He was the sexiest man alive and one night I went to see him. For two-and-a-half hours I watched Brad Pitt play the hero in his latest—a man who looks like Apollo and lives like Dionysus.
It was People magazine that crowned Pitt the sexiest man alive of 1995. Who cares anymore about Tom or Kevin or Mel?
Celebrity in America has always given us an outlet for our imagination, just as the gods and demigods of ancient Greece and Rome once did. Celebrities are our myth bearers; carriers of the divine forces of good, evil, lust, and redemption. "The wish for kings is an old and familiar wish, as well-known in medieval Europe as in ancient Mesopotamia," writes Lewis Lapham in his book The Wish For Kings. "The ancient Greeks assigned trace elements of the divine to trees and winds and stones. A river god sulks, and the child drowns; a sky god smiles, and the corn ripens. The modern Americans assign similar powers not only to whales and spotted owls but also to individuals blessed with the aura of celebrity."
Once the famous were recorded for the ages in stone and in paint. Alexander the Great was the first famous person in a modern sense, contends Leo Braudy, Ph.D., professor of English at the University of Southern California and author of The Frenzy of Renown. "Not only did he want to be unique, but he wanted to tell everybody about it, and he had an apparatus for telling everybody about it. He had techniques for doing famous things. He had historians, painters, sculptors, gem carvers on his battles."
Heroes, we all might agree, carry intrinsic value—the essence of the heroic and the noble. Durable gods serve to lift our vision above the mundane.
But fame ain't what it used to be. Celebrities are borne aloft on images marketed, sold, and disseminated with a rapidity and cunning unimagined by the heroes of old, and then just as quickly cast aside.
"We're in the Kleenex phase of fame," notes Braudy. "We see so much of people, and in all branches of the media. We blow our nose on every new star that happens to come along and then dispose of them." Every year brings a new Sexiest Man Alive. Technology has changed fame so that it is far more immediate and instantaneous—and our fascination with it has become far more fickle.
Where once the famous achieved an almost godlike status, one that seemed impermeable and historical (consider Lincoln or Washington, Charles Lindbergh or Jesse Owens), today celebrity exists for and by an information age. In our global and atomized world of bits and bytes, where information is instantly available and massive in its quantities, and as perishable as an electronic image, celebrities help personalize that information. They put a human face on it. However, they are diminished in the process. The trouble is, so are we.
Information comes at us with incredible speed, in innumerable changing faces and stories, on Court TV, on CNN in 24-hour play. We have far too much information about celebrities these days—their love affairs, their private conversations on cellular phones, the color of their underwear, how many nose jobs they've had, how many intestinal polyps our presidents have had removed. But the surfeit of information strips the famous of the sacred and heroic—therefore our culture and our own lives—as heroes reflect what we believe is best in ourselves.
"There has been a tremendous increase not only in coverage of celebrities but in the number of carries themselves," observes Dana Kennedy, senior writer at Entertainment Weekly. "Thirty years ago the only real celebrities were in the movies. Now they're everywhere"—radio hosts, lawyers, murderers, teenagers. As a result, "celebrities are just less interesting. Take Ingrid Bergman. She was beautiful, talented, a movie star, and then she went and brought a big scandal upon herself, and then triumphed with an Oscar. She was a perfect celebrity. These days we have people like Tony Danza. Who cares?"
Psychiatrist Peter Kramer, M.D., author of Listening to Prozac, a book that brought him his own measure of fame, found himself facing a huge media maw. "There is so much specialized media that the amount of material they require is extraordinary. I was amazed at the number of outlets on my book tour. Any small city has cable stations, drive-time morning shows, women's shows—you name it. The sheer amount of material needed to run the media we consume is enormous, so you have to create lots of characters."
In the beginning was the image. Thirty years ago in his landmark book, The Image, historian Daniel Boorstin defined modern fame in terms that have resonated ever since. "The hero was distinguished by his achievement, the celebrity by his image. The celebrity is a person well known for his well-knownness. We risk being the first people in history to have been able to make their illusions so vivid, so persuasive, so realistic that we can live in them."
The images, in turn, transmute celebrities into commodities to be sold for a price. In Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America (University of California Press), Yale's Joshua Gamson quotes 1930s screen star Myrna Loy. "I daren't take any chances with Myrna Loy, for she isn't my property…I couldn't even go to the corner drugstore without looking 'right,' you see. Not because of personal vanity, but because the studio has spent millions of dollars on the personality known as Myrna Loy."
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