In times like these, when beloved celebrities get up to undeniably toxic behavior, it can be tempting to stick up for your favorite in the face of allegations. It should be clear why wealthy, famous celebrities do not need or deserve our attempts to protect them: they made their choices and those choices are not ours to defend. The parasocial relationship maintained with celebrities through this defense of their character or actions places a star in a position akin to hero worship. The inverse of this can also occur: passionate hatred of a celebrity for their work tends to suppose they are equally harmful as people and everything they do is the worst of all time. This is a natural consequence of a person’s fame; they take up space less like a human and more like an abstract idea, but both the hero and villain track presuppose something that was never true: that we even know who these celebrities really are.
Celebrities as we experience them are not people. We could watch a thousand interviews, see all their movies and shows, listen to all their music, cook all their recipes, read all their books, play all their compositions, or beat all their games and still not know them as people. When we “love” a celebrity, we really love a persona and a body of work, both of which are crafted to cultivate and maintain an audience willing to pay. Interviews that purport to “tell-all,” social media posts, and public appearances all exist to buoy the feeling that you’re getting to know a person. Still, it’s all marketing and PR calibrated to make people feel whatever they need to feel to buy a ticket or an album or a book. I’m not telling you anything new here. It’s not some grand unmasking to realize that celebrities are here to sell you things, whether they be items or experiences. What gets forgotten is how much distance this puts between us (the audience) and them (the celebrities), so much so that we cannot possibly say we know anything meaningful about them.
Sure, we can rattle off the facts of a biography (albeit one that’s been filtered and massaged by publicists), but we can’t claim to know the person. That’s why it’s particularly ridiculous to see the apologia for Jonah Hill. We don’t know this man! None of us do! Why on earth would anyone leap on grenades for them when all we have is their ephemeral persona? We can’t claim to really know anything about celebrities or what they would or wouldn’t do. It was even more ridiculous when people came swarming out of the woodwork to defend Johnny Depp. They loved his work in Edward Scissorhands, see, so they know he can’t have done what he’s accused of! The value of the parasocial relationship they projected onto him was of more value to them than any notion of holding an abuser accountable. Well, that and the ever-potent presence of misogyny, internalized or otherwise, but you get the picture: enough people were convinced that they knew for a fact Depp was innocent with a certainty that eclipsed all else despite not knowing him at all. We can’t say we know celebrities or what they believe or think or would or wouldn’t do and it’s a fool’s errand to try.
While we may not know them as people, we can measure their impact by looking at how they use the power and platform their celebrity gives them. You don’t need to know who Just Kidding Rowling is as a person to grasp that she has used her power and platform to organize TERFs and neo-nazis to make the world as unsafe for trans people as possible. Those are choices she made. What does that mean about her as a person? We can’t really say. She could be a true believer or simply engaging in transphobia to appeal to the audience she wants. It doesn’t really matter which it is because the result’s the same: the provable, observable thing we can say about her conduct is that she uses her power to hurt marginalized groups. Choosing to consume the products of someone who uses their power in this way is a choice you can make and because we live within capitalism, we are driven to separate the art from the artist because art is a monetized product and we must keep consuming, but putting money in the known bigot’s pocket has implications nonetheless. And not to put too fine a point on it, but the kids are watching. They see us lowering ourselves to excuse all manner of bigoted bullshit for a celebrity and they hear us saying, this is the world we want for you.
So why do we play this sucker’s game of pretending to know the hearts and minds of famous people? It’s a very avoidable vacation from sense and it feels bizarre when you consider that the prize of the sucker’s game is nothing but your spent time and energy. Instead of going through this pantomime, let’s consider that not only do we grasp at personas, but that those personas are legion. There have been celebrities in some form or another since time immemorial. There have been tons of celebrities, there are tons of celebrities, and there will continue to be tons of celebrities. How can we possibly look at the crowded landscape of stars and think that they are anything but plentiful and of low value? Why lick the boots of some icon entirely indifferent to you when there’s another one just like them around the corner? There is no value offered by a celebrity persona so unique, so singular that it could ever justify the blind love we give them. Leave the worship behind and find clearer sight in the knowledge that we don’t know famous people at all.
Chris Revelle shouts into the media void with his pals on Why Did We Watch This?