Seeing by Starlight: Celebrity Obsession
by Carlin Fiora, published on Psychology Today
A few years ago, Britney Spears and her entourage swept through my boss's office. As
she sashayed past, I blushed and stammered and leaned over my desk to shake her
hand. She looked right into my eyes and smiled her pageant smile, and I confess, I felt
dizzy. I immediately rang up friends to report my celebrity encounter, saying: "She
had on a gorgeous, floor-length white fur coat! Her skin was blotchy!" I've never been
much of a Britney fan, so why the contact high? Why should I care? For that matter,
why should any of us? Celebrities are fascinating because they live in a parallel
universe—one that looks and feels just like ours yet is light-years beyond our reach.
Stars cry to Diane Sawyer about their problems—failed marriages, hardscrabble
upbringings, bad career decisions—and we can relate. The paparazzi catch them in wet
hair and a stained T-shirt, and we're thrilled. They're ordinary folks, just like us. And
yet…
Stars live in another world entirely, one that makes our lives seem woefully dull by
comparison. The teary chat with Diane quickly turns to the subject of a recent $10
million film fee and honorary United Nations ambassadorship. The magazines that
specialize in gotcha snapshots of schleppy-looking celebs also feature Cameron Diaz
wrapped in a $15,000 couture gown and glowing with youth, money and star power.
We're left hanging—and we want more.
It's easy to blame the media for this cognitive whiplash. But the real celebrity
spinmeister is our own mind, which tricks us into believing the stars are our lovers and
our social intimates. Celebrity culture plays to all of our innate tendencies: We're built
to view anyone we recognize as an acquaintance ripe for gossip or for romance, hence
our powerful interest in Anna Kournikova's love life. Since catching sight of a beautiful
face bathes the brain in pleasing chemicals, George Clooney's killer smile is impossible
to ignore. But when celebrities are both our intimate daily companions and as distant as
the heavens above, it's hard to know just how to think of them. Reality TV further
confuses the picture by transforming ordinary folk into bold-faced names without
warning. Even celebrities themselves are not immune to celebrity watching: Magazines
print pictures of Demi Moore and "Bachelorette" Trista Rehn reading the very same
gossip magazines that stalk them. "Most pushers are users, don't you think?" says top
Hollywood publicist Michael Levine. "And, by the way, it's not the worst thing in the
world to do."
Celebrities tap into powerful motivational systems designed to foster romantic love
and to urge us to find a mate. Stars summon our most human yearnings: to love, admire,
copy and, of course, to gossip and to jeer. It's only natural that we get pulled into
their gravitational field.
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John Lennon infuriated the faithful when he said the Beatles were more popular than
Jesus, but he wasn't the first to suggest that celebrity culture was taking the place of
religion. With its myths, its rituals (the red carpet walk, the Super Bowl ring, the
handprints outside Grauman's Chinese Theater) and its ability to immortalize, it fills a
similar cultural niche. In a secular society our need for ritualized idol worship can be
displaced onto stars, speculates psychologist James Houran, formerly of the Southern
Illinois University School of Medicine and now director of psychological studies for
True Beginnings dating service. Nonreligious people tend to be more interested in
celebrity culture, he's found, and Houran speculates that for them, celebrity fills some
of the same roles the church fills for believers, like the desire to admire the powerful
and the drive to fit into a community of people with shared values. Leo Braudy, author
of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History, suggests that celebrities are more like
Christian calendar saints than like spiritual authorities (Tiger Woods, patron saint of
arriviste golfers; or Jimmy Carter, protector of down-home liberal farmers?).
"Celebrities have their aura—a debased version of charisma" that stems from their allpowerful captivating presence, Braudy says.
Much like spiritual guidance, celebrity watching can be inspiring, or at least help us
muster the will to tackle our own problems. "Celebrities motivate us to make it," says
Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Oprah Winfrey
suffered through poverty, sexual abuse and racial discrimination to become the
wealthiest woman in media. Lance Armstrong survived advanced testicular cancer and
went on to win the Tour de France five times. Star watching can also simply point the
way to a grander, more dramatic way of living, publicist Levine says. "We live lives more
dedicated to safety or quiet desperation, and we transcend this by connecting with
bigger lives—those of the stars," he says. "We're afraid to eat that fatty muffin, but
Ozzy Osborne isn't."
Don't I know you?! Celebrities are also common currency in our socially fractured
world. Depressed college coeds and laid-off factory workers both spend hours
watching Anna Nicole Smith on late night television; Mexican villagers trade theories
with hometown friends about who killed rapper Tupac Shakur; and Liberian and German
businessmen critique David Beckham's plays before hammering out deals. My friend
Britney Spears was, in fact, the top international Internet search of 2003.
In our global village, the best targets for gossip are the faces we all know. We are
born to dish dirt, evolutionary psychologists agree; it's the most efficient way to
navigate society and to determine who is trustworthy. They also point out that when
our brains evolved, anybody with a familiar face was an "in-group" member, a person
whose alliances and enmities were important to keep track of.
Things have changed somewhat since life in the Pleistocene era, but our neural
hardwiring hasn't, so on some deeper level, we may think NBC's Friends really are our
friends. Many of us have had the celebrity-sighting mishap of mistaking a minor star—a
local weatherman, say, or a bit-part soap opera actor—for an acquaintance or former
schoolmate. Braudy's favorite example of this mistake: In one episode of the cartoon
show King of the Hill, a character meets former Texas Governor Ann Richards. "You
probably know me," he says. "I've seen you on TV." That's also why we don't get bored
by star gossip, says Bonnie Fuller, editorial director of American Media, which
publishes Star and The Enquirer: "That would be like getting bored with information
about family and friends!"
The brain simply doesn't realize that it's being fooled by TV and movies, says
sociologist Satoshi Kanazawa, lecturer at the London School of Economics. "Hundreds
of thousands of years ago, it was impossible for someone not to know you if you knew
them. And if they didn't kill you, they were probably your friend." Kanazawa's research
has shown that this feeling of friendship has other repercussions: People who watch
more TV are more satisfied with their friendships, just as if they had more friends
and socialized more frequently. Another study found that teens who keep up to date on
celebrity gossip are popular, with strong social networks—the interest in pop culture
indicates a healthy drive for independence from parents.
The penchant for gossiping about the stars also plays into our species' obsession with
status. Humans naturally copy techniques from high-status individuals, says Francisco
Gil-White, professor of psychology at University of Pennsylvania. It's an attempt to
get the same rewards, whether that's "attention, favors, gifts, [or] laudatory
exclamations." Stars get all kinds of perks and pampering: Sarah Jessica Parker was
allowed to keep each of her Sex and the City character's extravagant getups; Halle
Berry borrowed a $3 million diamond ring to wear to the Oscars. Understandably, we
look to get in on the game.
The impulse to copy is behind the popularity of celebrity magazines, says Fuller.
Regular women can see what the stars are wearing, often with tips on how to buy cheap
knockoffs of their outfits. Taken to extremes—which television is only too happy to
do—the urge to copy produces spectacles like the MTV reality show I Want a Famous
Face. By dint of extensive plastic surgery, ordinary people are made to look more like
their famous heroes. In one episode, two gangly 20-year-old twin brothers are molded
into Brad Pitt look-alikes. The brothers want to be stars, and they've decided that
looking more like Pitt is the fastest road to fame. No wonder makeover shows are so
popular, points out Joshua Gamson, an associate professor of sociology at the
University of San Francisco. These shows offer drab nobodies a double whammy:
simultaneous beauty and celebrity.
Saved from oblivion!
What's the result of our simultaneous yearning to be more like celebrities and our
desire to be wowed by their unattainable perfection? We've been watching it for the
past decade. Reality television is an express train to fame, unpredictably turning
nobodies into somebodies. Reality TV now gives us the ability to get inside the star
factory and watch the transition to fame in real time.
"The appeal of reality stars is that they were possibly once just like you, sitting on the
couch watching a reality TV program, until they leaped to celebrity," says Andy
Denhart, blogger and reality TV junkie. "With the number of reality shows out there,
it's inexcusable to not be famous if you want to be!" In the past, ambitious young men
who idolized a famous actor might take acting lessons or learn to dance. Now, they get
plastic surgery and learn to tell their life stories for the camera. In fact, says editor
Fuller, the newly minted stars of reality TV are better at the celebrity game than
many of the movie and television stars: "They are more accessible, more cooperative.
They enjoy publicity. They will open up and offer insight, often more than a
'traditional' celeb, because they want the attention, whereas an actress might have
ambivalent feelings about fame and how it is tied in with her 'craft.'" At the same
time, shows like The Simple Life and The Newlyweds (and amateur videotapes like Paris
Hilton's) let us gawk at the silly things that stars do in the privacy of their own home.
As a result, the distance between celebrity stratosphere and living room couch
dwindles even further.
Yet there's still something about that magic dust. A celebrity sighting is not just
about seeing a star, author Braudy points out, but is about being seen by a star: "There
is a sense that celebrities are more real than we are; people feel more real in the
presence of a celebrity." It wasn't just that I saw Britney; it was that Britney saw me.