Page 171 - Cultural Studies A Practical Introduction

Audience, Performance, and Celebrity 155

their favorite actor. They enjoy imagining themselves in the roles the star
actor plays in; it allows them to step outside of their ordinary lives and to
take on a more ideal identity, one often associated with good looks and
with personal strength that many adolescents feel is wanting in them.
Celebrity attachment also takes them out of either troubled or simply
ordinary, unremarkable lives and allows them to experience something
more extraordinary.
Celebrities are “ larger than life ” and help to augment those who attach
to them. In a sense, celebrities are means of self - empowerment. Celebrity
attachment also quite obviously tends toward more positive and equal
forms of affect, much like a relationship with a friend or a family member.
Fans report feeling that television celebrities are their companions, and
when the celebrity is sick, they are missed as a friend is missed. The celeb-

rity, especially those who fill in lonely times of the day such as the morning
for those at home, becomes a surrogate friend.
Contemporary life under capitalist auspices consists of work and enter-
tainment. The lives of those on the bottom rungs provide few avenues for
the kind of augmented sense of self - importance that comes with having
great wealth and social power. Those people will not be successfully crea-
tive professionals or entrepreneurs. Not surprisingly, they are especially
prone to celebrity attachment. Celebrity culture makes sense in a society
in which not everyone gets to be important or fulfilled or recognized.

Celebrity identification allows one access to a small, highly mediated
version of such things. To identify with a star is to leave oneself and to
change place, to become someone else momentarily. It is to leave an old
overly familiar world behind and to enter, briefly, a new and quite different

one characterized by ample wealth usually and the freedom of movement
and of behavior such wealth permits one. But there are a variety of attitudes
toward such celebrity freedom. Some feel liberated by it, and some of a
more conservative persuasion feel it is worthy of punishment. Women
celebrities, especially such as Princess Diana, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears,
and Lindsay Lohan, are as much reviled as revered in the celebrity press.
And the conservative gossip press, which would favor more traditional
identities for women, are especially hard on these female celebrities. Their
frequent tumbles from grace into drug or alcohol rehabilitation or into
police custody are occasions for the exercise of moral judgment of the
kind that seeks pleasure in the punishment of those who depart too easily
from the moral order that some conservative audiences uphold in a some-
what authoritarian and unforgiving fashion. Moral rigidity is a way of