Distraction Attraction

Celebrities, these days, are everywhere. They have invaded our newspapers, magazines, internet pages, television, life. People talk about them as if they were just Brad and Angelina from down the road. And if they actually know Brad and Angelina? Well, they’ve just jumped a few steps up the fame ladder themselves.

The question is, why do we like celebrities? What, really, is so interesting about them? Being a public relations student, one can see that really they’re normal people with a feisty agent behind them. The agent puts them in shoots, changes their name, gives them a sultry image, and boom: a star is born. Being a celebrity, to my mind, is no longer actually about having talent, like it once (or at least we thought it once) was. It’s about presenting yourself in a light that’s in line with the times, that gives people something new and apparently interesting to look at that’s just a bit different to what’s already out there (not too crazy; then you won’t be mainstream enough to be popular). Being a celebrity, it might seem, is all about presentation.

Presentation is a facet of our world that, especially in the last century, has come to dominate what we see, how we look at it, and whether we buy it or not. Presentation is really a personal word for self-marketing. When you think about it, much of what we see and do not even recognize as presentation is actually just that: female faces on the street (a presentation of make-up products);the city streets (a marketing and upkeep of the city as brand); the words on this page (presentation of information in a readable fashion). So, if much of our world is presentation, and presentation is always something a little better-looking or better placed than our real selves, does that mean that we’re continuously making a commodity of ourselves and our world? Additionally, if celebrities are the pinnacle of the sexy, perfected image that we are looking for, does that mean, subconsciously, that they are some form of super commodity? It all warrants extra room for thought.

If it follows from here that much of our world is commodity, and that celebrities are super-commodities, then the question of societal celebrity adoration simply takes another angle. Celebrities become, then, not just another person we admire because they are the best (or in some celebrity cases, almost the worst), in their field, but because we want to replicate their look. Their look is our ideal. And because ideals never die, but the outfit and the premiere does, we can continue to turn the pages of the latest NW and sigh at the latest. As the post-modernist author Nicholas Carr would argue, humans are suckers for the latest (in that it represents either a threat or opportunity as biological instinct), we are suckers for the newest presentation of celebrities. They are flashy, they represent distraction, and they have just that bit of sexy we want to inject into our lives.

Distraction indeed has a large part to play in all this. As well as living in a packaged world, we live in a world of distraction, a distraction that increases as the days go by. The Internet persuades, the television competes, the I-Phone beeps away to increase to distract us from one product to another: to buy this, to be available for that, to be enticed by the newest and the latest. Even products usually meditative and soothing activities, such as reading, is changing through the Kindle and other e-books, distracting us from the content and onto the links of advertising and dictionary definitions that surround them.


We are attracted to celebrities in that, they too, are tools of distraction. When you turn the pages of a magazine, or the channels the TV (especially E), one celebrity competes with another for your attention, brawn bodies over reclusive geniuses. Movies, good or bad, are made like revolving doors, spurning your interest away from your current duties (which most of us want to be distracted from anyway) and onto their glitzy, glamorous selves.  These Prada-preened goddesses and steroid studs tell us what society wants us to be: ideals, which we must buy their products to attain. To know about these products, you must be distracted by their presentations first. It all makes sense in the consumer cycle.  So it would be safe to say, behind the masks of their agents, celebrities are perhaps so alluring because of their promise of the unachievable. They are distracting because flashy, desirable because unreal, objects of adoration because they represent the everyday perfection we mostly achieve only on nights out.

So as for the question of whether we should adore them or not; well, do at your own peril. It is a rather fickle fantasy to admire something that in many ways is not real. But then again, aren’t most fantasies fun in that they represent something so opposite to the world we live in? We’d all, around study season, rather see Eva Mendes in the mirror than some entity with eye bags and pen on their face. Drugs or not, celebrities are just people hiding behind an agent or an image, a representation of what we ourselves would like to see: societal perfection. It’s just good to remember that in this age of distracting commodities, all you’re really luring after is the flash of the camera.