Sacrificial lambs of fame

The celebrity you idolize is just as much a commodity as the cup of coffee you drink every morning. They’ve been dehumanized and positioned with characteristics that make them great products to sell. Celebrities have been carefully molded, polished, and tied with a neat little bow for you leech on for inspiration, or exasperation at that.

Showbiz is, after all, an industry that has successfully turned human beings into consumer goods, so much so that every role they play, product they endorse and public appearance they make is carefully planned out by marketing minds, like a move for a pawn on the chessboard.

Do you know how hard people on top work to ensure that you feel like you need to own a certain brand? They’re obsessed with you. They traverse the inner workings of your mind and figure out what you like, how you make decisions, and what your goals in life are. They do the forward thinking for you, so that when all of that has been figured it out, they inject your ideals, dreams and aspirations onto the brand.

Like perfume, for example. They find the right venues and the right people to tell you about it so you will not only want it, but need it. Perfume then becomes more than just an accessory. It is confidence, bravado, sex appeal, and attractiveness embodied, à la Austin Powers’ “mojo.”

Celebrities are put together and sold in the same manner. Every sense of “real” was thrown off the wagon when they signed up to be sacrificial lambs of stardom.

The images celebrities’ play onscreen have been chosen so that you will fall in love with them, and maintained so that you will never let go of them, just as a consumer brand works hard to maintain its market share. The characters we see onscreen — the dashing, insolent man whose tough exterior is challenged by falling in love with a quirky young girl; the crying, ardent mother who will risk everything for her children; the antagonist who spits anger, batters his wife, does drugs and has rugged facial hair; or the overly flamboyant gay best friend — were roles made and established in cinema, and have merely been replaced by new actors and new faces. They aren’t real, and neither are the faces who fill them.

Nothing is more entertaining than a celebrity’s neurosis: Britney deals with her meltdown by shaving her head.

If typecasting was once a thespian’s curse, a revelation of the weak and limited range of an actor’s talent, in Philippine showbiz, it is proof of how strong a brand (the celebrity) stands in the market. And like most brands, our celebrities must stick to one role, played both on and off screen.

This is why they never really tell us that the handsome boy-next-door on screen is, in reality, an alcoholic and a drug addict. The innocent and well-loved sweetheart is actually easy to get in bed. The eloquent, sharp-tongued and insightful host is actually a chockfull of crazy.

Did you really think Lady Gaga was born that way?

The Price Of Fame

Because celebrities have based their lives on superficial values, their trek back into the world of mediocrity and hard-hitting reality is sometimes translated as neurotic or insane. And nothing is more intriguingly entertaining than seeing the psychotic breakdown of a celebrity, watching them juggle their dignity as everything comes crashing down.

Like how we shook our heads but became obsessed when Michael Jackson started playing with little boys in Neverland, or gasped but gaped our eager eyes upon Britney Spears when she shaved her head, mad with depression. How we laughed mockingly and half-sympathetically when we decided that KC Concepcion told us she fell in love with a homo, or adamantly took sides when Mo Twister waged war against his ex, branding her a baby killer.

The sense and sanity of stardom is skewed. Priorities are misconstrued and values are misshapen. People breathe fire on them all of the time, and so the bits we see of celebrity derangement could be a pieces of their humanity breaking away from the plastered world they live in, getting a taste of what its like to be normal: to have feelings and talk about it, to have problems and be able to show it. But the deal they signed meant their soul was on the table for the taking — by us, naturally. Their personal problems just become crisis situations to deal with for public relations, and their feelings just an entertaining tsismis to feast upon, all of which are quantifiable to cold hard cash.

The key to fame? Accept it, and resign yourself to it. Live within, and above, the system.

If you want a sense of peace or regularity in your life, settle for mediocrity. Settle for working an eight-to-five shift and earning a steady income. Settle for TGIF Fridays and partying on the weekends. Settle for boring. Settle for being able to sit in a public space but being invisible. Settle for pain, poverty, loss and shame. Settle for standing in line for hours, waiting for your order and getting shoddy service. The settling may not be filled with the glitters of superficial glory, but it does promise contentment.

Stardom: it comes with a price. And if any kind of sanity wants to be kept intact, it must be accepted that the claim to the throne loses any chance of a fairy tale conclusion. Heroes never get their happy endings.