March 16, 2023 • 26 mins
The 95th Academy Awards were held last weekend, with Everything Everywhere All At Once winning Best Picture. The Oscars are just the latest example of society’s fascination with the rich and famous, but there’s a complex history behind fame. University of Michigan Professor Susan Douglas joins One Day University founder Steven Schragis to explain the history and power of celebrity.
One Day University is a co-production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. It is a Curiosity Podcast. You can sign up at the website OneDayU.com to become a member and access over 700 full length video lectures. You can also download their app. Once you’re a member, you can watch Professor Susan Douglas’ lecture, “A History of Fame: The Power of Celebrity.”
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:05):
All presidents are sociopaths or at the very least psychologically unusual. Yeah.
I look in the mirror every morning and say, there
is no one else one. There's three hundred and fifty
million who can do the job I can. This is
a relatively new field, in part because of the growing
awareness that dogs weren't just pets, but the dogs also
(00:28):
have some real and tangible benefits. Willie Mays and Babe
Ruth athletes who weren't able to monetize themselves in the
way that they should have been able to. You know,
Serena is different. We've heard this so many times over
the years. When Diane and Charles divorce, the monarchy was over.
(00:51):
When Harry and Meghan gave the interview for OPRAH, people said,
the monarchy is over. Welcome to One Day University talks
with the world's most engaging and inspiring professors discussing their
most popular courses, the ones that students line up to hear.
The One Day University podcasts gives you a front row
(01:11):
seat to learn on your schedule. I'm Steven Schragis. Fifteen
years ago I founded One Day University to present top
performing professors on stages across the country. There's no homework, exams,
or student loans. It's learning for the sake of learning.
In each episode, I'll sit down with a different professor
to talk about one of their highly rated lectures. No
(01:33):
matter your interests, We've got you've covered. Our conversations will
include politics, history, science, music, arts, sports, and pop culture.
Our first episode falls into the pop culture category. The
ninety fifth Academy Awards were held last weekend, with Everything Everywhere,
All at Once winning Best Picture and six other Oscars.
Millions of people tuned in to see some famous faces,
(01:55):
including Lady Gaga, Nicole Kidman, Steven Spielberg, and Rihanna. Fans
of Tom Cruise may have been disappointed to learn that
he was a no show, even though his film Top
Gun Maverick was nominated for Best Picture. Professor Susan Douglas
has studied our relationship with the rich and famous. She
has a lecture for One Day University titled a History
(02:18):
of Fame The Power of Celebrity. She teaches communication and
Media at the University of Michigan, and she's written several
books on gender and mass media. With the Oscars behind us,
I was curious if Susan believed that movie stars still
even exist, or if they are a relic of the past.
I think it was a very unusual Oscar season. But
(02:43):
I do think we still have movie stars. But here's
the hitch. A lot of them have gone to television,
you know, in part because streaming has offered so many
opportunities to a list actors, Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford, Jane Fond,
what could go on and on. And this started with
the entrepreneurial work of Netflix and Amazon, and then COVID
(03:07):
hit and people stopped going to the movies. And so
I do think there are still movie stars. There are
more independent productions that are getting more attention, and maybe
people whose names we didn't quite recognize this Oscar cycle,
we'll become more recognizable in the future. But I don't
(03:29):
believe that Tom Cruise and a few others are the
only movie stars left. Let's start at the beginning with
the origins. Where did the word celebrity come from? Do
you have any idea. I'm not sure where it came from,
but it was certainly in use by the eighteen forties.
By that time, there were theatrical stars in the United States,
(03:50):
and so you began to get the emergence of the
notion of celebrity by mid century. Then why was there
this interest and need for celebrities and how responsible was
the media for this rise of celebrity culture. Then you
had a symbiotic relationship between the rise of inexpensive newspapers
(04:13):
meant for the general public, not expensive political papers, and
they needed content, and you had the ever expanding entertainment industry.
You know, first it was theaters, and then the circus,
and then by the late nineteenth century you had vaudeville,
and vaudeville wanted to promote its stars. Newspapers wanted content,
(04:37):
and so they worked together with each other. And of
course the media played a major role in producing which
stars were the best, you know, behind the scenes with
the stars, all of that, and they were fed a
lot of stuff by first vaudeville entrepreneurs and of course
then later and most famously, you know, the producers of
(04:59):
movie Okay, then let's talk about two types of stars. One,
you mentioned sports stars and movie stars. Specifically, I'm thinking
of Babe Ruth and Mary Pickford. These two were really important,
and in fact, movie studios were at first sort of
reluctant to even let this all happen. You want to
tell us about that, Yeah, sure, movie studios, you know,
(05:22):
very early on, this is the Nickelodeon period, you know,
from roughly nineteen oh five to round nineteen eleven, they
didn't want to put the names of the players on
the screen because they thought they would demand more money.
But what they found out is that viewers began to
respond to specific actors like Mary Pickford. Everybody referred to
(05:45):
her as the girl with the curls, and people wanted
to see more of the girl with the curls, for example.
So they began to realize by nineteen eleven it was
good box office to put people's names out because those
stars could then promote movies. So that's when the shift
(06:07):
begins to happen. And Babe Ruth was he really the
first sort of gigantic sports celebrity. He was. Yes, you know,
there were boxing stars, but boxing was very controversial at
the beginning of the nineteenth century because of interracial clashes
around who should be the world champion. But Babe Ruth,
I mean, let's remember Babe Ruth when he was with
(06:28):
Red Sox. He was a great pitcher, and a great hitter,
like who can do that? And so he obviously had
enormous talent. And then when he went to the Yankees
and you kept hitting homer after homer and helping them
win World Series. By this time, baseball was not only
(06:51):
being covered in newspapers. By the nineteen twenty, star is
being covered by radio, and that enhanced his star them
even more. Okay, Susan, you mentioned radio. One part of
your talk, which I had found fascinating because I never
really thought about it before, was your explanation about how
it was radio that created many African American stars. Yeah.
(07:15):
So this really relates to the great migration that occurred
during World War One. There was a great need for
workers in cities and up north, and you had sixty
thousand African Americans migrate into Chicago. And some of those
migrants were jazz musicians who have been playing in the
(07:38):
bordelos in New Orleans. But the bordellos were shut down
as like a national security issue in New Orleans. So
people like Louis Armstrong ended up in Chicago. So you
had something that's very important in Chicago. You had a
market for black music and independent companies arose producing what
(07:58):
was called race music, and they were mostly recording either
blues Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, but they were also recording
what was called hot jazz. And this music became hugely
popular and white listeners loved this music. And so even
though radio was, like all the media, very segregated, very
(08:22):
discriminatory against black performers, nonetheless, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith,
they all became stars on radio. And we have to
remember radio is a medium that denies sight to its audience,
and so it was easier for black stars to become
(08:42):
stars on a medium like that. Let's move on to
something very different. Walter Winchell and the rise of gossip.
Who was he and why was the gossip industry so important?
So gossip columns had started in the nineteen twenties and
they basically kind of fell on the heels of the
rye of movie magazines. You know, movie magazines starred in lateeens,
(09:04):
early twenties. So Winchell started out, you know, as a
newspaper gossip columnist, and he moved to radio in the
early nineteen thirties, and he had this rat tat style
of delivery, and he mixed news with celebrity gossip and
celebrity dirt. And he had a way of inventing all
(09:26):
kinds of language in terms to stand for divorce, romantic liaisons, etc.
And so what Winchell did is he melded legit news
with gossip, bringing gossip into broadcasting for the first time,
(09:46):
and he became enormously influential because of that, he could
make or break careers. I mean, hardly anybody has heard
of Walter Winchell now, but Walter Winchell from the nineteen
thirties until the early nineteen fifties was a superstar and enormously,
enormously influential, and you know, forty million people listened to him.
(10:08):
So if he wanted to condemn your career, he could.
It seems to me that People Magazine has been around forever,
but as you point out, it hasn't. That's not true.
Why was People Magazine so important in this area of fame? Okay,
So the story about People Magazine is that Time Magazine
(10:31):
was doing focus groups, doing research on you know, people's
engagement with Time magazine, and what they found was that
whenever somebody got Time Magazine, the first section they went
to was in the back of the book People, and
they said, Aha, let's start a whole magazine. This was
(10:51):
in nineteen seventy four, and of course it became a
smash hit, and the early People magazine had a mix
of celebrities and everyday people that they wanted to profile.
And during this period in the nineteen seventies, you begin
to get the early metastasizing of celebrity culture because you
get People, and then you get Us Weekly, the imitator.
(11:15):
You get Barbara Walters specials in the mid nineteen seventies,
you know where she starts interviewing celebrities. By the early
nineteen eighties, where you're getting Entertainment Tonight and then Lifestyles
of the rich and famous. So you're beginning to get
this kind of rolling building up of celebrity culture. Tell
(11:35):
us a little bit more about what you called the
blurring of the lines between news and entertainment. Why did
news expand its coverage of celebrities so much? Well, you know,
as I noted earlier, this really started with Walter Rinchell
bringing gossip into news, and for a while, when television
news was establishing its credibility, we didn't have much coverage
(12:00):
of celebrity in the nightly news. That began to change
in the nineteen eighties and beyond. One of the reasons
is that the news divisions of the networks in the
late nineteen eighties were spun off of the entertainment divisions,
meaning that the entertainment divisions which were making all this money,
(12:20):
were not carrying the news divisions anymore. Now the news
divisions had to make it on their own, and they
had to have good ratings and all the rest. And
so you began to see like Dan Rather on the
nightly news covering the divorce of Mike Tyson and Robin Gibbons,
and you're like, what is that? And then of course
(12:41):
you have the proliferation of cable, first cable news and
then cable shows, and so cable twenty four hour cable.
There's a twenty four seven maw that needs to be filled, right,
and there isn't that much politics all the time. And
also foreign news bureaus were cut, so you fill that
(13:06):
with stories about Britney spears. Celebrity news is cheap, you
can recycle it, people flock to it, and at the
same time we start to get more and more politicians
being treated like celebrities. And of course, the ultimate blurring
(13:26):
moment is twenty sixteen when you have the star of
a reality TV show transform that into becoming president of
the United States. So, you know, we're at a really
odd moment now where politics is as much or more
(13:48):
entertainment as it is public policy and politics. This has
been a long process and here we are. After the break,
we'll explore social media's impact on fame and the religious
undertones of celebrity worship. You described three different types of
(14:08):
celebrity ascribed, achieved, and attributed. So what's the difference between
those three? So achieved is obvious, You've earned it, Lebron James,
Meryl Street, the Rolling Stones. You know, people admired for
their obvious talent and achievements. Ascribed is you were born
(14:32):
into it. And right now we have a very prominent
ascribed celebrity, Prince Harry with the number one bestselling book
Spare And so you're a child of a celebrity, You're
born into the royal family. You had nothing to do
with it. Some ascribed celebrities remain celebrities and others don't.
(14:52):
And then attributed is it happens to you, usually through
US scandal or some kind of other event. Nobody knew
who Monica Lewinsky was right until the scandal of her
relationship with Bill Clinton comes out, and all of a sudden,
(15:13):
she is famous. She is well known simply because she
is caught in a scandal. Some other examples, if attributed
can be one hit wonders, a lottery winner can be
famous for a short period of time and it goes away.
Often attributed celebrity is the one that most rapidly fades.
The notion of what is and who is newsworthy has
(15:37):
changed dramatically. Seems like anyone can be a star. You
want to talk a little bit about that. Yes, there's
a term for this called the demotic turn, which comes
from the word democracy. And this really began around the
year two thousand. So there were stars of big hit shows,
friends er. The shows were doing incredibly well. The stars
(16:00):
kept demanding more money because they were making a lot
of money for the networks at the time. And after
a while, the networks were getting fed up with it
because they wanted to keep their profit margins high. And meanwhile,
there had been this little show on MTV called The
real World. He throw seven people together an apartment, see
what happens. That started in nineteen ninety two. By the
(16:23):
late nineties, it was doing very well for MTV. So
then we get this show called Survivor. The first episode
of Survivor was a smash hit, and that led to
more and more reality TV. Now why was reality TV
produced on MOSS It was so much cheaper to produce
(16:46):
than scripted shows. You could get people who would be
on those shows for free because they wanted to be
on television, and so you were cutting your costs way down,
and boom you get the explosion of reality to V.
And then, of course this intersects with the rise of
social media, right and people beginning to think, you know,
(17:10):
maybe I can become a star on Instagram. And of course,
more recently we now have TikTok stars and we have
YouTube stars, people who have basically crafted themselves into personalities
through social media. So when this term demotic turn was coined,
(17:31):
it barely anticipated the rampant democratization of celebrity in our culture.
Here's another phrase I learned from your lecture that sounded
very scientific to me. Parasocial interaction. What's that all about? Yeah,
it's a complicated term for something we all do. So, Steve,
(17:51):
have you ever sat in front of your television set
and yelled at a newscaster as if he or she
could hear you, or in a horror film, don't go
in there, don't go in there. Parasocial relationships refer to
us having imagined relationships with people as if we know them,
(18:18):
as if they can hear us, when, of course it's
a very asymmetrical relationship. You know, we may know a
ton about Jennifer Aniston, she has no idea who I am, right,
and so parasocial relationships are the relationships that we form
with stars, and so some people can have very strong
(18:39):
parasocial relationships, you know, be very devoted fans. A parasocial
relationship can also be negative, right, I could have a
very strong negative parasocial hatred of somebody famous. So, but
that's what it refers to, is that connection that every
day people have often powerful with as people. Can you
(19:01):
comment on some of the privileges and power of celebrity
and and some of the drawbacks for both celebrities and
for the people who become so invested in their lives. So, look,
celebrities have a wider voice in the world than we do.
They go to the front of the line. I don't
(19:23):
imagine Tom Cruise ever having to go to the Division
of motor vehicles and waiting, you know, two hours to
get as light as renewed. They go to the head
of the line. So you know, those are some of
the privileges that they get downfall or you know, the
anti privileges is really loss of privacy. Many celebrities really
(19:48):
hate the loss of privacy. They are under scrutiny all
the time. One slight mistake and especially now in the
era of social media. Boy, you know, can you get
banged up on on one slip of the tongue or
one mistake. And I will say in particular really worrying
about the privacy of your children, which has become a
(20:10):
big deal for a lot of celebrities. Those are some
really quite serious downsides. There's what some people would would
actually call a religious aspect to celebrity fascination, including pilgrimages
to important sites like the one in Memphis, and you
know what I'm talking about. So Grace Land is of
course a complete monument to Elvis and his grave is there,
(20:37):
and I went there with some colleagues on an off day,
and there were fans laying flowers on the grave. So
in terms of religion, there is, you know, a hypothesis
that celebrity worship is kind of a substitute for religion.
(20:57):
And if you've been to any rock concerts recently, think
about how the stars are beautifully lit on the stage,
almost haload. They are above us, they are illuminated. We're below.
Maybe we're holding candles, you know, to pay tribute to them.
(21:18):
We sing along with them. They're above us. They're like gods.
The way that musical stars in particular are staged is
very godlike, and people can become obsessed with what we
call reliquaries, you know, a shock of somebody's hair, a
(21:39):
piece of Michael Jackson's clothing, whatever. So some have argued
that there is a religiosity to celebrity worship and celebrity culture.
There were two Oscar nominated films that focused on past
movie stars, Elvis and Blonde, which was about Marilyn Monroe.
Why do you think they're still making movies about those
(22:02):
two and others so many decades later. There are certain stars,
especially those who've died young, who've died tragically who are
preserved forever in their use. And James Dean is another one. Right,
we go back and revisit these stars in their youthful beauty,
(22:24):
and what these stars kind of symbolize for us is
a kind of immortality, because yes, Marilyn Monroe is long gone,
Elvis is long gone, but we have posters of them,
we have their music, their films, They live on in
(22:48):
all kinds of imagery and sound. It appeals to some
notion of not really ever dying. That again ties in
with our fantasies about and relationship with stars. Okay, Susan,
one last question. Do you think the existence of celebrities
(23:10):
has an overall positive or negative effect on society and culture? Well, Steven,
I'd like to turn that question around a little bit
and ask what do celebrities provide? What do they take away?
What do they justify? And so celebrities in if you
want to go with a positive route, they provide everyday
(23:34):
people with role models. They provide everyday people with aspirational
stories about success. They provide everyday people with a kind
of social glue. So you know, if I am sitting
next to you on an airplane and we start talking,
and there's been a political scandal and a celebrity scandal.
(23:57):
The last thing I'm going to do is talk to
you about the political scan given the part as a
nature or politics right now, but a celebrity scandal, you
and I can be experts on that have a moral
compass about it, and in our conversation we affirm our
own morality about right and wrong. I think some of
the damaging things about celebrity culture is they enact standards
(24:23):
of beauty and slimness and youth that very few people
kind of achieve, yet too many people seek to measure
themselves by. They justify hierarchies of race and class, They
make hierarchies seem thrilling. They justify having way too much money.
(24:45):
And I think there are some problems with celebrity culture,
and they kind of legitimate a notion of who deserves
what and who doesn't deserve certain things. Susan, thank you
so much again for doing this. We really appreciate it.
With such an interesting subject and an unusual subject, I
(25:06):
learned a lot. I hope our listeners did too. Thanks
for joining us, Thanks for having me, it was great fun.
Thanks for joining us here. At One Day University. Sign
up at our website one dayu dot com to become
a member and access over seven hundred full length video
lectures from the world's finest professors. You could also download
our app. There you can learn more about today's episode
(25:29):
and watch University of Michigan Professor Susan Douglas's lecture on
fame and Celebrity, as well as her talks on the
history of radio pagism and more. Join us next time
when we talk about the Biden presidency. I would put
his legislati accomplishments up against almost anyone's since Franklin Roosevelt
or Lyndon Johnson for the first two years of his presidency.
(25:52):
One Day University is a production of iHeart Podcasts and
School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave a
review in your favorite podcas gust Out. You can also
check out other Curiosity podcasts to learn about history, pop culture,
true crime, and more. School of Humans
All presidents are sociopaths or at the very least psychologically unusual. Yeah.
I look in the mirror every morning and say, there
is no one else one. There's three hundred and fifty
million who can do the job I can. This is
a relatively new field, in part because of the growing
awareness that dogs weren't just pets, but the dogs also
(00:28):
have some real and tangible benefits. Willie Mays and Babe
Ruth athletes who weren't able to monetize themselves in the
way that they should have been able to. You know,
Serena is different. We've heard this so many times over
the years. When Diane and Charles divorce, the monarchy was over.
(00:51):
When Harry and Meghan gave the interview for OPRAH, people said,
the monarchy is over. Welcome to One Day University talks
with the world's most engaging and inspiring professors discussing their
most popular courses, the ones that students line up to hear.
The One Day University podcasts gives you a front row
(01:11):
seat to learn on your schedule. I'm Steven Schragis. Fifteen
years ago I founded One Day University to present top
performing professors on stages across the country. There's no homework, exams,
or student loans. It's learning for the sake of learning.
In each episode, I'll sit down with a different professor
to talk about one of their highly rated lectures. No
(01:33):
matter your interests, We've got you've covered. Our conversations will
include politics, history, science, music, arts, sports, and pop culture.
Our first episode falls into the pop culture category. The
ninety fifth Academy Awards were held last weekend, with Everything Everywhere,
All at Once winning Best Picture and six other Oscars.
Millions of people tuned in to see some famous faces,
(01:55):
including Lady Gaga, Nicole Kidman, Steven Spielberg, and Rihanna. Fans
of Tom Cruise may have been disappointed to learn that
he was a no show, even though his film Top
Gun Maverick was nominated for Best Picture. Professor Susan Douglas
has studied our relationship with the rich and famous. She
has a lecture for One Day University titled a History
(02:18):
of Fame The Power of Celebrity. She teaches communication and
Media at the University of Michigan, and she's written several
books on gender and mass media. With the Oscars behind us,
I was curious if Susan believed that movie stars still
even exist, or if they are a relic of the past.
I think it was a very unusual Oscar season. But
(02:43):
I do think we still have movie stars. But here's
the hitch. A lot of them have gone to television,
you know, in part because streaming has offered so many
opportunities to a list actors, Kevin Costner, Harrison Ford, Jane Fond,
what could go on and on. And this started with
the entrepreneurial work of Netflix and Amazon, and then COVID
(03:07):
hit and people stopped going to the movies. And so
I do think there are still movie stars. There are
more independent productions that are getting more attention, and maybe
people whose names we didn't quite recognize this Oscar cycle,
we'll become more recognizable in the future. But I don't
(03:29):
believe that Tom Cruise and a few others are the
only movie stars left. Let's start at the beginning with
the origins. Where did the word celebrity come from? Do
you have any idea. I'm not sure where it came from,
but it was certainly in use by the eighteen forties.
By that time, there were theatrical stars in the United States,
(03:50):
and so you began to get the emergence of the
notion of celebrity by mid century. Then why was there
this interest and need for celebrities and how responsible was
the media for this rise of celebrity culture. Then you
had a symbiotic relationship between the rise of inexpensive newspapers
(04:13):
meant for the general public, not expensive political papers, and
they needed content, and you had the ever expanding entertainment industry.
You know, first it was theaters, and then the circus,
and then by the late nineteenth century you had vaudeville,
and vaudeville wanted to promote its stars. Newspapers wanted content,
(04:37):
and so they worked together with each other. And of
course the media played a major role in producing which
stars were the best, you know, behind the scenes with
the stars, all of that, and they were fed a
lot of stuff by first vaudeville entrepreneurs and of course
then later and most famously, you know, the producers of
(04:59):
movie Okay, then let's talk about two types of stars. One,
you mentioned sports stars and movie stars. Specifically, I'm thinking
of Babe Ruth and Mary Pickford. These two were really important,
and in fact, movie studios were at first sort of
reluctant to even let this all happen. You want to
tell us about that, Yeah, sure, movie studios, you know,
(05:22):
very early on, this is the Nickelodeon period, you know,
from roughly nineteen oh five to round nineteen eleven, they
didn't want to put the names of the players on
the screen because they thought they would demand more money.
But what they found out is that viewers began to
respond to specific actors like Mary Pickford. Everybody referred to
(05:45):
her as the girl with the curls, and people wanted
to see more of the girl with the curls, for example.
So they began to realize by nineteen eleven it was
good box office to put people's names out because those
stars could then promote movies. So that's when the shift
(06:07):
begins to happen. And Babe Ruth was he really the
first sort of gigantic sports celebrity. He was. Yes, you know,
there were boxing stars, but boxing was very controversial at
the beginning of the nineteenth century because of interracial clashes
around who should be the world champion. But Babe Ruth,
I mean, let's remember Babe Ruth when he was with
(06:28):
Red Sox. He was a great pitcher, and a great hitter,
like who can do that? And so he obviously had
enormous talent. And then when he went to the Yankees
and you kept hitting homer after homer and helping them
win World Series. By this time, baseball was not only
(06:51):
being covered in newspapers. By the nineteen twenty, star is
being covered by radio, and that enhanced his star them
even more. Okay, Susan, you mentioned radio. One part of
your talk, which I had found fascinating because I never
really thought about it before, was your explanation about how
it was radio that created many African American stars. Yeah.
(07:15):
So this really relates to the great migration that occurred
during World War One. There was a great need for
workers in cities and up north, and you had sixty
thousand African Americans migrate into Chicago. And some of those
migrants were jazz musicians who have been playing in the
(07:38):
bordelos in New Orleans. But the bordellos were shut down
as like a national security issue in New Orleans. So
people like Louis Armstrong ended up in Chicago. So you
had something that's very important in Chicago. You had a
market for black music and independent companies arose producing what
(07:58):
was called race music, and they were mostly recording either
blues Mamie Smith, Bessie Smith, but they were also recording
what was called hot jazz. And this music became hugely
popular and white listeners loved this music. And so even
though radio was, like all the media, very segregated, very
(08:22):
discriminatory against black performers, nonetheless, Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Bessie Smith,
they all became stars on radio. And we have to
remember radio is a medium that denies sight to its audience,
and so it was easier for black stars to become
(08:42):
stars on a medium like that. Let's move on to
something very different. Walter Winchell and the rise of gossip.
Who was he and why was the gossip industry so important?
So gossip columns had started in the nineteen twenties and
they basically kind of fell on the heels of the
rye of movie magazines. You know, movie magazines starred in lateeens,
(09:04):
early twenties. So Winchell started out, you know, as a
newspaper gossip columnist, and he moved to radio in the
early nineteen thirties, and he had this rat tat style
of delivery, and he mixed news with celebrity gossip and
celebrity dirt. And he had a way of inventing all
(09:26):
kinds of language in terms to stand for divorce, romantic liaisons, etc.
And so what Winchell did is he melded legit news
with gossip, bringing gossip into broadcasting for the first time,
(09:46):
and he became enormously influential because of that, he could
make or break careers. I mean, hardly anybody has heard
of Walter Winchell now, but Walter Winchell from the nineteen
thirties until the early nineteen fifties was a superstar and enormously,
enormously influential, and you know, forty million people listened to him.
(10:08):
So if he wanted to condemn your career, he could.
It seems to me that People Magazine has been around forever,
but as you point out, it hasn't. That's not true.
Why was People Magazine so important in this area of fame? Okay,
So the story about People Magazine is that Time Magazine
(10:31):
was doing focus groups, doing research on you know, people's
engagement with Time magazine, and what they found was that
whenever somebody got Time Magazine, the first section they went
to was in the back of the book People, and
they said, Aha, let's start a whole magazine. This was
(10:51):
in nineteen seventy four, and of course it became a
smash hit, and the early People magazine had a mix
of celebrities and everyday people that they wanted to profile.
And during this period in the nineteen seventies, you begin
to get the early metastasizing of celebrity culture because you
get People, and then you get Us Weekly, the imitator.
(11:15):
You get Barbara Walters specials in the mid nineteen seventies,
you know where she starts interviewing celebrities. By the early
nineteen eighties, where you're getting Entertainment Tonight and then Lifestyles
of the rich and famous. So you're beginning to get
this kind of rolling building up of celebrity culture. Tell
(11:35):
us a little bit more about what you called the
blurring of the lines between news and entertainment. Why did
news expand its coverage of celebrities so much? Well, you know,
as I noted earlier, this really started with Walter Rinchell
bringing gossip into news, and for a while, when television
news was establishing its credibility, we didn't have much coverage
(12:00):
of celebrity in the nightly news. That began to change
in the nineteen eighties and beyond. One of the reasons
is that the news divisions of the networks in the
late nineteen eighties were spun off of the entertainment divisions,
meaning that the entertainment divisions which were making all this money,
(12:20):
were not carrying the news divisions anymore. Now the news
divisions had to make it on their own, and they
had to have good ratings and all the rest. And
so you began to see like Dan Rather on the
nightly news covering the divorce of Mike Tyson and Robin Gibbons,
and you're like, what is that? And then of course
(12:41):
you have the proliferation of cable, first cable news and
then cable shows, and so cable twenty four hour cable.
There's a twenty four seven maw that needs to be filled, right,
and there isn't that much politics all the time. And
also foreign news bureaus were cut, so you fill that
(13:06):
with stories about Britney spears. Celebrity news is cheap, you
can recycle it, people flock to it, and at the
same time we start to get more and more politicians
being treated like celebrities. And of course, the ultimate blurring
(13:26):
moment is twenty sixteen when you have the star of
a reality TV show transform that into becoming president of
the United States. So, you know, we're at a really
odd moment now where politics is as much or more
(13:48):
entertainment as it is public policy and politics. This has
been a long process and here we are. After the break,
we'll explore social media's impact on fame and the religious
undertones of celebrity worship. You described three different types of
(14:08):
celebrity ascribed, achieved, and attributed. So what's the difference between
those three? So achieved is obvious, You've earned it, Lebron James,
Meryl Street, the Rolling Stones. You know, people admired for
their obvious talent and achievements. Ascribed is you were born
(14:32):
into it. And right now we have a very prominent
ascribed celebrity, Prince Harry with the number one bestselling book
Spare And so you're a child of a celebrity, You're
born into the royal family. You had nothing to do
with it. Some ascribed celebrities remain celebrities and others don't.
(14:52):
And then attributed is it happens to you, usually through
US scandal or some kind of other event. Nobody knew
who Monica Lewinsky was right until the scandal of her
relationship with Bill Clinton comes out, and all of a sudden,
(15:13):
she is famous. She is well known simply because she
is caught in a scandal. Some other examples, if attributed
can be one hit wonders, a lottery winner can be
famous for a short period of time and it goes away.
Often attributed celebrity is the one that most rapidly fades.
The notion of what is and who is newsworthy has
(15:37):
changed dramatically. Seems like anyone can be a star. You
want to talk a little bit about that. Yes, there's
a term for this called the demotic turn, which comes
from the word democracy. And this really began around the
year two thousand. So there were stars of big hit shows,
friends er. The shows were doing incredibly well. The stars
(16:00):
kept demanding more money because they were making a lot
of money for the networks at the time. And after
a while, the networks were getting fed up with it
because they wanted to keep their profit margins high. And meanwhile,
there had been this little show on MTV called The
real World. He throw seven people together an apartment, see
what happens. That started in nineteen ninety two. By the
(16:23):
late nineties, it was doing very well for MTV. So
then we get this show called Survivor. The first episode
of Survivor was a smash hit, and that led to
more and more reality TV. Now why was reality TV
produced on MOSS It was so much cheaper to produce
(16:46):
than scripted shows. You could get people who would be
on those shows for free because they wanted to be
on television, and so you were cutting your costs way down,
and boom you get the explosion of reality to V.
And then, of course this intersects with the rise of
social media, right and people beginning to think, you know,
(17:10):
maybe I can become a star on Instagram. And of course,
more recently we now have TikTok stars and we have
YouTube stars, people who have basically crafted themselves into personalities
through social media. So when this term demotic turn was coined,
(17:31):
it barely anticipated the rampant democratization of celebrity in our culture.
Here's another phrase I learned from your lecture that sounded
very scientific to me. Parasocial interaction. What's that all about? Yeah,
it's a complicated term for something we all do. So, Steve,
(17:51):
have you ever sat in front of your television set
and yelled at a newscaster as if he or she
could hear you, or in a horror film, don't go
in there, don't go in there. Parasocial relationships refer to
us having imagined relationships with people as if we know them,
(18:18):
as if they can hear us, when, of course it's
a very asymmetrical relationship. You know, we may know a
ton about Jennifer Aniston, she has no idea who I am, right,
and so parasocial relationships are the relationships that we form
with stars, and so some people can have very strong
(18:39):
parasocial relationships, you know, be very devoted fans. A parasocial
relationship can also be negative, right, I could have a
very strong negative parasocial hatred of somebody famous. So, but
that's what it refers to, is that connection that every
day people have often powerful with as people. Can you
(19:01):
comment on some of the privileges and power of celebrity
and and some of the drawbacks for both celebrities and
for the people who become so invested in their lives. So, look,
celebrities have a wider voice in the world than we do.
They go to the front of the line. I don't
(19:23):
imagine Tom Cruise ever having to go to the Division
of motor vehicles and waiting, you know, two hours to
get as light as renewed. They go to the head
of the line. So you know, those are some of
the privileges that they get downfall or you know, the
anti privileges is really loss of privacy. Many celebrities really
(19:48):
hate the loss of privacy. They are under scrutiny all
the time. One slight mistake and especially now in the
era of social media. Boy, you know, can you get
banged up on on one slip of the tongue or
one mistake. And I will say in particular really worrying
about the privacy of your children, which has become a
(20:10):
big deal for a lot of celebrities. Those are some
really quite serious downsides. There's what some people would would
actually call a religious aspect to celebrity fascination, including pilgrimages
to important sites like the one in Memphis, and you
know what I'm talking about. So Grace Land is of
course a complete monument to Elvis and his grave is there,
(20:37):
and I went there with some colleagues on an off day,
and there were fans laying flowers on the grave. So
in terms of religion, there is, you know, a hypothesis
that celebrity worship is kind of a substitute for religion.
(20:57):
And if you've been to any rock concerts recently, think
about how the stars are beautifully lit on the stage,
almost haload. They are above us, they are illuminated. We're below.
Maybe we're holding candles, you know, to pay tribute to them.
(21:18):
We sing along with them. They're above us. They're like gods.
The way that musical stars in particular are staged is
very godlike, and people can become obsessed with what we
call reliquaries, you know, a shock of somebody's hair, a
(21:39):
piece of Michael Jackson's clothing, whatever. So some have argued
that there is a religiosity to celebrity worship and celebrity culture.
There were two Oscar nominated films that focused on past
movie stars, Elvis and Blonde, which was about Marilyn Monroe.
Why do you think they're still making movies about those
(22:02):
two and others so many decades later. There are certain stars,
especially those who've died young, who've died tragically who are
preserved forever in their use. And James Dean is another one. Right,
we go back and revisit these stars in their youthful beauty,
(22:24):
and what these stars kind of symbolize for us is
a kind of immortality, because yes, Marilyn Monroe is long gone,
Elvis is long gone, but we have posters of them,
we have their music, their films, They live on in
(22:48):
all kinds of imagery and sound. It appeals to some
notion of not really ever dying. That again ties in
with our fantasies about and relationship with stars. Okay, Susan,
one last question. Do you think the existence of celebrities
(23:10):
has an overall positive or negative effect on society and culture? Well, Steven,
I'd like to turn that question around a little bit
and ask what do celebrities provide? What do they take away?
What do they justify? And so celebrities in if you
want to go with a positive route, they provide everyday
(23:34):
people with role models. They provide everyday people with aspirational
stories about success. They provide everyday people with a kind
of social glue. So you know, if I am sitting
next to you on an airplane and we start talking,
and there's been a political scandal and a celebrity scandal.
(23:57):
The last thing I'm going to do is talk to
you about the political scan given the part as a
nature or politics right now, but a celebrity scandal, you
and I can be experts on that have a moral
compass about it, and in our conversation we affirm our
own morality about right and wrong. I think some of
the damaging things about celebrity culture is they enact standards
(24:23):
of beauty and slimness and youth that very few people
kind of achieve, yet too many people seek to measure
themselves by. They justify hierarchies of race and class, They
make hierarchies seem thrilling. They justify having way too much money.
(24:45):
And I think there are some problems with celebrity culture,
and they kind of legitimate a notion of who deserves
what and who doesn't deserve certain things. Susan, thank you
so much again for doing this. We really appreciate it.
With such an interesting subject and an unusual subject, I
(25:06):
learned a lot. I hope our listeners did too. Thanks
for joining us, Thanks for having me, it was great fun.
Thanks for joining us here. At One Day University. Sign
up at our website one dayu dot com to become
a member and access over seven hundred full length video
lectures from the world's finest professors. You could also download
our app. There you can learn more about today's episode
(25:29):
and watch University of Michigan Professor Susan Douglas's lecture on
fame and Celebrity, as well as her talks on the
history of radio pagism and more. Join us next time
when we talk about the Biden presidency. I would put
his legislati accomplishments up against almost anyone's since Franklin Roosevelt
or Lyndon Johnson for the first two years of his presidency.
(25:52):
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