The cult of celebrity strikes me as such an odd notion. I’ve thought many times about what it is that drives us to expose every inch of their lives. Like with Winona’s cleptomania or Kurt Cobain’s diaries, we want to expose them, their humanity and their faults. We want in some sick way to devour these people, their power over us, their lives.
Reading Coriolanus really made me start thinking about society’s obsession with celebrity terms of consumption, of devouring and devotion. Coriolanus, a heroic Roman warrior, refuses to speak to the common citizens, to dine with them, to entertain them. The citizens want him to acknowledge them by speaking to them, and when he doesn’t they want to destroy him. The citizens desire to make him one of them; when he doesn't comply they want to tear him down. A citizen speaks of this in terms of their consuming his body, “For if he show us his words and tell us his deeds, we are to put our tongues into these wounds and speak for them.” Coriolanus, though, does not want to share his battle wounds or his words with the common people, he doesn’t want to play the role of the politician. He just wants to keep to himself.
Coriolanus refuses to stoop to the common people and so they want to tear him down. Celebrity today, it seems, is not much different. We place the select few – the rich, the wealthy, and the powerful – on a pedestal where they become the focus of all eyes. We watch them on television, we read about them in magazines, we know the intimate details of their love lives, yet we don’t know them at all. Our desire to know about J.Lo’s new beau or George Clooney’s performance in bed, or what REALLY happened between Justin and Britney is really just our attempt to make these people human, to convince ourselves that they really are just like us.
The impulse to worship celebrities paradoxically makes us want to become iconoclasts, to reveal their darkest secrets, to expose their most intimate moments. We attempt to expose their faults, to understand them or to despise them – because we can’t stand the idea of a higher echelon of human life where the commoners aren't welcome. Thus the seemingly contradictory, yet entirely natural, impulse towards both idolization and iconoclasty.
6:41:22 PM 
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