Who will fix it for us? Toxic celebrity and the therapeutic dynamics of media culture

ABSTRACT

The exposé of Jimmy Savile’s perpetration of heinous abuse over many decades enables new understandings of the links between mediatised celebrity and affective experience. The much hallowed ‘national treasure’ status accorded to Savile during his lifetime was violently overturned following the disclosure of hitherto disavowed documentary evidence, leading to the desecration of his reputation and memory. Savile’s toxic rendition of celebrity has subsequently given rise to popular cultural narratives based on the scandal, most notably the acclaimed television drama, National Treasure. This article explores the media processes shaping and responding to the desecration of Savile’s celebrity, and suggests that there is a therapeutic quality at play. Operating over time at representational, affective and formal levels, popular and critical re-mediations of the scandal provide important outlets for unconscious emotional experience, creating space for resisting dominant narratives that contrive to shape celebrity as somehow ‘untouchable’. They provide a valuable means of grappling with painful experience, allowing it to surface and be worked through. Using Savile as a case study, I argue that the entanglement between mediatisation and celebrity culture creates important psychological space in which to make sense of affective experience. I further draw on object relations psychoanalysis to examine the containing and reparative dimensions of popular culture exemplified by National Treasure.

KEYWORDS:

• affect
• psychoanalysis
• celebrity
• scandal
• Jimmy Savile
• mediatisation
• National Treasure

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For a different approach to the theme of denial in the Savile case, see Greer and McLaughlin (2013).

2. For an excellent discussion of the chain of affective and ideological associations forged between Thatcher (at her death) and Savile, see Heather Nunn (2013). Nunn emphasises how Savile’s stained reputation rolls over on to Thatcher and to the UK political and establishment culture more broadly to encode it as guilty of doing damage to younger generations.

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Notes on contributors

Caroline Bainbridge

Caroline Bainbridge is Professor of Culture and Psychoanalysis at Roehampton University. Her publications include The Cinema of Lars von Trier (2007) and A Feminine Cinematics (2008), co-edited volumes such as Television and Psychoanalysis (2013) and Media and the Inner World (2014), and curated special editions of journals such as Psychoanalysis, Culture and Society and Free Associations. She is film editor for The International Journal of Psychoanalysis.