Abstract
If you pick up an album of film stars from the first few decades of the 20th century, full of photos celebrating their fame at that time, chances are you will know only a handful. Most of them have settled back into sepia obscurity, showing that there is nothing recent about the ephemeral nature of commercially driven fame. Recognising this is the first virtue of this study of celebrity. Indeed, Milly Williamson argues that this kind of fame emerged from the transition to capitalism and gained one of its first manifestations in the commercial Georgian theatre. Another positive aspect of the book is Williamson’s grasp of the contradictions of the celebrity. Central to these is that the differential use values derived from celebrities coexist with the exchange values they all share. These values are combined together in the celebrity as a commodity form, but with uneven weighting given to exchange values because these run through all commodities regardless of whatever use values may prevail in any particular case. Williamson sees celebrity as riven by other contradictions as well, including their symbolic meanings and associations. Following this, she attends to the circumstances under which celebrity develops and expands, and then examines how celebrity has been integral to the growth of the cultural industries from the outset. Celebrity has gone hand-in-hand with the industrialisation of the media, and Williamson shows how this happened with both the mass-circulation press and the cinema. She also argues convincingly that reliance on the celebrity ‘pull’ increases when uncertainty about profit margins increases, her example for this being the huge rise in celebrity content in late 1990s/early 2000s news media in the face of the arrival of the Internet. Williamson then turns to the concept of the ‘ordinary celebrity’, offering a justifiably negative appraisal of derogatory and belittling images of ordinary people this entails. The final chapter looks at so-called social media and celebrity, or rather the ‘celebrification’ of the self. This is a fine study. It benefits enormously from developing a substantial historical dimension and from emphasising the economic character of celebrity. Williamson asks the truly important questions about celebrity and gives some compelling answers. Her books help us fathom the prevalent, yet always peculiar, features of celebrity culture.