on the self, the idea of celebrity, and that one shitty aja romano article

[hiddenramen]

The real point of this post is that I have got to stop ranting on Twitter instead of Dreamwidth, lads.

There's just something about Twitter that feels breezy and casual enough that I can just fire off thoughts as I have them, and not feel like I have to craft something really technically deft in order to have a thought. I suppose, in the end, that's why Twitter gets people in trouble, though: the casual, breezy nature is an illusion. It's just a marketing trick. 

It also sucks because it seems like, so out of place on Twitter to have longform thoughts or conversations. It's just not suited for it. And yet I keep doing it because I'm seduced by the easy, off the cuff air of it all. 

But I digress!

I read the new Aja Romano article that's making the rounds, just because it popped up on my timeline, and I'm not sure why I clicked on it, to be honest. I have a certain History™ with Aja that normally wards me off of her work. Part of that history, in fact, has to do with Aja's rhetoric around addiction specifically, which I've found irresponsible and potentially damaging in the past. 

But I've been thinking a lot about the John Mulaney backlash for the past few days, and Aja's occasionally, in the past, had salient insights into the topic of celebrity specifically. It's obviously something she's at least mildly well-read in: she cites Lacan and Dyer and their derivatives fairly casually. So fuck it, I figured. Let's see what she's got to say. 

I went into my thoughts on the piece in a more blasé way on Twitter, which I'll link here. I almost wish I'd just done the full rant on Dreamwidth, just because I think Dreamwidth facilitates longform discussion and conversation better, but here we are. 

I think a lot of my frustration with the piece is a lot of my frustration with most editorials in this genre. I have a major in cultural studies, so like, obviously I think conversations about cultural issues and subcultures and cultural spaces are interesting and important. Obviously I want to read articles and editorials that talk about and dissect pop culture topics in a more analytical sense. But it seems like the whole genre is oversaturated with stuff like this. And it's just deeply, deeply frustrating, because I think a piece like this, with the kind of reach that this gets, would genuinely be good for people, because it could push them to question what facet of a celebrity they're interacting with, and how that fits into a broader cultural narrative and context. 

Like, a lot of the backlash against Taylor Swift all those years ago was a backlash against the rise of liberal feminism, and was part of the same cultural pushback that spawned Gamergate. It had to do with people's fears about women, and about women's sexuality and ambition, and it also had to do with the illusion of authenticity, and the erosion of the separation between celebrity and consumer. There's generally just an incredibly deep well that you could plumb for this.

Same thing with Jennifer Lawrence: the rise and fall of Jennifer Lawrence as a beloved public figure had nothing to do with Jennifer Lawrence, and everything to do with the collective culture's changing ideas about women and what it wanted from them. The now oft-cited hatred for Anne Hathaway, and her eventual return to glory, was part of the same cultural conversation. None of these women did anything: they were just symbols and characters being perceived and placed into a broader cultural narrative. That is, in a lot of ways, what celebrity is. 

I think I'm going to cut myself off here, because I could genuinely just spiral down this conversation for eight thousand years, but I am interested to hear what other people thought of the article, or of the issue I was talking about in the thread(s). Or even just like, the broader issue of the reaction to John Mulaney and how that's parsed through the lens of a cultural narrative. It's an interesting conversation to have!

Comments

[hyaenid]

1. ohhh, Aja. I have not taken her seriously since she wrote two articles, one about how m/m fanfic is more progressive than f/f because f/f at least gets porn lesbians, and then one about how m/m is regressive and f/f is progressive because of sexism or whatever, like 6 months apart from each other, honestly. There is way worse things she's done, but that's the one that makes me roll my eyes about her entire Thing

2. yeah - so much of celebrity is outside of any one person's control! It's sort of fascinating to me to watch the cultural understanding of a celebrity get rewritten and changed, or what is okay and what isn't (perhaps unsurprisingly I"ve seen women get absolutely raked across the coals for things men just shrug off, but whatever) - it's interesting/unsettling stuff!

[hiddenramen]

1. Aja normally frustrates me just because I think she's a bit of a hack, and she has the particular curse of being both a hack and incredibly loud about it. That and she genuinely just doesn't seem to give any credence to journalistic ethics, like... at all lmfao

2. Definitely! I think that the way we conceptualize celebrities can be a big insight into various cultural moments, and the way that we interpret stories. Even things like how presidents are received from one generation to the next, or celebrities like James Dean or Marilyn Monroe. Super interesting stuff.