Celebrity Infatuation

“Miley’s New Diet”, “Tom & Katie: All About The Baby” “Ashlee and Pete: Now What?” These are just a few headlines of magazines I recently observed while standing in line at the grocery store. Six out of eight magazines that were displayed near the checkout stand were celebrity gossip related tabloid magazines. Us weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Star, People, all situated at the top of the row, while Time Magazine, Newsweek and a couple health related magazines held a place below. The reason for their placement is quite obvious; gossip magazines are superior in sales. There’s a reason why the first photograph of Jennifer Lopez holding her newborn babies was sold to a dozen different magazines at $30,000 a piece, earning the photographer more than a quarter of a million dollars for one photo. Americans continue purchasing these magazines, the paparazzi will continue snapping photographs and the celebrities continue to cash in. Movie stars get paid more than doctors & scientists, and soldiers trudging through the sand with bullets overhead are lucky to get a shiny nickel. These tabloids play the role of a drug, feeding societies cultural syndrome of celebrity infatuation. The passionate imaginary relationships through media and fantasy are a characteristic of contemporary American society. So why and how are we infected?

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Celebrity figures are precisely packaged through makeup, camera angles, airbrushing and film editing giving them godlike qualities that a human cannot maintain. There is a certain extreme some celebrity obsessed individuals will go to, and that extreme is trying to aquire their physical characteristics by going under the knife. Societies infatuation with celebrities and our desire to acquire these features has taken plastic surgery to a different level. There’s even a television show on MTV called “I Want A Famous Face”, where every week 2 individuals decide to go through plastic surgery to look like their favorite celebrity. A 16 year old girl lays on her bed looking around at the vast array of Shia Labeouf posters which now looks like one uniform wallpaper collage covering her bedroom walls. She collects magazine clippings, movies, pins, memorabilia & she would even buy Shia Labeouf toothpaste if it were available. Long imaginary conversations are held between her and a photograph of Labeouf. Daydreams of the day she meets him, dates him and eventually has his children take up a considerable fraction of her day. Long love letters are written to him and sent to his talent agency. Is her artificial love relationship any different from a relationship a 16 year old has with a real boyfriend? The intensity is definitely as strong as a real affair. What strikes her to give into these sort of relationships? Where does it all begin? The girl must be regularly carried away into dramatic social situations through the media. For example the girl in this case will see all of Shia Labeouf’s films, and in all of them she is exposed to him in a romantic emotion-envoking way. With each additional film she watches, her feelings are reinforced. His characters are constantly in the role of the hero & romancer. Shia Labeouf’s personality is now associated with these characters, and the positive feelings that his characters have brought her. A real relationship unfortunately consists of some negative features, while a fantasy relationship does not. So is it surprising that this teenage girl is keeping her fictional relationship?

Will our obsession with celebrities ever cease? As long as the media dedicates themselves to the glorification of the celebrity, the obsession will continue. We will continue to call upon celebrities to host red cross telethons and give the terminator the upper hand during a political election. We’ll hear about Tom Cruise’s rants on psychiatry and Angelina Jolie’s efforts to save third world countries one child at a time on shows such as The Insider, Entertainment Tonight & Access Hollywood. Headlines such as Mariah Carey's secret marriage will continue to overshadow newsworthy stories, and the tabloids will remain on the top row at the check-out stand.