Page 169 - Critical Theories of Mass Media

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154 Now
(object relations). Perhaps even more important than this element
of competition between and within formats, however, is the transpar-
ency with which the production process of celebrity-hood is exposed
as part of the viewing experience. While at one level the celebrity
figure may help to distract attention away from the ideological
nature of the commodity form, the forensic way in which the
production of celebrity itself is uncovered for all to see can perhaps
be seen as a type of double bluff: if there is anything so significant
to hide, then why are we so happy to show you everything?
The ideological aspect of the production of celebrity thus becomes
an organic part of the audience’s viewing process and ironically
difficult to spot because of its very obviousness (as previously
pointed out, McLuhan once said ‘whoever discovered water wasn’t a
fish’). A self-perpetuating circle thus closes itself off from critically
minded questioning through the excessive transparency and explic-
itness of a society dominated by an obscene form of images explored
in Chapter 8. By providing openly forensic accounts of the produc-
tion of individual celebrities, the culture industry escapes equally
close scrutiny of the wider social aspects that go into creating the
appearance of the celebrity system as an apparently natural and even
inevitable social order. This inevitability is presented either on the
grounds of talent so great that it can only be imitated by other
extraordinarily gifted individuals (Bend it like Beckham), or pure
9
chance beyond anyone’s control . In either scenario, a potentially
critical understanding of celebrity production is displaced by a
distracted fascination with the contingent and contiguous details of
celebrities themselves.
Both celebrity culture and the closely related personality-based
politics, share the exposure of people’s private lives as a distraction
from more substantive structural issues – political, social and eco-
nomic questions – emotional affect replaces political effect. As
Benjamin pointed out, the public is a critic, but an absent-minded
one. The following chapters explore the rise of democratized forms
of celebrity within Banality TV and show how rational discourse is
displaced by the privileging of traumatic events and individual
opinion to the extent that Dovey claims: ‘in Foucauldian terms we
are witnessing the evolution of a new “regime of truth” based upon
the foregrounding of individual subjective experience at the expense
of more general truth claims’ (Dovey 2000: 25). The following
chapters suggest that a well-developed political awareness of the
ideological role played by the seemingly trivial is supplanted by
pleasure in the false intimacy and everyday banality of the trivial
itself (Langer’s Other News). It is now time to examine the notion of
Banality TV to explore what the culture industry does best –
encouraging the diner to be satisfied with the menu.

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