A couple of years ago Britney Spears and her entourage swept through my boss’s office. As she sashayed past, I blushed and stammered and leaned over my desk to shake her hand. She looked right into my eyes and smiled her pageant smile, and I confess, I felt dizzy. I’ve never been much of a Britney fan, so why the contact high? Why should I care? For that matter, why should any of us? Celebrities are fascinating because they live in a parallel universe — one that looks and feels just like ours yet is light years beyond our reach.
Stars live in another world entirely, one that makes our lives seem woefully dull by comparison. It’s easy to blame the media for this cognitive whiplash. But the real celebrity spinmeister is our own mind, which tricks us into believing the stars are our lovers and our social intimates. Celebrity culture plays to all of our innate tendencies: we’re built to view anyone we recognise as an acquaintance ripe for gossip or for romance, hence our powerful interest in Anna Kournikova’s sex life. But when celebrities are both our intimate daily companions and as distant as the heavens above, it’s hard to know just how to think of them.
Reality TV further confuses the picture by transforming ordinary folk into bold-faced names without warning. Celebrities tap into powerful motivational systems designed to foster romantic love and to urge us to find a mate. Stars summon our most human yearnings: to love, admire, copy and, of course, to gossip and to jeer. It’s only natural that we get pulled into their gravitational field.
John Lennon infuriated the faithful when he said the Beatles were more popular than Jesus, but he wasn’t the first to suggest that celebrity culture was taking the place of religion. With its myths, its rituals and its ability to immortalise, it fills a similar cultural niche. In a secular society our need for ritualised idol worship can be displaced on to stars, speculates psychologist James Houran, formerly of the Southern Illinois University school of medicine and now director of psychological studies for True Beginnings dating service. Nonreligious people tend to be more interested in celebrity culture, he’s found, and Houran speculates that for them, celebrity fills some of the same roles the church fills for believers, such as the desire to admire the powerful and the drive to fit into a community of people with shared values.
Leo Braudy, author of The Frenzy of Renown: Fame and its History, suggests that celebrities are more like Christian calendar saints than like spiritual authorities. ”Celebrities have their aura — a debased version of charisma” that stems from their all-powerful captivating presence, Braudy says.
Much like spiritual guidance, celebrity-watching can be inspiring, or at least help us muster the will to tackle our own problems. ”Celebrities motivate us to make it,” says Helen Fisher, an anthropologist at Rutgers University in New Jersey. Oprah Winfrey suffered through poverty, sexual abuse and racial discrimination to become the wealthiest woman in media.
Star-watching can also simply point the way to a grander, more dramatic way of living, publicist Michael Levine says. ”We live lives more dedicated to safety or quiet desperation, and we transcend this by connecting with bigger lives — those of the stars,” he says. Mexican villagers trade theories with home-town friends about who killed rapper Tupac Shakur; and Liberian and German businessmen critique David Beckham’s plays before hammering out deals. My friend Britney Spears was, in fact, last year’s top international Internet search.
In our global village, the best targets for gossip are the faces we all know. We are born to dish dirt, evolutionary psychologists agree; it’s the most efficient way to navigate society and to determine who is trustworthy. They also point out that when our brains evolved, anybody with a familiar face was an ”in-group” member, a person whose alliances and enmities were important to keep track of.
Things have changed somewhat since life in the Pleistocene era, but our neural hardwiring hasn’t, so on some deeper level, we may think the stars of Friends really are our friends. That’s also why we don’t get bored by star gossip, says Bonnie Fuller, editorial director of American Media, which publishes Star and The Enquirer: ”That would be like getting bored with information about family and friends!”
The brain simply doesn’t realise that it’s being fooled by TV and movies, says sociologist Satoshi Kanazawa, lecturer at the London School of Economics. ”Hundreds of thousands of years ago, it was impossible for someone not to know you if you knew them. And if they didn’t kill you, they were probably your friend.”
Kanazawa’s research has shown that this feeling of friendship has other repercussions: people who watch more TV are more satisfied with their friendships, just as if they had more friends and socialised more frequently. The most fascinating measure of status is, of course, sex.
”We want to know who is mating with whom,” says Douglas Kenrick, professor of psychology at Arizona State University. He speculates that we look to stars to evaluate our own sexual behaviour and ethics, and mistake them unconsciously for members of our prospective mating pool.
The beauty bias is well known. We all pay more attention to good-looking people. Research has shown that both men and women spend more time looking at beautiful women than at less attractive women. It’s not surprising that gorgeous people wind up famous. What’s less obvious is that famous people often wind up gorgeous: the more we see a certain face, the more our brain likes it, whether or not it’s actually beautiful.
On the flip side, celebrity overload — let’s call it the J.Lo effect — can leave us all thoroughly sick of even the most beautiful celeb. With the constant deluge of celebrity coverage, says psychologist and Harvard Medical School instructor Nancy Etcoff, ”they at first become more appealing because they are familiar, but then the ubiquity becomes tedious”.
That is why the stars who reign the longest — Madonna is the best example — are always changing their appearance.” Every time Madonna reconfigures her look, she resets our responses back to when her face was recognisable but still surprising.
What’s the result of our simultaneous yearning to be more like celebrities and our desire to be wowed by their unattainable perfection? We’ve been watching it for the past decade. Reality television is an express train to fame, unpredictably turning nobodies into somebodies. Reality TV now gives us the ability to get inside the star factory and watch the transition to fame in real time.
”The appeal of reality stars is that they were possibly once just like you, sitting on the couch watching a reality TV programme, until they leaped to celebrity,” says Andy Denhart, blogger and reality TV junkie. ”With the number of reality shows out there, it’s inexcusable to not be famous if you want to be!”
In the past, ambitious young men who idolised a famous actor might take acting lessons or learn to dance. Now, they get plastic surgery and learn to tell their life stories for the camera.
Yet there’s still something about that magic dust. A celebrity sighting is not just about seeing a star, author Braudy points out, but is about being seen by a star: ”There is a sense that celebrities are more real than we are; people feel more real in the presence of a celebrity.”
It wasn’t just that I saw Britney, it was that Britney saw me.
This is an edited version of an article from Psychology Today, August 2004