destiny in our lives to create something through our lives.
I don’t know JD. Are celebrities gods or are they sacrifices? I think fame itself is the god and celebrities are the people we sacrifice to get close to it.
In societies that practice human sacrifice they choose someone from among themselves. They choose someone with an ability or beauty that makes them distinctive and they decorate them, put special clothes on them, and recreate them. Then they lift them up and prepare them through special rituals and once they are so lifted they are then sacrificed. In this way, one of their own becomes part of divinity and in doing so raises the people up toward divinity as well.
Our celebrities too are selected for their abilities and for those abilities or beauty they are given luxuries and adoration. We are so happy to say that they are “down to earth” and “just like us.” all the while admiring their rise to fame. More than that, we entangle ourselves in their story, choosing to love the stars that best embody our own dreams and fantasies. Sadly this eventually gives way to derision and scorn. We start out loving them for what they can do, and then we crucify them for their imperfections. We forget that are merely human and bleed as we do. Their humanity and personhood are sacrificed so that we can lift ourselves up. We can be somehow better than they cause we haven’t been to rehab, shaved our heads, divorced nine times, or had our show cancelled cause we are on drugs. In this way we establish our own divinity despite our lack of luxury and universal adoration.
Fame is a god who feeds on not only his sacrifices but those who created them to begin with.
good insights and analysis here michaelangelo. celebrities as sacrificial lambs. i’ll smoke on that a bit. ;0)
i do think the quest for fame is the quest for god-hood. it makes a human person something other than human— at the same time they aren’t divine. they are somewhere in between– a type of demagogue. michael jackson is a good study in this. he became so famous that he literally began to disfigure his face. there’s something there. to be worshipped as a mortal does not make one divine– it, in my judgment, makes them something other than human.
As i was writing I was thinking demigod. It’s like the mysteries of Demeter… Through ritual participation people would carry the goddess within themselves hoping that she would flower in their lives the way grain flowers on the stalk.