Page 100 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Celebr ty Worsh p and Fandom |

Fans, aDmirErs, or worshiPPErs?
Just as with other media products such as television programs, celebrities too
can become multifaceted objects that offer fans a range of readings and mean-
ings, for pertaining to the rules and varieties of audience use, there is no fun-
damental distinction between the different forms of mediated popular culture.
Admittedly, in their glamour, many celebrities reveal the inherent commercial
logic of cultural production more pronouncedly than other popular texts. But at
the same time, fan cultures focusing on particular celebrities are distinctly less
common than phrases such as “celebrity worship” suggest. In Boorstin’s defini-
tion of celebrity based on how well known a celebrity is, the boundaries between
fame and notoriety are distinctly blurred. The dictum that there is no such thing
as bad publicity has been taken to new levels by twenty-first century arrivals
on the celebrity circuit such as Britney Spears and Paris Hilton. Yet, while their
immense exposure ensures how well they are known, this presence does not
automatically translate into being liked or even cherished. As Sconce notes, we
are erroneous if we assume that “most Americans like Paris Hilton, when in fact,
the vast majority of her media exposure is framed as negative irritation” (2007,
p. 330). Celebrities can then serve not as object of worship or adoration but also
as the focus of anti-fandom and displeasure. Moreover, in those cases where
celebrities are at the center of fan cultures, they—at least from the point of view
of the fan—take on other qualities than simply being well known and are valued
for their musical, acting, or sporting talents; their appearance; or their actions
and convictions.
Recent psychological and psychoanalytical approaches to the bond between
fans and their fan objects further confirm that celebrity and media exposure
provide a premise but not a sufficient basis for affection and adoration. In 1985,
Vermorel and Vermorel collected a series of fan fantasies drawing on popular
icons such as pop stars; their book documents how audiences’ interests in stars
are fed by sexual desires articulated in such fantasies. Desire and lust, however,
do not equate to worship (and on occasion, the sexual fantasies they report
point in the opposite direction) and can be assumed to be often fleeting and
tied to particular physical attributes. Subsequent work examining fans of fe-
male Hollywood stars of the 1940s and 1950s (see Stacey 1994) and Anthony
Elliott’s analysis of the motives of Mark Davis Chapman’s murder of John Len-
non in December 1980 have suggested that fans engage in processes of “pro-
jection” and “interjection,” in which an idealized reading of the star allows for
the externalization of positive and negative attributes of the fan him or herself,
and thus provides the basis for the emotional bond between fan and star. Stars
and other fan objects might then function as a “mirror” to fans’ self-image, of-
fering a bond between fan and star that is grounded in the fan’s unrecognized
self-reflection. In all such scenarios, the celebrity is thus not the object of abject
adoration or worship, but subject to complex processes of identification, pro-
jection, and reflection and can be ascribed with positives (fandom) or nega-
tive connotations (anti-fandom). While how well the celebrity is known is the
premise for such processes to take place in acts of “mediated quasi-interaction,”