When Did Celebs Stop Being Mysterious? Lifting the Curtains on Celebrity Constructs
A photographer friend earns a lucrative living taking editorial-style portraits for her clients’ Instagrams. These clients aren’t creative directors or influencers — not even those of the “niche” variety. She doesn’t operate out of Los Angeles, Miami, or any place known for selling hope to earnest-looking kids. Just the opposite: unassuming, small-town Canada. Nowadays, It doesn’t matter where you are so long as you’re online. The Internet makes stars of girls who dance in their bedrooms. Algorithms create virality, sometimes even fame, and spark hope — almost an electric anticipation — in those earnest-looking kids. I’ve never enlisted a professional to capture my best angle for the perfect post, but I have spent an hour trying to do it myself. The post undoubtedly reaches more people in a day than I interact with in real life over any given month. Social media has made public figures of us all.
We fabricate self-narratives for the digital public. Invented identities typically reflect their designated platforms and aid our objectives. The list of Facebook friends includes grandma, so the list of links on your profile includes crochet videos. But your Twitter followers consist of OnlyFans patrons. Or maybe you favour a simplistic self-creation: face-tuning photos and the excessive pondering of witty Insta captions. In the not-so-distant time of 2007, MTV developed The Hills as a spin-off of Laguna Beach. Lauren Conrad, who began in Laguna Beach’s ensemble cast of gorgeous SoCal high school students, was the central protagonist of its spin-off show. The Hills showed Conrad navigating love, her swanky Teen Vogue internship, and fashion school in Los Angeles. Neither Lauren Conrad the person — the megastar — nor the muted glamour of her onscreen life reflects a version of reality viewers that’s relatable to viewers.
So while it ought to be no surprise that production faked and staged scenes, allegations of fabricated narratives plagued much of the disapproving conversation surrounding the show. Nowadays, not only do revelations of such “allegations'' border on comical, but we’re sympathetic to a crew shooting “five takes of Lauren ordering dinner.” I think I’d need at least twice as many takes to get it looking cute. The noughties were the era of Us Weekly’s “stars — they’re just like us” slogan; the age of believing that everyone chows down on a burger, but the Lauren Conrads amongst us manage to do so with effortless elegance. Modern masses have flipped this slogan on its head. We’ve come to believe that we are like the stars. Each one of us is a viral video, a famous parent, an industry backer away from the celebutant status. Each one of us performs elegance.
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The ethos of our modern era is characterized by a desire to be part of the action. DeuxMoi, a pseudonymous Instagram tabloid, embodies this ethos by virtue of its digitality. Where the early years of Page Six necessitated a phone call to its editors, DeuxMoi receives tips from followers via Instagram DM. The casual, accessible nature of this communication evokes the feeling that you’re gossiping with a friend. Where budgets posit production limits on print publications, DeuxMoi’s platform allows unlimited publications, thereby indulging their followers. DeuxMoi posts everything from detailed exposés to candid photographs showing someone’s back to the camera. It recognizes that people are keen to participate, to walk amongst stars, to mingle with the media. A DeuxMoi catchphrase of sorts is “anon pls” — a cyberspeak request for anonymity by tippers. There’s a genre of wholesome, inoffensive submissions to DeuxMoi that occur fairly regularly on the page: tips from excited first-timers who mention their inexperience and excitement in the message. Usually, the tip is about seeing a particular celebrity eating at a particular restaurant. It’s a contextually harmless disclosure from someone who obviously lacks industry ties. Still, without fail, the sender signs off, “anon, pls!” The words “anon, pls” appear on various items of DeuxMoi branded merchandise. These days everyone is selling something. Most people are selling themselves; DeuxMoi is selling access to the in-crowd, a community, a club with a catchphrase. We may not need to ring DeuxMoi to disclose those tips, but they’ve certainly got our numbers.
“We want to make a mark on the culture, and who better to learn from than the early-twenty-first century’s most prominent cultural figures?”
It isn’t all illusions of grandeur and minor celebrity sightings. Writer MJ Corey, better known online as Kardashian Kolloquium, unpacks the Kardashian dynasty from an analytical, academic perspective often pertaining to postmodernism and media theory. In an interview with The Hollywood Reporter, Corey reflects on the Kardashians as “masters of dialectics,” citing the way the family will “promote the sexuality of their images but then revert to very traditional, Americana values of family and gender roles.” MJ Corey takes the Kardashians seriously. Corey’s recent popularity suggests that so do we.
During the days of the Hollywood studio system, movie studios would recruit beautiful or interesting faces and transform the people with those faces into stars. These recruits were assigned new names, new clothes, a new look, and audiences of this era happily accepted these constructs. Celebrity wasn’t about relatability or authenticity. Movie stars were meant to exist out of the reach of ordinary people — everything from their inception to their livelihood made this true. Today, we — everyone from cultural theorists like MJ Corey to curious young people on TikTok to industry figures like The Hollywood Reporter— are doing our homework. Theoretical inquiry is more than just gossip, more than morbid curiosity about unflattering paparazzi shots. We want to make a mark on the culture, and who better to learn from than the early-twenty-first century’s most prominent cultural figures?
Words: Cleo Sood
