Today’s celebrities serve the needs that in earlier points of history were filled by gods and heroes.
In the final analysis, what we seem to want out of them is to see ourselves writ large. If we feel small and insignificant, we crave people to identify with who aren’t dwarfed by the scale of contemporary life. At the same time, in our idfulness, we demand that they be just like us. (Extraordinary effort seems almost like cheating.)
This can be a difficult tightrope for celebrities to walk. If they’re not enough like us, we don’t ever warm to them. If they’re too much like us, we begin to wonder what business they have being celebrities, when we ourselves seem just as fit to occupy the role.
The balance is probably easiest to strike in areas where we expect celebrities to be just like us except for certain prodigious capabilities—for example, in professional sports. Even here, though, things can unravel with disturbing speed. For example, when fans see pro basketball players demonstrating what they feel are insufficiently mythical levels of talent, their frustration at not being able to vicariously experience resounding victory somewhere in their lives can combine with their resentfulness of the players’ exalted status, along with idfulness and poor impulse control, and suddenly drinks are being thrown at the players, and a small riot is underway.
When the celebrities are not seven-foot-tall basketball players or 300-pound NFL stars, and the distinctions between the endowments of performers and spectators are not quite as obvious, the celebrities have to walk a trickier tightrope. Take rap music, where it’s not necessary to be able to even carry a tune. Here the need to continually re-establish “street cred” leads to highly-paid performers living in a world where even though their material needs are well met, they are bound to lifestyles where they're still vulnerable to being gunned down like any other homies in the ‘hood.
Actors are another group where the distinctions between the endowments of performers and spectator are not quite as obvious. Since most people don’t really have a sense of what good acting is about, it’s fairly easy for them to picture themselves in front of the camera. Complicating matters is the fact that they may also be better-looking than the celebrities. As a result, love-hate relationships with actors tend to be particularly intense, ranging from the malicious glee many people feel at seeing the prominent brought low in celebrity tattler magazines to outright stalking.
Perhaps the most disturbing area where our ambivalence about celebrities comes into play is in politics. We basically won’t vote for anybody nowadays who isn’t already famous—effectively insisting that our candidates be mythic figures who are very different from us. At the same time, it's becoming more and more important that a President be somebody we could picture ourselves having a beer with.
Just by way of comparison, I can’t really picture myself having a beer with the likes of Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln, or either of the Roosevelts. The whole notion seems reminiscent of Chevy Chase’s idiot fantasy in European Vacation of having a cookout with the British royal family—gassing away with the queen about the same inane subjects most people yak about at their own backyard barbecues.
More to the point, though, to require our political leaders to be exceptional in terms of celebrity and ordinary in other regards seems profoundly backward. Shouldn't we want exceptional people, and not care how well known they are when they start out?
