Gods Behaving Badly: Media, Religion, and Celebrity Culture

4. What Kind of Gods?

87 4 WHAT KIND OF GODS? Celebrity culture is generated as a flow of images and stories in media representation. This representation is theological in nature, but it does not speak in a traditional way either about religion or about God. Christian thinking situates knowledge of God, or theology, in a narrative of relationship . John Calvin, for instance, begins his Institutes of the Christian Religion by saying, “Nearly all the wisdom we possess, that is to say, true and sound wisdom, consists of two parts: the knowledge of God and of ourselves.”1 For Calvin the key to “theology” lies in knowledge of the self in relationship to God. This relational element not only structures the knowing of God but also a right knowing of the self. Celebrity culture collapses these traditional theological distinctions into each other. Knowing self equals knowing God, who is a reflection of the self. In celebrity culture the distinction between the self and the divine is blurred. One of the ways that this is manifested in discourse is through the adoption of theological metaphors and language as part of the structure of celebrity narratives. Thus celebrities become icons; stars are seen as “divine”; celebrities are “saviors”; celebrities sin, but they are also subject to judgment (by the tabloids); they are “sexy saints”; they find redemption and resurrect their careers. These theological themes are borrowed from traditional religious sources, but they are 88 Gods Behaving Badly disconnected from any transcendent reference point. So the structure of a largely Christian theology remains, but it has been relocated in the theology of the self as divine. But as theological metaphors and analogies are articulated with celebrities, the meaning that they carry starts to shift and alter. So para-religion does not simply describe a dislocation or a degeneration of the religious in popular culture—it also connects to the way that theological metaphors are relocated and regenerated in popular discourse. It is not simply that celebrities are spoken of in analogous religious terms but that these theological metaphors are subtly altered in the process. irOniC AttAChMents In December 2009 when Tiger Woods made his confession of infidelity to the world, blogger Reasonable Robinson was quick to comment: “The announcement today that Tiger Woods is going to take an indefinite leave from golf appears to confirm his status as a Fallen Angel. He has lost his heavenly status in Brand Heaven.”2 This kind of religious analogy is very common in celebrity discourse. Another example from the blogosphere was found on Defamer, Gawker.com’s Hollywood column, which greeted the new “Forbes 100 List of the World’s Most Powerful Celebrities” with the headline “These Are Your Gods Now.”3 The Forbes list ranks celebrities according to their earnings during the year and their media visibility.4 The Defamer blogger is condemnatory, convinced that the list is proof that we are worshipping false gods. Forbes’ Top 100 is “Judgment-Summoning False Idolatry.”5 As part of the rehabilitation and publicity fightback of brand “Brangelina,” the friends of actress Angelina Jolie also resort to religious analogy when they try to talk her up to the press. “Sources” are reported to have told the National Enquirer that “those who know her call her Saint Angie because of all the wonderful work she has been doing in Haiti,” and “all her hard work in New Orleans seems to be finally paying off. She is being dubbed the ‘Maid of Orleans.’”6 No one really believes that celebrities are saints, or that they are divine, or that they inhabit some kind of heavenly planet. The theological in representation operates as an analogy. The analogy, however, is not straightforward. Celebrity discourse uses religious metaphor with a What Kind of Gods? 89 heavy dose of irony. Tiger Woods is called a fallen angel with a knowing sense that he was never really an angel at all. His heavenly brand was always artifice. Some people may have been taken in for a time but with a false regard for a fake icon. Angelina Jolie may be represented as a saint or the Maid of Orleans, but this imagery carries within it the potential that everything will eventually go up in smoke. The gods of celebrity worship are false gods. They are idols. The theme of idolatry is endemic in celebrity culture. It is not entirely insignificant that one of the longest-running top-rated...