[Red Moon]

Year of celebrity meltdowns

Britney, baby, did it one more time, but she was not alone.She was joined in her public unravelling by Amy, Lindsay, Heather and many others. And says, Julia Molony, we all clamoured for a ringside seat at the celebrity freak show.

There is one iconic image that sums up the state of celebrity in 2007. Among the many recorded examples of how, this year, we explored virgin territory in our ongoing invasion of the minds and lives of the rich and famous, one shot captures the extent of this paradigm shift; one picture heralded a whole new state of play in the long-standing relationship between entertainer and the entertained.

In it, a familiar face stares into the fuzzy lens of what seems to be an amateur camera. Looking haunted and hunted, Britney Spears's eyes are ringed with shadow as she pauses mid-shave, the crown of her head shockingly bare, a tangle of muddy brown curls still held fast at her neck. It's hard to define exactly the arresting expression on her face, but it hints at an emotional state somewhere between defiance and defeat, suggestive simultaneously of simmering hysteria and the placid absence of a lobotomy patient.

This moment, the one in which Britney Spears grabbed the shears and laid herself physically and emotionally bare in front of the world, wasn't by any means the rock-bottom point in a year when we have seen stars behaving dementedly in greater depth and more detail than ever before. But it was the point at which exhibitionism and dysfunction melded completely, symbolising an emerging new brand of popular culture -- live, real-time celebrity breakdown.

At that point, it seemed inconceivable that things could get any crazier. Little did we know. Since then, in the case of Britney Spears alone, we have watched, agape, as she has destroyed her personal life, lost custody of her children and systematically sullied her professional reputation. At an OK photo-shoot in August she wiped her chicken-grease-covered hands on a designer's dress, allowed her dog to foul on another, and then disappeared after five minutes in front of the camera, taking with her stg£10,000-worth of clothes and jewellery.

And then, just when we thought her humiliation couldn't get any more public, we had her jaw-droppingly incompetent performance at the VMA awards. So comprehensive is the catalogue of eccentricities and erratic behaviour displayed by the singer that she has achieved the remarkable feat of making her slimy, opportunistic husband, the same man who had previously walked out on his eight-months-pregnant girlfriend to shack up with this superstar (for whom he seemed to hold limited genuine affection), look like a character in The Waltons.

But Britney is not alone. 2007 was the unforgettable year of Amy Winehouse's bloody ballet slippers, of Heather Mills's ranting on morning television, and Jade Goody's pin-drop exit from Celebrity Big Brother. More recently, Sophie Anderton offered to sell her body to an undercover reporter, and Lindsey Lohan and her pals gave away free glimpses of body parts that can generally only be seen on pay-per-view. Week by week, we watched vivid, violent, freeze-framed snapshots of superstars going off the rails.

And we followed it, of course, with slavish devotion and mock-appalled delight. After all, the appeals of celebrity dysfunction are manifold, but they boil down to one single point. The stars have everything we want. And there is no better antidote to envy than watching success and beauty corrupt irredeemably.

It has, by now, been repeatedly observed that this epidemic of mental instability, or at least the breakdowns that attract the highest viewing figures, occur mostly among young women who have precociously reached great heights of fame. Feminists have rushed to an analysis of this as an example of the way modern society prematurely sexualises its female stars, only to ridicule and degrade them for sport when they have passed a certain, stringent threshold of age and physical perfection.

Now, for the most part, the women who play starring roles in this carnival of mental imbalance do so of their own volition, eagerly martyring their lives and their sanity for the sake of our ongoing entertainment. But the feminist argument becomes more convincing when you consider, as a counterpoint to the Britneys, the Amys and their kind, and all the messy, bloody, drug-fuelled hysteria they spread across countless magazine pages, the example of the one highly publicised mental breakdown suffered this year by a man. After Owen Wilson tried to kill himself in August, he made the well-advised decision to take the opportunity to retreat from the public eye, rather than vomit his "issues" all over the nearest paparazzi. Perhaps that is the reason his case was handled so sensitively, why his calls for privacy were respected, and why no one took much interest in his illness except to hope that, before long, he'd be well again.

But even if Wilson hadn't behaved so impeccably under pressure, his story would never have attracted the same level of traffic as the girls'. That is partly because the consumers of celebrity-breakdown sagas are mostly women, who find in them some kind of consolation for the ordinariness of their own lives. Men don't tend to sit at home, in the barber's, or in the pub, and dissect the newest developments in pop stars' mental states. They may keep a cursory eye on the headlines, but the incessant chatter, the relentless pursuit of news, the lengthy discussions, the avid interest belong to women. It's the female audience that contributes most generously to lining the paparazzo's pocket.

Women's interest is rooted in comparison and competitiveness rather than empathy, and so they are more interested in stories about other women.

But what else is at the dark heart of our insatiable appetite for celebrity anguish? Certainly, as figures of hate and evisceration these stars generate more attention than they ever did when they were still respected for their achievements. Recently, an LA paparazzo was quoted as saying of Britney: "She's the major story in this town. All the trouble that she has gone through, all the bad publicity -- if anything, that just makes her hotter right now. Britney sells."

Similarly, Heather Mills is rumoured to have been considered such an audience-draw that she bumped Gordon Brown off a slot on the GMTV couch on that fateful morning in November. Amy Winehouse's reputation for being volatile and damaged has earned her as much attention as her remarkable voice. There is no question that we have developed an insatiable, prurient interest in these young women's personal pain. It is entertaining not because it represents real-life tragedy -- we tune into the latest on Heather, Britney, and Amy, not to sympathise, but to mock, and we take an unmistakably smug satisfaction in charting their decline.

Those famous females whose public meltdowns have kept us all so enthralled throughout the year have two crucial things in common. Firstly, and most obviously, is their gender, which provides a partial explanation. Women demand vulnerability from other women -- it has always been a prerequisite for female bonding. When making friendships, we distrust females who don't, shortly after we meet them, make some big show of weakness, be it through self-deprecation, or revealed insecurities.

We'll take anything, really, as long as it's the social equivalent of baring one's jugular. It's not surprising that for female celebrities to attract our interest or devotion they must do the same, intentionally or otherwise.

The second factor that unites those stars is class. This year's most-watched basket cases -- Heather Mills, Britney Spears, Jade Goody, Lindsey Lohan, Amy Winehouse -- are all individuals who have, by virtue either of preternatural talent or sheer, dogged determination, defied the limitations of their backgrounds to reach a point at which they embody the height of modern aspiration. They have endless wealth, replete wardrobes and enviable figures. Most importantly, they have a constant stream of that commodity which, in today's narcissistic society, is most valuable -- attention. Perhaps, alongside envy, latent snobbery is at the heart of our eagerness to see these women ripped from the pedestals of prestige on which we mounted them.

If Britney Spears is a modern-day Cinderella, risen from the ghetto (or at least from a perfectly ordinary background) and elevated to a position of the highest privilege our society can provide, we are, with her permission, scripting a very bleak anti-fairy tale. She has become a clown. We take unrestrained, vindictive pleasure in laughing at her stupidity, her lack of education, her white-trash accent, cheap taste in clothes, and the way she has defaulted to her trailer-park heritage -- and always will.

Similarly, in the case of Jade Goody, we fashioned our very own council-estate icon. It delighted us that her estuary vowels and unapologetic ignorance had become a fixture on a slick and polished media landscape. Jade Goody was the underprivileged, dysfunctional social misfit with her own television series and a fragrance to match. How very amusing we found the contradiction. When, however, during Celebrity Big Brother, she revealed the brutal side of a personality that had been forged in the fires of deprivation and hard knocks, the whole nation rushed in without compunction to crucify her.

This is an era when celebrity comes first and ability second. Big Brother is an emblem of how fame can be achieved on a whim, at the behest of the voting public, a reward for the degree to which real people can sell themselves and their lives for the purposes of our entertainment. The famous-for-being-famous ideal is lauded as a marvel of our modern egalitarian spirit. Anyone can get to the top, no matter how dim, no particular talent necessary. Education is not a requirement. The capacity to cope with the attention an irrelevance.

But when you throw people into the bearpit of celebrity without the talisman of talent to protect them, or even the wit to learn how to manipulate the system, you send a lamb to the slaughter.

Owen Wilson, post-breakdown, was spared not only our scorn but also our scrutiny. He is easier to respect, of course, because he is smart and funny and creatively gifted. Certainly with an enlightened, middle-class upbringing and a tight-knit clique of film-school intelligentsia around him, there was no question but that he would be well protected at the height of his unravelling.

With Wilson, there's no fun to be had in mocking his accent. He has never displayed the kind of unsophisticated tastes that we can regard as an outward sign of some inner deficiency. Thus, there is no malicious pleasure to be taken from deriding him. The privileges of his class, and, by extension, his education have allowed him to be more of an agent and less of a pawn in the creation his own public image.

The degree to which Britney Spears, Heather Mills, Amy Winehouse and Lindsay Lohan are trapped by the chimera of fame is ever apparent. We, their loyal audience, are neither innocent nor ignorant of the fact that our collective glare has all the searing power of sunlight refracted through a magnifying glass. Under the heat of our attention, anyone without the wherewithal to dodge the system will simply burn alive.

There is no denying these women are all complicit in their fate. And there is, of course, a certain irrefutable justice in the view that anyone who volunteers themselves for trial by media gets what they had coming to them. There's no shortage of people who are prepared to prostitute their dignity for the purposes of our entertainment. But there is something vaguely cannibalistic about a society that makes stars of simple, ordinary, unsophisticated and guileless people in order to then glory in the ensuing visceral carnage as they fail to cope with stardom. The anti-meritocracy we have created may have offered access to fame to anyone, but it has also turned that fame into a poisoned chalice.

By virtue of her formidable abilities as a musician, Amy Winehouse is mostly spared this immolation and is, instead, offered our pity. But if her star had been on the rise in a different era, the details of her demons would have been ringfenced from the public, her personal life protected rather than served up as an essential part of her brand. True, she might not have been quite as iconic or interesting, but there is something so wantonly exhibitionistic about the way Winehouse is falling apart that it is impossible not to surmise that she herself has come to believe that being demented is a fundamental part of the performance she offers. For our part, we offer no better reinforcement of this behaviour than our rapt attention.

Of course, there are plenty of examples of success stories where people have made a virtue of working-class origins. And plenty more media figures who are, as yet, still successfully trading on a pastiche of being common. Jordan, for example, gets away with it by becoming a parody of herself, an elaborate caricature who continually underlines the fact that she never really expects to be taken seriously. That, of course and the fact that under the bimbo gloss she is smart as a whip and tough as nails.

It's a nice idea to think that social standing is no longer a value in the modern media game. It's an idea, in fact, that most people who follow the vagaries of glossy magazines and reality TV wholeheartedly buy. But all it takes is for someone like Britney Spears or Jade Goody to crack up before our eyes, and the whole world openly revels in what it seems to feel is the rightful return of trash to the gutter.

Source: Irish Independent

[natjake2504]

I think it has been a hard year for a certain few celebs - hey hey chin up for next year

[Jackie]

All the money in the world i wouldnt ever want to be a celeb whats the point?

[GiRTh]

It's been a good year for celebrity come uppance.