The Fantasy of Celebrity

I’m kind of unusual when it comes to the state of celebrity and pop-culture—meaning I’m a normal guy. I saw the absurdity of the change in culture, and though I did not go along with it, I did not have an enormous problem with it.

However, in the past five years or so, I have been unable to understand many aspects of popular culture and the appeal. For anyone who’s not a huge fucking nerd this would be no problem, but as I need tv to survive, it has been a bit of an annoyance.

But looking back on the celebrities of my childhood, what I consider to be the golden age of celebrity, I think I have finally understood what the core difference is.

It comes down to a collective fantasy.

In the early 2000s, my coming of age, I really think what drove stories and stars was the idea of the hero. Not a perfect or naive hero, but a darker, more realistic hero.

It was kind of the perfect storm of a fantasy—cinema was reaching its peak, special effects were erupting, and the internet wasn’t really active enough to spoil the mystery behind the stars.

So me, and my generation, were able to enjoy this fantasy of a troubled hero in a corrupt world who against all odds did something noble.

Of course, overcoming this cultural fantasy is what some would say is growing up, but of course, my goal was to never grow up, so I try to understand the zeitgeist.

I think that the new cultural fantasy of celebrity is someone who is a good person. Not a hero, not wise, not deep—because those people exist now and they’re probably homeless. No, people want to watch someone who is living the good life while being a good person.

General society has only become crueler and we all know that people are not good—but celebrity has somehow still survived, as it always seems to in modern America, as the fantasy that the public needs.

People want to believe that there is someone out there who is good, I think (I hope), and they want to lift them up as the best of us.

But, of course, as the final filmmaker from the glory days of cinema (Christopher Nolan) puts it:

The world is simple. It’s miserable, solid all the way through. But if you could fool them, even for a second, then you could make them wonder. And then you got to see something very special.

And, I think, now more than ever, people want to be fooled.

But it’s strange—it’s almost as if we are elevating celebrity as a form of our own ego. People want to believe that they have a say in someone’s greatness—that this person is good enough to deserve it.

Because where would they be if they didn’t believe that? They would be like me, alone and unemployed. An average guy with no value.

Bless them for their fantasies, bless us all. Dreams seem to be the only thing that keeps the human soul alive. And I think celebrities are a huge part of that—a manifestation in American popular culture of a collective fantasy that keeps us alive.