Jennifer Horgan: Our 'relationships' with celebrities are weird — we don't know them
(Left to right) Taylor Swift, Cillian Murphy, Greta Lee, Jodie Turner-Smith, Domhnall Gleeson, and Lewis Capaldi with host Graham Norton last year. Graham Norton makes us feel like we know people we really, really don’t know at all. File picture: Matt Crossick/PA Media Assignments/PA
I’m not a celebrity. Get me out of here. Get me out of this weird concoction of a reality where I’m surrounded by celebrities pretending to be ordinary, and by ordinary people pretending celebrities are their friends. It’s unbearable.
I watched a 1990s Oscars red carpet reel recently. Jodie Foster, Daniel Day Lewis, Julia Roberts… they all shine like deities. Tom Hanks arrives with an adorable bed head, Morgan Freeman wrapped in purple. The music is jaunty – old Hollywood. Crowds wave; celebrities wave back from a curated distance. It’s showbiz, baby.
Nowadays, actors (via social media) convince us that they are just like us — ordinary, everyday people. It’s not enough anymore to go away and make a piece of art. The trend of sharing its cast dancing to Rihanna is spreading like a virus.
Now it’s Margot Robbie bopping unconvincingly to Kate Bush in a bodice. Ah yes, I did that in my kitchen last week, Margot. And I looked just like you. Maybe we could hang some time and let loose together?
The weird thing is that back in the 1990s, when celebrities inhabited a different galaxy, they looked more like us. Without the circus of image consultants, hair and make-up magicians, Botox ninjas and plastic surgeons, they seemed almost natural.
Genetically superior, yes, but human. Now, an increasing number of celebrities are other-worldly. Look at Heidi Klum struggling to walk in her naked Grammy dress; they are genuinely turning plastic.
The distance between us and them has actually grown, but social and mainstream media pretend the opposite.
I never thought I’d say it but there is one media personality who has done more than most to create this queasy camaraderie between celebrities and the public. I love the show, but Graham Norton makes us feel like we know people we really, really don’t know at all.
The charade began with dynamic duos like Matt Damon and Bill Murray, then James McEvoy and Michael Fassbender. Ever since, it’s been gathering hot air, and stacks and stacks of profit.
The latest heist of public emotion is the ‘Opalite’ music video that was apparently conceived on the red couch. Can you believe it, people? We are now in the room at the very moment of artistic conception. I mean, we have it on tape, right?
Domhnall Gleeson confessing his dream of being in a Taylor Swift video. Taylor looking to the camera, sharing her light bulb moment with us all. Graham, post-production, ‘wanging on’ about how amazingly down-to earth ‘Taylor’ is and how her family made him feel at home.
“She wears it so well,” he tells us, her global fame, her billions of dollars. Aren’t we so lucky to know her? I mean to really know her.
"I love this for her," we say to friends, discussing her relationship with Travis like they’re neighbourhood sweethearts just trying to get by.
It isn’t just Norton whose whipping up this faux closeness to make lots of money. Podcasts are doing a great job, making us feel like we know people on an intimate level. with Jason Bateman is right up there, as is Bateman’s recent and most nauseating collaboration with girl-next-door, Jennifer Aniston.
In a reel for LolaVie, the former star's haircare brand, we see her buddy Jason turning up at her house for a haircut. Oh, it’s all very meta, what with Aniston being famed for her Rachel haircut, but it’s also another example of us being led to believe that these people act just like us, popping to one another’s houses solo for a chat.
“I hear you're doing hair now,” Bateman says to Aniston. “Firstly, I don’t even have a smock on. So, I don’t know what your rates are but they should be low.”
We’re all so busy being entertained that we miss the punchline. It’s us. We’re the punchline! The lowly people who must walk into actual hairdressers and put our hands in our pockets for a service.
Beyond being annoying, this pantomime is affecting art. As Colin Sheridan excellently pointed out a few months back, the love-ins between actors are becoming vomit-inducing.
Remember when we could just go into a cinema and watch a film without having to filter out all the marketing noise? I had to work hard to keep Paul Mescal and Jessie Buckley at bay when watching . It shouldn’t be so hard. It shouldn’t be so much about the actors that it is becoming less about the art.
Another consequence is our potential drift away from real friendships in real life. I’m enjoying Tanya Sweeney’s this week. It’s Sweeney’s debut novel, about a woman who forms an emotional attachment to a celebrity online.
Her real relationships suffer terribly. I’m not suggesting we’re all becoming online stalkers, but there is a technology creep happening. I have certainly grown accustomed to heading off on a walk with the companionship of a beloved podcast.
Five years ago, I might have called a friend, but it’s easy to just listen and be amused. You can’t say the wrong thing, can you? It feels emotionally safe. We think little of the fact that it’s entirely one-sided. I am, after all, the only one investing time in the — can I call it — relationship?
But it gets worse. At the core of this ‘we’re just normal people’ stuff is something deeply cynical and manipulative. It reached its peak last week, when news of James Van Der Beek’s death hit the internet along with the establishment of a GoFundMe page to help his bereaved family.
The death of such a young person is deeply tragic and horrific for his wife and six children, and for his extended family and friends. It’s understandable that people want to give money to help.
However, we do not know this man. He is not our friend, no matter how many Instagram reels he shared. I grew up on but I understand that it is a work of fiction, created by paid actors. It’s a job.
Hundreds of thousands of young people die of cancer every year in America, a country with inhumane health policies. The public’s money is better spent giving whatever they can afford to cancer charities, not to one celebrity who managed to pool money together from wealthy friends to buy a $5m property before he died.
My feed is overwhelmed with James Van Der Beek, when real problems are fracturing our system — where SNAs are being taken from the children who need them, and beds for psychiatric patients are being left untended, simply because we won’t pay nurses enough to stick around.
The entertainment industry needs to get back in its lane. People need the arts and they need inspiration. They may even need the occasional distraction of celebrities, the escapism.
But celebrities are not personal friends. Their woes are not ours to manage. Whatever about individuals, the industry has started to turn. It’s time our attention, our emotional energy, turned too.
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