| WILL YOU BE FAMOUS?
by Jason Loewith on 10/30/2007 04:27:00 PM
I loved this from the Sunday New York Times article, "She's Famous (And So Can You)", about internet phenom-turned-Hollywood-celebrity Tila Tequila. As we get closer to The American Dream Songbook, I'm more and more fascinated by fame as the new American Dream.
It's routine to dismiss these people, to sniff from the sideline about the depths to which the culture has sunk. Misses Hilton and Tequila may represent, respectively, leisure-class and working-class variants of the same feminine caricature, a real-time Betty Boop. And yet each, in her own way, has divined truths about the marketplace that academics and industry are still laboring fully to comprehend. Each has understood the wacko populism of the cybersphere and pitched her ambitions to capitalize on what Joshua Gamson, the author of "Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America" calls "a shift from top-down manufactured celebrity to a kind of lateral, hyper-democratic celebrity."
"Because of new technologies, we get to see now what happens when people have the option of making up their own celebrity," Mr. Gamson said. "We've gone from 'Oh, my God, they're so much better than I am,' to 'Oh, my God, they're so good at making themselves up.'"
We've gone from dazed idolatry to another and more familiar form of identification. Fame, when not concocted by Hollywood and available to only the genetically gifted few, takes on softer contours. It becomes less an exalted state than a permeable one, available to those from classes and cohorts that, in the days of the studio monoliths, the gatekeepers of the star-making machine kept at bay.
By the standards of the new "Jackass" landscape, traditional stardom, with its career building stations-of-the-cross, its rigid talent requirements, its "Entourage" shtick, seems clunky and out of step with a culture so much more fluid now that a hit record - like the recent Internet sensation "I'll Kill Her," by Soko - could emerge from a young French woman’s bedroom and MySpace page.
Who says any longer that one must be able to sing or dance or emote in order to attract an audience or, anyway, a batch of new friends in the ether? Who says that only winners win? As reality TV, with its durable affection for flame-outs, car wrecks and actual losers, has made abundantly clear, even after the tribal council has voted you off their tropical island, you’re still welcome in our homes.
When Jake Halpern set out to write "Fame Junkies," his book about what is now a universal obsession with celebrity, he was surprised to uncover studies demonstrating that 31 percent of American teenagers had the honest expectation that they would one day be famous and that 80 percent thought of themselves as truly important. (The figure from the same study conducted in the 1950s was 12 percent.)
"Obviously people have been having delusions of grandeur since the beginning of time, but the chances of becoming well known were much slimmer" even five years ago than they are today, Mr. Halpern said. "There are an incredibly large number of venues for becoming known. Talent is not a prerequisite."Labels: American Dream, Fame, New York Times
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