It felt like déja vu. A procession of famous faces stared soulfully into their phones and, by extension, the eyes of some unseen plebe. Front-facing camera after front-facing camera offered a different version of the same message: “I take responsibility.” Those taking responsibility included, among others, Sarah Paulson, Debra Messing, Ilana Glazer, Justin Theroux, Bryce Dallas Howard, Stanley Tucci, and Mark Duplass. The two-minute clip, posted to social media on June 11, prompted plenty of derision, but also bafflement. In the context of the ongoing Black Lives Matter protests what does “taking responsibility” even mean? Why were these celebrities in particular doing it so publicly? Most of all: Weren’t we just here?
“I Take Responsibility” is different from “Imagine,” the Gal Gadot–led John Lennon cover that received a universal “no thanks” in March, the early days of pandemic-induced isolation. The former has the imprimatur of no less an authority than the NAACP, which partnered with the stars in the clip to promote a campaign aimed at engaging non-Black people in anti-racism. To emphasize its sobriety, the video is shot in black-and-white. And every participant is posed against a nondescript background—no opulent kitchens or expansive backyards in sight.
And yet the two videos share a fundamental cluelessness, both about what they’re trying to accomplish and how they’ll be received. “It seems like, in the second video, the celebrities have learned something since the ‘Imagine’ video,” observes Amanda Hess, a critic-at-large for the New York Times who covers online and popular culture. “But still, what they are doing is inserting themselves in the situation in a way that implies they believe themselves to be helping.” The videos are an attempted display of selflessness that only emphasize the participants’ self-centeredness.
Each video was made as a response to an ongoing crisis: the first to the novel coronavirus and the massive disruptions to daily life required to limit its spread; the second to the latest round of nationwide protests against police brutality set off by the killing of George Floyd. But they’re also symptoms of a much smaller crisis, albeit a related one. The coronavirus has essentially short-circuited the various mechanisms of the celebrity economy. And without parties to attend, photo shoots to pose for, film sets to work on, or concerts to perform, it’s starting to look like months at home may have short-circuited the celebrities themselves.
Examples abound, from the egregious (Jake Paul looting a mall) to the merely excessive (Shawn Mendes and Camila Cabello trudging down a sidewalk). Every day in quarantine seems to bring a new faux pas: Ellen DeGeneres comparing her multimillion-dollar house to a jail; Madonna filming her son dancing as a tribute to Floyd; John Krasinski turning his DIY distraction Some Good News into a massive moneymaker, even as its new buyer makes painful cuts to its payroll. One PR fumble after another drove home the inevitable conclusion that celebrities are buckling under the pressure, even as our collective boredom puts them under more pressure than ever.
The rich and famous, of course, don’t really need our concern. But celebrity culture is never really about the looked-at. It’s about the onlookers, which is to say, us. “These are entertainers, ultimately,” says Elaine Lui, founder of the popular site LaineyGossip and a broadcaster with Canada’s CTV. “And whether or not we want to admit it, we created them. We enable them. We make it possible for them to exist.” Which means our idols’ crisis of confidence is also ours. What do we even want from celebrities right now? Are they capable of giving it to us? Has the social contract between these public figures and the public been rewritten, or even broken? The celebs are not alright, but then again, neither are we.
“Even more so than most people, leaving the house is core to celebrities’ identity,” explains Bobby Finger, a writer and cohost of the popular celebrity culture podcast Who? Weekly. “So much of celebrity gossip and celebrity media is about celebrities hanging out with and being friends with other celebrities. Celebrities being together. Celebrities being outside. Celebrities being at events. We’re used to seeing them being social, and they can’t be social.”
The “celebrity economy” is a concept, but it’s also a tangible network of transactions. When celebrities can’t do their jobs—promoting their main line of work with public appearances, both formal and informal, that build their personae—it has a trickle-down effect on the collaborators who can no longer do theirs, or at least not the way they used to. Paparazzi can no longer simply spot unmasked faces on once-crowded streets. Hairstylists and makeup artists are now giving one-on-one tutorials over Zoom. Magazine profile writers aren’t paid by celebrities, but they do work closely with them on propagating their image, albeit much less closely than when they could share a physical space with their subjects.
“This is a profession where most of the things that we see are done for them,” Lui says. “Their clothes are picked for them. Their schedules are set for them by other people. The things that they talk about are often decided by committee. Now, when we talk about something like quarantine, where we actually have to be physically separated from people—the things that celebrities had before, the access to people doing shit for them? It’s gone.”
That leaves celebrities exposed, often in more ways than one. Without the ability to be social, the world of celebrity has moved onto social media, where an increasing proportion of it took place already. But some public figures are better suited to it than others. In the early days of quarantine, Instagram’s live feature became ubiquitous, jumping as much as 70% among the app’s overall user base—a telling indicator of how much time we’re all spending online. For people like Priyanka Chopra or Vanessa Hudgens, that kind of unmediated exposure can be a liability. Chopra filmed herself clapping for coronavirus first responders, a gesture of solidarity in a crowded city rendered a parody of itself in a cavernous celebrity compound. “It’s a virus, I get it. Like, I respect it,” Hudgens drawled in a now-infamous dispatch. “But at the same time, like, even if everybody gets it, like, yeah, people are gonna die, which is terrible but, like, inevitable?”
Much like “Imagine” or “I Take Responsibility,” Hudgens’s misstep feels rooted in the same irrepressible impulse to insert oneself into a larger conversation, no matter how inexpert the opinion. “They may complain about having to do junkets and answer the same questions over and over again, but also, this is an industry full of people who love the spotlight and love the attention,” Lui observes. Without a spotlight already aimed at them, celebrities have instead trained one on themselves. At a minimum, this reads as mildly narcissistic; other times, it’s flat-out absurd, as when Ana de Armas one-upped her daily walks with Ben Affleck by placing a life-size cutout of herself on the lawn, with the help of Affleck’s three kids. The stunt seemed to be poking fun at the attention de Armas herself had courted aggressively. “Ben Affleck and Ana are playing along. They want to be photographed. They’re enjoying it,” argues Finger, whose podcast has a recurring segment called “BenAna Updates” dedicated to de Armas and Affleck’s regular outings.
But even as celebrities feel the need to make themselves heard, there’s a decreasing sense their fans even want to hear from them. Back in March, Hess wrote a column titled “Celebrity Culture Is Burning,” which noted how the access we once craved to celebrities’ private lives is precisely what now leads us to turn on them. “When the ‘Imagine’ video came out, the thing that was obvious was that everybody was stuck somewhere quarantining,” Hess says now. “But celebrities were stuck in a really, really nice place, and most people were not. When celebrities started ministering to the public from their huge mansions, it bred a lot of resentment and put even more of a spotlight on the inequality everyone was feeling very acutely at that time.” It’s one thing when celebrity home tours are a fun distraction on YouTube. It’s another when they come with empty platitudes like “we’re all in this together”—and this was before an even more urgent story would widen the cracks ever further.
Yassir Lester is a comedian, actor, and writer who’s lately taken to spoofing what he calls “performative allyship.” Over the last few weeks, he’s coined hashtags like #FedorasforFreedom and #raiseyourvoicenotyourbrows, which tweak empty gestures like the widely criticized Blackout Tuesday action while raising real money for causes like the Tamir Rice Foundation and the Black Mamas Matter Alliance. Naturally, he was appalled when “I Take Responsibility” merged the common trend of performative solidarity with the unique mindset of fame.
“We know what we need, and it’s not The Mysteries of Laura telling us she’s gonna make a commitment to saving black people,” Lester scoffs. “We need access to education. We need access to healthcare. We need access to due process and lawyers and healthy food.” The coronavirus had already stretched celebrity past its natural limits. Held up against the national outpouring of grief and rage at the killings of Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, the concept starts to look positively useless.
“I think the only way that a celebrity could be doing anything ‘good’ right now is to be using their platform to be explicitly political and explicitly in support of the Black Lives Matter movement,” Finger says. “I think that even includes the cringiest of cringeworthy, [the] ‘I Take Responsibility’ video. Because even though it’s cringe-y to see actors acting, chewing the scenery in that way, it was associated with a good message in a way that the ‘Imagine’ video was not associated with anything.” Finger also points out that, after their daily sojourns, Affleck and de Armas’s appearance at a Los Angeles protest in early June was almost compulsory. “They were seen outside so often in the weeks before the protests started that the moment the protests did start, they had no excuse not to go.”
But as “I Take Responsibility” shows, involvement alone isn’t enough to guarantee a positive result, either for a celebrity’s image or the cause they’re ostensibly trying to help. Kylie Jenner may have given a million dollars to COVID-19 relief, but that only encouraged fans to up the pressure when she responded to the Floyd protests with an MLK quote. When fashion designer Virgil Abloh donated just $50 to a Miami-based bail fund, the Louis Vuitton czar was promptly, as (former Ringer intern) Jordan Coley wrote in the New Yorker, “memed into a fine dust.” Just days after releasing a statement many saw as singling out her Black peers, Lana Del Rey was excoriated for posting a since-removed video of Los Angeles protesters engaged in looting.
Flat-out bad judgement is certainly to blame. But celebrities have also struggled to rise to the occasion in part because traditional means of celebrity activism are increasingly outdated. “The idea of a celebrity PSA doesn’t make sense in the same way that it used to,” says Hess. “There used to be this very clear calculus [that] when a celebrity would film a PSA, they were using their platform to raise awareness about an important issue.” That logic no longer holds when footage of Floyd’s death is just a smartphone tap away. “The awareness around racist police violence could not be higher. It’s not as if we need them to continue to raise that awareness. So instead, what they may be doing is taking attention away from other people who may be discussing this issue and putting it on the celebrity.”
Comedian Dave Chappelle dedicated the entirety of his latest special—8:46, hosted for free on YouTube—to this exact conundrum. People like CNN’s Don Lemon may be calling on celebrities to do their part, but what does a celebrity like Dave Chappelle have to say that’s actually of value? “Answer me,” Chappelle demanded. “Do you want to see a celebrity right now? Do we give a fuck what Ja Rule thinks?” As my colleague Micah Peters wrote, Chappelle somewhat contradicts his own point by releasing the special in the first place. But that he’s even asking suggests the sentiment is in the air.
Not all celebrity actions have been as widely condemned as “I Take Responsibility.” The day before the video was posted, 46 white women and 46 Black women took part in #ShareTheMicNow, a one-day social media campaign organized by marketing executive Bozoma Saint John, authors Glennon Doyle and Luvvie Ajayi, and fashion designer Stacey Bendet. The campaign had white volunteers, including Elizabeth Warren, Chelsea Handler, and Gwyneth Paltrow, hand over their passwords for 24 hours, allowing the partner they were signal-boosting to post whatever they wanted. Paltrow, for instance, temporarily ceded her platform to Latham Thomas, another player in the wellness space.
#ShareTheMicNow had some of the same spokespeople as “I Take Responsibility,” including Messing and Paulson. It also didn’t earn anything resembling the later video’s backlash, in part because the whole point was that its white participants didn’t say anything at all. “A lot of times our social media platforms, especially now, represent our voice,” Ajayi explains. “We wanted to make sure that it went beyond the symbol of, ‘I’m gonna repeat what you just said.’ No, I’m gonna have you say it, directly.”
Ajayi is also straightforward about the limitations of a one-day initiative, a counterpoint to the self-importance that can set off readers’ alarm bells. “We’re not saying that we are solving racism, but we just wanna do something, and right now, this feels like something that we should do,” she says. “We’re not telling people to do the exact same thing, or that we’ve given the solve for what’s happening, but we have to start hearing each other’s voices. That’s the starting point.”
As cathartic as it can be to project our own sense of futility onto celebrities, it may not be that empathetic. And given that empathy, or at least perspective, is what celebrities’ critics are asking for, it’s only fair to offer them some in return. “I think right now, people are trying to figure out what to do,” Ajayi says. “There might be some campaigns that don’t land with the intention they were created in. So we have to give grace and be like, ‘OK, at least you tried.’”
Widespread anger at celebrities may also obscure the deeper roots of our society’s ills. After all, celebrities aren’t the cause of economic inequality or cloistered privilege. They’re just its most visible symptoms. “Not to have too much sympathy for them, but they are, in some ways, the representatives of the moneyed class. They’re the ones tasked with interfacing with the public,” Hess argues. “But they’re far from the richest people in America! And those people are rich enough, and secure enough, that they don’t have to do any of that kind of work to maintain their position. They can just hide in their yacht or wherever it is they are.”
Billionaire David Geffen made the mistake of posting about his quarantine at sea in a swiftly deleted Instagram; he hasn’t posted since. Others have learned from his example. “Now, there’s an IQ test,” an unnamed source told Times media columnist Ben Smith in a piece about media executives fleeing New York City while their employees report the news. “I’d have to be insane to let you quote me.” Celebrities who have to maintain a reputation in order to make money off it don’t have the same luxury of logging off to ride out the storm. “As powerful and as wealthy as celebrities are, corporations are even more powerful,” Lui notes. “So spending a lot of time on how celebrities are a symptom of what’s evil in the world, I think, absolves us from a conversation that we should all be having about how much power we’ve given to corporations.”
If we don’t need celebrities to speak for struggles they don’t understand, and we also don’t need to burn them at the stake, what should they be doing? What purpose do they serve? Some are clearly in a rush to get back to business as usual; Vanderpump Rules’ Lala Kent popped up at LA restaurant Craig’s the very day it reopened to customers, enduring a temperature check for a photo op and an overpriced entrée. But we’re nowhere close to “normal,” even by skewed celebrity standards. Just days later, two of Kent’s castmates were fired in a scandal over racist harassment.
For Hess, celebrities’ success lies in doing what they do best, citing Anthony Hopkins’s loopy Instagram presence: “I do think there has been this great need and embrace of actual entertainment. The idea that a celebrity is there to entertain people, as opposed to using their position in some social way, is more attractive than ever.” Finger thinks that’s why people are so drawn to Affleck and de Armas: “When this hot new couple are out on the street holding hands as if this was just normal paparazzi life in Hollywood, it was like, ‘This is a celebrity narrative I miss and haven’t seen in a while. I love this.” For Lester, impact means backing up rhetoric with resources: “Chrissy Teigen giving $200,000 to help out protesters—that’s what you should be doing. She’s literally put her money where her mouth is.”
Both Hess and Lui independently offered the same best-case scenario: Rihanna, whose nonprofit committed $5 million to coronavirus relief while she’s continued to promote her fashion and beauty lines. “When a celebrity is doing it well, they understand specifically why people connect to them,” Lui explains. “They actually have a level of self-awareness that escapes many celebrities. When they can tap into that self-awareness, good things can happen.” For Rihanna, that means understanding the responsibility that comes with success and the carefree charisma that earned her success in the first place. Headlines about six-figure rentals might earn others backlash, but alongside her donations, Lui says, “That is 100% what I want from Rihanna.”
As pandemic-related restrictions start to ease, some of the existential questions surrounding celebrity may be rendered moot. California Governor Gavin Newsom has cleared film and TV sets to restart production, though Hollywood trade unions are still working out safety procedures to protect their members. Restaurant reopenings have allowed for the resumption of paparazzi hotspots like Craig’s. The status quo is far from restored, but the publicity machine is working its way back to business as usual.
After the last few months, though, do fans even want celebrity to go back to normal? Has our view of celebrities as aspirational figures, instead of clueless plutocrats, been irreparably changed? Finger doesn’t think so. “The cynical part of me is going to win out here. When it comes to the type of coverage celebrities are gonna get and their behavior, apart from the fact that maybe a lot of them are going to be a little more conscious of things they say and the way they talk about things, I think it’s gonna go back to normal. Because at the end of the day, their careers rely on the attention that the celebrity content provides.”
On the demand side, Lui still thinks we need celebrities as much as they need us. “We will always be fascinated by people with notoriety and people with a profile,” she says. What might change is who we’re fascinated with, and why. Much like in other industries, the coronavirus has only accelerated trends in celebrity that were already there. Influencers were already on the rise; now that bands can’t fill arenas and blockbusters are on pause, social media stars are at a competitive advantage. That power shift, more than disillusionment with fame as a whole, is what interests Lui.
These days, “every celebrity is an online celebrity,” Lui observes. “There was a version of celebrity, pre-Covid-19, that you might call ‘true celebrity.’ They weren’t just famous online; they were famous in person, as well. But you can’t be in person with anybody! Online fame is the only fame accessible right now. And what is that going to do to the celebrity ecosystem?” How we see celebrity is always a proxy for how we see one another. And for the foreseeable future, how we see one another is through a screen. There’s a reason Ohio’s governor turned to teenage TikTok star Charli D’Amelio for his social distancing awareness campaign. As they migrate to the internet, actors and singers court our derision. Those already there know how to get our attention.
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Does the World Still Need Celebrities? - The Ringer
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