Toxic Celebrity Final
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Toxic Celebrity by Allison Maplesden MA, BA Submitted in fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Deakin University July 2015 Acknowledgements I would like to acknowledge my supervision team: my Principal Supervisor David Marshall, for your always encouraging support and your astute guidance, thank you. To my Associate Supervisors Kim Toffoletti, and Deb Verhoeven, thank you, for lending your knowledge and your critical insights I would also like to acknowledge Robyn Ficknerski and Deakin Research Services for their kind support, and administration of information and workshops Thank you Moya Hannan at Deakin University Student Association and Pearl McNally at the Equity and Diversity Unit Deakin I would like to thank Anita Brady for her kind advice and encouragement I would also like to thank Philippa Drayton for her input and advice copy- editing this thesis Finally, I would like to thank Mel Maplesden, Brent Drysdale, Steven Maplesden, Sarah Titheridge, Robyn Kenealy, Johanna Calvi-Freeman, Claire Harris, Grace C. Russell, Jo Maplesden, Cath Lealand-Maplesden, Geoff Lealand, Hamish Pearson, Frances Maplesden, and Travis Lealand, all of whom have given me support, advice, a bed, or a break at one time or another Abstract This thesis analyses the representation of celebrities who are popularly described as train wrecks or as famous for being famous, and argues that these celebrities present an emerging discourse of Toxic Celebrity. Denigrated female celebrities are represented in popular culture as aberrant and are imagined to be poisoned by fame as well as poisonous to culture, and as indicative of poisonous aspects of contemporary culture. Toxic Celebrity is a discursive formation which produces young female celebrities who are imagined to embody particular denigrated behaviours and lifestyles to such an extent that their disgrace and perceived lack of cultural value becomes the dominant trope of their celebrity. This thesis argues that this perceived lack in terms of professional or artistic validity authorises an intense focus on the personal excesses of the Toxic Celebrity. This discourse of personal excess and appreciable lack is a dichotomy which works as an overdetermination of anxieties about the stability of normative constructs of gender, class, and race in contemporary Western culture. Yet the phrase famous for being famous is also itself excessive: A doubling of fame which illuminates Toxic Celebrity as a productive and active location of power. Contents Introduction 1 Chapter 1: Literature Review 24 Chapter 2: Famous Magazine 86 Chapter 3: Toxic Celebrity Objects 130 Chapter 4: Toxic Celebrity and Discourses of 163 Cultural Reproduction Chapter 5: Toxic Celebrity and Discourses of 201 Mental Health and Self-Help Chapter 6: Toxic Celebrity and Discourses of 254 Class and Race Conclusion 293 References 309 List of Figures Figure 1: Britney Spears Tastes Fear and Fascination in the Music Video for Toxic 2 Figure 2: Paparazzi Photograph Young Hot Hollywood (Britney Spears and Paris Hilton) 38 Figure 3: Britney Spears with Bleakly Ironic T-Shirt 42 Figure 4: Vogue April 2014 Cover, Controversial for Featuring Famous for Being Famous 51 Kim Kardashian and Her Partner Kanye West Figure 5: Simple Life Promotional Still Juxtaposes Signifiers of Farming Life with City Brats 54 Figure 6: Celebutante Brenda Frazier with Movie Star Joan Crawford 65 Figure 7: Club Kid Celebutante Lisa Edelstein 66 Figure 8: Anna Nicole Smith in Still from The Anna Nicole Show 70 Figure 9: Famous Good and Bad Girls (October 21, 2013) 90 Figure 10: Emotional cellulite (September 9th 2013) 96 Figure 11: Miley and January face off (May 20, 2013) 104 Figure. 12: Kim Kardashian Walks Out (16 September 2013) 111 Figure 13: Miley Dumped by Text (9 September 2013) 122 Figure 14: Amanda Bynes Tweets “I’m Not Crazy” 132 Figure 14: Promotional Image From Red Light District’s 1 Night in Paris 137 Figure 15: Stupid Spoiled Whore Video Playset 139 Figure 16: Amanda Bynes Approved of this Image of Herself, Putting it on her Twitter Feed 150 Figure 17: Kim Kardashian Makeup Selfie Demonstrates the Work of Being Looked at 174 Figure 18: Paper Magazine: Break the Internet Kim Kardashian 177 Figure 19: Kim Kardashian Takes a Selfie in #KimsDatastash 190 Figure 20: Kim Kardashian: Famous Person, in #KimsDataStash 192 Figure 21: Amy Winehouse Performing Live 216 Figure 22: Amy Winehouse Performs at the Grammys in 2008 218 Figure 23: Shrine to Amy Winehouse in Camden Following Her Death 232 Figure 24: Fan Comments on Media Coverage of Amy Winehouse’s Death in Note Left at 233 Shrine Figure 25: Lindsay Lohan’s Manicure, Interpreted as Indicative of Her State of Mind 245 Figure 26: Still From Britney Spears Music Video for Piece of Me 261 Figure 27: Kerry Katona on the TV Show Good Morning, Responding Intervention Ambush 265 Figure 28: Rihanna Wears Contrasting Styles in Pour It Up Music Video 276 Figure 29: Rihanna Throws Bills at the Viewer in Pour It Up Music Video 277 1 Introduction The figure of the overexposed, denigrated female celebrity, or Toxic Celebrity, seems almost ever-present in contemporary media. Mega-famous despite a superfluity of personal and professional failings, her continued visibility is routinely posed as baffling and vexing, yet this figure seems to show no signs of disappearing anytime soon. This thesis does not promise to solve such a perplexing problem, at least not in the sense of working to rationalise the figure of the Toxic Celebrity, or to iron out this kink in the contemporary media landscape. It does, however, make sense of the success of this failing figure, detailing rather than flattening out the complexities of this mediated construction by analysing the media spaces and mediated events where Toxic Celebrity comes into focus, and contextualising its functions within the contemporary Western cultural climate. In this thesis I formulate the term Toxic Celebrity to describe the discourse that constructs and makes sense of denigrated female celebrities in contemporary popular media. Media often label such (usually young) female celebrities with terms like train wreck, hot mess,orfamous for being famous. Toxic Celebrity is a term which encapsulates this contemporary language of personal crisis and cultural disease. It also references the 2004 hit song Toxic (Karlsson et al.) recorded by Britney Spears, who is one of the case studies in this thesis. With lyrics like “you’re toxic, I’m slipping under”, Toxic alludes to the combination of fascination and anxiety which characterises 2 contemporary media treatment of celebrities like Spears, and Toxic is an example of the ways in which celebrities frequently play into the contradictory framing of their celebrity. Figure 1: Britney Spears Tastes Fear and Fascination in the Music Video for Toxic The mediation of Toxic Celebrity works to articulate shifting understandings of what is culturally valued, including which personal qualities are or should be valued. The conceptualisation of cultural value as fundamental and universally held is critiqued in this thesis, which critically explores Toxic Celebrity as a construction around which value is verified, which she demonstrates by embodying its inverse; the debasement of value. This thesis examines, through close textual analysis of media texts, the various conditions under which the phenomenal visibility of the Toxic Celebrity in popular culture is imagined to contrast with her perceived lack of value. In addition, in 3 this thesis I contend that the Toxic Celebrity is at times positioned to disrupt established systems of value, and to expose ideological contradictions. This thesis was in part inspired by a special issue of the journal Genders, which surveyed the changing contemporary landscape of female celebrity. In the introduction, Diane Negra and Su Holmes ask, What is it with female celebrities lately? While the good girl/bad girl categories of a ludicrously dichotomised cultural script of femininity have long been in operation, these poles now seem to be moving further apart in a celebrity landscape peopled by remote cinema goddesses and overexposed tabloid “trash” (Negra and Holmes 2008) This thesis contends that the figure of the overexposed denigrated celebrity is now an established figure in contemporary Western popular culture, and the combination of cultural scripts and media practices which Negra and Holmes outline together constitute a discourse that is coming into coherence. I argue that while this emerging discourse is preoccupied primarily with young female celebrities, it is ultimately concerned with the relationship between femininity and visibility more generally in contemporary Western culture. Toxic Celebrity articulates key aspects of contemporary identity, specifically those of contemporary femininity, and the value placed on idealised iterations of femininity. This thesis argues that the Toxic Celebrity’s dramatic failure or refusal to represent an ideal feminine self, and yet to also continue to occupy public space, reflects both a wider cultural desire for, and a fear of, the erosion of the traditional boundaries of idealised femininity within contemporary 4 Western culture. This thesis makes an original contribution to existing academic debate on celebrity by exploring critically the conditions of idealised femininity in which the Toxic Celebrity emerges. It examines the structures of power which produce the expectation of an ideal self within the complex and often contradictory