The News: A User's Manual

The Injuries of Fame

The High Court in London has just ruled that a column satirizing Elton John was not defamatory. Elton John had claimed that the article in the Guardian made fun of his serious charity work. He claimed it even joked about important events, such as the White Tie Ball, saying he only held them for self-promotion and to meet celebrities, not to raise money … Elton John described the article as having a ‘gratuitously offensive, nasty and snide tone’. However, the judge disagreed, saying, ‘The words complained of … could not be understood by a reasonable reader of the Guardian Weekend section as containing the serious allegation pleaded.’ Elton John was seeking damages and an apology. In a statement, Guardian News & Media said, ‘We’re sorry that Elton John lost his sense of humour over this article … Newspapers have published satire since the 17th century in this country: the judgment is an important recognition of the right to poke the occasional bit of fun.’

Perezhilton.com

1.

THOSE SETTING OUT to be famous dream of securing a particular kind of attention for themselves: high-grade attention, by which they imagine an audience sympathetic to their talents and forgiving of their faults, an audience that resembles a loving parent, an ideal teacher or an all-seeing and generous God.

Then, once famous, they realize that they have become the recipient of a most perplexing kind of attention: one where intense love is followed by sudden hatred, where their most minor lapses are treated with violent intolerance, where weaknesses are pounced upon and never forgotten, where a prurient interest surrounds matters entirely unrelated to the talent that initially earned them public notice, where journalists go through their rubbish in the early hours and where embarrassing pictures of them appear online and within hours attract the ridicule of millions. If they were to complain about this kind of attention, what might be termed low-grade attention, they would quickly and sanctimoniously be put in their place and informed that someone who courts attention cannot choose which version they are accorded and must be ready for, and even deserve, any sort of attention whatsoever.

2.

CELEBRITIES ARE SO unusual and so privileged that it takes a little effort to remember that they aren’t a different species in every respect and indeed that they are especially like you and me in one area in particular: they get hurt very easily.

The exaggerated need for approval that drove them to be famous in the first place makes them particularly unprepared for coping with the taunts and denigration they can be sure to face once they have a name. They will be forced to understand that their reputation is not theirs alone, but is a co-creation between themselves and their audiences over which they have appallingly imperfect and indirect control. Shepherding a reputation has some of the futility of trying to guide a soap bubble. When insult strikes, inside their frightened minds everyone has read the venomous articles and seen the embarrassing pictures and will believe the worst. The fears about themselves that made the celebrities struggle to win fame have turned out to be real: they truly are the monsters they tried to persuade themselves and the world that they were not.

3.

A STANCE OF heroic defiance is sometimes suggested at this point; the wounded celebrity is advised to be the bearer of his or her own meaning and to disregard what the world is saying. But how could anyone become famous without a disposition to care a little too much about what other people think?

A better tactic would be to get into the minds of one’s enemies. The famous person might imagine their critics to be motivated solely by a limitless, obsessive hatred, and to have made their lacerating deductions from immovable convictions. But in truth, their opponents are generally not much more than thoughtless, unem-pathetic, inured to low standards and accustomed to doing what others do. Their cruel jibes arise chiefly from the sheer implausibility that the person they are being mean to could actually be listening and is likely to be deeply vulnerable. As when one is dropping a bomb from high altitude, the capacity for hurting others increases hugely when one doesn’t have to look one’s victim in the eye.

4.

THE REASONS WHY we need others to fail and why we delight in gossip about their missteps are in the end deeply sad; because we are furious about our own lack of attention – and so attempt to gain relief by punishing those who seem to have deprived us of our due. Our disappointed ambitions turn us into failures: people who need others to fail.

The urge to gossip and the desire for fame spring from the very same ill: both are caused by a shortage of attention. Celebrities are really only trying – albeit on a much larger stage and scale – to solve the same problem we all grapple with, that of being ignored. We might even say that famous people stand in relation to failures of attention much as the fearless pioneers of flight stood in relation to air travel. Although many of these early airmen died in violent explosions and crashes, the ultimate goal was that one day everyone might be able to fly safely, just as the hope in the arena of fame is that dignity will over time grow more common, and that the sort of respect that is now still the preserve of only a few will some day become properly and democratically prevalent.

We are still working out what the word democracy really signifies. At first, it reflected a conviction that power shouldn’t just be in the hands of the few. It took a great deal of time, sensitization and political articulation for this point to get across and for elites to recognize that being deprived of the right to vote deserved to be listed among the very real ills that a ruler might inflict on his or her people. We should now move the democratic process along and accept that we have other needs which are no less urgent or important than the need to vote, among which we must include the need for dignity and respect. We should sensitize ourselves to the immense psychological repercussions of being pushed around and humiliated. A society which routinely debases the greatest share of its members will find itself afflicted by a strong desire for fame, mixed in with eruptions of the most sarcastic, vindictive and schizophrenic attacks on the few who have managed to secure renown.

The solution to both vicious gossip and the overardent longing for fame lies in a manoeuvre all but unimaginable within the current arrangement of society: a broader distribution of high-grade attention. With more of this in circulation, the manic need both to insult the few and to stand out from the many would abate, to the flourishing of all.