“There aren’t any big stars anymore,” said the doyenne of the gossip business, Liz Smith, in a recent interview. “It’s very diminished in quality, I guess is what I’d say, the quality of stardom. Because I don’t know who most of those people are. I’m not kidding! I read Page Six mystified every day, and everybody I talk to agrees with me. They don’t know who anybody is.”
To be sure, what with Iran getting the bomb and all, the declining “quality of stardom” is not an issue of great moment. But there is something interesting, as a matter of cultural sociology, in Liz Smith’s observation. There really are dozens of stars of whom the majority of Americans has never heard. Let me mention just two: Lauren Conrad and Jason Mesnick. They sell magazines, get sky-high television ratings, and are the objects of intense interest and concern.
So who on earth are they? Lauren Conrad has been, for five years, the star of a series of real-life soap operas broadcast on MTV (Laguna Beach: The Real Orange County, The Hills) in which America has watched her grow from an impassive blonde teenager into an impassive blonde twentysomething. She is so famous, in fact, that she is routinely referred to in the gossip mags simply as LC.
Jason Mesnick has only been a star for a few months, and will probably cease being one now: He was this year’s title character on the reality show called The Bachelor, in which a man gets to choose from a menu of 25 women. Mesnick seemed like such a nice fellow, a divorced man with a three-year-old child; but then, having proposed to one girl, he turned around on television six weeks later and dumped her in favor of the second-place winner, whom America had watched him dump in favor of the new dumpee.
The world may not long remember them, but little-noted Conrad and Mesnick are not. Having paid the cost of losing all dignity, privacy, and sense of proportion, they have been rewarded with fame beyond their wildest imaginings. And yet this country is so vast, and the menu of entertainment choices so various, that I would expect most readers of this article are only learning of them from me and will forget them as soon as they turn the page.
Liz Smith’s lament, then, has a great deal to do with the fact that fame is simultaneously accelerating and growing more evanescent. That is due to the radically egalitarian turn in the nature and definition of stardom in America. Stars are no longer the assembly-line creations of what was once called the Hollywood “dream factory,” people with carefully constructed images who were kept away from the public, scarce and elusive, in part to retain the mystery and inaccessibility that would cause millions to pay money just to catch a glimpse of them.
Performers are exhibitionists by nature, but it was the particular genius of the Hollywood machine that it controlled and limited the nature of that exhibitionism. The collapse of those controls has changed the nature of stardom in the United States, because now the key to stardom isn’t the limitation of exhibitionism but the unleashing of it.
This is due, in part, to the explosion of celebrity-driven media. For years, there was only People and its distant rival, Us Weekly; now there are dozens of weeklies and monthlies dedicated almost exclusively to show business. Entertainment Tonight ruled the roost on television for a decade or more; now five shows daily compete for the same soft news.
The sad fact is that the older methods of celebrity manufacture no longer suffice. They did not produce enough material, a sufficient number of celebrities to feed this inexhaustible maw. The maw itself had to produce them, and the complete abandonment of personal modesty as a cultural value gave them the means, the motive, and the opportunity.
What Liz Smith is lamenting is the collapse of the artifice–the glamor that was, in large measure, an invention of a public-relations machine notable for its invisibility. Now there is no artifice. Celebrity and notoriety are indistinguishable, and the phenomenon of stardom, like so many other American institutions, has been delegitimized.
John Podhoretz, editor of Commentary, is THE WEEKLY STANDARD‘s movie critic.
