The passion plays of celebrity culture

Introduction

Turning and turning in the widening gyre

The falcon cannot hear the falconer;

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;

The best lack all conviction, while the worst

Are full of passionate intensity. (The Second Coming, Yeats, 2008)

I am a passionate creature; I bring its corporeal and exterior intensity to everything I do. I have to feel things deeply as much as think them clearly, and I readily present those feelings as markers of my commitment to, and engagement with, whatever it is I am investing in. In the continuum that exists between the forces of Apollo and Dionysus, I lean towards the frenzy of feeling.

This is no more so than with those celebrities I am passionately connected to. These feelings I have may relate to desire and attraction, empathy and longing, belonging and emulation, but they move me and I am moved by them. It is always a phenomenological encounter, wet with expectation (Redmond, 2014). A recent case in point was the death of actor Philip Seymour Hoffman, which I felt deeply because of certain performative registers and biographical revelations – our passions matched and collided in an affective sea of melancholic incidences and lonely coincidences. Passion and celebrity culture go hand-in-hand …

In this article, I will explore the ways in which celebrity culture engages with passion, connecting it to the idea that it involves a modern re-imagining of the passion play. As with Lauren Berlant (2012), I will argue that the passion ignited by the celebrity works to contain and regulate desire in the contemporary world. However, I will also suggest that the celebrity passion play offers up the opportunity for sensorial engagements that violate and resist the normative terms of how desiring is dominantly constituted.

I will suggest celebrity figures are themselves caught up in this passion play. They suffer and feel deeply, channelling this violent crisis to their fans as they do so. Here, I will be drawing on a decidedly phenomenological perspective, linking the chaos of the senses to both troubling and liberating possibilities. Loneliness, narcissism, erotomania and celebrity worship will be a series of sticky case studies that I will explore, set within the context of what I view as, following Bauman, these liquid modern times where there has been a turbulent disembedding of social relations and a corresponding rise, rise in passion as that which sits at the heart of meaning. As Bauman (2013) suggests,

In a liquid modern life there are no permanent bonds, and any that we take up for a time must be tied loosely so that they can be untied again, as quickly and as effortlessly as possible, when circumstances change – as they surely will in our liquid modern society, over and over again. (p. ix)

Finally, drawing on Nietzsche (1999), I will also argue that celebrity passion needs to be understood as a complex mixture or synthesis of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, and in so being has the ability to free us from the tyranny of rationalism and what would otherwise singularly be the weaker signifiers of passion. When celebrity culture is created out of the syncretic union of Dionysus and Apollo, one is allowed to suffer in new and unexpected ways.

A final note, at times I will write the article passionately, from an impassioned perspective, measuring and weighting my own desires in the delicious folds and flows of celebrity culture.

Love and passion

In Desire/Love, Laurent Berlant (2012) argues that the ‘love plot’ of much of contemporary popular culture sustains ‘the signs of utopian intimacy’ (p. 112), while simultaneously always offering its opposite: love enunciated as an impossible condition and so very easy to break. Love is positioned within a dialogical romantic discourse, seemingly something that naturally and essentially emerges from the chemistry between star-struck lovers, and yet also in the need for remedial help since it is always threatening to unravel, to implode.

This tension between blossoming love and perpetual ruination requires a therapy-centred culture to emerge, to help people knead its ingredients back together (Furedi, 2004). All manner of confession and therapy-centred texts and practices emerge, from counselling services through to gossip and health-focused magazines, ‘coupling’ reality television shows and talk shows that prescribe ways and means to rescue and resurrect love’s waning glory. If there is a dominant discursive formation (Foucault, 1977) that holds contemporary life in its grip, then it is love coupled with passion set within the articulating realms of confession and therapy.

Passion is considered to be central to the cure for a love that is diagnosed as dying. It is suggested that marriages fail because passion has deserted the relationship. Lovemaking may now be mediocre because passion has left the bedroom. New relationships won’t be started or pursued if the flame of passion isn’t there from the start. Two people will only work if they share the same passionate interests. A passionate makeover in the setting of the bedroom will be required if erotic love once shared is to be re-ignited. For example, in the book, Passionate Marriage,

Acclaimed psychologist David Schnarch guides couples toward greater intimacy with proven techniques developed in his clinical practice and worldwide workshops. Chapters – covering everything from understanding love relationships to helpful ‘tools for connections’ to keeping the sparks alive years down the road – provide the scaffolding for overcoming sexual and emotional problems. This inspirational book is sure to help couples invigorate their relationships and reach the fullest potential in their love lives. (http://www.amazon.com/Passionate-Marriage-Intimacy-Committed-Relationships/dp/0393334279)

Dr Phil (2011) similarly advises that ‘putting passion back into your relationship’ is a number 1 objective. Passion is tied centrally to an active sex life where you need to give it ‘project status’.

However, the passion that is being advocated in these therapeutic settings may not be about intense feeling and sensuous active agency. Rather, as Berlant (2012) argues, the therapeutic ‘love plot’ may aim to actually tame what is an essentially wild heart within us all. The passionate makeover will in effect inoculate the natural violence of intimacy for a more placid and compliant normative and neo-liberal passion. This is a passion that sustains the logic of liquid modernity (Bauman, 2000) and the needs of patriarchy and heterosexual relations.

When passion is let loose in culture, it has been crafted out of patriarchal and heteronormative discourse. If one was to take the example of the teen makeover film, the central female character will often be normalised through the trappings of beauty and the realisation that passionate, romantic love is all she has been really looking for (Ford and Mitchell, 2004). She will either be a nerd or a dork, driven by Apollonian goals, or will have locked her passion up because of some prior trauma or heart-break, as is the case in 10 things I Hate about You with the ‘absent’ mother being key to the lead’s arrested development (Junger, 1999).

When the ugly duckling finds passion, or lets passion out, it is ultimately for the boy of her dreams. His recognition of her beauty, now revealed on her perfected ‘outside’, confirms that passionate heterosexual relations will sanction love. His passionate look into her soulful eyes takes place on a public stage, often in a scene of spectacle. She will descend a flight of stairs, or appear through ornate doors, and the male gaze will fall upon her face and body, and fabulous dress, lips and hair. Passion fills the exchange of glances, enchants the objects and people in the room and creates the context for it to be made safe in the regulatory way it is brought-into-being. This is sanctified and purified passion set in the house of patriarchal inscription. The teen makeover

Civilises its protagonist, outlining the rules and regulations of gender performance in an age where girls are invited to consume to gain empowerment. The teen makeover film does extend this invitation, but in a limited capacity which represents female consumption as taking place under a strict policing gaze that ensures the new look does not come at the expense of traditionally feminine virtues or in the way of romanticised, sanitised love. (Marston, 2010: 25, unpublished thesis)

Nonetheless, this revelation scene is often followed by a private and privatised moment. They will meet on a balcony, in a park and will consummate their passion through a heart-felt kiss. The kiss of course takes away the speech acts of the girl – she is rendered silent apart from the gasp and breath of feeling love on her lips (Radner, 1995). Passionate love not only sanctifies idealised heterosexual coupling but silences the girl. This, then, is passion emptied of carnality, transposed into an ideological setting where normative relations are being promoted and sustained. As Marston (2010) summarises in relation to A Cinderella Story (Rosman, 2004), the first kiss operates as a ‘seal of approval for the central couple to go forth and procreate’ (p. 36).

And yet there is always the possibility that the volatile traces of ‘real’ passion will come to the fore, spill over and wreak havoc upon the scene. The senses may be opened to desires that then cannot be contained. There is generally such an over-investment in creating the conditions for passion to take place that it cannot be so easily neatly packaged up. Passion leaks, runs into innominate objects, takes hold of the inert and rocks their foundations.

At the end of The Princess Diaries (Marshall, 2001), Mia (Anne Hathaway) is so taken with her first true love’s kiss, that her shoe triggers a series of lights and waterfalls to turn on, filling the scene with primary colours and natural elements. While this is meant to encapsulate the fairy-tale ending, it also registers as a flowing, out-of-body experience in which her passion invests the world with heated imagery and affecting temperatures of textures. The kiss might be a closed envelope but her passion escapes, escapes, escapes. This is something the gendered body often does: as Vivian Sobchack puts it, ‘our bodies escape’ the cultural and ideological conditions in which they are produced (Bukatman, 2009).

It is important to note that film star images are essential to the way these teen makeover films negotiate their play with passion. Generally, a star image is born or cemented in these films; the female lead is usually ‘unknown’, or with little semiotic screen history; or else she possesses a representation that matches the qualities of the romantic heroine she is playing – such as was the case with Anne Hathaway in The Princess Diaries. The passion that is born in these films is often carried over into the female lead’s future film roles, continuing the negotiation of competing forms of passion as they do so – Anne Hathaway became a romantic lead and then a passionate lover as her career progressed. The teen makeover film becomes a central mechanism through which the female star becomes a signifier of passion and registers as an affecting passionate intensity. It is the first act in the star’s celebrity passion play.

Celebrity love, passion, worship

If there is a cultural arena today where passion plays a central, heightened role, then it is in the affecting intensifications of celebrity culture. This manifests in two interrelated or inter-locking ways. First, celebrity representations are crafted out of passionate sensory aesthetic signifiers. Light, colour, texture, fabric, movement and sound are used to conjure up the passionate interiority of the celebrity, so what is made manifest is soul, heart-felt expressions of their lust for life, their profession or for the context they may be found in.

One only has to experience Natalie Portman’s 2013 Miss Dior ‘La vie en rose’ advertising campaign to understand how sensory-based signifiers create the conditions for her impassioned self to emerge. Portman is captured in a series of heightened Parisian-inspired backdrops, with elemental, natural and haute couture textures brought together in an irresistible mise en scène of passion. Water, sunlight, blossom, silk, flower and bouquet are brought into the world of opulent apartments and summer houses, long drives in open sports cars, and romantic embraces and dreamy kisses. This is a world crafted out of primal and primary sensory experiences and Portman is the carnal embodiment of what her celebrity image and the perfume will bring to one’s life if you consume them both together. This is romantic passion between two idealised people furnished from a sea of sensory-based experiences that dance across the skin of the screen.

The aesthetics of passion are matched with passionate or impassioned events, where the cultural context demands outpouring, commitment, such as at a charity event, political rally, promotion or sponsorship launch, or media spectacle carnival such as the Oscars. Passionate celebrity texts have to also be seen in enchanted environments so that life is itself seen to be impregnated with heightened forms of passion. Paparazzi shots of celebrities coming out of high-end fashion shops, kissing in doorways or emerging from swimming pools on exotic beach holiday locations create a world of desiring and desirable events.

Second, celebrity culture makes an impassioned plea to the senses, calls upon the emotions to be activated and revels in the excesses of feeling that the consumer or fan is asked to register and then fully embody through their contact with famous figures and dramatic encounters they identify with. In part, celebrity culture attempts to turn one into a passionate creature, ruled by the heart and crafted out of carnal desires.

As I have argued elsewhere (Redmond, 2006, 2011, 2014), celebrities are first and foremost embodied individuals, intense molecular manifestations, and one of the key ways they communicate with fans and audiences is through the senses, through the sensorial aesthetics mentioned above. In fact, I think we can usefully define the sensing individual that identifies with a favoured celebrity as the Celebaesthetic subject (Redmond, 2014). I see this is an engagement in which the individual and celebrity face one another as experiential beings in a dynamic, relational structure of reversibility and reciprocity. Feelings and affects move backwards and forwards, in and out, within and without the two identifying figures. I take the position then, following Vivian Sobchack (2000), that we exist:

As ‘lived bodies’ (to use a phenomenological term that insists on ‘the’ objective body as always also lived subjectively as ‘my’ body, diacritically invested and active in making sense and meaning in and of the world), our vision is always already ‘fleshed out’ … it is ‘in-formed’ and given meaning by our other sensory means of access to the world: our capacity not only to hear, but also to touch, to smell, to taste, and always to proprioceptively feel our dimension and movement in the world.

Celebrity culture exists in what is this relational, cross-modal exchange through which the senses are activated and where the body is the fleshy organ through which a communion – a shared experiential relationship – takes place. This exchange relies on ‘both synaesthesia (or intersensoriality) and coenaesthesia (the perception of a person’s whole sensorial being)’ (Sobchack, 2004). Put rather simply, celebrities and fans communicate with one another in and through the activation of powerful emotions and senses, through shared, heightened and proximate embodied awareness. This is the very material out of which a phenomenological passion grows.

This intensification of affects readily extends to religious type countenance. In reviewing and classifying memorial fan letters from women asked to reflect on their relationship to female film stars of the 1940s, Jackie Stacey finds a type of spectatorship that is constituted out of religious love and devotion. In summarising their responses, Stacey (1994) argues,

These statements represent the star as something different and unattainable. Religious signifiers here indicate the special meaning and status of the stars, as well as suggesting the intensity of the devotion felt by the spectator. They also reinforce the ‘otherness’ of the stars that are not considered part of the mortal world … Worship of stars as goddesses involves a denial of self found in some forms of religious devotion. The spectator is only present in these quotes as a worshipper, or through her adoration of the star. (p. 143)

Celebrity devotion is here constituted as a supernatural force conferred on a venerated individual, who is not thought or felt to be of this world. As a fan, one loses one’s sense of self in the heady mixture of perfected beauty, glamour and sexuality that the film stars are imagined to be. Losing oneself is felt as transcendence but one made manifest in intensified embodied relational exchanges.

Nonetheless, passion in these contexts is again constructed on a dialogical and oppositional axis. On the one hand, it is regulated, controlled and ultimately silenced: channelled through acceptable impressions and expressions, and ways of behaviour. Fans are encouraged to express their passion through corporate and commercial means, whether attending a concert or show, or buying a product or service that is ‘enchanted’ by the celebrity who has endorsed it. There are agreed forms of passionate congregation and identification, particularly around how one expresses love and desire for a celebrity they feel close to (Couldry, 2003; Rojek, 2001). These include rules and rituals around expressing excitement at a glittering event, taking ‘shared’ photographs or how to approach a celebrity at a book signing or public event. The fan can be passionate, but the passion has to follow an agreed presentational formula.

On the other hand, passion can overflow, can refuse to be regulated, and so the ‘extremes’ of passion do also manifest, whether that be through excessive expression, obsession, stalking or other such transgressive and dangerous affects. Fans do regularly resist the way they are meant to commune with celebrities – they storm stages, rush over barriers, write besotted letters, camp outside of homes or hotels and invest their own lives with all that the celebrity they worship stands for. Shrines can be created, fan groups established and the pattern of everyday life constituted out of what the favoured celebrity is doing in their world.

There are psychic and social issues at stake here. As Paul Hollander (2011) suggests,

Relating to celebrities is a fantasy relationship stimulated by the shortage of genuine, face-to-face, one-on-one relationships – a futile attempt to personalize an impersonal world. When there is a scarcity of sustaining, intimate personal relationships and a decline of closely-knit, durable communities, people seek substitutes. Celebrity worship is one of them.

In this context, celebrity worship is arguably an extreme form of fandom, at one end of what has been defined as the Celebrity Attitude Scale comprising three sliding degrees of identification and attraction (Maltby et al., 2002). First, at one end of the scale is the Entertainment-Social level of attitude, where one is attracted to a favourite celebrity because of their perceived ability to entertain and be socially focused.

Second, there is the Intense-Personal attitude where intensive and uncontrollable feelings about the celebrity begin to emerge and in doing so affect one’s well-being in the world. One begins to exist in and for the celebrity that is adored, and the rhythm of everyday life is constituted around seeing their latest pictures, keeping up with their latest news, and buying and consuming their latest outputs and products.

Third, there is the Borderline-Pathological attitude, where the fan sees their existence only in relation to their favourite celebrity, whom they imagine feels exactly the same way about them. Borderline-pathological fans are often stalkers and enact fantasies of coupling. Such fan–celebrity pathologies can be attributed to two social types or social circumstances, both related to the conditions of liquid modernity.

Shy, culturally disconnected people, who also view themselves as lonely, find that they struggle to achieve or maintain positive social interactions. Their loneliness presses on them to find company and companionship in and through celebrity culture. They are told that passion is at the centre of a meaningful life, but their lives are felt to be dry-bones of existence. Celebrities become recuperating figures that the isolated individual can invest in, talk to, fantasise over; in exchanges where they are no longer shy, alienated and through which they feel wanted and connected – where passion courses through their veins (Rubin et al., 1985).

The narcissist type (Lasch, 1979) resonates with the passion of celebrity culture since the possessive individual and the celebrity are honed out of a vain self-love and the constant need for adoration. Of course, the age of liquid modernity produces this cult of the narcissist since (self) love is also imagined to be crafted out of commodities that are to be purchased. The narcissist makes themselves over through cosmetic, leisure and fashion purchases, much in the same way that a celebrity does. The constant renewal of the self renders love a thing, with a quality that can be both deep and shallow, everlasting and ephemeral – yours to possess and in the possession of others who love just like you. Celebrity love is ultimately disposable and yet its intensity, when felt, is immense (Redmond, 2010).

The narcissist is made in the image of the celebrity and sees himself or herself as a celebrity – as very like the celebrity they most identify with (Ashe et al., 2005). And because the narcissist is driven by the deep need to be loved, a love that they believe is rightfully theirs to claim and which warrants them a privileged experience in the world, they struggle to maintain social relationships. The narcissist imagines a god-like relationship to everyday life, with ordinary people not good enough for them unless they can share the higher order forms of passion they are connected to. The narcissist is like a celebrity, but they also engage in celebrity fandom as if it involves a peer relationship; they have a fanatical view of themselves and the celebrity they latch onto.

Stalker Robert Dewey Hoskins imagined that he had a relationship with Madonna, leaving a scrawled over religious tract, named Defiled, in her call box at her Los Angeles home in April 1995. One side of the tract read, ‘I love you. Will you be my wife for keeps. Robert Dewey Hoskins’. The other side read, ‘I’m very sorry. Meet me somewhair [sic]. Love for keeps. Robert Dewey Hoskins’. Also, on that page was a drawn circle with the words, ‘be mind [sic] and I’ll be yours’. Beneath this love note was the printed part of the religious tract which described how sinners who have sex outside of marriage should be killed and those who are not decently dressed should be punished.

After initially leaving, Hoskins returned to Madonna’s home to be confronted by her bodyguard, Basil Stephens. Hoskins threatened to kill Stephens if he did not pass on his note and told him that if he did not marry Madonna that evening he would ‘slice her throat from ear to ear’. After a brief gap in time, Hoskins returned to Madonna’s home some 7 weeks later, scaled the walls and was twice shot by Stephens after he went for his gun.

While on remand awaiting trial, Hoskins wrote graffiti love messages on his prison walls, ‘I Love Madonna’ and ‘Madonna Love Me’. Underneath his bed he scrawled ‘The Madonna Stalker’. When a Sheriff’s Deputy asked him about the love messages, Hoskins claimed that Madonna had written them and that when he got out of jail he was ‘going to slice the lying bitch’s throat from ear to ear’.

This is a love that is actually a form of erotomania.

Erotomania

The mental illness erotomania involves the delusion that the celebrity a fan has fixated on loves them in return. An imagined manifest destiny narrative is played out, which results in stalking behaviour to make true the relationship that the erotomanic feels is destined to be. The erotomanic believes that the celebrity has given them a ‘secret signal’, that they have revealed their admiration for them through a song lyric, interview, or film and television role. This erotomanic episode results in them ‘returning’ the affection through letter writing, texts, gifts, phone calls and house visits. The more the celebrity declines the offerings, the more the erotomanic believes it is a concealment device, not to be revealed in the glare of the media. The erotomanic passionately believes that the celebrity passionately loves them but has to hide this truth from the watching world. The fuel of pathological love is constantly re-ignited, and the celebrity is hounded into existential crisis.

South Korean Sasaeng or ‘private life’ K-pop fans dedicate themselves to following their fans at every step of their lives. Sasaeng fans are usually females aged 13–21 years, going first through puberty and then through progression into adulthood. Their devotion to K-pop stars involves serial stalking, technical surveillance and snooping, and attendance at all public events. Their desire is to be noticed by the star, to have interactions with them, in the hope of love being requited, and to share with other Sasaeng fans their tactics and successes. For example, it was reported in July 2012 that ‘Sasaeng fans install CCTV in the parking lot of Park Yoochun’s home’. Park Yoochun is a member of Korean boy-band JYC, who have been the main object of Sasaeng’s erotomanic impulses.

The Sasaeng fan exists in a dual realm of interactions: on one hand, they communicate in and through blogs and forums which are secret and secretive, and they desire more than anything to get to know the secret (private) life of the K-Pop star they stalk. On the other hand, their acts are self-publicised, their reported devotion a badge of honour and their appearance in the media confirmation of their selfless love. Their interactions mirror the dual way that a celebrity experiences their fame – set in both private and public realms, existing in tension with one another.

However, there is also a masochistic relationship being fostered here. The Sasaeng fan allows their K-Pop idols to dominate and abuse them. K-Pop stars engage with fans in aggressive and violent ways. In March 2012, the Korean news outlet Dispatch released audio footage of JYC band members, Yoochun, Jaejoong and Junsu, which shows the three abusing and acting violently towards Sasaeng fans. Yoochun can be heard swearing at a fan over the phone, while Jaejoong can be heard repeatedly hitting one of the female Sasaeng fans. This does not break the devotion of the fan to the star but seems to reinforce it and the patriarchal power inherent in much of Korean culture.

This oscillation between love and hate, or the co-mingling of these two concepts, is found in a great deal of celebrity fan identification, but generally contained within disappointment and rejection narratives when a celebrity has changed direction or re-styled themselves. Teen fans of Britney Spears responded with dismay to her transformation into a vamp-like figure, labelling her a ‘slore’, an elision of slut and whore (Lowe, 2003: 124–125).

Celebrity craving

Celebrities are themselves heavily caught up in the confession and therapy regimes, either through emotional outpouring and subsequent repair or through their very own makeover. They sit at the heart of a passionate culture, demonstrating to us all how they embody passion safely and how passion can be recuperated for just means, serving and servicing the dominant order. Passion can flow through the products they countenance, wear and employ to fully make the makeover moment successful.

Celebrities very often crave fame, attention, to have the adoration and dedication of their fans. According to Donna Rockwell and David C Giles (2009), the effect of fame and fandom on the celebrity is ‘experienced as a progression through four phases’(p. 184). First, there is a period of love/hate towards the experience of being a celebrity, where the celebrity covets their new found fame but finds it difficult being in the public eye all the time.

Second, there is an addiction phase where being famous is experienced as an intoxicating fix, and the celebrity is goal-focused in terms of behaving in ways which maintain and sustain the fame they have acquired.

Third, there is an acceptance phase that requires a permanent change in everyday life routines to accommodate the public and private, positive and negative demands of being famous. Finally, there is an adaptation phase, where new behaviours are developed to deal with the highs and lows of fame, to create life patterns that work for the celebrity in question. One powerful aspect that celebrities seem to face is an existential crisis in the face of the interactions that fame brings them:

From an initial desire to become successful, the celebrity experiences personal confusion and a loss of ownership of life in a depersonalizing ‘entitization’ process, in which participants reported feeling like a thing rather than a person of unique character … The public wants a piece of them, to touch them, to get an autograph, to have their picture taken with the star. All the while hearing one’s name screamed out, the famous person feels as if he or she is not even there. (Rockwell and Giles, 2009: 185)

Nonetheless, one can read the passion in these passionate encounters as potentially constructive, involving transformative and liberating qualities and intensities. To return to my example of the death of Philip Seymour Hoffman, the recent cluster of close-up shots of Philip Seymour Hoffman (February 2014), it can be argued, acted as dramatic entry points to the depression, brilliance and loneliness that marked his acting, his private life and which affectively confirmed the tragedy of his death. The close-up of the celebrity’s face registers as a particularly strong affection-image, as ‘immobile unity’ combined with ‘intense expressive movements’ (Deleuze, 2005). For Deleuze (2005),

The face is this organ carrying plate of nerves which has sacrificed most of its global mobility and which gathers or expresses in a free way all kinds of tiny local movement which the rest of the body usually keeps hidden. (p. 90)

Immobile unity is particularly affecting in this case because it is a face that will now only ever be able to express in images and footage recorded before his death, a still past tense made intensely present.

Of course, the cultural or media context for sensing a close-up of a celebrity is that there is already written into the image something to be seen, felt and to be affected by. The celebrity close-up is mobilised within an affective structure manufactured by the promotions industry to make them appear emotionally real and available (Holmes, 2005; Rojek, 2001). For example, gossip magazines and entertainment channels readily employ the close-up of the celebrity to affectively signify their mental and physical well-being. While these intensive close-ups can of course be ‘read’ as artificial, promotional constructs, set within a commodity-driven marketplace, there is I would suggest, nonetheless, very often a ‘surplus’ of affect at work.

It is not just that in general terms the celebrity’s face leaks its phenomenological truth but that in this singular, affecting instant, a startling of-this-moment truth is being revealed – the ‘micromovements’ of the face exposing guilt, remorse, heartache, desire. More prosaically, we can sense these close-ups as an actualisation of the celebrity’s being-in-the-world, which simultaneously impresses upon our own embodied self. However, the level of impression is not just about generalisations – fans and consumers sharing the same affective response, like automatons carried by the ideology of intimacy (Nunn and Biressi, 2010). Rather, and to draw on Barthes (1982), the close-up may directly ‘wound me’, serve as the punctum or, ‘that accident which pricks me (but also bruises me, is poignant to me’) (pp. 26–27).

To return to the cluster of close-ups circulated of Philip Seymour Hoffman after his death, they had a particular powerful affect on me because I felt a deep and terrible connection between his demons and my own – his face became my face in a sensorial chain of recognition and misrecognition. I saw/see in Philip’s face a direct embodiment of my come-and-go depression, and in his eyes I find a crystal clear reflection of what I call my loneliness room (Redmond, 2014). I have rarely felt at home in my own skin, and alone even when in the company of friends and lovers, so Philip’s anguished face resonates strongly and intensely.

I encountered the death of Amy Whitehouse in a similar way. For me, she embodied a particularly transgressive and aggressive form of agency and empowerment, and yet she was also a conduit of/for suffering and misery in the face of betrayal and the pressures of conformity. When she sang of ‘I cannot play myself again, I should be my own best friend; Not fuck myself in the head with stupid men’, she draws attention to gender as performance and romantic love as wasted on pathetic masculinity. Her passion, then, was one of chaos and dissolution as resistant to order and unity. Her confessional song lyrics, and her confessing public appearances, are the discourses out of which opposition and refusal grow; they are sensed, they become embodied and they make me incensed too.

I would suggest, then, that to properly understand the way celebrities make sense-based meaning, one also needs then to recognise the role of auto-ethnography in the consumer/fans relationships with famed images. For example, I have written about the impact on me of Sam Taylor Wood’s photograph of Daniel Craig because of the way his wedding band activated a poignant affective memory that mine is long gone. In sensing the punctum of the photograph, I felt it missing from my finger (Redmond, 2014). Sensing celebrities passionately, then, is uniquely personal. We each have our own version of the passion play.

The celebrity passion play

Celebrity culture is a type of passion play: its meta-narrative and prevalent aesthetic devices often involve a celebrity rising to fame with an associated dedicated following or group of disciples. Settings of communion and worship take place as their fame grows, as their status rises to ever greater heights. This ascension scenario may take place in the sports arena, concert hall or cinema, or the new portals of communication and congregation, the social media. This exponential rise up the fame ladder is often followed by suffering and pain and a symbolic death, as the celebrity’s light recedes or destroys them. They age, they make bad choices, they get involved in crimes and misdemeanours and their fans desert them. Finally, there is the moment of resurrection, either through death and a retrospective that leads to symbolic immortality or a return to the heights of fame as their work again succeeds and (new and old) fans return to the holy fold.

This rise, fall and rise narrative very much resembles the Passion of Christ (Murdock, 1997) albeit with key differences. The Passion of Christ refers to the last few days of Jesus’ life including the Last Supper, his trial and execution by crucifixion and his resurrection. One can see these stages played out in the Passion of the Celebrity. An event moment will be seized upon by the media to stand in for the Last Supper: the celebrity will be surrounded by both his idolising friends and two-faced enemies and will be betrayed or let down in some way. Photographs and first-hand accounts of what has gone wrong for them will be leaked to the media. A Judas-figure will emerge. The fallen celebrity will then suffer the ordeal of the trial by the media with photographs and video footage showing them in a state of decline and moral collapse. Passion will be the fuel that represents them and denounces them. They metaphorically die, struggle to remain in the aura of the media unless it is to confirm their wretchedness. After a period of time, through the agencies and activities of rehabilitation, they are re-born again, are able to create and attract the love and passion of old and new fans alike. While ‘Celebrity culture is no substitute for religion … it is the milieu in which religious recognition and belonging are now enacted’ (Rojek, 2001: 97). Furthermore,

To the extent that organized religion has declined in the West, celebrity culture has emerged as one of the replacement strategies that promotes new orders of meaning and solidarity. As such, not-withstanding the role that some celebrities have played in destabilizing order, celebrity culture is a significant institution in the normative achievement of social integration. (p. 99)

Ulrich Beck (2010) argues that we live in a post-secular age where new forms of religion and spiritualism are on the rise and which focus on self-management and self-improvement through both the circulation and ingestion of healing mantras, and the call for calculated decision making in everyday life. In the post-secular age, the neo-liberal self is passionately invested in as both a combination of the spiritual and rational – where one looks to astrology and science to ground and atomise the liquid self. Celebrity culture sits at the heart of the post-secular age since its passion plays rest on this mixed potion – celebrities are neo-religious and neo-liberal vessels who draw us into their enchanted kingdoms.

One can read Mickey Rourke’s film star trajectory as the exact embodiment of the celebrity passion play, and The Wrestler (Aronofsky, 2008) his resurrection moment.Touted as being the next Robert de Niro, Rourke experienced a meteoric rise as an actor and screen idol. Self-grandeur, a questionable politics, alleged misogyny, and poor film choices dented his progression as a renowned Method actor and a formidable Hollywood star. He suffered greatly and his anguish and pain became a passionate signifier of his fall.

Rourke then turned against fame and film acting, said they were fake, took up amateur boxing, had a car crash, underwent botched cosmetic surgery and was involved in accusations of battery and assault of his then wife, Carrie Otis. His film roles dried up, his Hollywood mansion was repossessed and he spent time in rehab and jail. This was all played out in the eye of the media where his suffering was constituted and commented upon with headlines such as ‘Oscars No-hoper Mickey Rourke’, ‘Rourke’s Adrift’, ‘Wife’s Smack for Love Row Mickey’, ‘Bad boy Rourke Thumped Wife’ and ‘Rourke’s Shame’.

It was his appearance in The Wrestler (Aronofsky, 2008) as Randy ‘The Ram’ Robinson that fully resurrected his career, winning him the 2009 Golden Globe award and British Academy of Film and Television Arts (BAFTA) award, for best actor, alongside an Oscar nomination.

The Wrestler can be read as the carnal embodiment of Rourke’s own career: Rourke/Randy experience the same sort of rise and fall experiential celebrity trajectory, with both being led by passion and the passion of suffering. Aronofsky has noted that Rourke was explicitly chosen for the part because of his close resemblance to the character. Rourke’s life mirrored the story line of the film.

Summarised briefly, Rourke/Randy is a has-been professional wrestler who had achieved celebrity status in the 1980s. Making ends meet by wrestling at weekends in back street promotions, and working at a supermarket weekdays, he agrees to a 20th anniversary re-match against his most notable opponent, ‘The Ayatollah’ (played by Ernest Miller).

This re-match involves Rourke intensifying his training regime and overcoming various obstacles. Rourke/Randy takes steroids to add muscle to his physique, and he subsequently suffers a heart attack that requires a bypass operation. He carries on against the odds and against his Doctor’s advice.

Complicating subplots include his desire to reunite with his estranged daughter and a hopeful romance with a club stripper, who Rourke tells near the end of the film that he belongs in the ring where his fans adore him. The anniversary wrestling match at the end of the film has Rourke/Randy clearly struggling with heart pain, climbing on to the top rope of the ring to land his signature wrestling move, a diving head butt called the ‘Ram Jam’. In tears, Rourke/Randy is seen saluting the crowd before he leaps, a metaphoric freeze-frame of victorious adulation at the exact moment that death may consume him.

The parallels to Rourke’s career and to his own sense of celebrity are obvious. Like Randy, Rourke had fame and adulation and had lost it. Rourke’s drinking and womanising mirror Randy’s, as does his reputation for being head strong and difficult to work with. The steroids that Randy takes to bulk up are a carnal echo of the cosmetic surgery that Rourke had to have to heal and beautify his face. The low-rent part-time jobs that Randy has mirrored the acting bit parts that Rourke had begun playing. The chance to come back, to regain celebrity status, to do what he loves most, to be loved again, is given to Rourke as it is to Randy.

Through Randy, Rourke can fully embody the passion that lies at the heart of his star image. Randy is led by the heart, by emotion; in scene after scene we see him suffer, express that suffering, while embracing the passion that defines him. Suffering seems to find him and through it he gets to rise again, to find meaning in his life. Not only is Rourke passionately re-embodied through Randy but also the cultural logic of passion soaks the film text from start to finish. It is through the passionate suffering of Randy that Rourke will regain his celebrity status, the adoration of fans and critics, who can again admire his acting skill. While Randy dies at the end of the film, Rourke lives on, his success in the role secured through acting awards and further major film roles. The Wrestler could only have been made in a culture honed out of passionate encounters and engagements. And yet, there is more than passion alone in the arena of celebrity culture.

Apollo and Dionysus in the age of liquid celebrity

Nietzsche argues that meaningful art is only produced when what he defines as the opposing qualities of the Apollonian and the Dionysian come together in holistic union and synthesis. Apollonian forces can be defined through their restraint and reason and which bring structure and form to art. By contrast, Dionysian impulses are marked by their frenzy of feeling and vitality – they create the passion needed for artistic creation. Taken together, argues Nietzsche, art becomes form and substance and is able to communicate meaningfully with those in society. Nietzsche argues that in Ancient Greece this synthesis allowed the particularly sensitive populace to protect themselves from the full reality of suffering since art’s reliance on images and dreams acted as a buffer to real world sensitivities. The art in Ancient Greece was passionate, but this passion was mediated through the enchanted forms they were set in.

One can argue that contemporary celebrity culture operates in a similar way. In the age of liquid modernity where ‘togetherness has been dismantled’ (Bauman, 2000: 21), and social and emotional bonds have been largely rendered ephemeral, people are particularly susceptible to suffering, to anguish and the pains of alienation. They long for connection and are implored that passion is the answer. Celebrities become the images and dreams of the modern age, steeped in passion, wet with aesthetics that are decidedly experiential, as sufferers suffering, but still held in the grip of liquid modern conditions.

And yet, passion gets out, moves from the image and the dream into the affecting activities of fans and audiences. Passion lets intensities out and allows liberating emotions to escape, escape, escape.