The cultural iconography of the small-town girl turned big-time pop star is one of the most tried and true tropes of American popular culture. While it is a prevalent American dream, it often seems to turn young starlets’ lives into nightmares.
With the rise of social media, it’s easy for the public to feel like they’ve broken the fourth wall. We as consumers of celebrity culture and media love to claim our righteous take on authenticity and transparency. Of course, the media has caught wind of this and now, it seems nearly every celebrity is “authentic” and “relatable.”
They’re abandoning stage names, they’re doing live videos on tour, they’re inviting us into their homes and giving us makeup tutorials. Celebrities are using the same social media platforms we do to sell their authenticity to us.
We complain about being sold to, yet we always take the bait. This brand of pseudo-authenticity is still feigned, though. The live videos have product placements, as do the home tours and the makeup tutorials.
Celebrities are selling themselves to us. This isn’t a new phenomenon.
Christopher Terry, media law professor at the University of Minnesota, said celebrities’ names, likenesses and most notable attributes are protected under laws similar to copyright. This is called the right of publicity.
The right of publicity protects celebrities and public figures from being misrepresented, according to Terry. It distills their likeness down to their associations. Essentially, celebrities own rights to their persona because they’re famous for a reason.
Celebrities are hot commodities and have certain traits that define them, their trajectory and their marketability, according to Terry. Celebrity itself is a business and monetary asset that requires legal protection from misrepresentation. To a large extent, celebrities are brands themselves. In order to become famous, the 3-D of what constitutes a real person must be flattened into a few distinct, summarized and well-defined boxes to check.
This can mess with a person’s identity and legacy. Celebrities are known by the world for a few things that are usually not authentic. Those traits are used to define them, often for the rest of their lives and beyond.
An infamous case of this is Marilyn Monroe — or Norma Jean Baker.
Over the course of her lifetime, Monroe went from child bride to one of the most iconic women on the planet. She’s become synonymous with midcentury American femininity and her image has proliferated after her untimely death. Monroe became more of an icon and symbol than a person.
Ruth DeFoster, an assistant professor who teaches media and popular culture at the University, said Monroe and Norma Jean couldn’t be more different.
“It’s not her, it’s not who she was, the image of her,” DeFoster said. “The famous Andy Warhol shot for example, which I think is the one we all associate with her, that wasn’t her… she was this very laid back down to earth person.”
The discrepancy between who Monroe was and who she was made out to be lies at the heart of her exploitation, according to DeFoster.
“The way that she was really exploited as this vapid, dumb blonde,” DeFoster said. “That’s really the archetype of the character she played her entire life. There’s no question that she was subsumed by this character Marilyn.”
There is a new wave of change and awareness sweeping the public consciousness. A new star has risen this past summer. Chappell Roan, or Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, has had a meteoric rise over the past year.
The Missouri native broke the record for the largest daytime crowd at Lollapalooza, opened for Olivia Rodrigo on her Guts World tour, reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with her debut album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” and has earned the unofficial title of “your favorite artist’s favorite artist.”
Within a year, Roan went from barely being able to afford rent to one of the most lauded figures of pop music’s last decade. Most recently, she’s come under fire for her anti-establishment attitude, particularly surrounding her stardom.
Roan’s stage persona is a very meta representation of the transformation required of celebrities. She wrote in an Instagram post, “When I’m on stage, when I’m performing, when I’m in drag, when I’m at a work event, when I’m doing press… I am at work,” Roan said. “Any other circumstance, I am not in work mode. I am clocked out.”
By having a drag persona, Roan implicitly separates her personhood from her fame. Kayleigh Rose and Chappell Roan are two separate people. One is a person and the other is an entity for public consumption.
Of course, stage…
Read More: Fame is just a job – The Minnesota Daily