The Red Carpet Mentality
We created this — our celebrity president, our popularity contest politics, our reality show world. We, meaning America.
America’s founding fathers imagined a democracy in which everyone lived on a level playing field on which we all have the right to life, liberty, and pursuit of happiness. A beautiful ideal, yet in reality somewhat a utopian vision. For in a world predicated on elitism, classism, racism, and sexism — that level playing field seemed pretty pie sky to many Americans. Then along came celebrity. In many ways, celebrity is the literal embodiment of the American Dream — for it is the one place, in theory, where anyone can transcend their origins and succeed beyond the world’s wildest imaginings.
I grew up in Hollywood as the daughter of a movie star. I saw how celebrity worked — how my father received preferential treatment because of his status. The best room in the house, a reservation even when the restaurant was full, a miraculous bump up to a first-class seat on the plane.
After my parents were divorced, my mother and I would visit the same hotels or restaurants where we had been with my father, and get a room next to the elevator shaft over looking a brick wall or be told we had a three-hour wait for dinner.
My father was a famous white man — and famous white men are given preferential treatment wherever they go. My mother — a successful designer and businesswoman in her own right — suddenly became a fifty-something-year-old nobody with a young daughter. She was treated accordingly. She had to fight to get her own credit card in the early 1970s, so fight she did. My mother refused to back down, but at great cost to her fragile heart still reeling from being left for another woman. I learned at an early age that while celebrity levels the playing field, it only does so for those who write the rules of the game AKA white men.
When I was 23 years old, I read an idea in a book that leapt off the page and seared itself into my consciousness. The author, Peter Berger, defined alienation as the state of mind created when a person can no longer distinguish between their public persona and their private psyche. I sat bolt upright in my chair, realizing that not only described my famous father, but also everyone else whom I had met growing up in Hollywood. Most famous people I knew could no longer distinguish where their celebrity self ended and the person who pooped and peed like the rest of us began.
Why? Was it because they were power hungry jerks? For some maybe. But my dad and most of his friends were largely kind, generous, giving people — most of whom used their celebrity to give something back to the world. But even they had a hard time not losing their identities in the fame game.
I spent my early twenties studying and teaching celebrity studies while working on my doctorate — desperate to understand the mercurial meritocracy that is America, and the effects of this rampant alienation as it played out in the lives of the rest of us. I came to realize that we were a country, if not a planet, teetering on the edge of great danger. In a world where our role models have ceased to be real people we know and have instead become celebrities we will never know, we essentially hero worship alienated individuals. We were, I realized, on the verge of raising a completely alienated generation.
To Baby Boomers, who grew up watching the famous of my father’s generation live their larger-than-life lives, fame seemed like the way out. The ultimate level playing field in the game of the American Dream. But by making celebrity — being seen, the adulation of the public eye — the ends instead of a by-product of genuine achievement, celebrity has become even emptier than it already was. That is what the next generation has discovered
Celebrity is like Gertrude Stein’s clever quip about the city of Oakland: There’s no there There. Oakland has actually become a pretty cool place. But celebrity — well, thanks to social media — there’s even less there now. We worship people who are not even real people any more. With personas instead of people as our role models, is it any wonder the whole world feels like fake news?
Social media is just celebrity mutated into a mass phenomenon. Our selfies and posts and commentaries create the means for us all to feel seen — and for many people, that becomes more important and more real than their daily lives. We move through the world with a red carpet mentality — image conscious, power hungry, privilege seeking, and yet, desperately insecure. Knowing that right behind us on the red carpet is the next fresh meat to feed America’s hunger for the beautiful, the powerful, the privileged, the great.
Everyone who has achieved celebrity comes to understand the fickleness of fame, but perhaps none so eloquently as Steve Jobs. These are his last words on his Facebook page:
“In the eyes of others, my life has been the symbol of success. However, apart from work, I have little joy. . . At this time. . .remembering all my life, I realize that all the accolades and riches of which I was once so proud, have become insignificant with my imminent death. Only now do I understand that . . .you have to pursue objectives that are not related to wealth. It should be something more important: For example, stories of love, art, dreams of my childhood . . .God has made us one way, we can feel the love in the heart of each of us, and not illusions built by fame or money, like I made in my life. I cannot take them with me. I can only take with me the memories that were strengthened by love. This is the true wealth that will follow you. . .Love can travel thousands of miles and so life has no limits. Move to where you want to go. Strive to reach the goals you want to achieve. Everything is in your heart and in your hands.”
So how to we wrest back our world from the alienated emptiness and fake news inherent in our celebrity culture? The first task isn’t easy. We have to be willing to lose a lot of what we have been told we have to spend our whole lives finding, accumulating, becoming, and hoarding — and choose instead to find meaning in things that don’t cost money, get our names in print, or exploit other people or our natural resources. We need to speak true even when we make people uncomfortable.
That is why there is so much power in the #metoo movement. That is why change is coming from women, people of color and the differently-abled, the LGBTQ movement, and all of us who feel like we have not had a place at the patriarchal power table. That is why all of us who still have a voice have to use it — to keep speaking the truth, even if it is deemed fake by those who make the real fake news. To keep pointing out all the ways that the Emperor has no clothes. To keep keeping it real, even when it makes everyone uncomfortable.
But then, having spoken true and relinquished some long-cherished ideals, there is one thing, and one thing only, we all have to do. It’s what Steve Jobs discovered at the end of his life: We have to learn to love and then keep learning to love — and then love some more. To love one another, love those who can’t speak, love those who speak too much, and love this world back whole.
We need to turn our backs on the red carpet with all its illusory promises, and rediscover that the beating heart of this planet is within each of us. We must choose Love.
