Culture, Digested: The Celebrity Digested

Chappell Roan, Tracey Thorn, and the new fan culture

A friend texted, a little spooked. The New York Times was sending a photographer. What does that mean, is the paper going to be profiling their work? Had they assigned a review? Most importantly: How do we keep this from happening?

When my friend had told others about the predicament, they offered congratulations. You’re going to be mentioned in the Times! How wonderful! This is how you break through to the next level of success! But I knew they would be preparing for the arrival of the New York Times like others prepare for hurricanes: board everything up, load up the car, get out of town. I had been writing something for a national magazine on a topic close to where my friend works, and I had asked how they would feel about being included in the article. After going back and forth for a couple days, they texted me: “Can’t do it, Crispin. I’m barely surviving where I am, but if I get my head above water I’m surely doomed.”

To others it might look like a paranoid crouch, but to me it looks practical. Going from obscure to exposed comes with certain dangers. It’s not just the usual cancellation stuff, although I did notice that soon after Conflict is Not Abuse writer Sarah Schulman went from a university press to a major publisher here comes the cancellation attempt and here comes the predictable lines of attack from anonymous accounts. Bad things also happen in the name of enthusiasm and appreciation.

We’ve covered the perils of virality in The Culture We Deserve before: the people yelling “mother” at Mitski during concerts, the people who show up to screenings of cult and old films to laugh and hoot and holler. But I think even outside of the TikTok phenomenon, we’ve got to figure out a way to like people without ruining their lives.

Tracey Thorn recently wrote for the New Statesman about how fan behavior has changed. People used to want autographs, but now they want photos, which is terrible enough. Not only are you having to navigate the hard shift from being private to public when a fan approaches, but you also have to shift from being a physical body to a photographable body, without the benefit of prep work. Unless you want to leave the house only when dolled up, which is its own kind of hell. But the biggest shift, Thorn thinks, is the inability of the fan to accept a “no.”

“Unlike previous over-enthusiastic fans, these men were being entitled, rude and aggressive. Asking me for something and refusing to hear the word no, they seemed a hair’s breadth from anger.” Widespread dehumanization is a contributing problem, people are struggling every day to admit to themselves that people other than themselves exist. There is something particularly dark happening with people’s conception of money – I paid you, so now I am entitled to X Y and Z from you. It doesn’t matter if it’s a gig worker or a musician whose streams are making them a total of $19 a month from Spotify. But also any investment a person has made in someone else – emotional, imaginative, physical – must be repaid. Gotta get your money’s worth. So if you have dreamed away on your commute to a song or spent your evenings streaming their television show, you’ve invested yourself in them and now they owe you.

There is a new season of Love is Blind, which means there is a new round of fantastical projections onto complete strangers happening. An individual gets selected by Netflix not so much to be themselves but to stand in for specific cultural issues. The contestants are there to represent a problem within the contemporary heterosexual dynamic so millions of people can play with them in their minds like dolls. Even when the masses decide they like a specific person, there is a violent process of decontextualization that happens, starting with the manipulation of “the edit” by producers to the forums and comment sections deciding what a person is really like.

The think piece media is eager to help this process along as the fans scramble to figure out “what is wrong with this guy anyway?” It’s his problematic relationship to money, which is so similar to his whole generation. It’s her insecurity from having been heavier in the past, which is so similar to my own issues as an op-ed writer. The only way this whole set up seems at all fair is if it is based on this belief that because we are investing our time and attention into you, we are entitled to do whatever we want with you.

There was a story circulating online about Yusuf Dikec, the Turkish shooter who went viral after his appearance at the Olympics. Before anything had come out about him, people created this origin story about him, about how he was divorced and always pictured his ex-wife’s face when taking aim. It was a vile little thing, concocted by bitter and resentful children, but people loved it because it lined up with what they wanted to think about men and women and accomplishment.

When Dikec started to talk to the media, people who wanted to correct this false story about him started circulating information that he was a war criminal, actually. He’s Turkish, so he must be this or that. Even attempts to defend him did little more than distort and diminish him.

These think pieces about what is wrong with fans these days tend to focus on Chappell Roan, because she has been outspoken and firm about the ways in which her newfound fame has caused suffering. By constantly centering the attention on Roan, it only seems to increase the scrutiny she faces. Because then people have to judge whether she’s overreacting, how bad is it for her personally anyway, could she be handling this in a better way. Even by defending her decisions to cancel shows or refuse photographs, or defending her against imagined attacks from Saturday Night Live, it all just draws more and more attention her way.

It's easy to blame dumb and young fans for this, and yes, technically it is their fault for being dumb and young. Yet the way media, gossip sites, click bait generators, and “influencers” write about these controversies and celebrities helps to perpetuate the cycle. And the way the music, publishing, and film industries promote and exploit talent leaves them vulnerable. My friend couldn’t prevent the Times from writing about them, but they did refuse to cooperate with the photographer to limit some of the potential damage. But what a stupid place for us to be in.

Recommended:

• Zoo animals get so distressed from being looked at they self-harm and develop mental illness. Monkeys and apes in particular probably should not be in these environments.

• Really liked this Herb Sundays profile of music critic Ann Powers, which comes with a playlist. Powers has an interesting and unconventional new book about Joni Mitchell, and it seems like she is trying to figure out a new way to write about genius and art, centering it less on the biographical and more on the cultural.

• Directors are ruining opera with heavy handed productions and attempts to make works “relevant.”