Melanie Phillips reviews Peter Whittle’s latest book , Look at Me: Celebrating the Self in Modern Britain, which focuses on celebrity:
What Peter Whittle has grasped, however, is that modern celebrity is not characterised, as it was in previous times, by the idea of 'them and us', the sense of a curtain being lifted on a world ordinary people don't share and which draws its glamour precisely from its inaccessibility. On the contrary, the current obsession with fame actually represents a deeply narcissistic obsession with the self. What we worship most of all in the media are the first two letters of that word. Celebrities represent a star-studded mirror which mesmerises us because we imagine that in it we can see ourselves.
This is because the modern cult of fame derives from a culture in which the individual has become the centre of the universe: the sun around which everyone and everything else must revolve. With external authority now considered an affront to the self along with the religious doctrines that imposed it, morality and culture have been systematically privatised and relativised so that no one's values or lifestyle can trump those of anyone else. Every individual is thus a hero to himself.
If everyone is special, however, it follows that no one is special. So people can achieve fame even if they have no particular talent or have achieved nothing of distinction. They can be famous simply for being famous. Indeed, our super-egalitarian culture tells us that elitism is a bad thing; the very idea of a hierarchy of values offends our most cherished belief that no one can be judged inferior to anyone else.
Celebrity culture in our times has more to do in my opinion with the fact that people are obsessed with pleasure and that everything has become sexualized and not in a good way. Something matters nowadays if it is able to get to our G spot and to make us feel the big O. Everything and everyone has to be sexy. Celebrity is just a symptom of our impatience and our inability to make the effort not to focus on the now and to take the time to look for substance especially when it isn’t sexy and requires more than our senses. The point is that we live in a time when because of the compression of time and space and because more is always more chic than less, we have fallen in love with glitz and forgotten that what shines isn’t always better. The sad reality is that we are all overweight not because we eat too much, but because we live in society obsessed with their stuff and their dumbing down effects on our senses. After all, the point of celebrity is that it objectifies humans being, beings for themselves by transforming them into beings in themselves, into things that people can enjoy just like a sex toy.