Reading People or Us or Perez Hilton, we learn variously about the joys of new love and the hurts of the old, the satisfactions of parenthood, the wages of sin, the punishment for hubris, the drawbacks to fame as well as its blessings, the risk of losing yourself and the exhilaration of finding yourself, and, perhaps above all, the things that really matter in life and the things that don’t, which means that celebrity, far from being a shallow artifice, often addresses the fundamental differences between the real and the false, the meaningful and the meaningless. These are the concerns to which we have always turned to art to explain. Even the Speidi story has a postmodernist subtext about identity, reinvention, the lust for fame, and envy that tells us something significant about ourselves and our society if we have the tenacity to dissect it.
In effect, then, we have invented celebrity and latched onto it because celebrity does a better job of giving us what traditional art and entertainments once gave us before they became too enervated to surprise us or we became too jaded to be surprised. By the same token, in a symbiotic turn, many protagonists of celebrity narratives have become sophisticated enough to realize that they could recast their narratives as a way of sustaining their own celebrity, turning their life into their work. One will never know how much of Michael Jackson’s eccentricity was a way to keep his narrative (and his celebrity) going, though we can be fairly certain that his decision to return to performing was intended as another chapter in his story: Michael’s Comeback! We don’t know how much of Lindsay Lohan’s behavior is a way to keep herself in the public eye when she has no movies to do so. And we don’t know how much Madonna’s abrupt career changes and public romances are her way of manipulating celebrity to her benefit. We do know the effect.
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