Abstract
Celebrity is a frontier existence. It is situated on the edge of normal experience. Normal people can imagine what it is like to live an existence full of incident and emergency. We know that they pay for magazines like Hello, Heat and Closer which deal exclusively with data pertaining to the stars, and newspaper columns covering the triumphs and tribulations of the famous. Psychologists of celebrity maintain that up to one-third of normal people suffer from “celebrity worship syndrome”: neurotic obsession with a famous person that can produce some type of dysfunctional behavior.
But this everyday act of imagination is very different from really living a celebrity existence. Just as one can imagine, but not experience, an empty room (since it would not be empty if you were in it), we can imagine, but not experience what it is like to wake up every day and find yourself economically better off than yesterday, adored by strangers, showered with gifts, offered honors without seeking them, treating global prestige as a right, having a wider latitude over moral conduct and exerting a compulsive sense of entitlement in social encounters. Yet this is the staple fare of superstar existence. No wonder Ruth Penfold-Mounce holds that there is an elective affinity between celebrity culture and crime. Both worlds offer the prospect of having everything and getting away with it. The normal rules governing everyday life do not apply.
The author correctly notes the operation of a double standard here. Typically, ignoring conventions, never apologizing, and having your cake and eating it produce social reactions of disapproval. When celebrities and criminals behave thus they are often admired for their boldness, daring and freedom from social conventions. Why?
For Penfold-Mounce the answer lies in Foucault’s concept of governance. The figures of the celebrity and the criminal have emerged as key elements in the governing regime of social behavior. They provide role models and parables of practice that modern people, fatefully bobbing in the sea of para-social relations, eagerly devour for a sense of anchorage and direction. Outwardly, this comes close to reasserting the well-worn culture industry thesis of the Frankfurt School which holds that the culture industry extends the control of capital from the workplace to the realm of entertainment, leisure and consumption. The result is a widely discredited model of cultural literacy in the public. It treats the consumer as docile, passive and uneducated about the wiles of the PR-Media complex.
Actually, we know from histories of the Hollywood studio system and the payola scandal in pop music, that even in Adorno’s day fans were aware that celebrity data were rationed by the culture industry. They were inquisitive about disclosure, revelation and exposure precisely because it compromised the chicanery of PR-Media spin-doctors. Seeing was not necessarily believing.
Psychologists tell us that up to 30 percent of the population suffer from celebrity worship syndrome. That is, an unhealthy, morbid obsession with fame. The book does much to clarify the historical and sociological roots of celebrity culture. It sets considerable store on Foucault’s concept of governance. Arguably, it over-extends the concept. Simultaneously, Penfold-Mounce uses it to describe the power regime that regulates behavior in Western society, and the subversive world of the criminal that offers people a transgressive alternative which exposes the arbitrary confines of everyday life. This is to make of governance everything and nothing. What is required is a more careful elucidation of the ends of regulation and transgression.
Putting that to one side, the book is a lively, provocative addition to the growing field of celebrity studies. Twining celebrity with criminality provides the useful contribution of revealing both as leading examples of edge-work in contemporary society. By examining the phenomena of fame and crime we strike a path into the dense and knotted forest of moral regulation. Celebrities and criminals belong to the social category of edge-workers.