Life in a fishbowl

Been thinking a bit about the whole celebrity worship thing and the role of the media in magnifying news stories of celebrity happenings. I know it’s all been around for quite a while, but the intensity of the insanity didn’t really distress me until the recent report that Kristen Stewart had cheated on her Twilight and real-life boyfriend Robert Pattinson with Snow White and the Huntsman movie director Rupert Sanders. Ok, so I know the names of all involved. It’s impossible not to know that information these days. Everywhere you turn, there was the same story. The story ‘broke’ in the media in a manner reserved for invasions of countries by aggressors and the start of world wars. All hell broke loose. You would have thought someone famous had died—a statesman, the pope, a president. God only knows. I didn’t watch the major TV news channels that day but I shudder to think of the news coverage of this trite infidelity story. Of course we all know it didn’t deserve this amount of news coverage, but heck, infidelity sells newspapers, magazines, and gets people to watch the TV news. It gets fans to spread the story on Facebook, on Twitter, and all other social media avenues available. I couldn’t believe how fans took the news. You would have thought Bella and Edward from Twilight were real people with a real life. But alas, they are not. Fans should try to understand the difference--Kristen is not Bella, Robert is not Edward. Fans may want them to be, but they are not. Their movie marriage was not real; they were not married to each other in real life. Rupert Sanders is a married man with children. It just points out yet again that the celebrities worshipped by society are just regular people who blunder along and fail like the rest of us, but who do so in a fishbowl unlike anything we could possibly imagine. There has always been celebrity worship (think about Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and their affair during the filming of Cleopatra), but the coverage was more restricted at that time. It’s another world now. It’s all been written about before, analyzed to death, and talked about ad nauseum—that the celebrity hounding and worship have got to stop, but they continue. They continue because the profit motive remains the goal. But as a society, we have shifted off balance, toward a world that cannot sate itself; there will never be enough news that’s fit to print about any celebrity or film star. The fixation on dissecting celebrities and film stars into minute atoms and to report the results of these dissections—that will continue to snowball. I sense desperation now where before there was just excessive curiosity. What is the natural end of desperation?