Kimberly Steele

 

I was obsessed with celebrities from an early age. I was a religious watcher of Saturday morning cartoons: The Smurfs, He Man and She Ra, Richie Rich, and Dungeons and Dragons were my favorites, but I was known to stick around for Bugs Bunny and Fat Albert if nothing else was on. My mother taped a Christmas cartoon special about the Nutcracker accompanied by the full score of Tschiakovsky's Nutcracker Suite; that ancient Betamax tape also had a cartoon special on gnomes uncreatively titled Gnomes as well as a Berenstain Bears feature. I watched that video cassette dozens of times.

I am not sure how my love of cartoons morphed into a passion for live action, but it did. By the late 80s, I watched every sitcom aimed at my pre-teen demographic plus a few more: Different Strokes, Family Ties, The Cosby Show, The Greatest American Hero, and Cheers ate up the scant amount of time I had when I was not doing homework on school nights. For a number of reasons, the schools in the Chicago suburbs have always given ludicrous amounts of homework to children between the ages of 11 and 18 along with the weird presumption that pre-teens and teenagers can easily afford 4-5 hours of the stuff a night, six hours if they are "gifted". It was only by my mid-teens that I began to reject television for books, and this meant alienation from my parents, as they have always watched at least 3 hours of television a day from my earliest memories. Popular media had me from the short hairs even before I had short hairs. By college, I could name most of the famous supermodels and I had seen every big movie in Blockbuster video at least once regardless of the genre.

Fall of the Mighty

My own Generation X was the last one to regard celebrities as demigods. By the late 1990s, celebrities did not have to trash their images: the public was happy enough to do it for them. The celebrities of the 70s and 80s were the last to be given carte blanche by the public when it came to bad behavior. When Madonna stunt-queened in the 80s with her Like a Prayer black Jesus schtick, she was able to get the exact rise out of the public her handlers had planned. Her book Sex (1992) debuted and the results also seemed to go as planned. By 2001, South Park's Kenny called Madonna

"an old anorexic whore who wore out her welcome years ago, and that now she suddenly speaks with a British accent and she thinks she can play guitar and she should go f**k herself."

The public agreed. Madonna's career began to circle the drain around that time. Her albums and songs, which used to sell in the millions, now struggle to break fifty thousand sales per country. Madonna now tries and eerily succeeds in looking like a young Instagram star, replete with inflated lips, alien-smooth skin, and tight, almost-concave eyes. The result is ghastly, but then so are the younger versions who ham it up for TikTok in an endless series of poses.

The influencer is the new Hollywood star. The phenomenon began when Justin Bieber was either planted or organically emerged from YouTube. Via brand deals, donations, and more questionable means, influencers prove that anybody can be a celebrity these days. Gatekeepers no longer hold the keys. Anyone, including the unbeautiful, can gain influencing success, provided she is willing to devote her time, talent, and resources to the full time job of influencing.

Influencing is a Full Time Job

The question becomes whether or not the full time job of fashioning oneself into a modern celebrity is worth it. The facts on the ground are that influencing is a massive time suck. I once took on the project of making one vegan lunch a day for a year for my Wordpress blog. I barely dipped my toe into influencing and I found it to consume huge amounts of time. I succeed and posted photos and recipes for every day that year, but I would not say the project was worth it despite getting a few good recipes out of myself. As for influencers whose careers are based on their own looks, the phrase "diminishing returns" springs readily to mind. The money may roll in for TikTok ballers at the moment, but looks are ephemeral. Physical beauty being unsustainable is the beginning of the problem; the predicament beauty and fashion influencers need to worry about is the unsustainability of the internet itself, especially in its current form. Influencers who depend on mommy blog or meme channel money had better have some meat plane skills or rich relatives who are willing to support them in the style to which they have become accustomed, because the internet is not forever. A couple of Ogham reading Sundays ago, one of my querents made me aware of a video company that is determined to retroactively charge people for using their platform. I see this not as a fluke but as a symptom of a greater problem, like a single inflamed follicle that is about to go full body chicken pox. My husband used to work security at a server farm. Every night at least one guy had to walk around the building -- it was about a mile all the way around. Server farms are huge, expensive, and they create crazy amounts of heat. The cooling apparatuses for a server farm are massive. I believe there will come a time within my lifetime when we will have to resurrect the corpse of paper book, newspaper, and magazine publishing because the internet will no longer be tenable for most people.

Don't get me wrong; I believe the internet celebrity will be a thing for a long time, but it is self-evident the pool is already shrinking.

The Astral Mirror

Celebrity is image or more specifically a competition between images. Some images are more powerful than others. A person "hitting" as a celebrity depends a great deal upon astral mirroring. Astral mirroring is when one person can see a little of himself in another human being. If the general public can grab onto you as an everyman or everywoman, meaning a large number of them can see themselves in you and put themselves into your place in the fantasy realm, your image will be a hit.

Since the days when Evelyn Nesbit was used to sell everything from soap to lumber, corporations have employed human images as cacomagic in order to push products and agendas. Adele became popular based on her pliability and the fact she was not a stick figure. Her talent was average, but her image as zaftig everywoman is what struck true harmony within the astral mirrors of her adoring fans. She has been used to push a woke, liberated woman message. Her sound, which imitates American black singers of the civil rights era, was a gimmick popular at the turn of the millennium. The same gimmick was used by Adele's fellow Brit, Amy Winehouse, to appeal to the insecurity of college-educated women who desire to see themselves as an oppressed class.

One thing the modern celebrity has in common with the kings and queens of old is the desire to sit atop a large astral pyramid. The larger the celebrity's astral pyramid, the more they are attributed with godlike powers.  Ted Gioia recently attempted to appeal to Taylor Swift, begging her to form a label to support independent artists. I believe Ted Gioia is naive. As much as Taylor Swift seems like a good person who pays her roadies millions of dollars and appreciates her fanbase, she is owned. She may seem to have to power to act autonomously because she brings in a great deal of money, but one only needs to look at the examples of Michael Jackson and Prince. Both were top dogs on Taylor Swift-like tiers and both were 100% owned by the industry that made them. In Michael Jackson's case, his rise to the top broke his mind. Prince's mind gave the impression of remaining intact but he became a depressed, bitter recluse. Michael Jackson may have been a monster. I have a difficult time believing that any little boy would make up such a horror story, even for large amounts of money.  Michael Jackson had several boys who claimed he had abused them (sometimes later as grown men) in gory detail.  We all want to believe our heroes would not do that: look at how long it took people to believe Bill Cosby was a sexual predator. Pedogate unveiled the murky celebrity process and the high price of fame, and its not like the receipts are missing. There are videos of young Leonardo DiCaprio with convicted pedophile Brian Peck in what looks a great deal like a grooming relationship.  The same predator was rehired by Nickelodeon and Disney after being incarcerated for his eleven counts of being a rapist of children.  At any rate, I am glad I never had any part in what some of these talented people have most likely had to endure in order to become and stay famous.

Celebrity is not going anywhere, but the way celebrities rise to power and influence is always changing. Maybe I am just getting old and crotchety, but from my point of view, money and fame hardly seem worth the trade.