Opinion Piece

This blog entry began its life as a comment on another person's blog, and turned into something much bigger. I sort of took it as a challenge to see if I could turn it into a blog post. It's a bit different from what I normally write here, but I realized that I have a blog partly because it gives me a writing space somewhere in between the formality of my academic writing and the informality of my journal. This piece definitely fits into that space. (Which, incidentally, is a much more satisfying writing space than either of the two extremes.)

A couple days ago I was reading my Newsweek magazine while eating dinner, and I got to the cover story, with the provocative¹ subtitle "In defense of our Brangelina-loving, Jon and Kate-hating, Tiger-taunting, tawdry tabloid culture."

Here's something you should know before I continue: I'm not really one to follow celebrities. In fact, I kind of have a major aversion to it. Celebrity gossip is not something I have ever understood. One of the (many) reasons I get my news online or in news magazines or from NPR (though even NPR and, clearly, Newsweek were not immune to the recent Tiger Woods scandal) is that I can usually avoid the celebrity gossip that way. I think it's inevitable that famous people will have less private lives. People are interesting. We all engage in our share of talking about the people we know in our own private circles, and people who are famous become a part of everyone's circle. But there's a difference between knowing what's going on in the lives of people who are interesting to us, and really seeking out and magnifying scandal. This holds true at the level of the celebrity, but also at the level of our personal circles (a group of friends, work, church, neighbors).

So when the author of the article, Neal Gabler, purported to be a defender of the tabloid culture, I was interested to hear how he could twist it for good. The article, it turns out, was a really interesting read, and I was intrigued by a lot of what he said. But I was also a bit stirred up, because the idea of justifying and rationalizing our "tawdry tabloid culture" bothers me at a fundamental level. Unfortunately, reading is not the most interactive activity, and I couldn't really argue back at the news magazine, so I filed my thoughts away and went about my business.

The next morning, however, I turned on my computer and saw that my friend Brian had written on his blog about the indoctrination of the young into the celebrity gossip culture, and I suddenly had a reason to think through my half-formed thoughts. And when I started actually forming those half-formed thoughts, they morphed into an essay way beyond what I consider to be the acceptable bounds for blog comments. Which is either lucky or unlucky for the readers of my blog, because now I'm sharing my thoughts here.²

Gabler's "defense" of tabloid culture takes the form of arguing that tabloid culture is not mere gossip, but a new narrative art form, up there with movies, novels, plays, and television shows. He argues that the reason celebrity gossip has taken such hold of the media is similar to the reason movies and television drew people away from the novel, and that is that it can offer more than it's narrative predecessor could. Movies allowed people to identify with characters as real people in the way that a book could not. Similarly, celebrity narratives trump movies and television because they are real people (hyperreal, I would say), and because their narratives do not end the way narratives end in movies and television. There is always another divorce/affair/baby/drug-induced escapade on the horizon.

I wouldn't call this a defense yet. So far it's just an interesting explanation of the ubiquity of celebrity culture—and a depressing one because it's compelling and suggests that celebrity-gawking isn't going anywhere anytime soon. It makes me think about television and how in recent years so much of programming has been taken over by serial television shows with extended narratives and reality television shows for, I would guess, much the same reason (and for the record, I count this as a good thing). Lost, for example, with it's 6-year-long plotline, is incredibly engrossing for those of us who have gotten caught up in it because the story doesn't end at the end of an episode, or even a season in this case. And shows like American Idol or Project Runway or So You Think You Can Dance can draw in viewers partly because the people and the personalities and even the drama are real, not scripted.⁴

And yet, depressingly, celebrity gossip will still trump these shows because all TV shows will have an end eventually, and the end can come before we lose our interest (Pushing Daisies comes to mind). Celebrities, however, are celebrities by virtue of our personal interest and are guaranteed to be there as long as we want them to be. Unless they die unexpectedly. Which actually sort of adds to and perpetuates the celebrity narrative, rather than ending it.

But beyond simply arguing reasons for the existence of celebrity culture, Gabler does what he says he's going to do and defends celebrity culture by suggesting that it is as much an art form as other narrative forms (novels, movies), and that it can transcend mere entertainment:

"Reading People or Us or Perez Hilton, we learn variously about the joys of new love and the hurts of the old, the satisfactions of parenthood, the wages of sin, the punishment for hubris, the drawbacks to fame as well as its blessings, the risk of losing yourself and the exhilaration of finding yourself, and, perhaps above all, the things that really matter in life and the things that don't, which means that celebrity, far from being a shallow artifice, often addresses the fundamental differences between the real and the false, the meaningful and the meaningless. These are the concerns to which we have always turned to art to explain."

I guess what bothers me is calling celebrity-gawking an art form. I don't think Gabler only means to provoke. The article is very well thought out, and I think he has a very interesting and informed and valid argument. And yet I think there are limits. There's a lot of trash out there in books and music and movies and television that is transcended by real high quality, and often still very accessible, music, literature and film. But that doesn't mean that the lesser-quality stuff does not also speak to human concerns like "the wages of sin, the punishment for hubris, etc., etc." It does. But that does not make it good, nor good for society. And so while tabloid culture may be a form of art in the sense that people turn to it to address "the concerns to which we have always turned to art to explain," I don't see how tabloid culture can ever be elevated above the tawdry, in the way other narrative art forms like novels and movies and television most certainly can.

The cover of Newsweek the week of this article read, "Why we can't turn away," and in the end I think that's as far as Gable's argument can really go. Whoever is to blame (the media who feed the audience, the audience who feeds the media), our culture has a really hard time "turning away" from the most tawdry and trashy and scandalous celebrity stories. Gable's argument is that it's for the same reason that humans have always been drawn to narratives in their various forms, but that does not justify or elevate the spectacle. It does not make it worthwhile or uplifting or intellectually engaging or harmless.


¹ I'm pretty sure provocative was exactly what the author was going for.
² You can blame/thank Brian for this blog post. After, of course, you go read the blog post that inspired mine.^3
3 That's three citations...
⁴ Okay, mostly unscripted.