Monday, January 28, 2008

The Obsession with Fame

Have you ever noticed how much we obsess over celebrities? If you really think about it, it’s insane!! We buy magazines to read about famous people and what is going on in their lives. We talk about the latest gossip with our friends about who’s who in Hollywood. Now don’t get me wrong, I am very guilty about this. Just the other week, I bought a magazine because it had Matt Damon and Patrick Dempsey on the cover and I am a huge fan of both. But why do we do this?

When thinking about it, we always talk about famous people and how glamorous it must be to have that lifestyle. But in reality, how great is it? Sure, the perks tend to be lots of money, great clothes, top-of-the-line cars, huge houses, and famous friends. However, I was talking with my friends the other day and we all decided it would be a huge burden to be in the limelight 24/7. The paparazzi would follow you all of the time. There would be no privacy to this otherwise fantastic lifestyle. Some celebrities even go crazy because of this issue.

Well, after looking at the negatives, I would not want to be a famous person in today’s world. However, if we cannot become famous, we worship the famous to a very extreme extent. Take the infamous Brittney Spears for example. We have been with her every step during her mental break down because of the magazines and TV shows broadcasting the news. We sit, we watch, we gossip-it is an ongoing cycle.

I could talk about my opinion on gawking of the famous all day. However, that will not stop me or anyone else from finding out the next juicy gossip in Hollywood. So, why do we want to know so much about the celebrities’ personal lives?

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

This post connects with some of the stuff Schumaker talks about in the narcissism chapter. Why not go back and add a comment to your own post about whether or not you agree with what he says there. Or anybody else who reads this, do it. We need to get some conversations going that have to do with connecting your interests and ideas with what you are reading about.

MAM said...

To expand on my blog, I want to make connections with Schumaker. He says that “the ego has become so artificially inflated in today’s cultural climate that the idea of being famous is seen as a requirement for happiness” (170). I have to agree that we all want to be famous, like I said in my blog, and if we can’t, we obsess with the people who are famous. As we watch the celebrities, we see them “fall prey to their anxieties about the fickleness of their unknown worshippers” (171). It is obviously a scary world, living in the limelight, yet all we do is worship them for it. So I still ask the question “Why?”. Why do we watch celebrities fall as the whole world watches? Why do we crave privacy but don’t give celebrities any at all?