‘A trust betrayed’: celebrity and the work of emotion

Abstract

This article draws on psycho-social theories of emotional labour and the sociological concept of ‘emotion work’ in order to interrogate the affective communicative performances of celebrities, their deployment of a ready language of emotion and the broader therapeutic discourses from which this language is derived. It takes as its focus the emotional work undertaken by celebrities in order to limit or repair reputations damaged by scandal and to overcome a perceived betrayal of public trust. Starting from the premise that an ‘ideology of intimacy’ has formed the conditions in which the celebrity now labours as an emotional subject in the public arena, and that social relationships are considered to be ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ mainly through their commitment to the ‘inner psychological concerns of each person’, we explore the affective demands made upon the celebrity subject in contemporary media culture to be both intimate and ‘real’. In so doing we draw attention to the range of cultural spaces in which celebrity emotion work takes place, the conventions which enable this work and the only partially articulated contract of on-going public intimacy upon which this work is predicated. The article concludes with a consideration of how the public–celebrity contract intersects with a broader cultural imperative to perform emotion in the media, evident in the expectation that public figures should convey authentic feeling and convey it convincingly, in order to manage an on-going relationship of trust with their publics and thereby sustain a successful career in the public realm.

Keywords:

• emotional work
• emotional labour
• celebrity
• intimacy
• scandal
• rehabilitation

Introduction: celebrity work

As individuals are increasingly called upon to effectively deploy the language of emotion in their public lives, as well as in private settings, it is timely to consider the expectations placed upon celebrities as ‘emotional labourers’ (Hochschild 1979, Overell 2005, Sternberg 1998).¹ As P. David Marshall has argued, the celebrity is a strategically important figure in a consideration of the affective domain of modern life and social interactions in the public realm, because the celebrity system is instrumental in the organisation of the ‘affective economy’ in which culture and politics increasingly operates (Marshall 1997, p. 247). The celebrity is crucial here, because the ‘expansion of celebrity status’ is dependent upon its association with both capitalism and the ‘democratising sentiments’ of an apparently accessible culture (Marshall 1997, pp. 25–26). In other words, the celebrity figure spans the fields of the individual and the collective, the popular and the political, and thereby offers a model of personal success which reinforces the idea of individual achievement and social success as attainable by all. We suggest therefore that the tensions and dilemmas at the heart of celebrity emotional labour (as media workers and as ‘personalities’) critically foreground the affective terrain which all individuals are forced to negotiate in the public realm in order to be regarded as socially successful. Consequently, by drawing upon sociological theories of emotion, the market power of emotional labour and its centrality to both paid and unpaid working relationships, we interrogate the ‘emotion work’ of public figures and its implications for our understanding of the changing terrain of contemporary public life (Hochschild 1983/2003).

Reality television, the ghosted autobiography and the one-to-one interview have all become vehicles for the production of celebrity intimacy through the relaying of the life-story. They provide platforms via standardised formats for the staging and framing of celebrity lives and, crucially, provide mechanisms for the expression of dominant cultural devices of self-understanding: confession, introspection and the re-presentation of a better or improved self (see Redmond 2008). These mechanisms, albeit differently inflected, are of course also deployed by ordinary individuals – a key difference between them and the public figure lying in the public reach of the celebrity life story and its importance in the maintenance of the celebrity as a viable public commodity. For example, a celebrity media scandal can trigger personal disclosure of tragedy or serious dysfunction, with their story explaining the transgression in the light of a long-running private battle to be happy against the odds. This battle is often expressed as an emotionally difficult psychic journey complicated by fame and the media spotlight. The public telling of that journey is, among many other things, a means of attempted self-validation and often rehabilitation of the damaged celebrity persona. In these life scripts, the celebrity figure reveals to the public the ‘story’ of their misery, their flaws and their roots in a previously private or early life. A contract seems to be negotiated in which ‘authentic’ or ‘truthful’ personal disclosure is traded for continuation of the relationship between the celebrity and his/her followers. On a more pragmatic level, these revelations have become integral to the highly profitable circulation of the celebrity figure in contemporary media markets. They are cheap to reproduce, and stories of abuse, guilt, addiction, vulnerability and mental illness and greed appear to slot into the formulaic reproduction of entertainment journalism.

Audiences see the ‘hard labour of the persona’ played out in these scenes, employed by public figures ‘so that they can reference a realm of meaning that consumers find evocative’ (Sternberg 1998, p. 426), authentic and above all connective. As such, they witness what sociologist Arlie Hochschild (1979, 1983/2003, 2003) described as ‘emotion work’: work requiring one to perform the ‘right’ feeling and ultimately even ‘feel’ the right feeling according to the rules of the setting and often in the service of commerce. Hochschild (2003, p. 7), partly influenced by Erving Goffman's well-known work on the dramaturgy of everyday life, expressed concern that Goffman's human actors were denied psyches: ‘his characters had feelings … but we couldn't know, from Goffman, where those feelings came from’. Consequently, Hochschild sought to develop a ‘sociology of emotion’ in order to understand neglected dimensions of culture such as the ‘feeling rules’ which moderate, prompt and even direct the expression of emotion in specific contexts. Importantly, she rejects any simplistic notions of manipulation or staged performance (1979, p. 561). Instead, she emphasises the context in which the work takes place. While Hochschild addresses everyday workplace cultures, we want to suggest that media spaces such as the broadcast interview, reality television and confessional journalism (sites that allow the public presentation and reshaping of the intimate self), are also places where specific ‘feeling rules’ operate. These quasi-therapeutic spaces often prompt celebrity performances which identify the complication or ‘dysfunction’ immanent in the celebrity life story; that which prevents the individual from being successful, fulfilled, happy or intimate despite all appearances of a triumphant life (see Blackman and Walkerdine 2001). As already noted, this complication is sometimes structurally linked to events in the celebrity's past (poverty, neglect, low self-esteem), enabling him or her to understand their life as one of dysfunction or, as in the case of others such as Jade Goody, it may be articulated through present suffering or trauma (a narrative which ensued following her cancer diagnosis).

This article was conceived in the spring of 2009 when disgraced British reality TV star Jade Goody undertook her final media role as a figure of exemplary suffering; a troubling part which refigured her place in the media scene and ultimately helped to consolidate her media rehabilitation. The mass media coverage of her painful decline began with the cancer diagnosis, delivered to Goody as she starred in Bigg Boss (2008), the Indian version of Big Brother (undertaken in ongoing expiation of her racist behaviour towards Bollywood actor Shilpa Shetty in Celebrity Big Brother 2007). As Su Holmes (2009, pp. 35–36) explains, the Shetty affair led to the public divestment of Goody's celebrity status and an expectation of abject contrition which was to be marked not only through her demeanour (posture, attire, tearfulness, physical and psychological frailty on exiting from the house), her spoken apologies and subsequent reparations, but also through the relinquishment of celebrity privilege, including that of taking paid media work. Holmes observes that it was Goody's role as a ‘working mum’ which was necessarily re-invoked as part of this navigated retreat from authorised celebrity-hood. The announcement of Goody's illness, and the management of her media career in its wake, helped to revise the conditions under which she had been labouring. Accordingly, she was now sanctioned on behalf of her children's future to be lavishly reimbursed for her final media work with her domestic role as mother and her public role as celebrity finally and neatly fused. Justine Picardie (2009), writing in the Sunday Times, declared:

If she wants to make some money before she dies, then by all means let her do so, for this is one of her few remaining moments of defining herself, both as a mother and as a woman who has made a career as a reality TV star. (Picardie, 2009)

Her televised wedding (with medics on hand) in February 2009 to Jack Tweed, and the lucrative publication of exclusive wedding photographs in a special tribute issue of OK! magazine – a memorial tribute published just before her death (March 2009) – revealed how much her image was now bound up with the anticipation of her demise. OK! headlined with Goody saying: ‘I've had the happiest day of my life, now I'm ready to go to Heaven’. Inevitably, Goody became a subject of national media debate outside the usual spheres of entertainment culture. It seemed to some that TV news footage of her return home from hospital for the last time after emergency surgery, or the glossy post-chemotherapy photographs of her wedding in which she appeared uncharacteristically demure and frail, embodied in a quite literal way the increasingly commonplace display of private suffering for audiences' consumption, pleasure and identification. ²

Goody's suffering was physical as much as emotional, and therefore it was not openly read as self-inflicted in the way that her earlier career ‘gaffes’ had been. Consequently, her experiences of pain and trauma required an alternative interpretive model to dominant psychological discourses, and it is perhaps for this reason that the media, and Goody herself, drew upon older narratives of stoicism filigreed by religious tropes of despair, hope and redemption through suffering to articulate her predicament. The often sentimentalised representations of her contrasted sharply with earlier aggressive media responses to her ill-judged appearances on Big Brother 3 (2002) and Celebrity Big Brother (2007) (CBB) and the characterisation of her as stupid, bullying and racist. Thus, Goody's changing relationship with the public was effected not so much through the tropes of current tabloid culture but via an affective women's culture spanning nineteenth-century literature, stage melodrama, Hollywood women's films, women's weekly magazines and soap opera. As with Princess Diana, Goody became a ‘site of affective communication and public disputation over the conduct of life’ (McGuigan 2000, p. 11), not the ‘people's princess’ but ‘the people's commoner’ (Picardie 2009). The Goody case coupled older, deeply gendered melodramatic and religious representations of the suffering maternal heroine with a more contemporary class-inflected narrative of the ‘nobody’ who becomes a ‘somebody’ by following their lucky star (Biressi and Nunn, 2008). Following her death, Bishop Jonathan Blake, who officiated at Goody's wedding declared: ‘Jade has become for us, so many different things, a saint from Upshire and a princess from Bermondsey, an exemplar of biblical proportions' (Weaver and Percival 2009). Her public suffering became synonymous with domestic virtue; her self-subjection to the media bound into a narrative of bravery that celebrated her family life and her media appearances to fund her sons’ future and promote women's health-care. In Goody's case the footage of her lying on a hospital bed, losing her hair in her bathroom, being comforted by her mother and so on, was visually and textually anchored through the family scene to a domestic and pseudo-private realm. This easily translated the concrete and individual experience of her suffering through emotion work into a vehicle of shared intimacy made poignant by its proximity to her end and the irony of her recuperation from ‘national disgrace to national treasure’ (Weaver and Percival 2009).

Goody's prolific and often troubling media appearances in those final months (as seen in Jade's Progress, Living TV 2008), highlighted the sheer grind of maintaining a celebrity persona in the most adverse circumstances and what seemed to be a resolute commitment to sustain the intimate relationship being rebuilt between her and the public through emotion work. This reading of her career arguably opposes the frequent media commentary that presents the reality TV star, in particular, as someone seeking to evade the ‘real’ work required to achieve significant career success (see also Bennett and Holmes in this issue). It challenges the stereotype of poorly directed and undisciplined performance so frequently attached to the reality TV star (see Holmes 2004) and deflects the accusation of lazy avarice which dogs the ‘ordinary’ person who becomes a celebrity. Read from this perspective, her example of emotional labour, together with others discussed below, productively complicates the ongoing theoretical enquiries of Celebrity Studies which seek to analyse reality television and celebrity culture as part of a sophisticated account of labour, consumerism and the broader dynamics and economics of the social (see Andrejevic 2004, Marshall 1997, Turner 2004, pp. 32ff).

‘Poor me, poor, me’: celebrity reputation rehab

Not all performances of emotion work are as dramatic or as intensely sustained as Goody's, whose final months were featured on a number of linked reality shows on the Living Channel. Heightened moments of emotion also arise from the group and interpersonal dynamics of bonding and conflict played out in reality television such as I'm A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here or CBB, which bring together diverse individuals within a competitive/social experiment format. The inclusion of celebrities across the list: media darlings, faded stars and starlets, survivors of scandal and those with reputations for trouble-making, fosters an expectation of emotional fireworks. The differences engendered here can trigger a brutal unpicking of career histories, veiled aspirations or personal flaws. For example, in 2006 CBB relayed the 20-minute confrontation between disgraced former comic and variety show host Michael Barrymore and vociferous MP George Galloway. As Barrymore seemed to break down on screen Galloway sneered: ‘Poor, poor me, pour me another drink’. The complexity of Barrymore's scandalous media life – the revelations around his sex life, his involvement in a murder investigation, his alcoholism and the subsequent fall from public grace which had seen him slip from family favourite to tabloid monster – was reduced through the logic and dynamics of the CBB encounter to a theatrical dialogue between cruel mockery and whining self-pity; and lest we forget, both celebrities were performing the emotion work expected not only of their particular media personae but also as participants in a reality show. Although we do not have the space to address the dynamic of these inter-celebrity encounters here, we wish to note that the emotional labour undertaken (by both Galloway and Barrymore, to stay with this example) is no less powerful than that worked through in the more obviously therapeutic setting of the interviewer's darkened studio or observational documentary. ³ In terms of celebrity narratives of dysfunction, these various formats all demonstrate that it is not simply high achievement (the fame, fortune, power of having ‘made it’) that propels the celebrity story forward: rather, it is suffering, dysfunction or the personal flaw, once concealed but now revealed to the public, and this because the celebrity trope always contains within it the potential to become undone; to unravel spectacularly in the midst of its own success (Illouz 2007, p. 53).

This excavation of the troubled self is partly the inevitable outcome of the media's in-depth and sustained interrogative analysis of celebrities which, while not new, is increasingly integrated into the economics of mainstream journalism and factual programming. It may also be an attempt by the celebrity subject to limit the public damage experienced as the focus of punitive media coverage of a transgression of social norms. Scandal as it is conveyed in the tabloid media in particular is used to invoke the ‘ordinary’ moral community of celebrity followers whose shared condemnation is rooted in assumed communal mores: the ‘unconscious aggression’, which is an underlying motivation for the admonishment of a flawed celebrity figure, is often transformed via media gossip into narratives of collective ‘moral disdain’ (Alberoni 1962, p. 116). The scandalised celebrity, then, even if rehabilitated through confession and abject self-exposure, remains an ambivalent public figure: initially set up as the idealised emblem of successful individualism, then cast out from idealised status, although they may return to public favour they must remain open to constant observation for signs of setbacks, recidivism, subterfuge or deceit. Celebrity status, then, is an endless project to achieve, sustain and manage. And while, as noted above, the personal revelation of the celebrity persona can be cheap to reproduce, at a more personal or psychic level it must be very costly indeed.

The therapeutic narrative is frequently the means to shift the story of celebrity transgression beyond initial shock, outrage and disdain and into a new field of self-inspection and public reparation. Invoked by media commentators, ‘experts’ and the celebrity him/herself, the tropes of therapy – the family history, the consideration of sexuality as a motivating force in identity, the notion of unconscious drives to be identified and unpicked, the idea of the returning symptom, and so on – are now a compacted device for delving beneath the surface of the celebrity's persona both in particular moments and across career histories. As Marshall (2006, p. 3) has argued in relation to the intensive coverage of Michael Jackson's 2005 child abuse trial: ‘As much as the audience-watch via the media is an elaborate exegesis of the celebrity, it also resonates with notions of identity that have emerged from a century of psychoanalytical inquiry’. As Marshall stresses, celebrities are not only psychologically deconstructed by consumers; they ‘act out’ appropriate public personae and these personae necessarily adapt to notoriety. It is the business of this article to highlight these processes of adaptation as they unfold through the performance of celebrity intimacy which takes place in response to the rupture of the scandalised celebrity persona.

Here, we want to suggest that the therapeutic discourse – and the ready language of emotion and the damaged self that the celebrity figure is mediated through – can be linked to broader dilemmas at the core of contemporary late modern identities (see Plummer 2003). It could be argued that the celebrity figure writes large the contradiction of contemporary identity for many citizens of the developed mediated society: the expectation that we have the right to live pain-free lives bound up with the current pressure to understand those same lives through painful emotion work: a compulsion which forms the central plank of contemporary biographical narratives of self-understanding. As Illouz notes (2003, p. 119):

Because we are now all entitled at least to a life free of misery, suffering is to us what sex was to Victorians, something that becomes constitutive of our identity at the very moment we pronounce it taboo by expelling it and excising it from our ideal self.

Moreover, the ready expression of emotion (properly moderated and directed) has become a yardstick for measuring the healthy (read ‘successful’) performance of the achieving subject in both public and private life. Hence, the celebrity figure performing emotion is at the high (visible) end of a spectrum of emotional conduct; conduct by which many of us are now expected to manage our public lives in order to demonstrate integrity, authenticity and personal commitment to our public role (see McKenzie 2001). In other words, drawing upon Richard Sennett's (1974) well-known discussion of the end of public culture, we want to say that an ‘ideology of intimacy’ has formed the conditions in which the celebrity, along with other public figures and the ordinary person, now labour as emotional subjects in the public arena. Starting from the proposition that this ideology operates via the conviction that social relationships are considered to be ‘authentic’ or ‘real’ mainly by virtue of their commitment to the ‘inner psychological concerns of each person’ (Sennett 1974, p. 259), we might question the price paid for the often unspoken expectations placed on ourselves and others of warm and especially intimate relationships across the board. Is it not the case, as Sennett has argued, that when the relationship with the ‘other’ cannot sustain the burden of ‘our’ expectations we conclude that the relationship is at fault rather than the demands made of it? If so, when relationships change, as they inevitably must, the betrayal of these expectations leads to a ‘feeling of trust betrayed’ (p. 260), and this disappointment needs to be managed by all parties if the relationship is going to continue.

Therapy talk: from Face to Face to Shrink Rap

In order to narrow the focus of this discussion and consider the particular circumstances in which the celebrity articulation of emotion takes place, this section addresses specific media formats – that is, formats that resemble or claim a resemblance to the therapeutic encounter. We begin by identifying some affinities between one-to-one journalistic interviews and therapeutic encounters before going on to highlight notable British broadcast formats in which these encounters have taken place. We then proceed to an interrogation of the idea of the therapeutic narrative of self as a re-casting of celebrity persona in the wake of media scandal; often and paradoxically through the disclosure of the shameful or embarrassing experience.

Therapy talk formats present an intimate discussion between interviewer and guest in the confined space of a television or radio studio where the emphasis is upon an in-depth personal encounter that goes beyond the usual conventions of the chat show. These formats facilitate a public performative space for celebrity intimacy and the excavation of the celebrity persona which involves, to a lesser or greater degree, a number of consistent features depending upon the medium, which can only be briefly indicated here. These include a title, opening shots and mise-en-scènes which suggest an unmediated close encounter of a therapeutic nature, e.g. the consulting-room sofa, the spot-lit chair. A sense of an enclosed or confined or intimate space is also created through sound, lighting and camera work. The interviewer is usually positioned as authoritative, impartial and well-briefed on the personal history of their guest. There is an emphasis upon emotional intensity through either ‘face work’ (Goffman 1959/1990) or ‘voice work’ or both, especially on the part of the guest. There is a loose but credible and perceptible contract between guest and interviewer based on prior expectations and some degree of trust in the professionalism of the project, and crucially the format fosters a performance of introspection, reflection and revelation on the part of the interview subject.

These features can be found in the early British landmark series Face to Face (BBC 1959–62), a one-to-one interview series which broke new ground in the exploration of the public figure as a psychological subject (see Bennett and Holmes in this issue). ⁴ Despite the stiffness of its participants characteristic of that era, it retains a prominent place in popular memory and media history because it filmed emotional scenes and even triggered what were seen as on-screen breakdowns through persistent and carefully targeted questioning (see Holmes 2007). The series appeared on the brink of a new era when, as Ilouz (2007, p. 27–29) explains, a ‘new cultural model of intimacy’ came to the fore which required that to discover the ‘true self’ one must overcome a range of emotions including fear, shame and guilt; emotions which may well be deeply hidden and whose uncovering required a ‘new skill in language’. The true self was posited as opaque to its owner in this new psychological imagination, and required an intermediary with the skills of emotional literacy to dig out, to unearth that inner self and capture it in ‘a set of observable and manipulable entities’ (Illouz 2007, p. 33). These intermediaries or experts were to be found in both private and mediated spaces: the relationship counselling session, the ‘agony’ advice column and, increasingly, the talk show.

Face to Face (FTF) was set in a darkened studio. The face of the interviewer, journalist John Freeman, was rarely seen on screen, as he was filmed from behind with the static camera focused upon his guest in either medium range or close-up, lending a heightened emotional intensity to the scene and aligning the viewer with the authoritative position of therapist/interviewer. Most sessions were filmed in the television studio. Memorable episodes included those with figures such as Carl Jung, Evelyn Waugh and Tony Hancock. On the whole, Freeman's guests were substantial public figures, artists and intellectuals, and it is well known that comedian Hancock was nonplussed to find himself invited to take part. He found that Freeman's direct interrogative style demanded unconditional co‐operation: ‘Tony Hancock. The whole of Britain knows you in your professional comic mask … and tonight we want to try and find out what lies behind the mask. Now, are you in the mood to come clean?’. ⁵ This was followed by a reminder to his guest that he would have to manage without his scriptwriters: ‘you know you are on your own?’, ‘And you'll tell us the truth?’, to which Hancock answers in the affirmative. In the ensuing conversation Hancock was asked, among other things, about his income, his taste in literature, whether he would like to play Hamlet, whether he took sleeping pills and why he had no children. Under this scrutiny the comedian came across as somewhat troubled, rather pathetic and a little pretentious; a pseudo-intellectual who had lost his way personally and professionally.

Interviews such as these made for absorbing television that intentionally linked the personal and the public sphere, connecting character and personal achievement, family life and public success. One well-known episode from September 1960 featured the witty and hugely successful television star Gilbert Harding who was visibly upset when questioned about his relationship with his late mother. Andy Medhurst (2000, pp. 254–256) described Freeman's deliberate probing of Harding's sexuality and unmarried status as a kind of ‘crucifixion’, knowing – as Freeman did – that that homosexuality was virtually unmentionable at the time. Medhurst also suggests that Freeman knew about Harding's encounters with psychoanalysis and capitalised on this in order to ‘unmask’ him. The episode sparked a media sensation not least because of Freeman's clipped, stiff and unsympathetic demeanour when faced with Harding's visibly vulnerable state.

On BBC radio, the best-known but far later equivalent programme would be In the Psychiatrist's Chair (ITPC), which was launched in 1982. The host, Professor Anthony Clare, conducted more than 60 interviews with celebrities from every context, including sport, politics, literature and entertainment. ⁶ As Clare (1992/1993, p. 88) himself ruefully noted, the title was potentially misleading, because the interviews were not psychiatric treatments and the subjects were not patients. But he also hoped that the title would point to the aim of the series, which was to focus upon the ‘early experiences, the drives, the motives, the stresses and strains characterising the lives of the interviewees’ (Clare 1992/1993). ⁷ The taped interviews were often conducted in an impersonal basement studio, the intimacy of the experience being reinforced by the discretionary conditions of radio, which meant that guests might smoke cigars (Jimmy Saville), drink champagne (Eartha Kitt), arrive already drunk (R.D. Laing) or, in the case of Anthony Hopkins, treat the whole experience as though it were a private therapeutic encounter (Clare, pp. 88–89). The ‘agreement’ between the show's host and guest that this was to be a deeply personal, even revelatory interview (as signalled by the title and conventions of the show) was both variable and unstable. For example, Clare (p. 1) recalled that the American tennis player Arthur Ashe did not seem to realise until he arrived at the studio what the interview would involve, or that Clare was even a psychiatrist. As Clare explained the remit of the show to Ashe he observed a ‘wary, watchful expression clouding his face’. But in the case of popular agony aunt and consumer campaigner Clare Rayner (whose breakdown in interview was compared by others to that of Gilbert Harding), Clare (pp. 218–219) points out in his defence that Rayner was ‘prepared to talk’ for a variety of reasons and knew what form the encounter would be likely to take. The generic trajectory from FTF (presented by a journalist) to ITPC (presented by a medic) was clearly acknowledged when, in the late 1980s, Clare interviewed John Freeman himself as part of a repeat season of the most famous episodes of FTF. ⁸ Clare (p. 218) acknowledged the impact of the Harding episode in particular, noting that ‘it burned itself into the collective television unconscious’, and he observed of Freeman's interrogatory approach that ‘this was revelatory, psychological, clinical probing at its most effective and detached best’.

Both FTF and ITPC, albeit differently located in terms of both era and media platform, were formally serious BBC broadcast formats which typified an opening-up from the 1960s onwards of ‘quality’ broadcasting to a new-style engagement with the public figure as a subject of a quasi-therapeutic encounter. As such, they are representative of the enculturation of the ideology of intimacy into media culture and its concomitant imperative that not only celebrities but all notable public figures should be willing to engage in the business of emotional intimacy; especially when questions have been raised about whether they have breached a bond or relationship of trust between themselves and the public.

The co-operation between host and guest in this enterprise is starkly evident in the series Shrink Rap (billed as part chat-show, part psychodynamic interview), which featured a well-known person in conversation with trained American psychologist and psychotherapist Pamela Stephenson. Stephenson is also a celebrity (a former comedian herself and married to high-profile actor and comedian Billy Connolly), whose avowed clinical interest lies in the traumatic processes at the heart of ‘celebritisation’. Shrink Rap ran for two short series to date and mainly featured international stars and ‘A-list’ celebrities such as Tony Curtis, Kathleen Turner, Robbie Williams, Joan Rivers, the Duchess of York and Sharon Osborne. Only occasionally has it also featured lower-profile figures such as the British scriptwriter and comic actor Chris Langham, who attained media notoriety following his arrest and trial for accessing child pornography on the internet. In each case 2½ hours of talk is edited down to a 50-minute episode. In interview, Stephenson explained that the concept of Shrink Rap:

… is to have a deep, psychologically-based conversation with people that we think we know… . Shrink Rap is an attempt to allow people not to be under pressure of performing, not to feel that they have to present the ideal self, the one that is always adorable and perfect and funny and together. This allows people to bring forward the true self, to not always tell the official story. ⁹

She suggests that ‘fame’ is a ‘trauma’ that splits the real self from the businesslike persona and that her aim is to reveal this other hidden self. While Stephen Fry's recollections of his childhood rape experience, or Sarah Ferguson's memories of her mother calling her monstrously ugly, undoubtedly disclose damaged histories, there is no sense in Stephenson's account that these, too, might be a kind of self-production and one which is inextricable from contemporary cultural scripts of emotional labour and the labour of performance both in the media and within the social realm.

Shrink Rap is a sometimes uneasy collaboration between the celebrity and the interviewer according to the strictures of the format. Each celebrity appears ‘stripped down’ in presentation as well as psychologically. For example, the movie and theatre star Kathleen Turner arrives on set dressed in black with modest make-up and minimal jewellery which, together with the sober setting of spot-lighting and leather sofa, signals the seriousness of the event. ¹⁰ In the case of Tony Curtis, the performance of seriousness is even more explicit. He is also dressed in black and having recently dispensed with his trademark hairpiece appears to be quite literally ‘exposed’ and far more vulnerable in appearance. His very presentation is a sartorial declaration of earnest intent and his full commitment to the project of televised therapy talk. Playing to the new rules of personalised and revelatory encounter actors such as Curtis, a movie star from a different era when distance from fans was considered seductive rather than aloof, shows that they are able to engage with the twenty-first-century imperatives of celebrity culture. Curtis's performance as variously vulnerable, open, flirtatious and damaged but resilient was both charming and well-measured; essentially presenting himself as a Hollywood survivor whose life-story was one of personal development and growing self-knowledge. The presence of Curtis and others of his status on shows such as this is indicative of the skill with which celebrities adapt their personae to the ‘requisites of the market place’ (Sternberg 1998, p. 418), and suggests that this capacity for adaptation is at the heart of the new economics of self-presentation which we all, to some extent, recognise and feel compelled to take on board if we are to succeed in an image-driven economy. Shrink Rap, by its own definition, seeks to differentiate itself from the many other public performances of celebrities which variously highlight their function as idols, divas and stars or people that ‘we think we know’. Consequently, the contract entered into is one that requires the performance of intimacy to be styled in a particular way: this is not just another talk show, this is an encounter.

Where a guest does seem to fully collaborate in the televised therapeutic encounter, the stakes are high. Stephenson's interview with Langham is exemplary here in terms of its detailed and explicit discussion of childhood trauma and adult dysfunction. As already noted, Langham had been prosecuted for accessing child pornography, an offence which naturally had a catastrophic effect on his career. The recording took place only days after his release from prison and the episode was actually broadcast ahead of schedule in order to capitalise on the ensuing publicity. It is arguable that the emotional ‘work’ of the celebrity becomes even more explicit in this example because he was a figure who was obliged to navigate away from a highly regarded celebrity persona – one which has been badly damaged by scandal – into another mode of public visibility, if indeed he could remain visible at all. Langham's encounter with Stephenson makes for uncomfortable viewing as she takes him back through memories of being abused as a child and his recollections of drugs, sex and drink addictions. Editing, dialogue and performance come together to produce a remarkably fluent life-story narrative in which Langham recalls, for example, not only his own experience of sexual abuse as a child but the very moment in his own trial when repressed childhood memories resurfaced. Following Stephenson's prompts he chronicles his substance abuse, his selfishness and his long-term neglect of his own family in pursuit of his own obsessions. When he tries to explain his consumption of child pornography as the result of ill-judged research for a new television series Stephenson's reaction shot is one of disbelief superseded by more professional probing. The session ends on a positive note, with Langham visibly moved in recalling the unexpected support and practical help that he experienced following his conviction.

Viewers never learn why Langham agrees to the interview, although some might speculate about this as a gambit for his public rehabilitation. However, the motivation or intentionality behind this media work is not our business; rather, it is the emotion work at play. In the Langham example, viewers see the expression of damage, regret and above all shame which is, as Sara Ahmed (2004, pp. 105–106) argues, an emotion rooted in the perception of being seen by others to have done wrong:

Shame as an emotion requires a witness: even if a subject feels shame when it is alone, it is the imagined view that is taken on by a subject in relation to itself… . In shame, I am the object as well as the subject of the feeling.

In these terms, the ‘therapeutic biography is almost an ideal commodity’ (Illouz 2007, p. 56) requiring foremost that the person is required only to allow the audience ‘to peek into the dark corners of their psyche and that they be willing to tell a story. Narrating and being transformed by one's narration, are the very commodities being produced, processed and circulated’, to the extent that even extremely damaged celebrity figures are substantially recoupable via confessional media culture. See, for example, disgraced boxer Mike Tyson's 90-minute monologue in James Toback's close-up documentary Tyson (2008) in which he offers an engrossingly rhythmical, relentlessly intense and sometimes tearful recollection of his life story. Toback declared Tyson to be the ideal subject standing in the rubble of a career ruined by drugs, drink and violence towards women. In interview with a journalist following the film's release, Tyson noted: ‘Listen, I'll talk about anything. I'm not ashamed of who I am. I understand I've got to be sold in a certain way’ (Hattenstone, 2009).

Coda: the politics of apology

Fallen celebrities such as Goody, Barrymore, Jackson, Tyson and Langham shared a vulnerability to a mass-mediated cycle of celebration, transgression, suspicion, disdain and punishment which demanded a public expiation (see Turner 2004, p. 106, Whannel 2002). In all these cases, anxieties about social conduct and appropriate modes of moral and ethical behaviour were collectively explored via the media, and the established relationship between celebrity/star and the public was severely tested. For a variety of reasons, only Goody could make full reparation. First, Goody was better placed to make good because the others had been accused or found guilty of crimes involving a sexual or violent dimension (or both). Her primary misdemeanour was racist/bullying behaviour which operated along different lines of social transgression. This context, and other factors which cannot be explored in any depth here, such as gender, ethnicity, motherhood, her status as a classed figure and as a British ‘character’ and her history as an ‘ordinary’ person turned reality star, all combined with the conduct and labour of her final months and the anticipation of her death to seal her return to public favour. In every case, then, the emotion work of the celebrity needs to be contextualised in order to better understand the celebrity's specific contribution as well as their wider strategic importance to a consideration of the affective domain of modern life (Marshall 1997). As indicated above, for this to happen due account needs to be taken of the poorly articulated but demanding contract between celebrity and public; the contract under which the celebrity performance becomes meaningful and the relationship codified. In order to understand the perceived ‘betrayal of trust’ committed by the celebrity, the specifics of that celebrity–public relationship need first to be unpacked. Lauren Berlant (2008), tracking a different set of commodified genres of mass cultural intimacy, helps to articulate the structure of address, common mediated assumptions and a realm of feeling that we ascribe to celebrity performance here and which, in our view, make this contract or relationship possible. Speaking of the ‘intimate public’ she suggests (p. viii):

… What makes a public sphere intimate is an expectation that the consumers of its particular stuff already share a worldview and emotional knowledge that they have derived from a broadly common historical experience … [an] intimate public is a space of mediation in which the personal is refracted through the general, what's salient for its consumers is that it is a place of recognition and reflection.

As such she contends, ‘emotional contact, of a sort, is made’ (Berlant 2008); this contact extends from powerful identification to dis-identification; from love to hatred; and all manner of emotional and psychic associations in between.

We suggest that this contact impacts most visibly on the contemporary celebrity subject in terms of emotion work and the contract of ongoing public intimacy which sustains it. We conclude by pointing to how the emotional labour of the celebrity and its centrality in media culture intersects with the broader cultural imperative to emotion work as the foundation of a productive and successful life in the public political realm.

Sennett (1974) has lamented the end of a public ritual of civility and performative detachment which he associates with an earlier period and model of public engagement and one which has been in decline since the nineteenth century. These civic virtues were, he argues, eroded by an ideology of intimacy ushered in with the late modern period when society began increasingly to be measured in psychological terms and authenticity of individual identity becomes calibrated to the markers of an open, fully disclosed private self. Sennett, referencing Weber and Freud, locates the contemporary fascination with the psychology of the private life in the modern turning to the private self as the measure of public integrity. The notion of identity and of the liberated self derives, to a great extent, from the advent of modern psychology and of psychoanalysis as a doctrine. The standardisation of unconscious life and the models of personality attached to it have produced formulas for the calculation of the public expression of suffering, regret, apology and reparation. Sennett describes this standardisation as an economy closely linked to and understood through market relations. The revelation of intimacy has paradoxically become a repressive and controlling set of criteria:

We speak of whether we can personally ‘relate’ to events or other persons, and whether in the relation itself people are ‘open’ to one another. The first is a cover word for measuring the other in terms of a mirror of self-concern, and the second is a cover for measuring social interaction in terms of the market exchange of confession. (Sennett 1974, p. 10)

Sennett's concern was with the diffusion of this market exchange into all aspects of public life, including contemporary politics. Anticipating current debates about the politician as personality and celebrity (Corner and Pels 2003, Marshall 1997, pp. 203–240, Street 2004, Van Zoonen 2005), he declared a new age of ‘incivility’ in modern politics in which the electronic media have overexposed the political persona and thereby eclipsed the importance of policy, guiding political values and principled courses of action. ¹¹

A parallel argument has been made by Ernest Sternberg (1998, p. 420) regarding the ‘new economics of self-expression’ as an integral part of contemporary capitalist relations. He suggests that workers, managers and executives in the new economy have to adapt to all-pervading notions of product presentation and that these are linked to ideas of emotional transparency: ‘At every economic level the ability to present oneself has become a critical economic asset’. To succeed in the business world, then, or in public institutional work, the corporate subject will be increasingly called upon to ‘shape the persona in consonance with market forces’ (p. 434). He argues (p. 418) that ‘New capitalism workers and managers raise their self-value through calculated self-presentation, using techniques originally meant for the making of celebrities’ and the successful corporate worker will mimic the strategies of the celebrity: ‘To truly advance his value on the market, the ambitious performer must be willing to calculatedly adapt persona to the desires of the audience’. Today's worker, then, must possess a ‘heightened iconographic capability’ and ‘a superior cultural insight into the symbols, ideas, personifications and themes that move the audience’ (Sternberg 1998).

As a coda, we end with a recent media event which involved not celebrities but the newly and reluctantly visible executive finance capitalists: chief executives and corporate bankers. The ‘age of the apology’ (Harris et al. 2006) has seen a proliferation of demands for public apologies from politicians and financial workers in relation to the banking crisis and the financial meltdown that led to the global recession of the late 2000s. Sir Fred Goodwin was one such prominent figure. In January 2009 The Guardian’s City editor Julia Finch identified Goodwin, former Chief Executive of the beleaguered Royal Bank of Scotland (RBS), as one of the 25 people at the centre of the financial meltdown. Goodwin became a media emblem of high-level corporate greed and ineptitude due to his aggressive expansion of the RBS and his leading role in the bank's exposure to the North American sub-prime mortgage crisis. As a former captain of industry and knighted business leader, his fall from grace was confirmed by the near collapse of the RBS in October 2008 and its subsequent rescue by the UK government. Media coverage seized upon his nickname ‘Fred the Shred’ – a moniker used by city financiers to indicate his renowned style of savage costs savings – and portrayed him as the personification of corporate greed. He became the corporate villain with a multi-millionaire lifestyle gained at the expense of the ordinary shareholder and taxpayer. Reports flagged his private use of a corporate jet, lavish spending on the bank's headquarters, an investment of £200 million on celebrity endorsements and his final extravagant pension.

In February 2009 it was reported that the RBS had posted a loss of £24.1 billion, the biggest loss in UK corporate history. In the same month Goodwin, along with three other senior executive bankers, was called before a Treasury Select Committee and subjected to hostile questioning from MPs on the failure to anticipate the financial crisis. In a widely reported and televised confrontation, these former corporate ‘stars’ were asked to accept blame and to account for the inflated city bonus system from which they had benefited. Goodwin and his colleagues were facing career meltdown and serious damage to their reputations. In what became a widely televised and reported scene, each one apologised for the distress caused and for the ‘turn of events’. The four attracted heated criticism from media commentators: much of it linked to their detached, de haut en bas style of pre-prepared apology. The strategies of apology used were overtly formalised – each of the men used similar phrases and appeared to declare the apology almost by rote. No one chose to frame their apology in terms of personal attributes, moral failings or character flaws or in terms of a breach of public trust. The bankers did not ask for absolution, nor did they accept personal responsibility, and their responses were read as arrogant, cold and out of touch with the ordinary public. Public figures such as Goodwin had found career success in a marketised system of performance in which the executive accrues power through a persona associated with flair, intuition, aggression and charisma; little wonder that the public rehabilitation of his image was impossible. What is salient here from the perspective of this article is the frustration generated by the men's apparent lack of demonstrable contrition – they did not appear to understand the media politics of apology or the nature of the trust that they had betrayed. The public expectation of an expression of genuine sorrow for the large bonuses, excessive private expenditure and an on-going engagement in a culture of high-risk finance which played a major role in the recession was never met, and bearing in mind the solipsistic culture of corporate finance, perhaps never could be met.

Our interest lies in how this event highlights the extension of the expectations of the mediated confession and emotion work into other arenas of public life as much as in the inability of public/political figures to meet these expectations or make these connections effectively (see Couldry and Markham 2007, Richards 2007). The bankers' performance of apology (for which it was reported they had received media coaching) failed. It broke down partly because as labouring subjects they uncomfortably straddled the break between an older institutionalised performance of corporate power and the newer affective economy of public performance which measures the integrity of public figures on their competence as emotional actors. It could be argued that both modes of public communication are flawed. The former acted as a restraint which, more often than not, impeded the political subject's attempts at connectivity but the latter model, by which politicians are now frequently judged, turns on the ability to present oneself as an intimate or confidante engaged in a relationship of personal (rather than institutional) trust. But it is this second model that public figures must learn to work within. As Barry Richards (2007, pp. 97–98) notes, ‘we are amidst a cultural transformation in which politics and policies in the traditional sense are becoming more enmeshed with the personal, with psychological considerations and with emotionality’ and it will be the public figures who best understand the emotional dimensions of the public realm and its communicative rules who will most effectively connect with their publics.

Notes

1. The term ‘emotional labour’, originally used to describe the experiences of service industry workers in the 1980s, is increasingly being drawn upon by scholars working within sociological approaches to media, celebrity, reality TV and talk shows (Couldry and Littler 2008, Hesmondhalgh and Baker 2008, Wood et al. 2008).

2. Following Goody's funeral, chat show host Sir Michael Parkinson lamented that Goody had become a ‘media chattel to be manipulated and exploited till the day she died’ (Singh 2009).

3. Barrymore came second to winner Chantelle Houghton (the only non-celebrity in the house) and in interview with Davina McCall was visibly moved by the public support he had received.

4. The series was revived in 1989, with Jeremy Isaacs as the interviewer.

5. Transcript for Face to Face. Available from: http://www.railwaycuttings.co.uk/face_to_face.htm [Accessed 20 October 2009]. For a discussion of ‘unmasking’ and issues of agency in Face to Face see Holmes 2007.

6. But see also BBC radio's On the Ropes, which interviews celebrities and ordinary people who have undergone serious life changes and challenges, and Between Ourselves, with Olivia O'Leary, which also conducts extended conversations with mostly ordinary people who have experienced extraordinary situations.

7. ITPC had its critics. Oliver James, a psychologist and himself a well-known media figure, observed that what audiences really enjoyed about the series was a ‘quasi-tabloid revelation of the private life of a public figure’ (quoted in Attwell 2007).

8. The Late Show: Face to face with John Freeman (1988) with Anthony Clare.

9. Interview with Dr Pamela Stephenson, March 2007. Available from: http://www.channel4.com/more4/shows/s/shrinkrap4.html

10. As Clare noted in his account of his interview with Ashe, the challenge for the show is that not all celebrities, and certainly not all stars, will collaborate with the interview project (see Collins 2008, Plummer 2003, p. 25). The Turner interview turned out to be a masterclass in stonewalling as she resisted Stephenson's attempts to expose a trauma at the heart of her itinerant but affluent childhood as the daughter of an influential diplomat. As such, she seemed to be out of step with the current cultural script of connectivity between celebrity and audience via intimate media talk, or at least beyond its considerable reach. Essentially, then, power relations are uneven and variable in every case of ‘mediated self-disclosure’ in talk shows (Couldry 2003, pp.115–116).

11. The debate about the incivility of politics continues in the light of Barack Obama's own calls for a return to civility during the Presidential election campaign and beyond; see Daniel 2009, pp. 3–5.