Paragons of failure: fallen celebrity and the crisis of social mobility

ABSTRACT

Widely associated with upward mobility, celebrity is typically used to affirm the possibilities for transcendence in economically polarized capitalist societies. Relationships between celebrity and social mobility are less utopian and more complex, with celebrity effectively masking limited opportunities for advancement in a world of automation, austerity, nepotism and globalization. Representing the other side of social mobility, fallen stars-turned-celebrities like Lindsay Lohan and Tori Spelling couch individual failure in neoliberal terms – as personal shortcomings in a world where fame is ostensibly readily available – effectively challenging structural social, economic or institutional critiques of contemporary late capitalist society. Celebrity, in short, plays a sleight of hand: it reassures the public that success is still attainable as it offers a wide range of ordinary, untalented, unsuitable and fallen celebrities. At the same time, it masks the limited prospects for social mobility that make fame – an irrational, precarious and unlikely accomplishment – appear a viable alternative to more mundane forms of employment. We should therefore problematize ideas about celebrity and class mobility, rethinking those ideological narratives that link it to widespread upward mobility.

KEYWORDS:

• Celebrity
• decline
• social mobility
• neoliberalism
• failure
• consumption

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. This rhetoric of accessibility and the belief that relatively new media offer unprecedented opportunities for the self-staging that can lead to celebrity is not unique to digital/social media. This tendency is instead seen across many forms of ‘not so new media,’ from the star search contests found in film fan magazines and newspapers during the 1910s to the stories of early studios like Biograph, Vitagraph, Essanay and Selig hiring studio visitors who later become stars. It can also be found in early television’s focus on the ordinary person, both on quiz shows and documentaries, and on today’s reality shows and social media.

2. The fallen celebrity can be distinguished from the fallen star. Fallen stars like Clara Bow, John Barrymore, Jack Gilbert, Frances Farmer, Brittany Murphy and Amanda Bynes fascinate due to the melodramatic, potentially unjust nature of their decline. Possessing talent and (at times) working hard, fallen stars’ downfall usually points to the failure of luck. Fault typically lies with society, as their decline results from changing trends, industrial upheaval (as with Hollywood’s transition to sound, the collapse of the studio system or changes in pop music), professional injustice or personal tragedy (including mental and physical illness) – developments outside individual control. Even as the fallen star provides melodramatic catharsis for the unfairness of their (and by extension our) fates, there is a more general sense that these figures were exceptional and thus outside social norms, qualities that mark both their fall and our reactions to it.

3. Fallen celebrities can thus be distinguished from other abject models of self who have few professional entertainment credentials and are known more for being ‘themselves.’ These figures–Tyler and Bennett’s ‘celebrity chavs,’ or reality/tabloid stars like White Dee, Farrah Abraham, Josie Cunningham, Jade Goody and Mama June Shannon–incarnate ‘the “dregs” of ordinariness.’ They serve both as semi-comic repositories for public vilification and as examples of the worst kind of social mobility – the unwarranted, unearned, undesirable and unjust. (Kavka 2012, 162–164).