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Headlines, Gossip, and Stars: How Tabloids Have Fused Monster and Celebrity

Contemporary culture stands apart from eras of the past for many reasons, but one of the greatest is the obsession with celebrity, a fairly young cultural phenomenon the only really came into existence a century or so ago.  As celebrity culture grew during the 20th century, a form of reporting on it developed that revolved around the average person’s desire to know the inside lives of the rich and famous.  This form is commonly known as the gossip tabloid, which has become so prolific that we can now find it the shelves of every supermarket checkout line and news stand, racy headlines calling out in neon over paparazzi snaps.  The rise of the tabloid as popular culture’s prevalent mode of celebrity news has made the monster and the celebrity synonymous through normalization and glamorization of scandal.

Some qualities of monster are innately possessed by anyone who is fame.  The greatest of those qualities is the idea that the monster is born of the culture of the times.  Very simply, a celebrity could not be famous or attain any kind of notoriety without being intimately intertwined with contemporary culture.  The star (or their PR team) must have a firm understanding of what is appealing in this culture, and mold their public images accordingly.  Thus the celebrity is not really themselves, they are a mirror in the shape of their true personality that reflects the cultural body of our current world.  The celebrity is also a prime example of the monster’s trait of always escaping and returning in another different, but essentially the same form.  Though celebrities wax and wane in and out of vogue, it seems like there is always a newer, younger, more sparkly carbon copy of them in line to rise into the limelight after they fall.  For example, Madonna has reached and departed from her prime, and less than half a decade after she experienced her last era of commercial success with Confessions on a Dance Floor, a look-alike rose to fame in the form of Lady Gaga.  In this way, celebrities carried some forms of the monster in them before tabloids became prevalent.

There is absolutely no question that tabloids portray celebrities as monsters.  They run headlines describing Tom Cruise “blindsiding and betraying” his wife, Kim Kardashian “faking her pregnancy for $$$”, and the Bradgelina couple’s “jealous rages needing couples therapy”.  And those are just the words.  The pictures of celebrities we see gracing gossip magazine covers are snapshots of them unaware, mid-step, mouths hung open, faces bare and dressed in sweatpants, completely opposite to the pristine and manicured image they work so hard to present to the public.  Oftentimes the stories run are completely fabricated.  For example, OK! Magazine ran an article about Taylor Swift and Calvin Harris getting married with a baby on the way, but months later the couple split and Swift was linked to another man.  Celebrities could feasibly sue these publications for libel, but they don’t.  Why?  First of all, tabloids are so numerous that it would be tedious and maybe impossible for one’s PR team to track down all articles about themselves.  But the second, more important reason follows the old adage: Any news is good news.  Because celebrity revolves so greatly around being known, it doesn’t matter if a star is known in a good light or a bad light, their brand still benefits from the exposure granted by tabloids.  The truth of this principle has even created a new brand of celebrity, one that is famous not because of a talent, achievement, or occupation, but because they can create dramatic news stories.  The most famous of these examples is Kim Kardashian.  Her brand is actually incredibly savvy; she and her manager, who is also her mom, have built an $150 million dollar brand from a single, explosive sextape.  That’s more than her husband, Kanye West, a traditional musician-celebrity is worth.

The next question is, why does the public continue to love and support celebrities, despite their portrayal as the monster by tabloids?  Our media has become saturated with famous people with “bad behavior”, to the point where a well behaved celebrity is an anomaly worthy of praise.  Thus, monstrous behavior has been normalized because of its overwhelming frequency.  The aspect of monster that represents taboo that we wish we could break is transformed by celebrity into an alluring image of forbidden rebellion. In this way, one facet of the cultural monster is turned into a positive desire.  A second thesis of the monster that celebrities have come to embody in a positive way is its difference.  Celebrities are certainly different from the ordinary people who read about them in tabloids, but instead of that difference creating a feeling of alienation between us mundanes and our dazzling stars, a celebrity’s differences are what draw us to them and make them attractive.  In fact, it’s precisely the stark, astounding, untouchable difference between us and the stars we follow that make the idea of meeting or being associated somehow with them so appealing.  So, as we continue to read about celebrities from a variety of sources, tabloids or not, it is important that we’re aware of how the most well-known people in our culture are represented.  Not necessarily so that we can be disgusted by their monstrosity, but only to use the knowledge to examine celebrity culture more deeply and draw our own conclusions about what we read, instead of being told what to think by the very sources that we must be most critical of.

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Black Mirror “Playtest”

“Playtest”, an episode of the British tv series Black Mirror, peels back the layers of main character Cooper’s reality.  We meet Cooper as he is leaving what is later told to be his Mom’s house on a worldwide globetrotting trip.  Throughout this intro, his Mom calls his phone several times, and each time he ignores and doesn’t pick up.  On his last stop in London, he hooks up with a journalist who gives him some grief about not answering his Mom’s calls.  Later, his credit card is deactivated and he is encouraged by his hookup to playtest a VR horror game to make enough money for a plane ticket back to America.  She also suggests that he take a couple of pictures so that she has material for an exclusive story on the game.  Cooper goes to a remote location and is lead through the facilities by Katie, who will administer the VR playtest for him.  She tells him to shut his phone off and they enter a completely white room.  When Katie leaves the room for paperwork, Cooper leaps up to send pictures to his journalist hookup, but doesn’t have enough time to turn the phone off before Katie returns.  She then puts a small chip called a “mushroom” into the back of Cooper’s neck and begins to initialize the VR syncing process.  

Up until this point, everything we’ve seen has been physical reality.  Everything Cooper had been experiencing actually existed in the physical world.  If we were to follow him, we would have seen and heard the same things he did.  However, when Katie begins the initialization process, Cooper’s phone goes off- his mom is calling.  Mom’s phone call marks the end of physical reality in this episode.  From that moment on, Cooper experiences augmented reality, seeing what is really there, but also seeing projections of the VR simulator such as the whack-a-mole gopher, the spider in the haunted house, and his high school bully.  

Augmented reality and hyperreality are very closely intertwined in this episode.  Although Cooper, and the viewer, are lead to believe that only the projections he is seeing are deviations from reality, Cooper’s entire experience is not real.  By the end of his wild ride through the VR haunted house, we think that Cooper is able to return home to speak to his mom.  But it is revealed that this too never happens.  In reality, Cooper’s playtest lasts 0.04 seconds, from the moment his phone goes off to all of his brain cells go dead.  His entire experience, from whack-a-mole to meeting the CEO to being stabbed in the haunted house and abandoned by Katie in his ear was the result of all of his brain cells firing simultaneously, and thus it was all hyperreality.   Augmented reality is contained within hyperreality, and yet it was all created by Cooper’s brain, a real, physical mass.  Thus the writers of Black Mirror suggest that despite how boundless and unlimited virtual reality appears to us, it is ultimately no different from the unlimited conceptual ability that exists in physical reality.

The experience Cooper goes through is his life flashing before his eyes before he dies.  Everything he sees in the haunted house are things in his real life.  The cookie jars in Sonja’s house and the ones in the haunted house are the same.  The outfit his high school bully was wearing was on a screen as he walked through the game facilities with Katie.  He picks up Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Raven” to read in this haunted house, the name of the bar where he met Sonja.  Hyperreality is not so different from physical reality. ��In fact, hyperreality as portrayed in this episode is merely a rearrangement of elements of reality.  Not only does Black Mirror blur the lines between the real and imagined by fooling the viewer into thinking one is the other, it actually mixes the elements of each- they use the same props, shots, and characters in both reality and Cooper’s imagined simulation as a forewarning that reality and hyperreality are even more similar than we think.

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Miley Cyrus as The Monster

Miley Cyrus is a prime example of a contemporary monster.  Firstly, she was born of the culture of kids television that bloomed in the mid-2000’s with the rise of channels such as Nickelodeon, Cartoon Network, and Channel Disney, the home of the hit show Hannah Montana of which Miley Cyrus played the titular character.  In addition to coming into the public eye as Hannah Montana, her onscreen character, she was also known as the daughter of Billy Ray Cyrus, an American singer-songwriter.  Thus she was conceived by the public signifying two things: the All-American role model for young girls, and the celebrity child.  However, as Miley matured, she grew out of these roles, even as the public demanded that she continue to conform to them.  Paparazzi photos came out of her smoking, wearing skimpy clothing, kissing another woman, and so on.  Not only was she caught clandestinely defying the categorization the masses wished to keep her in, she deliberately presented herself as rebellious, sexually liberated, and at times, teetering dangerously out of control through lyrical themes (We Can’t Stop), music videos (the infamous Wrecking Ball video), and national performances (twerking on a married man at the VMA’s).  Even as the nation shifted their perspective of her to an outrageous, drugged up party doll, Miley veered course again, releasing Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz.  The 2015 album was wildly experimental and psychedelic, and Cyrus is pictured on the cover smearing pink gel and glitter all over her face with her mouth hung open.  Lyrics on the album included “I feel like a slab of butter / that is melting in the sun / oppression melts away / now that you and me are one”. Her live performances give the impression of a beast being unchained. She bangs on the keys of her piano, clad in BDSM body suits and rainbow colored cornrow weaves, screaming, yowling, almost crying out her incoherent lyrics with unnatural fervor. She refused to put out a polite, comfortable, blond, All-American Hannah Montana album. Miley Cyrus & Her Dead Petz made it incredibly clear that Miley was intent on destroying any and all categories others tried to hold her in.

Miley’s shameless liberation sets the boundaries for the behaviors of regular civilians.  She seems to be living in her own world, where partying and the host of scandalous tabloid headlines surrounding her every day is the norm.  By being constantly being portrayed as defined by tabloid claims, Miley becomes the headlines, whether they or true or not, and in turn governs the edges of normalcy for others.  As long as one does not cross over the lines the media draws about Cyrus, they remain acceptable.  But if they do step into the uncanny valley of pregnancy scares, broken engagements, secret hook-ups and wild nights of drugs and debauchery, they become the monster as Miley Cyrus defines it.  What is interesting is that Miley intentional portrays the same image of herself in her work that the media smears on her in their headlines.  She does it with a positive, empowered attitude, whereas the media headlines make it clear that her behavior should be regarded in a negative light.  Miley embraces her differences, whereas the rest of us demonize them.  When she was Hannah Montana, the vanilla, All-American conforming sweetheart, no one batted an eye.  It was only when she deviated from the norm that she began to be demonized by the general public.  First of all, Cyrus differs from the majority simply because of her celebrity status.  Celebrities in general are seen by the mundane non-celebrity as a different breed, whether that is a positive or not.  But even amongst celebrities, Miley refuses to assimilate into the same.  Her glitter smeared image is certainly not the way most PR agents tell their clients to represent themselves.  Her bold sexual displays and actions, combined with her twiggy, almost adolescent body turn sex on its head, making something that is usually pleasing and satisfying into a very uncomfortable viewing experience. Even by simply sporting a short haircut, she deviates from how females normally present themselves.

In her differences, Miley occupies the space where desire and the taboo overlap. She takes the pleasures in life- sex, partying, indulgences such as drugs, and pushes them.  She pushes them further than socially acceptable boundaries, and audiences are disgusted but will watch with morbid interest.  Miley’s extreme behavior embodies everything we wish we could do but feel, for whatever reason, may it be societal pressures and rules, monetary bounds, the constricts of responsibility, or the expectations of friends and family, that we cannot.  The reason we keep going back to Miley’s twerking VMA performance, or Wrecking Ball music video, is because she can do what is forbidden.  And by watching Cyrus, we can experience the taboo debauchery and unimpeded lifestyle we desire.

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Cohen Monster Culture

Thesis 1: The Monster’s Body Is a Cultural Body

The monster exists at a metaphoric crossroads.  More specifically, the uncertainty of crossroads, and the fear, anxiety, and fantasy that comes with that uncertainty.  In this way, it is merely a construct of culture, representing something other than itself.

Thesis 2: The Monster Always Escapes

Despite the evidence it leaves behind, the monster is never truly caught.  The yeti only leaves footprints, Nessi is only captured in blurry photographs.  Despite being killed, banished, or destroyed, the monster will always return again, perhaps in a slightly different form, but with the same essence.  This is shown in the multitude of reworks of the vampire trope, or of the many ways aliens have been examined in works of entertainment.  The shifts of the monster follow the shifts of culture, but the monster can never be truly be pinned down.  We can only observe the remnants of its passing or transformation.

Thesis 3: The Monster is the Harbinger of Category Crisis

One of the reasons the monster always escapes is because it defies categorization.  Just as it sits at the uncertain crossroads of culture, the monster is itself at a crossroads, or a hybrid between two categorized things.  The laws of nature and science of violated in the amalgam of the monster’s body.  Instead of following either/or, the monster is and/or.

Thesis 4: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference

A monster is different, and those who are different are perceived as monsters, whether the differences are racial, sexual, political, religious, or economic.  Groups are often turned into monsters when their differences are exaggerated.  For example, medieval France justified the Crusades by characterizing Muslims as demons lacking humanity.  As the monster is further caricaterized, differences blur, a sexual difference becomes a racial difference, et cetera.  

Thesis 5: The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible

The monster inhabits the edges of what people perceive as real.  By inhabiting this space, showing us the limits of the real, the monster warns against exploration and curiosity. Those who push the boundaries of the real risk being consumed by the monster for becoming the monster themselves.  Oftentimes monsters are utilized for the purpose of discouraging others from actions that will shatter the culture of their world.

Thesis 6: The Fear of the Monster is Really A Kind of Desire

The monster is an embodiment of our desires that are not allowed in the confines of our society.  When we look at the monster, there is an escapist delight that arises in us, that only gives way to fear when the the monster threatens to step into our world.  By placing monsters in temporary spaces, they become our source of entertainment and we can indulge in our taboo desires.  For this reason, the monster is always dangerously enticing, and we find ourselves drawn to it despite our disgust.

Thesis 7: The Monster Stands at the Threshold... of Becoming

We are the creators of monsters and they are born from us.  They escape us and return with knowledge of themselves, and consequently knowledge of us.  The existence of the monster leads us to question and ponder how we define our world, how we represent it, and most of all, why we created monsters in the first place.

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Mac Demarco ‘My Kind of Woman’ MV Analysis

Canadian singer-songwriter Mac Demarco croons “Oh, baby, oh man,” in the opening lines of his song ‘My Kind of Woman’.  These lyrics are taken very literally, as the video shows a close-up of Demarco’s lips reciting the lyrics as he smears lipstick around his mouth.  Demarco is at the same time the female (oh, baby) and the man that he is singing about.  Demarco steps back from the camera and we can see that he is in a small room with walls covered in newspaper, which will become significant at the end of the video.  He continues his preparation for dressing in drag with a gaudy, almost exhibitionistic smile, never breaking eye contact with the camera.  As he backs up, he falls through the newspaper behind him, revealing flashing electronic letters stacked in a jumble, spelling his name.  He puts on an earring, and for a brief couple of seconds uncannily resembles George Michael from the 80’s, though I’m doubtful that this was intentional.  The lights fade and the music video cuts to Demarco in full drag with a black wig and a pale blue dress spotlighted against a red curtain.  A microphone is lowered on a cord for him and he cups it in his hand as he performs for the camera, winking, smiling, and caressing his satin clad body in an exaggeration of femme fatale songstresses in the first half of the 20th century.  This first sequence makes it clear to the viewer that the “woman” that Demarco talks about in his lyrics is not a girl, it’s his feminine alter-ego.  His hamming for the camera reinforces his unapologetic cross-dressing.  He seems comfortable in himself, his eye-contact with the camera challenging the viewer to be comfortable with what they are seeing as well.  

Demarco sings that he’s “begging ... baby, show me your world,” as the red curtains and microphone are pulled from view to reveal the scene has been taking place in a junkyard near LA.  Demarco gestures to his surroundings as if the junkyard is the world he’s speaking of.  At this point the tone of the video changes. Demarco carries the camera through the rubbish, but his actions seem haphazard and disoriented; much less intentional than his act for the camera in drag. A woman slings her arm over him for a couple seconds and a man presses a noncommittal kiss halfway on his lips before he comes to rest on a couch in front of an older couple.  The man sticks a cigarette in Demarco’s mouth just in time for a camera flash to go off, capturing a strange approximation of a family portrait.  Demarco moves again, wandering through the junkyard.  His face is sprayed with whipped cream, his wig is yanked off, and ketchup, oil, and flour are thrown at him as he stumbles, following the camera all the while.  This second act shows a loss of control.  Demarco no longer owns his autonomy.  He is stumbling, being led by the camera as other people impose their will on him, rejecting his cross-dressing performance.

The flour from the previous scene morphs into a dreamy haze and then clears, revealing Demarco in a seating position, nodding his head dazedly and mouthing his lyrics.  Hands from below strip him of his blue dress and he stumbles out of the frame for a moment.  When the camera returns to him, we see that he is naked and running through the junkyard, attempting to escape the camera in pursuit and cover himself.  After many dead-ends, he finally dives into a clearing with an unfolded cardboard box and newspapers.  He rolls into a fetal position and the newspapers and cardboard fold around him, obscuring and concealing his body.  The video ends with a shot receding away from the cardboard box until the screen turns black.  Demarco’s plea to “show me your world” sings over the shot.  Demarco comes full circle in the last shot, encasing himself in the same newspaper covered box that he begins the video in.  After his dress is pulled away, he is exposed, not only literally but also figuratively, as he is unable to maintain the (already thin) facade of femininity.  His reaction is to hide himself, to seek protection, and he retreats back to his box, where he feels comfortable enough to don the costume of a woman without facing judgement or rejection. The lyrics “show me your world” imply that his feminine alter-ego can only exist in that world- the shelter of the box.  Demarco takes a love song sung by a man to a woman and turns it into an exploration of a man’s struggle with his desire for cross-dressing.

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Assignment #2 Part 1

This image portrays a group of 5 girls wearing matching red maid outfits with the text “09/09 WED COMING SOON RED VELVET”.  The girls have matching red tipped bangs and spiraling ponytails, and are styled indistinguishably except for their differently colored stockings.  A viewer with knowledge of the genre of kpop would identify this group as Red Velvet, a group that was just over a year old at the time this image was released.  The text provides a date and promise that they are”coming soon”, indicating that the group will be releasing something on September 9th, presumably new music.  We can conclude that this image is an advertisement of sorts to make the viewer excited and informed about the group’s new material.  The styling of the girls is somewhat reminiscent of Pippi Longstocking, a western children’s book character known for her free spirit. The different colored stockings appear to be a direct nod to her name.  In addition, she is a red-head with freckles, reflecting the drawn on freckles and clip on red bangs that the group wear in this image.  However, the maid outfit is more similar to the red dress and white apron donned by V.I.C.I., an android in the 80’s sitcom “Small Wonder”.  The girls are also posed in a pyramid, with all but the center member only having a single leg.  The look surprised and shocked, as if they are in a situation they don’t know how to respond to.  The identical nature of their styling, along with its parallels to an android character can be seen as acknowledgement of the artificial nature of the genre.  The members are difficult to tell apart from one another.  Instead of human traits defining each as an individual, they are assigned colors to differentiate themselves.  In addition, robots such as V.I.C.I. in “Small Wonder” are produced in factories.  This image is also aware of the hours of training, prepping, and grooming that each member went through in the factory of their entertainment company.  However, the Pippi Longstocking imagery provides a playful feeling, suggesting that although the group is self-aware of their artificiality, they are still capable of being “fun”.  The element of fun is also reflected in the whimsical type and bright, mismatched colors chosen for the text.  The image asserts that the group is willing to embrace the idea that they are a product, and in the act of embracing that, they are freed to take a more humorous approach to how they deliver and present their music.

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Assignment #1  Kurt Anderson: You Say You Want A Devolution?

In the article “You Say You Want a Devolution?”,  Kurt Anderson argues that Western culture has fallen into a pattern of recycling past trends.  He postulates that advances in technology in the past couple of decades have exhausted our capacity for newness and novelty in our world, causing people to fall back on a culture that remixes the old and comfortably familiar. I agree that current pop culture revolves around throwbacks and nostalgic reinventions of the past, especially in the areas of music and clothing, but that is not necessarily a death sentence for the evolution of pop culture in the future.

Mark Ronson and Bruno Mars released “Uptown Funk” in 2014 and enjoyed 14 weeks at number one on the Billboard Hot 100.  Yet, the song was distinctively old-sounding.  It pulled sounds from electro-funk of the early 80′s and featured primarily brass instruments; even the music video feels like it was filmed in a different decade, with Mars and his five-man posse strutting downtown in suits that make them resemble Boyz II Men to an almost suspicious degree.  The explosive success of “Uptown Funk”, which was based so heavily in culture of decades before us, is proof of our current obsession with the past.  The pop music landscape is full of songs that are permutations of earlier sounds.  Other examples include disco-influenced “Get Lucky” by Daft Punk, Walk the Moon’s 80’s rock-driven “Shut Up and Dance”, and Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way”, which, in my opinion, is a shameless cover of Madonna’s “Express Yourself” with the lyrics pointlessly changed to convey the exact same message as the original song.  I believe that a partial reason for the resurgence of old sounds in new music is a new audience.  Young people, the main consumers of pop music, haven’t lived through music trends from decades ago, so for many of them retro-inspired pop music does feel new.  That’s why reinvented music from the 70’s, 80’s, and 90’s is running rampant while club music circa 2009 sounds incredibly outdated today.

Anderson makes the excellent point that jeans have remained the casual uniform of choice amongst the fashionable for quite some time.  Especially recently, mom jeans with a 90’s silhouette are becoming increasingly popular.  There are stores dedicated to curating vintage fashion, such as Tagpop, an online clothing store that specializes in clothing from the 90’s.  It is true that your typical citizen of the 90’s would not look out of place in 2017.  But I do believe that up until the past several years, what is fashionable has evolved.  The early and mid 00’s had a very distinctive look, with it’s exaggeratedly low-waisted bootcut jeans, strappy shoes, spaghetti strap tank tops, and uninhibited lip gloss.  Similarly, as the 00’s came to a close and the 10’s started, a very different silhouette emerged, defined largely by the tremendously popular skinny jeans.  Although they’re still jeans, the stretchy aspect made skinny jeans markedly different from any other denim based bottom before them, so I believe it can be argued that skinny jeans were an innovation in fashion.  Though current trends mirror those of the past, fashion has changed in the past 20 years- and then cycled back.

I don’t think that enjoyment of redundant pop culture is bad.  Although culture is about advancement as a society, it’s also about entertaining and making people happy, otherwise it wouldn’t be considered popular.  For this reason, as long as we are aware of the content we are consuming or the trends we are participating in, and the fact that at some point culture must morph into something new, “devolving” culture will not be a permanent symptom of society.  In fact, we should enjoy this period of nostalgic tribution while it last; who knows when the next new thing will whisk us into the future?