Page 168 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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The culture of celebrity 153
4 During the programme, celebrity guests frequently ‘plug’ their
latest performance/book and so on.
5 Even the various experts used in various chat shows tend to be
partially identified as the author of a best-selling self-help book.

Programme structures themselves frequently involve fragmented
narratives that have less in common with the more unified artistic
8
format of a movie and more with the disjointed, imagistic, and
relatively shallow narrative presentation of commodities found in
advertising. This occurs in a manner similar to Kracauer’s comments
about illustrated magazines and their contribution to a ‘strike against
understanding’. The Oprah Winfrey Show, for example, ‘constructs the
conception of currency; the issues being discussed are of vital
concern for that particular moment’ (Marshall 1997: 132). Currency
in this instance, however, does not just only refer to the topicality of
the show’s content. Like Barker’s use of the term ‘investment’,
currency becomes an apposite term for the connotations it has with
the commercial values underpinning of-the-moment, fashionable
content. Premised upon the same short-term values as the fashion
industry, topical items and news stories readily present themselves
for repackaging and further reselling in ‘new’ formats even though
there is little change in their true content.

Conclusion

Contemporary celebrity plays a crucial part in the naturalization of
the strange and metaphysically ambiguous commodity form
described by Marx as ‘abounding in metaphysical subtleties and
theological niceties’. The Hollywood star system played an important
role in the industrial manipulation of charisma, but as Benjamin
recognized, it still contained vestigial forms of art’s ritualistic prop-
erties – the cult of beauty that grew up around its most famous faces.
Newer forms of celebrity embodied in Banality TV, to which we now
turn, provide a much more sophisticated way of further taming the
aura Benjamin saw being pumped out by media technologies, ‘like
water from a sinking ship’. New forms of celebrity translate the
concept of distraction Benjamin sought to invest with radical poten-
tial into a process that serves to hide the media’s sponsorship of an
ultimately irrational (but highly rationalized) reversal of human/
object relations (an image-based irrationality explored in depth in
Chapter 8). For example, the fame-for-fame’s sake element of today’s
celebrity produces the format inflation of Reality TV’s endless
variations upon the same basic theme. The particular qualities and
achievements of the competitors (human relations) become less
important than the competitive element of the formats themselves

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