Celebrity Watching

Banjo Eyes: Eddie Cantor and the Birth of Modern Stardom, By Herbert G. Goldman, Oxford University Press, 1997

Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture, By Leonard Leff, Rowman and Littlefield, 1997

Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture, By P. David Marshall, University of Minnesota Press, 1997

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In 1962, Daniel Boorstin wrote what has surely become one of the most celebrated quips on celebrity: "The celebrity is a person who is well known for his well-knownness" (57). Boorstin meant to draw a distinction between "heroes" of previous centuries and notables of the twentieth. "Our age has produced a new kind of eminence," he wrote. "This new kind of eminence is 'celebrity'" (57). For Boorstin, the celebrity reeks of inauthenticity, of cultural declension from a prior age in which "heroes" were admired for "greatness in some achievement. [The hero] is a man or woman of great deeds. . . . The hero created himself; the celebrity is created by the media" (49, 61).

In light of the three books under review here and the intense critiques of "celebrity culture" found even--perhaps especially--in the popular press, Boorstin's extended polemic on "our arts of self-deception" is most remarkable not for its rightness or wrongness but for what have proven to be its compelling terms of analysis. Celebrities are frivolous, according to Boorstin, but represent a cultural tragedy in their frivolity. Celebrities speak with utmost seriousness to the falsity of modern experience, to the synthetic and mass-produced character of twentieth-century consciousness. Celebrity is, says Boorstin, "as characteristic of our culture and our century as was the divinity of Greek gods in the sixth century B.C." (57).

Herbert G. Goldman's Banjo Eyes: Eddie Cantor and the Birth of Modern Stardom and Leonard Leff's Hemingway and His Conspirators: Hollywood, Scribners, and the Making of American Celebrity Culture both try to explain the origins of modern celebrity and the blurring of authenticity that accompanies it through the lives of central figures. For Goldman, Cantor "singlehandedly" (xiii) changed the course of stardom. In a career that covered more than 50 years, Cantor moved from vaudeville to the legitimate Broadway theater, to movies, to radio, and to television. In the process, according to Goldman, he became the first star to foster the illusion of intimacy between himself and an anonymous audience, a kind of mass-mediated closeness that would become characteristic of modern renown. Leff, rather than attributing "the making of American celebrity culture" to Ernest Hemingway alone, sees him as a figure emblematically destroyed by it. For Leff, who notes the emergence of celebrity at roughly the same historical moment as Goldman, the early Hemingway, a writer of genuine talent and ambition, surrendered his authentic self to a caricature of masculinity produced--with his complicity--by an elaborate apparatus of promotion just emerging in the 1920s.

P. David Marshall's Celebrity and Power: Fame in Contemporary Culture is written almost explicitly against the biographical approach that characterizes Goldman's and Leff's books. Marshall instead wants to derive "the distinctive discursive quality of the celebrity . . . from its emergence from the twinned discourses of modernity: democracy and capitalism" (4). Celebrity, for Marshall, is not the story of individuals per se but the story of various constructed subjectivities struggling with the nature and possibility of individual agency: "Celebrities are the production locale for an elaborate discourse on the individual and individuality" (4). Celebrities, according to Marshall, make manifest the tendency of culture industries to control the construction of individuality in subordinate populations--variously known as the mob, the mass, and the crowd--but celebrities might also be appropriated and repositioned by their audiences in efforts to resist such assertions of cultural power.

Reading these books together, one gains the overwhelming impression that celebrities might serve as useful flashpoints for any discussion about mass mediation and the role of the audience in creating meanings from the images produced in the context of consumer capitalism...