The Revolution will not be Celebritized
There’s a thing anarchists say: “no gods, no masters.” I’d like to add, “no celebrities.”
With awards season underway, Oscar nominations out, and ensuing controversies, it’s the perfect time to dig into our obsession with celebrity culture. Let’s start back in December, when a white lady and her cat were on the cover of Time.
Meanwhile, the death toll in Gaza at that point was around 20,000, mostly women and children. Countless journalists and healthcare workers had also been murdered. So, unsurprisingly, at least among the politically conscious of the world, this started popping up:
I don’t begrudge anyone enjoying the music or movies they enjoy. But I do begrudge when we become so obsessed, and valorize celebrities so much, that we mistake pop culture and clever branding for social progress or justice. I don’t give a shit who Time picks as its person of the year, but the fact that we could make this a prominent topic of national conversation during a genocide speaks to how deeply unserious we are as a culture.
We are quick to descend into cults of personality, and it makes us stupid. We engage with social issues through brands, memes, aesthetics, and superficial storytelling. And it renders us (Americans) politically vacuous.
Beyonce is probably the single clearest figure that represents how we confuse a celebrity brand with actual revolutionary or liberatory ideas. For progressives/lefties, Beyonce is an icon of liberation (especially for women and LGBTQ+ folks). But what a lot of us don’t seem willing to acknowledge is that… Beyonce is a billionaire. She displays zero class consciousness; she’s a brilliant business woman whose image and brand is meticulously curated and calculated, centers material success (with no concern for the attendant environmental destruction), wealth, and let’s face it, pretty damn conventional notions of female beauty that just so happen to please the male gaze. She excels at reading the zeitgeist, understanding her audience, and delivering to them precisely what they want.
When her single Break My Soul came out in 2022, I couldn’t help but feel like there was something gross and dystopian about the billionaire queen of grind culture singing to us about quitting our jobs and resting… all while there were definitely folks picking up extra Uber shifts to be able to afford hundreds of dollars to see her live. And now, this so-called “revolutionary” icon hasn’t said shit about Palestine, you know, where brown people are resisting colonial oppression and being annihilated for it. Shout out to my pal, Pem, for sending me this podcast episode that examines the cognitive dissonance of Beyonce’s silence.
She gives us only what she wants to give us. To the extent that she takes a “stand” for anything, it is always within the calculation of what will or will not risk her brand and career. She can be loud and proud for the queer community because she knows it doesn’t risk her fanbase or business relationships. But being loud and proud for Palestine in the entertainment industry is not exactly a popular stance, and has real potential consequences.
We can love Beyonce’s music without insisting that she’s a one-woman revolution. She’s a Black capitalist, through and through.
Then there’s our precious white capitalist queen, Taylor Swift, yet another supposed feminist icon. She rerecorded her music so she could own it! She got a bunch of people to vote! She probably did other stuff I don’t know about because I don’t actually care! But what she’s not interested in is actually dismantling systems of oppression. She’s a poster child for white feminism, which author Koa Beck describes this way:
“The goal of white feminism is not to alter the systems that oppress women—patriarchy, capitalism, imperialism—but to succeed within them.”
Read: girlbosses looking for a seat at the boardroom table.
A controversy last spring was Swift’s alleged use of a collaboration with Black female rapper Ice Spice as “damage control” after she dated some guy who’s apparently a racist asshole. Also, while she’s certainly not the only celebrity to do this, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out all the coverage of her private jet use and its extraordinary carbon emissions.
My point is not to tear these women down, just to knock them off the pedestal. If we think they’re icons of any sort of liberatory feminist movement, then we’ve gravely misunderstood these ideas. These women are icons of capitalism, with only the most superficial, neoliberal nod to anything more than that. And they’re just the two most visible of many celebrities that we are so desperate to make our heroes. Enjoy their music, but don’t mistake them for social justice leaders.
Just in the past week, as the Oscars nominations have come out, we’ve seen white feminism rear her head again, in the form of outrage over the Margot Robbie/Greta Gerwig snub. Many folks have pointed out that, um… America Ferrera was nominated, and “Barbie” was nominated for best picture, and maybe we should be celebrating Lily Gladstone’s nomination for best actress, since, you know, she’s the first Indigenous American woman to be nominated in that category. But nope… all eyes on the white ladies.
Also, many of the same “feminists” who are losing their minds over the “Barbie” snubs have, again, been silent about Gaza, where women are having c-sections without anesthetic, miscarriages are up 300%, and tent scraps are serving as sanitary napkins because there’s no other option. Oh, and tens of thousands of women and children have been killed in a matter of months. Are these not also feminist issues? Are they not, perhaps, slightly more important than “Barbie?”
We’re wasting our time if we’re looking to Hollywood as some reliable barometer of social progress or an effective tool of social justice storytelling. I enjoyed “Barbie” well enough, and like many women, that America Ferrera monologue had me tearing up. But there was no real examination of the structures of oppression in the daily lives of women, beyond the existence of shitty, powerful men and cultural double standards. What about poverty and class issues? Or systemic racism? Or the nuclear family structure that leaves women isolated and overworked? What about the devaluing and erasure of care work, so-called “women’s work?” Or the lack of affordable childcare, parental leave, or healthcare? I mean, hell, the character in the movie who was pregnant was there only to be the butt of jokes. The one actual child in the movie was a teenager who served solely as a narrative tool.
We didn’t watch women destroy oppressive, patriarchal structures in “Barbie.” We watched them empower themselves within those structures. Be a supreme court justice! Be a CEO! Be president! Plus, as Naomi Klein so aptly put it in an interview, at the end of the day, this is a doll commercial, meant to sell millions more plastic toys that destroy the planet.
Cool. Girl power.
Let’s talk about another “feminist” movie that raked in the Oscar noms - “Poor Things.” I watched this a few weeks ago and was extremely put off by it. Visually, it was a work of art. The costumes were a delight. The acting really was stellar, especially Emma Stone. But, I don’t think I’ll spoil it for anyone by saying that about 75% of this movie is just Emma Stone having sex. Lots of graphic sex. Like, softcore Cinemax stuff.
Her character, Bella Baxter, is an upper-class white lady created by a man (it’s a Frankenstein story), implanted with the brain of a baby, but which apparently develops rapidly… it’s not really clear at what mental age she is when she starts having all that sex, which is… unsettling?
A sexual awakening story is fine, and I don’t intend to sex shame. But it just got so damn tedious. So, the first thing I did after the movie ended was confirm my suspicion (which is statistically likely, anyway) that it was, in fact, written and directed by men.
Bella Baxter is supposed to be this unapologetic, liberated woman, utterly untouched by societal expectations and impervious to the attempts of the men in her life to control her. My problem was, this is all told primarily through the lens of sex. It felt like the male fantasy version of the liberated woman. When Bella ends up working in a brothel (because OF COURSE she does) and even finds a way to enjoy having sex with men who are gross and creepy and she doesn’t actually want to have sex with, I wanted to throw up a little (plus, we’re supposed to laugh at some of these scenes). Not only is that decidedly not feminism, but it feels a little too rape-culture/violent patriarchy adjacent for me to be cool with it.
I didn’t know this movie was based on a book. A few negative reviews point out that the movie misses the book’s deeper and more nuanced look at feminism, socialism, inequality, and poverty. These other issues are totally glossed over in the movie: we get a scene where she sees poor people for the first time and wants to give them money; one of her gal pals at the brothel is a socialist (which is just tossed in there as a label for this woman, no more detail); and in the last 10 minutes or so, Bella decides she wants to be a doctor and is working on her degree. That’s it. End of discussion. Let’s get back to the sex.
This trope of the “liberated woman” as sexually promiscuous is individualistic feminism. Fine if sex is your jam, but female liberation doesn’t begin and end at sex. One woman’s sexual adventures doesn’t somehow open up doors for all women (especially if that one woman is an affluent white lady). It’s a simplistic version of feminism ready-made for Hollywood; cis-gender, heteronormative, titillating (lol at that word), and it doesn’t pose any real threat to systemic patriarchal oppression. Also, it’s been done a million times now, so it’s extraordinarily boring (see: Madonna, literally decades ago, Sex and the City, Girls, etc.). I mean, it’s 2024. Is the idea of a woman enjoying sex without shame really so revolutionary?
So, to wrap this up, let’s get over our need to obsess over and form parasocial relationships with celebrities and let’s stop looking to Hollywood to tell us how to do justice and liberation. Brands, celebrities, Hollywood movies - they’re all money-making machines. Hollywood mostly gives us the same, individualistic “hero’s journey” formula over and over again, told primarily by men. Beyonce and Taylor Swift are not our friends. They’re two dimensional, simplified representations of ideas, packaged in pleasantly consumable songs and appealing aesthetics. And you gotta pay a lot of money to find yourself in the same room (or stadium) as them.
Celebrity culture leeches our complexity and creative thought. When we farm our political imagination out to the likes of “Barbie,” we get lazy. Shit, we even now stan politicians themselves. I will forever be disgusted by Hillary 2016 and the fucking “pantsuit nation” hysteria of the HRC brand.
The unholy alliance of the entertainment industry (which basically includes politics, now) and social media - aka the distraction/attention economy - neuters our capacity for resistance. Our ability to focus on serious issues, let alone think beyond the capitalist frameworks doled out to us by these industries, will just continue to atrophy the more attention and energy we give to this nonsense.
Listen, is there some brilliant storytelling out there in Hollywood? Sure. Are you allowed to love pop music? I mean… I guess so.
But when we’re happy to treat brands as saviors and think Oscar nominations are indicators of social progress, while fascism is staring us dead in the eyes and genocide rages, that’s when our vacuousness becomes dangerous.
The revolution will not be celebritized.
Extremely powerful commentary!