Anghus Houvouras on the cult of celebrity…

Celebrities. Most of the world seems obsessed with their every act. There’s a billion dollar business that revolves around cataloging the mindless minutia of their day-to-day life. The movies and television shows they star in sometimes feel less important than the hundred thousand articles, talk show appearances, and gossip columns that will be spawned from whatever project they’re currently promoting.

I don’t care about celebrities. Like, not even a little. I don’t care what or who they’re wearing, who they’re fucking, or what they look like off set when they’re shopping for fresh guava pastries at the local Bodega. I don’t care how likable or unlikable they are in ‘real life’. I’m not interested in their personal drama or any hardships they have suffered or are currently suffering. I’m uninterested in their stints in rehab, the terrible advice dispensed in self-help books, or the righteousness of their latest charitable cause. The life they lead outside of the roles they play is of no consequence to me.

Every so often someone will repeat something they read on social media. For example “Did you know Steve Carell owns a quaint general store in Massachusetts?” No, I didn’t. But now I do. That little nugget of trivia is now occupying space in my brain where once useful information used to live. I can’t prove that celebrity news is destroying my brain cells, but i can’t completely rule it out either.

On the flip side, it’s not like I’m actively wishing that something bad happens to them. Quite the opposite. I hope that my favorite movie and television stars are happy and healthy enough to continue producing quality content to my enjoyment. But that’s it. The movies and TV shows they make are the only thing I care about. Everything else is just tabloid nonsense for people who suffer from a strange starfucking affliction that seems to revolve around the idea that celebrities are approachable, decent human beings worthy of our adoration.

I’m not sure why people are so hung up on the hopes that celebrities are actually good and decent people. My natural assumption would be ‘they’re not’, and that’s not just because they’re celebrities, but because I believe most people are assholes and I doubt that percentage decreases when you add money, fame, and a lack of accountability to the scenario.

There’s not a lot I expect from movie and TV stars other than their commitment to making good product. I don’t care whether or not they’re fundamentally good people. There is a line that can be crossed and behavior so abhorrent that I’ll stop caring about a celebrity’s career. A drunken, drug fueled bender is fine but I’m probably going to lose interest in your career if you kill someone or do something truly deplorable. I refer to this as ‘The Polanski Factor’.

This week the media couldn’t stop talking about Brad Pitt’s revelatory interview with GQ where he talked about the fallout from his divorce from Angelina Jolie. I had already zoned out by the time the vapid talking head got to the words ‘personal life’. If I wanted to hear people talk about their crippling addictions and failing marriages I’d spend an afternoon at a Starbucks without my headphones on.

In Pitt’s case my painfully low-level of empathy is even more depleted considering he’s one of the world’s best looking men with a hundred million or more in the bank. But this is a world where an actor’s image has to be crafted and managed because the public wants to believe that the people they idolize are decent. It’s such a strange, sycophantic relationship. The idea that the people who star in our favorite movies and TV shows are somehow ‘worthy’ of entertaining us. What is equally odd is the disappointment felt by those when a celebrity does prove themselves to be capable of embarrassing behavior.

It’s not like we apply the same logic to other professions. We don’t follow our Pharmacist home after his shift at the corner CVS ends and analyze every lifestyle choice. There’s no gaggle of paparazzi camped outside the Chipotle to find out what your Uber driver is doing on their lunch break. No one is posting en masse when they learn their Mail Man ends up in rehab for the third time for an ‘addiction to pain medication’.

The truth is that I consider movie & TV stars just that: movie and TV stars. The lives outside the characters they play is of no interest to me. They’re real people only in the technical sense, but not to me. These are movie stars, not actual human beings. I spend as little time considering the non-fictional part of their existence as I do the slave labor being used to manufacture iPhones or gay prisoners being rounded up in Chechnya. Perhaps the world would be a better place if we started taking this molecular level of interest and applied it to things in the world that actually mattered. What if we took the same amount of time we committed to learning about Jennifer Aniston’s latest terrible movie and personal life and used it to learn about Syrian Refugees? Imagine a world where we cared as much about the LGBTQ crisis in Chechnya as we did whatever crap Gwyneth Paltrow was peddling on Goop. The fact that I even know what Goop is causes a wave of shame to wash over me with the radiating ferocity of a toxic Fukishama tidal wave. The sobering reality is that humanity spends a disturbingly disproportionate amount of time focused on the lives of the rich and famous than we do the poor and disenfranchised. That sounds judgy, but I’m as guilty as the majority of my fellow humans of being little more than an apathetic, well-intentioned person with a screwed up sense of priorities. I consider myself slightly elevated because I have so little interest in the real lives of famous people. Then I realize I’m an elitist prick with a superiority complex and have to deduct those points I just assigned myself.

My point is; our favorite actors & actresses are just regular, flawed people like everyone else. Some may be nice, some might be total assholes, but the idea of being invested in their personal lives outside the work they’re doing and applying higher standards to them than you apply to actual people you interact with in day-to-day life is troubling. I doubt the mewling, mouth breathing public will ever tire of hearing the most intimate details of a celebrity’s life. For me, the feature film or television show they star in will be the only source of drama I remotely care about.

Anghus Houvouras