Page 166 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The culture of celebrity 151
and so end their celebrity worship, generic celebrity watchers are
much less easily dislodged from their devotion to celebrity’s overall
culture industry framework.
In the knowing wink, the grip of celebrity culture is tightened by
the very revelations of artifice that one might otherwise assume
would weaken its hold on the popular consciousness. Baudrillard
(1983a) explains this in terms of the specific instance of the
Watergate scandal as serving to hide the fact that US politics in
general is pervasively corrupt. What superficially appears to be an
incident that may undermine the credibility of the political system,
in fact becomes a pseudo-event that reinforces the system by providing
the false impression that such moral lapses are the exception rather
than the rule: ‘It is always a question of proving the real by the
imaginary; proving truth by scandal … Everything is metamorphosed
into its inverse in order to be perpetuated in its purged form’
(Poster 1990, cited in Gamson 1994: 171). At best, celebrity watchers
seem resigned to the apparent difficulty of achieving a stable critical
perspective within the cultural industry’s manipulative hall of mir-
rors, while at worst, their enjoyment of the mirror show precludes
normatively evaluating it. Rather than fuelling criticism of its artifi-
cially manufactured nature, any deconstruction of the celebrity
production process, tends merely to promote further enjoyable
consumption of celebrity by providing yet more material for gossip.
It is this circular and self-augmenting nature of celebrity culture that
makes it such a close ideological fit with the wider commodity
society that contains it – premised as it is upon the expansive
circulation of signs as an end in itself.

Celebrity: the seductive occurrence
Our experience tends more and more to become tautology –
needless repetition of the same in different words and
images … Celebrity is made simple familiarity, induced and
re-enforced by public means. The celebrity is therefore the
perfect embodiment of tautology: the most familiar is the most
familiar.
(Boorstin [1961] 1992: 60–1)
The ascension of the cinema idols, the masses’ divinities, was
and remains a central story of modern times – it still counter-
balances all political or social events. There is no point in
dismissing it as merely the dreams of the mystified masses. It is
a seductive occurrence that counterbalances every productive
occurrence.
(Baudrillard 1990a: 95)

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