America’s Celebrity Obsession Is Getting Out Of Control

America’s Celebrity Obsession Is Getting Out Of Control
America’s Celebrity Obsession Is Getting Out Of Control
Has Been Optimized

I’m still amazed at all the attention, and awful criticism, actress Renee Zellweger got last week when seemingly every online entertainment news source, every broadcast entertainment show and everyone remotely interested in stars and Hollywood, went bat crazy about the difference in her look and her supposed bad plastic surgery.

The poor woman had to actually respond to all the talk and criticism it got so out of hand. And she isn’t the only one. How many stories have we read about every single thing Kim Kardashian does? Or what the latest debate is about her younger sister Kylie Jenner and whether she is too young to wear something or do something? For that matter, we get inundated with almost anything any Kardashian does. You would swear we were talking about the royal family in England the way the media and the public seem to devour anything related to that family. I would venture to say most Americans know more about the Kardashians than they do the Obamas. Very strange. And it sure says a lot about our country.

We have an absolute obsession with celebrity in our country. If Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt step outside anywhere in the world, the American media will cover it. Beyonce and Jay-Z do anything at all, it is news. The list of stars the public obsesses over goes on and on. I am not even fully sure why we have this obsession. Is it because most Americans live absolutely boring lives so it is easy to fantasize about these people we see on film and television? Is it because we want our own version of royalty like in England, so the stars are the closest we can get? Some even have made the point that our obsession is actually about a desire to want to see people fail so we can feel better about ourselves. So what seems like adoration and love on a deeper level is about jealousy and envy.

Oprah, another person the public can’t seem to get enough of, actually once said she has a term for this, she calls it ‘fallen celebrity syndrome,” which is about the public actually putting people up on a pedestal so they can then knock them down. In one interview with Elizabeth Lesser, author and the cofounder of the Omega Institute, Lesser said this about the public’s seeming delight in reading about and seeing celebrities fall and fail:

When a celebrity falls, we take some sort of comfort in it because it proves… everyone suffers in life. These celebrities who we have pumped up to being something they’re not, and we begin to lose touch with what life is really about...So when we think oh they have the life, they have everything we want, something in us knows that’s not true. When they fall, it's like, 'See? My life is important too.'

Of course celebrity worship is not new. Stars of old were worshipped as well. After all, the red carpet walk and obsession with watching stars and the fashions before the Oscars is not new. But because of our far reaching media and glut of entertainment and other news magazines, since even regular news mags now feature star coverage as well, and because of the Internet and its take-over of all other sources of information, we just have a lot more opportunities to feed that obsession.

I know celebs feed the fascination, that to a point, the Kardashians and others want us to know everything we can, they want us to look at them. I am not saying they are victims by any means. But it is not their side of the equation that is the most important to me. It is the celebrity consumption side. I just think this obsession with stars, which is indeed getting worse, coupled with the sense of isolation that many feel, ironically thanks to the Internet and its anonymity and thanks to texting and lack of real human interaction, is leading to a society that is fast losing touch with what’s real and what is important.

Real life is just becoming less and less entertaining to people, so they are engulfing themselves in alternative worlds, fantasy worlds, online worlds. I can’t help but wonder where this will all end up.

Photo credit: WikiCommons

1
Shares: 
Combined FB: 
Video Piece: 
Regular Piece
OV in Depth:  Reported by Opposing Views 1 day ago.