Britney Spears buys the love of men. Pete Doherty steals cars, goes free. Steven Tyler is the missing link. Miss Nevada turns down Girls Gone Wild for Playboy.
A sampling of headlines plucked from celebrity blogs such as thesuperficial.com shows our culture’s fascination with the lives of the famous. No longer do we need to glimpse at tabloid gossip rags while in line at the supermarket, they are now available free with a few clicks of the mouse.
Reading Star Magazine while waiting to pay for your milk and eggs could be embarrassing, but now, celebrity blogs have allowed us all to be closet voyeurs. They have brought the surreal life of Britney Spears’ pantyless crotch onto our laps through our laptops.
Society’s fascination with celebrity culture is not by any means new. The National Enquirer, for example, was started in 1926. Shows such as ” The Insider” and “Entertainment Tonight” have existed for decades. These newfound gossip Web sites are not eliminating other forms of celebrity gossip, but instead simply moving it to another medium and, in some cases, nurturing our infatuation. Why do we care about celebrities lives? Isn’t there something better we can be doing?
Gossip Web sites transport us down the rabbit hole to a world of bizarre oddities. It’s a world much like ours, only fueled by sex tapes and Botox. But, it’s the fascination of transporting ourselves to Wonderland that continues to spur the tabloid’s popularity. Why is it that images of scantily-clad Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan are so fascinating? Are they able to transport our minds from a humdrum existence and suspend us for a small moment while they bring us to a place of disbelief?
Or maybe it’s just an attraction to the so-called beautiful. They allow us an escape from news of the troubled, instead focusing on what celebrity is the bigger drunk. Whatever the case, they let us peer through the looking glass into a world not our own.
The strange phenomenon of celebrity-gossip blogs is owned by a world of idol worshipers, fan boys and publicists. Its rise can be traced back to the beginnings of blogs and its range is immense.
A popular site such as TMZ.com, which stands for the thirty-mile zone around Hollywood, for example, was launched in 2005 by Time Warner-AOL and has Harvey Levin, a producer and investigative reporter, as its managing editor. The TMZ is one of the more upscale celebrity blogs featuring original pictures and video.
Other more interesting sites such as PerezHilton.com are supposedly run by celebrity gossip whores, who desperately want to be part of that plastic world. The celebrity images displayed on Perez Hilton’s Web site are more grotesque, transmogrified with white, semen-like globs plastered on their faces. Hilton’s narratives are spite-filled and degrading. It’s as if he was the kid in high school who openly mocked the popular kids while secretly, behind closed doors, watching “Beverly Hills, 90210.”
It’s people such as Hilton who started these rags and it’s people like him who will continue to push tabloid gossip further. They allow people from Ohio a glimpse into the world inhabited by a Carrollian cast of characters who continue to confound us.
It’s that brief worldly respite – the moment in our bedrooms in front of the blue-glow light of the computer monitor – that perpetuates and allows these sites to prosper. The moment is the transcendence of the everyday into something surreal that keeps us coming back. And, I think, we’re better off for that moment.
Ryan Merrill is a senior in English and journalism and the editor of The Lantern. He is a sucker for celebrity gossip and can be reached at [email protected].
