Celebrities Reacting to News Event! (Wait, Why Do We Care?)
In the wake of the highly controversial grand jury decisions concerning police killings in New York City and Ferguson, Missouri, widespread protests continued across the country for several days. Officials in New York have called for a special prosecutor to investigate the case there; both incidents have sparked a national debate, stretching all the way to the president and even the United Nations.
But wait. What do celebrities think?
Great news: The modern mediascape is on the case! “Celebs” themselves update us with their thoughts on current events, grave and trivial, via social media. And traditional media is happy to serve readers who don’t follow every movie star, comedian, musician, athlete, professional weightlifter, and so on: The “celebrities react …” roundup of top tweets from people you’ve heard of has become a clickable staple of online news.
Celebrities React to the Eric Garner Grand Jury Decision (Vulture)
Celebrities React to Eric Garner Verdict (CBS News)
Jamie Foxx, Diddy, Gabrielle Union and More Celebs React to Eric Garner Decision (ET)
Kendall Jenner, Pusha T, And More Celebs Say ‘Not Again’ After Eric Garner Grand Jury Decision (MTV)
While this category has been building steam for years — and is arguably just an extension of a longstanding fascination with celebrity thoughts — it’s taken a curious turn lately as the news has gotten gloomy.
Following last week’s news that a white New York police officer would not be indicted for applying a chokehold that resulted in the death of Eric Garner, a black man arrested on Staten Island for selling loose cigarettes, a slew of celebrities responded with a range of anguish and outrage. Among them was rap artist Azealia Banks, whose reaction included criticizing Iggy Azalea, another rap singer, for … not reacting.
The dig was retweeted more than 30,000 times. “Azalea’s lack of empathy for … Eric Garner set the Twittersphere on fire,” according to this report on a celebrity’s reaction to another celebrity’s failure to react. (What about Vanilla Ice? Did he react?)
Celebrities, of course, have the same right to take a stand or express views on current events — or simply make snarky jokes about one another’s names — as the rest of us.
What’s notable is that the rest of us are evidently so eager to hear them. Aren’t the Web in general, and social media in particular, supposed to enable a more egalitarian version of cultural conversation?
In some ways they do. But apparently this superfluous-seeming category of expression has its uses — to celebrities, the media, and, perhaps most of all, the rest of us.
‘Generating intimacy while disclosing nothing’
Gathering random opinions about the latest news is practically a journalistic tradition, albeit a dubious one: Think of the venerable “man on the street” interviews that The Onion neatly satirizes on a recurring basis.
Similarly, there’s long been a market for celebrity thoughts: As far back as the 1920s, magazines like Photoplay built audiences with profiles carefully managed by star handlers “generating intimacy while disclosing nothing,” as Anne Helen Petersen put it in a recent history of the form in The Believer.
The “celebrities react” phenomenon mashes up these two gimmicks. Stars issue thoughts on their own terms; the media packages these and spreads them further (presumably reaping healthy traffic along the way).
Again, celebrities are humans (“just like us!” as Us likes to say). It’s perfectly understandable that they might want to, for instance, express public grief. And when, say, the Internet collectively mourned the passing of Robin Williams, the man’s peers, friends, and past collaborators were relevant and even comforting voices.
More lightheartedly, pop culture figures’ chiming in on pop-culture events can seem pretty silly but is a logical extension of, well, pop culture.
Peter Pan Live! Carrie Underwood, Sarah Michelle Gellar, More Celebs React to NBC Musical Production
‘Breaking Bad’ Series Finale: Celebrities react to end of AMC’s meth drama
But as we edge into more substantial events, we also edge back into something that feels more like packaged intimacy: It’s unlikely that any tweeted celebrity opinion about major news discloses much that’s genuinely useful — about either the news or the celebrity.
Obsessing with the stars
Why, then, do we seem to welcome, even crave, the celebrity reaction to whatever is happening?
Sometimes we don’t. Back in 2011, Gilbert Gottfried was famously fired by insurer Aflac (as the voice of its advertising mascot) after tweeting jokes about the tsunami in Japan. More recently, Ashton Kutcher’s thoughts about reports that the car service Uber considered gathering information on journalists were not greeted warmly.
I’ve written previously about how the social media masses, when riled, can “level the old boundaries between the mighty and the masses” — even if we seem to have trouble sorting out “the difference between the mighty and Shia LaBeouf.” And just weeks ago, Bill Cosby was leveled by the Twittersphere when he (or his PR team) tried to launch a jokey meme stunt directly into a storm of disturbing allegations from women who say that he drugged and raped them.
Still, my earlier speculation that Twitter’s role as a gaffe-spreading mechanism might scare away high-profile users at some point has proved unfounded. Despite these sporadic online-mob incidents, celebrity reactions are mostly welcome, especially by content-hungry journalists.
One reason is surely the same strange fixation with celebrity that’s been around forever: The words and deeds (good and bad) of seemingly larger-than-life figures feel like common signposts that help us make sense of a world we can’t control.
A second reason is more of the moment. “The Internet’s default mode is obsession,” Slate critic Willa Paskin observed recently, in the course of arguing that these days “we are engaged in a near-constant cycle of being ‘totally obsessed.’ ” Her subject was cultural obsessions (like the “Serial” podcast or the show True Detective), but it can be roughly applied to the way certain stories flare across the news cycle, too.
That sounds counter to the idea that the Internet has supposedly wiped out everybody’s attention span. But who can deny that sometimes one story feels like the story, the thing everyone you know is talking about, and the only thing you want to know more about. So when there isn’t any more new information to be known, we turn to analysis of (or remarks about) what’s known already. Celebrity reactions, for instance.
Finally, when a celebrity viewpoint is expressed through social media, it’s more than a reference point, or a way to feed the mania of the moment. It’s also raw material: fodder for pushing a point of view or merely projecting an identity. Share a celebrity reaction you agree with, and in a way it’s yours; you and Chris Rock, or Aaron Paul, or Azealia Banks are on the same page, and you’ve just made that clear.
It’s such a convenient little system, in fact, that it’s easy to miss where it falls short, at least when it involves real news stories with tangible consequences: Consuming and endorsing the bite-sized views of famous people is not a substitute for understanding and coming to terms with serious events that require sustained and complex responses. In fact, it’s a distraction.
So, sure, everyone has the right to express an opinion about those grand jury decisions — even if it’s an opinion borrowed from somebody famous. But let’s not kid ourselves. The process of addressing issues that drive thousands of protesters into the streets for days on end will be long and difficult. And that’s true whether Iggy Azalea chimes in or not.
Write to me at rwalkeryn@yahoo.com or find me on Twitter, @notrobwalker. RSS lover? Paste this URL into your reader of choice: https://www.yahoo.com/tech/author/rob-walker/rss.
