So after weeks of sitting on my to read pile, I’ve finally gotten to Chuck Klosterman’s new book of essays Eating The Dinasour.  In his first piece “Something Instead of Nothing” he examines an interesting point which, I think helps shed light on our contemporary obsession with fame and celebrity.  Essentially the piece asks the question, why do people, specifically celebrities, answer journalists questions, especially the personal ones?  Klosterman picks up the thread on a couple of theories, but the main thrust is that it would just feel too weird for the interviewee not to answer.  But the more I think about it, the more it occurrs to me that Klosterman is on to something here in terms of our culture’s newfound relationship between fame and self definition.  Celebrity after all is America’s new favorite religion.

I think that before we understand why the process of being interviewed helps define our culture’s aching desperation for fame it is important to first understand our relationship to fame.  Celebrity has pretty much always been around in some form or another, dictated only by the form of media that exists at the time.  In ancient Greece, a celebrity would only be known to those within the confines of word of mouth.  Thanks to newspapers, and then radio, TV, and eventually internet, the power of celebrity has known only upward momentum.  But it has been in the last decade or so that the nature of celebrity and our relationship to it has changed dramatically.  The best example is with movie stars.  Early on, they were products of a studio system that attempted to create untouchable gods on Mt. Olympus.  While the studio system faded, this nature of celebrity remained more less in tact for close to a century.  Movie stars, rock stars, they were just different from us, somehow more deserving of interviews and photographs because of their exotic lives.  We average Americans, whether rich or poor, toiled away in anonymity, because that’s just the way things were.  All of this, as we now know, wasn’t meant to last.  By the turn of the 21st century, celebrity became our newest form of entitlement.

The day that everything changed was May 21, 1992.  This was the first broadcast of MTV’s The Real World and, thanks to Mary-Ellis Bunim’s brain child, everything about celebrity and our relationship to it would be forever altered.  While the point I’m about to make is that reality TV changed our relationship with celebrity, it’s not for the reason that you think.  Most of the focus of reality TV’s popularity has been on exhibitionism and our latent look at me desires, but it’s more complicated than that.  What The Real World really did to change our cultural landscape was to introduce the video confessional, that point in the show when the featured players sit alone on camera and explain themselves, their feelings, and what put them in a particular situation.  Every reality show now has them and they often serve as the crux of the narrative.  But what is a video confessional really but a small example of an interview.  These are, as Klosterman examines in his essay, people answering questions that they are under no obligation to answer.  This, I think, is the very key to our current cultural understanding, or more aptly misunderstanding, of self worth.  Answering questions in an interview allows us to, potentially, be understood and, as Klosterman points out, possibly understand ourselves.  Fame is really the only opportunity to share our own brand of brain vomit with the rest of the world. That or, of course, the less glamorous avenue of blogging. 

Self worth, you know the shallow, unfulfilling kind that tends to define western culture, had for most of the 20th century been tied up with money and career success.  If you rose through the ranks to an important position within your own particular industry, thus earning a bigger paycheck, thus owning a bigger house, then you were just plain rich with self worth.  You didn’t just keep up with the Joneses, you kicked them in the nuts and spit in their eye.  As deeply unfulfilling as this is, it is what essentially defined the American dream for close to a century.  With the introduction of reality TV however, and of course the internet, achieving celebrity has become more accessible, which meant it shot right to the top of the self worth wish list.  Before, with celebrity, you always had to do something that required work or talent or both.  But with reality TV, you could have a litter of kids and a reverse mullet and suddenly you’re splashed across the glossies.  Accomplishment quickly took a back seat to recognition.  If two people are walking down the street and one has created some miracle drug and the other is unaccomplished but is recognizable to everyone else on the street, then who’s going to have the whole my life is validated upper hand.  Sadly, as our culture demonstrates time and again, the recognizable one.  Fame has become the primary achievement in the battle for finding self worth.

How though do interviews and video confessionals help define this new paradigm?  It is because of their very nature.  Interviews create a forced sense of intimacy, a chance to speak in a way that you wouldn’t speak with your friends.  I don’t know about other people, but if I sat around with my friends discussing my accomplishments or my reactions to personal situations or my take on the world for the entire conversation, they’d not be my friends for very long.  Interviews are by their nature solipsistic for the interviewee, an opportunity to contemplate themselves and offer explanations in order to seek understanding.  An interview means that people are interested in you and if they are interested, then on some level they must care, on some level they may even love you.  I’m not saying it’s healthy, I’m just saying it’s there.  If we can come to be understood by way of interview/confessional, then there is the possibility that we can bridge the chasm that separates us as human beings.  I think that ultimately the lure of celebrity lies in the truly misguided notion that it is the cure for loneliness.  Celebrity is really nothing more than wanting to be the popular kid in high school, and if you weren’t the popular kid, then you assume that being one means you are loved which means you are no longer marooned by the inherent aloneness of your own self.  This kind of makes it easier to see why when many people attain celebrity they go off the rails.  

I think that ultimately religion is a search for something that will make us feel less alone.  As humans, it’s hard for us to accept that we can only experience life as ourselves, meaning no one else will truly understand our own personal experience.  Chasing money, success, and celebrity just happens to be the most popular religion at the moment.  We see these people who are famous, and who often seem to like being famous, and we assume that this must be the tonic, this must be the cure for our aloneness.  And now that celebrity is so much more attainable than in the past, it has opened the flood gates.  The question is, how many Parises or Snookies are we going to have to live through before we realize that fame isn’t the cure.