MEDIACTIVE editorial

The opposite of fame

John O’Farrell’s novel This Is Your Life tells the story of thirty-something Jimmy Conway who, near the beginning of the book, describes the dawning disappointment of living a non-celebrity life:

As you grow older, you gradually realise that the gulf between where you arenow and where you had hoped to be is never going to be bridged. In your daily life you pretend that you will catch up, make up all that lost ground andsuddenly be catapulted to that elusive magical place called ‘Success’. But slowly it starts to seep through from your subconscious to the conscious: this is your fate, this is who you are, this is your life.¹

Jimmy wants fame because it ‘wouldn’t just bring status and respect and money and purpose. It would mean an end to being so bloody lonely all the time’ (p199). Humiliated by being confronted with letters he wrote as a teenager, letters advising his future self how to handle his fame, he suddenly finds himself pretending that he is famous and faking the persona of a semi-famous stand-up comedian. Inevitably, however, when he does accede to celebrity status, it doesn’t make him fulfilled (p225). Lazy journalists recycle each other’s quotes and perpetuate the myth of his celebrity through the stardom-machine whilst he feels increasingly isolated and friendless.The desirable spaces and glittering pleasures that only celebrities have access to suddenly seem hollow, shallow, empty. He always wondered what was behind that door on the set of his favourite breakfast TV programme. Now he knows: there is nothing behind it.

The novel’s happy ending sees Jimmy turning his back on celebrity and revaluing the locality of his life and his friendships. His friends forgive him and produce their own surprise version of the TV show This Is Your Life in his local pub. His life is no longer a famous life but a friend-filled life and because of that it is better, richer, more successful. Like Ben Hatch’s book The Lawnmower Celebrity – in which the anti-hero’s high-achieving BBC dad pays more attention to his celebrity friends than his son – This Is Your Life is a story of a young, white British man coping badly with not being famous against all his expectations.² In part both books might be read as dramatising a crisis of the certainties of Britishness, and of white male masculinities. At the same time they dramatise shifts in formations of celebrity culture. Journalist Barbara Ellen writes of how our culture has spawned the existence of ‘willabees’ rather than ‘wannabees’ – a generation for whom there is a moment of expectation that you will be famous rather than merely hoping or wanting to be famous.³ Some of this structure of feeling is easy to recognise.When I was at primary school I distinctly remember feeling that whatever it was I was doing at one particular moment would look embarrassing when it was my turn to appear on This Is Your Life, an event which my six-year old self confidently expected to happen (whereas, of course, the only thing that turned out to be embarrassing is the structured expectation of that incident itself).

These examples indicate that how lives are evaluated – what they are imagined as being, and what they are imagined as being worth – can be formed in relation to what ‘celebrity’ is thought to be, and to involve.We draw boundary lines between so-called ‘ordinary’ lives and the ‘extraordinary ordinariness’ of celebrity culture, and the unevenness of the power relations between a celebrity and a non-celebrity is only too graphic.

This second issue of Mediactive explores some of the ways celebrity functions now in relation to ‘ordinariness’ and to contemporary versions of democracy (or to the lack of it).What does the surge of commentary, programming and statements of fascination – ‘ironic’ or otherwise – about celebrity say about the culture we live in? How might we understand the dynamics of power, the politics of contemporary forms of celebrity, and its relationships to ordinary lives? Where might we look to find the more positive aspects of celebrity, if there are any – and if not, where might we look to pursue alternatives?

The contributors approach these issues by drawing from a range of areas including cultural studies, sociology, politics, film studies, philosophy and media studies. Drawing from the latter, Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi interrogate the dramatic rise of ‘Reality TV’ in Britain and the instant fame granted to some of its participants.They explore how Reality TV has increasingly allowed for the rise to celebrity status of those who have neither cultural capital nor elite roles in the public sphere, and examine how these ‘classed’ subjects become iconic through their newly found social mobility.

Jo Littler’s piece investigates how a Blairite ‘meritocracy’ has enabled new possibilities for social and cultural mobility, but argues that it has at the same time allowed inequalities to become polarised in new ways. It considers how this is both reflected in and produced by celebrity culture, examining the recurrent use of three tropes: intimacy, reflexivity and ‘keeping it real’.These are considered in order to explore how desiring fame is in itself constructed as desirable and rendered ‘ordinary’.

Oscar Reyes explores the relationship between New Labour and celebrity by focusing on Blair’s persona. Prime ministers have tailored their images to play on their ‘ordinariness’ for a long time:Wilson through beer and sandwiches, Thatcher by being simply a grocer’s daughter, Major by accentuating his unexceptionalness, Blair through semi-faded jeans and mugs of tea. Reyes examines how in the case of Blair, this ordinariness has been primarily articulated to the family. Examining the centrality of ‘trust’ in New Labour politics, he shows how these issues are not debated in terms of work or institutions, but around the celebrity family, which has become both a crucial mechanism to secure power and also that which threatens to break it down.

Different types or modes of celebrity culture are discussed by Kay Dickinson and Matt Hills. Kay Dickinson’s starting point is the enthusiastically vitriolic response to pop stars who crossover into film.The outrage at ‘pop stars who can’t act’, she argues, reveals conservative value systems which aim to keep workers in their place. At the same time, however, she points out that such categories of worth appear to be changing: celebrity all-rounders (like the ‘all-conquering brand’ Jennifer Lopez) are multi-tasking in different fields.The article explores what our reactions to celebrity work reveals about the intertwined issues of celebrity and regimes of labour.

Pointing out that celebrities have often been taken as being ubiquitous, as known by everyone, Matt Hills suggests we think about how they might not always act to sustain a common, unifying currency, but how they have other functions, such as connecting subcultures of fans. Proposing that we think about ‘subcultural celebrity’, he looks at the popular theorising of two dramatic comedies, the Hollywood movie Galaxy Quest and the made-for-BBC-TV film Cruise of the Gods. Both invent their own cult TV series and worlds of subcultural fandom, and both engage in a mixture of parodying, reinforcing and/or subverting cult TV fans’ images as ‘sad, weird geeks’. Hills examines how these texts negotiate the issue of fans’ cultural power, and considers what this can tell us about the potential range of relationships between celebrities and their audiences.

Finally, Jeremy Gilbert rethinks how we might understand the relationship between celebrity, social life and individuality. He points out that conventional psychoanalytic accounts of the relationship between stars and their fans (like much neo-Lacanian political theory) reproduce the assumptions of early twentieth century mass psychology, and can be challenged by a range of theoretical and empirical sources, from the work on the productivity of fan cultures to the deconstructions of psychoanalysis offered by Deleuze and Guattari and Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen. He argues that celebrity culture is inherent to capitalism from its earliest emergence and that there is a fundamental incompatibility between capitalist individualism and any form of meaningful democracy.

There are many links between these pieces, which share a concern with how changing celebrity cultures relate to issues of power, equality and democracy. One link is the interest in the affective investments and relationships between celebrities and ‘ordinary people’. Another is the concern to explain the significance of dramatisations of the route from ordinary to extraordinary. In different ways the contributors all explore how celebrity is both a magnified example of the individualisation of our society and a key mechanism through which this process of individualisation functions. Alongside celebrity, then, this issue of Mediactive is keen to consider its opposite, or opposites, whether thought of as ‘the ordinary’, as non-fame, as a fan, as community, as socialism or as anti-individualism. To do this is to move beyond the individualistic dreams of celebrity, to move from stating ‘This is your life!’ to asking: ‘What are our lives?’

Jo Littler Issue editor

Notes
1. John O’Farrell, This Is Your Life, Doubleday 2002 p57.
2. Ben Hatch, The Lawnmower Celebrity, Indigo 2000.
3. Barbara Ellen, ‘Who’d wannabe a willabee?’, The Observer Magazine, 10 February 2002, p3.