The Allure Of Celebrity Gossip

This whole Brangelina baby affair has got even me wagging my tongue in public as if I am a regular consumer of celebrity gossip. I am, but I am also in denial. I think celebrity gossip is my guilty pleasure the way some people secretly love...Barry Manilow, John Denver and Flakies, even though you know they are sickly sweet and bad for your image as an urban sophisticate.

So it is to my great delight that cousin Kiki, the multi-media artist, presenter at the University of Toronto's Subtle Technologies conference, guest feature of G5 Tech TV, and guest lecturer at the Canadian Film Institute, also follows paparazzi news. When we went shopping this week, she insisted on buying the National Enquirer and the People magazine featuring Angelina, Brad and Shiloh on the cover.

She knows more about what celebrities are up to than I do. For example, she exclaimed, What's going on with Katie and Matt? I ventured with, Urrr...Katie Holmes and Matt Dillon? She said, You're really struggling with that one. She meant Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. Duh, of course.

But the truth is, aside from knowing they are (was for Katie) the hosts of the Today show, I have never actually seen the show. In fact, most of the time, I don't know who the celebrities are that get gossiped about. Cousin Kiki admits as much - she doesn't know who most of the celebs are either. Yet, both of us are drawn to celebrity gossip the way a crack in the ground sucks in water.

Kiki has a friend who did a PHD thesis on the allure of celebrity gossip. Her theory is that in past times, there were the bible, Greek myths, Chinese gods, Indian deities. Almost every culture had its own polytheistic gods that bore human characteristics and interacted with humans. After that, people turned to kings and queens for stories. Their stories are our metanarrative - stories that are bigger than ourselves. In our secular world of technology, we have done away with the gods, royalty, and folklore. But we've got zoom cameras. So where we used to look for the numinous in our gods, we now we turn to celebrities for our metanarrative. We have the tools to look closer at lives that are beyond us. At the same time that we put celebrities on a pedestal, we want to squeeze the humanness out of them to make sure they are just like us.

Oh, I can say that I am doing social research, or I am assessing the social observations of Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens to see if they still apply in the 21st Century. But the truth is, celebrity gossip requires little effort or investment on my part. I can don a deliciously wicked persona without actuallly investing in a relationship. The carryings on of celebrities, or the way the paparazzi rewrites their lives, is highly entertaining. I really just want to do nothing and be entertained. It is my own theatre of the absurd. Wonder if Chaucer would have anything to say about that.