Genesis 1:14: And God said, Let there be lights in the firmament of the heaven to divide the day from the night; and let them be for signs, and for seasons, and for days, and years.
Chalk it up to growing up in a celebrity and film obsessed household. Blame it on being an American who doesn’t shy away from reading the cultural news of the day. Whatever the reasons, I have found the observation of celebrity unavoidable. I find celebrity fandom in turns understandable and disturbing, idolatrous and fun, wasteful and harmless. I’ve been the first to ask others why they take time to know which celebrity is dating another and yet I haven’t been able to avoid frequently knowing the answers despite my lack of effort in obtaining this information. Though celebrity worship is part of the American identity, until recently, I never asked myself what purpose it served, instead lazily blaming it on being a silly way to spend free time or a by-product of the good feelings celebrities’ creative or athletic outputs generate.
The interest in and celebration of Celebrity and its component parts – in Hollywood, the actors and actresses, the directors, the scenes and memories, the off-screen romances –, the focus on the lives of famous musicians and artists are things that have been practiced for too long to have no deeper meaning or use. If that is true, to the extent that something so vague could be true without being attached to anything factual, then what other purpose does the Celebrity serve beyond building further the egos of celebrities being worshiped? What do we as people gain by casting our gaze at these stars (a perfectly fitting term). Could it be that by observing celebrities and celebrating their accomplishments we are observing a desired version of ourselves and celebrating accomplishments we see ourselves as being capable of obtaining whether we strive toward them or not? Do we, in our humanness also desire to observe those apparently more accomplished but still relatable to us in hopes that we can find confirmation that we are acceptable as we stand?
It is those questions that form the basis for a series of essays and analyses to follow. These pieces will focus on man’s archetypal use of celebrities as aspirational and confirmational tools used in self formation. The concept of Celebrity will begin with focusing on groups normally associated with the term including pop singers, athletes, and movie stars. Once their use as archetypes is outlined, celebrity will be used more broadly to include role models, lovers, and additional examples that differ in presentation but serve similar, and at times more important aspiration and confirmation functions.
This work is not intended to be a factual or data driven analysis of Celebrity as a concept. You will not see any charts; you will read nothing of year-over-year box office or album sale statistics or much by means of quantification. Attempting to consider the importance of something as un-fact based as celebrity worship by using facts would be like attempting to use theories from the humanities to understand a basic math problem. Recent developments in pseudointellectualism have shown us the absurdity of similar attempts.
The tools used in exploration are as important as the territory to be explored. This understanding leaves the writer striving for a discovery of truth, whole or incomplete, in a conceptual region that is lacking in facts. This may suggest that understanding the content going forward will be challenging or that it will be ungrounded in anything tangible. On the contrary, as you will see from the first piece on, there is nothing ungrounded about discussing such non-fact focused matters. In fact, the vacuum created by a lack of useful data must be filled by something or somethings else, and in this case they include anecdotes and real-world scenarios toward which to point, making them more relatable than any data point could be.
While these ideas could be sketched out in further detail, the delay in getting the meat of this theory would only serve to obfuscate and delay the reader's getting around to its consideration. With no additional discussion on what is to come, let us begin to consider this aspirational-confirmational celebrity archetype spectrum by observing how two prominent female singers, both much in the news, as well as a couple of superstar athletes, and one famous scientist fit in, shall we?
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