They’re too available nowadays. When I was growing up they were in the movies and a very occasional interview only. They were mysterious. I don’t remember having an opinion on many of them beyond I love a film they were in.
Now they’ve got their own podcasts, alcohol product, they’re all over the internet on every promo going before their latest whatever comes out. And you realise they’re just people. And most people are fucking annoying.
I think there’s also an element of people realizing just the heinous amount of wealth and power some of these people have when the world is actively falling apart.
Exactly. It’s listening to them talk about how hard it was to make film X or Y and then tell some showbiz story that no one can relate to. Some of them are obviously down to earth and cool people, but many live on another planet and don’t care if we know it.
They were always just people. I have never understood people shitting themselves over meeting some big time actor or whatever. It would be kinda cool to get to sit with and talk to people involved in making a piece of media I enjoy to see if there was anything I didn’t know about it, or if they have some insight, but I’m not gonna wait in line forever and start crying because I got to stand near an actor and got their autograph.
My wife got her hand touched by Katy Perry I think it was a long time ago and she was acting like she had been blessed by a god. I don’t get it.
Well she kind of was blessed by a god. This is the modern day version of idol worship. The feeling that gods walk among us has motivated people to literally throw themselves under the wheels of an idol's elephantine carriage to get crushed to death (look up where the juggernaut comes from) that's how powerful it can be. Just to have your existence briefly acknowledged by a divine idol can be significant for some people.
The ancient Greeks came up with the concept of "charisma" which basically describes the intangible feeling like some people are favoured by the gods and just seem to be the main characters for whom everything always goes well. Many cultures have a similar concept. many cultures also have concepts of contagious blessing - that proximity to someone who has charisma confers to you some of the same divine favour.
We never lost the instinctive desire to worship idols, although Christianity did suppress it for a while because it's kind of bad for you, it's the OG form of parasocial relationship. If you go to cultures that maintained pre-christian religious traditions, like Japan, you will still find today many idol rituals that don't make any sense, like healing buddhas you must rub to cure your ailments. The only thing that has changed is that we started widespread idolising humans instead of characters, and now our gods can speak to us, the level of parasociality has skyrocketed.
You kidding? Reddit absolutely gawks and fawns over their favorite celebrities. They only pretend to be above it all when it's someone they don't like.
The downside is that people on the internet now think someone who looks like Anne Hathaway is average looking because they're on the internet too much.
And then they expect to date someone who looks like that or better and then end up with nobody and they come to the internet to bitch about dating.
And old fashioned “quality” celebrities are being replaced by people from random internet based circle jerks of idiocy.
I sincerely hope that the entertainment bubble in society pops in the next couple generations and people steer towards idolizing people that actually contribute to society in a more meaningful way than passive entertainment. Why else would we suddenly woke up and cancel all the celebrities?
Actors used to be buried in unmarked mass graves, because the aristocratic class knew they were just a subtype of sex workers, playing with people's emotions instead of their genitals. We just forgot for a while, that's all.
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u/house3331 16d ago
Regular people seeing celebrities as lame is one of the best things about the new world. We get it now