Sean Redmond

Celebrity and the media

Celebrity and the Media introduces the reader to the key terms, concepts, dilemmas and issues that are central to the study and critical understanding of celebrity. In this insightful text Redmond explores the impacts of celebrity culture on the modern media and everyday life, drawing attention to the ways in which people experience celebrity culture and how celebrities are able to communicate through spectacle, ritual, the confession and the close-up. Drawing on a diverse range of case studies from the worlds of film, music, television, and sports, and featuring topical, current and popular celebrity examples, the book stands as a pertinent examination of the influence that celebrity has on the way people place themselves in the modern world.

Avatar Obama in the age of liquid celebrity

Barak Obama, orator extraordinaire, the embodiment of the American success myth, ‘global’ prophet of the adoring masses and multi-media auratic figure, is the leading illustration of what is the expanded nexus of celebrity, spectacle and politics in the age of what Zygmund Bauman refers to as liquid modernity or ‘the era of disembedding without re-embedding’ (2001, p. 89). This is the era in which a traumatic sense of fear, uncertainty and transience defines ones relationship to the nation state, and social (media) centre, as they lose their economic singularity and cultural coherency and cohesiveness in a world system ever inter-connected and driven increasingly, incessantly by supra-corporate concerns and spectacular celebrity-based presentations. In this world of ‘togetherness dismantled’ (Bauman 2003, p. 119), the disenfranchised individual feels they cannot meet the trans-capital intensive, show reel-like, boundaryless world on solid ground. That adoration, or a liquefied definition of it, is key to this imagined and affective communion between Obama and those who adore him, suggests that there is a terrible wanting and simultaneous waning to those who look for such rootedness and the promise of deliverance in the celebrity political figure. This is a charismatic authority figure who promises this solidity yet streams in and out of material view, unable to fix or properly propagate their communion beyond triumphant spectacularism. Their ‘lightness of being’ (ibid, p. 123–9) is powerfully seductive and decidedly empty because it echoes the instantaneous (instant) way in which all lives are increasingly led. I will suggest that liquid celebrity is one of the cornerstones of liquid modernity, and Barack Obama is the epitome of this ‘runniness’.

Pieces of me: celebrity confessional carnality

In this article I explore the carnal nature of the celebrity confession. I argue that when the celebrity confesses they do so in, through, and with their revelatory bodies. The carnal celebrity confessional is very clearly a self-reflexive performance, often stage-managed and manipulative, and therefore designed to raise, redeem, or resurrect a profile, or for damage limitation. But it can also be, depending on the performative context, an “authentic” doorway into the crisis of the celebritys living phenomenological self. The carnal confessional, then, can be an explicit, compliant or forced will to reveal all through the celebrity body that had guaranteed them fame in the first place, but which now fails them in some way. Or, it can be an unconscious, unthought, pre-semiotic sense-based revelation – a sensational leak – about some “truth” or damage that has/is being done to them as icons of desire. This phenomenological leak has the ability to make intimate the relationship between the celebrity confessor and the fans who receive it. I will conclude that celebrity confessional carnality can be read as a productive form of bio-power. In this article the carnality of the celebrity confession will be read in terms of its relationship to Christianity and corporeal religiosity; to therapy discourse; to docility and active agency; and to affective intimacy. Britney Spears will be my central case study. I begin the article, however, with an overview of the embodied nature of the confessional, and its centrality to mediated life and individual self-worth, using Catholicism and the television therapy talkshow as my conjoining illustrative entry point.

Swivelling the spotlight: stardom, celebrity and ‘me’

Celebrity studies critiques the ways in which celebrity culture constructs discourses of authenticity and disclosure, offering the cultural and economic circulation of the ‘private’ self. Rarely, however, do we turn the spotlight on ourselves as not only scholars of stardom and celebrity, but also part of the audience. Autoethnography has become increasingly important across different disciplines, although its status within media and cultural studies is less visible and secure, not least because the emphasis on personal attachments to media forms may threaten the discipline’s still contested claim to cultural legitimacy. The study of stars and celebrities has often found itself at the ‘lower’ end of this already debased continuum, perhaps making such tensions particularly acute. Based on three personal narratives of engagements with stars and celebrities, this co-authored article explores the potential relationships between autoethnography and celebrity studies, and considers the personal, intellectual, and political implications of bringing the scholar into the celebrity frame.

Who is he now? The unearthly David Bowie

The question that has led and organised this special edition on David Bowie draws provocative attention to the way his career has been narrated by the constant transformation and recasting of his star image. By asking who is he now? the edition recognises that Bowie is a chameleon figure, one who reinvents himself in and across the media and art platforms that he is found in. This process of renewal means that Bowie constantly kills himself, an artistic suicide that allows for dramatic event moments to populate his music, and for a rebirth to emerge at the same time or shortly after he expires. Bowie has killed Major Tom, Ziggy Stardust, Halloween Jack, Aladdin Sane, and the Thin White Duke to name but a few of his alter-egos. In this environment of death and resurrection, Bowie becomes a heightened, exaggerated enigma, a figure who constantly seems to be artificial or constructed and yet whose work asks us to look for his real self behind the mask – to ask the question, is this now the real Bowie that faces us? Of course, the answer is always no because Bowie is a contradictory constellation of images, stories and sounds whose star image rests on remaining an enigma, and like all stars in our midst, exists as a representation. Nonetheless, with Bowie - with this hyper- schizophrenic, confessional artist – the fan desire to get to know him, to immerse oneself in his worlds, fantasises, and projections - is particularly acute. With the unexpected release of The Next Day ((Iso/Columbia) on the 8th March 2013, the day of his 66th birthday, Bowie was resurrected again. The album and subsequent music videos drew explicitly on the question of who Bowie was and had been, creating a media frenzy around his past work, fan nostalgia for previous Bowie incarnations, and a pleasurable negotiation with his new output. In this special edition, edited by life-long Bowie fans, with contributions from die-hard Bowie aficionados, we seek to find him in the fragments and remains of what once was, and in the new enchantments of his latest work.

Who am I now? Remembering the enchanted dogs of David Bowie

In this personal recollection of my investment in David Bowie, I draw on the ideas of enchantment and escape (Bennett 2001), self-transformation and belonging to make critical sense of my fandom – defined here as active agency and wiling participation in Bowie’s unearthly musical and performative universe. I explore why, through a particular moment in time, listening to the album Diamond Dogs, the intimate strangeness of his star image struck a powerful chord with(in) me. Memorial in context, I longingly look back on the way, as a working-class kid growing up in a grim 1980s social milieu, I identified with the difference-in-Bowie. I also ask why his new work in 2013 recasts or reignites that relationship, encouraging me to question: who am I now?

The passion plays of celebrity culture

If there is a cultural arena today where passion plays a central and heightened role, then it is in the affecting and textural operations of celebrity. Celebrity representations are crafted out of passionate aesthetic signifiers and impassioned pleas to the senses, to the emotions and to the exaggerations of feeling that the consumer or fan is asked to register and then fully embody. Celebrity culture attempts to turn one into a passionate creature, ruled by the heart, lost in a sea of desires and desiring wants and needs, as the adoring figure that moves us, moves intimately before us. Such passions can and do go unrequited, of course; some are resisted and rejected, and some celebrity passions register as fully carnal and liberating encounters. That is to say, the plays of celebrity passion serve (hetero) normative and policed accounts of feeling and belonging in the world, fuel a desire for commodity objects and material possessions, and yet also open up the possibility for engagements that are violent, liberal and unregulated. In this article, I will explore the ways in which celebrity culture engages with passion and through the idea of it involving a modern form of the passion play. Following Lauren Berlant, I will argue that the passion ignited by the celebrity works to contain and regulate desire, and yet also offers up the opportunity for sensorial engagements that violate and resist the normative terms of desiring. I will suggest celebrity figures are themselves caught up in this passion play, suffering and feeling deeply at the same time, while channelling this violent crisis to their fans as they do so. Finally, I will write the article passionately, from an impassioned perspective, measuring and weighting my own desires in the contradictions and tensions of passion as they emerge in the body of the writer before you. This article is part of a themed issue entitled ‘Passion’.

Growing celebrity studies

This special issue ofCelebrity Studies simultaneouslymarks the fifth anniversary of the journal’s launch, and curates the collection of the best papers that were presented at the inaugural Celebrity Studies conference held at Deakin University, Melbourne, Australia in December 2012. That event was attended by over 120 delegates from around the world, with papers given by scholars from every continent and ranging across a broad intersection of disciplines: from business studies to literary studies, English to history, newmedia studies tomusicology, through to cultural, film, television and media studies. This was a conference dedicated to growing the intellectual climate of the study of celebrity, while evidencing this growth in the fertile grounds of discovery that took place across the papers and panels presented.Wewere particularly pleased towelcome nearly 50 papers from postgraduate students. Excitingly, with over 250 submissions received for the second biannual Celebrity Studies conference, to be held shortly after the publication of this issue at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, we are witnessing this growth in ever more interesting and provocative ways. The work of the journal Celebrity Studies is also clearly evident in this growth: since its launch in 2010, the editors have witnessed a sizeable increase in both the number and quality of the submissions it receives, so much so that in 2014 the number of issues it publishes will increase to four per year. This special issue has been at the forefront of this growth; cohered around a burning issue, often interdisciplinary in nature, it has allowed for critical conversations and dynamic debates to emerge around a single theme, giving it the time and space for serious, complex analysis. Growth, however, is a politicised concept, particularly in the neo-liberal age where an obsession with economic growth is used to measure and regulate all areas of social and political life, very often at great detriment to the poor and disadvantaged. Growth is also a decidedly gendered concept; on the one hand a patriarchal construct employed to justify the masculinisation of the economy and political life; and on the other, essentialised as feminine, and tied to nurturing and domesticated energies. To a degree, growth in the work carried out in celebrity studies has been marked by both an obsession with the journal getting greater downloads, library subscriptions, and citations, and with a hierarchy that has gently begun to locate the development of the field in the hands of male scholars. As Chris Holmlund remarked in her keynote speech delivered on the last day of the 2012 conference, where are all the women in this field? This was a reference to the fact that it was often ‘leading’ men who had been cited on the days preceding her talk. As with film authorship theory, we need to be mindful of the histories and legacies we construct for the field, particularly one where the strongest, most critical voices have come from feminist enquiry and discovery. Celebrity Studies, 2014 Vol. 5, Nos. 1–2, 1–4, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/19392397.2014.887528

This is the Sea: Cinema at the Shoreline

This is the Sea: Cinema at the Shoreline examines those directors and films for which the relationship between the sea and land at the shoreline and beach is of particular narrative, aesthetic and ideological significance. The articles explore the ways in which the meeting place between land and sea exists as a site where complex issues around identity, belonging, Otherness, nomadism, death and rebirth are played out. For the contributors to this special edition, the shoreline holds particular significance for understanding the ways in which the relations between sea and land can create liminal, often transgressive possibilities for representational and phenomenological encounters between people who ‘find themselves’ at the water’s edge. In cinema one can consider the beach to be a powerful transformative meeting and resting place. It is very often a liminal heterotopia of illusion and compensation (Foucault 1986) where capitalist time is unwound, and the sense of belonging, lost in the urban world, is newly found. This utopian world of the beach often stands in stark contrast and opposition to the mean city streets, the banality of suburbia and the commodified, relentless time of liquid modernity. The beach offers idealized love, youthful romance and the gifted time of unfettered freedom, while the city and the suburban home have in some way failed to provide these. The beach provides, as Murray Pomerance suggests in this special edition, the setting for the action and display of perfected youthful bodies, while Deborah Jermyn and Janet McCabe suggest it is a ‘magic space that sanctions and protects those desiring love’. And yet these beach and city spaces are also relational: that one can visit the beach means one can return to the city, rejuvenated and cleansed. In cinema, the beach is also the place of (childish) play involving a nostalgic return to an imagined lost paradise, or an attempt to reclaim a childhood that never maturated or was arrested in some way. In this special edition, Heather Wintle argues that child characters in post-apocalyptic science fiction films perform a transformative function in relation to the behaviour of adult protagonists who, charged with journeying them to the beach, develop nurturing characteristics. Troubled youth and adults in crisis visit the beach also for rejuvenation and resurrection aims, but death, literal and metaphoric, may consume them once they arrive. The beach is the site of the last ‘exit’ and the point of no return for doomed lovers, outsiders and the disenfranchised.Characters commit suicide at the shoreline, are viciouslymurderedon the beach or willingly enter the sea to be claimed by time and tide. Death at the edge of the water can also be a type of new beginning, involving purification and contemplative transformation as the finalmoment arrives. As FionaHandyside suggests in this edition, ‘the seashore setting itself speaks of liminality, of the (fluid) line between the living and the dead’. In cinema, the beach is very often gendered, encoded as a feminine space, and this either produces the essential utopian nature of the beach or renders it potentially monstrous and devouring. This is something Rachel Moseley discusses in relation to the Cornish

Sounding alien, touching the future: beyond the sonorous limit in science fiction film

In this paper I examine two particular aspects of sounding science fiction film: first, the ulterior, Othering sounds of the alien, whether it is creature, object, technology or environment; and second, the soundscape that accompanies or underscores the type of space travel that crosses temporal and spatial thresholds. In both instances of sounding science fiction film I suggest that human limits are reached and breached, leading to a deterritorialization of the self and a hearing that touches the future which is a moment of pure becoming. I focus on the womanly sonority of the alien to suggest that patriarchal and heterosexist sound devices can be ultimately corrupted. In the analysis of sounding space travel I suggest that science film can create a series of moments in which one experiences the double sublime. This spectacular rendering of a liquid chaos enables the viewer to experience the logic of sensation beyond bodily integrity. In this paper my over-arching position is one that hears in science fiction film the profound potential of a radical alterity that exists beyond the sonorous limit.