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In "The Assembly Line of Greatness" article by Gamson there are 2 different types of celebrities that can be identified. Someone who is talented and above average from the rest will become celebrities and use the images given to them as things to admire and to hold as a standard for other people. Other celebrities are celebrities who in any other conditions would not be famous but were made to be. In the article I have chosen I think that it illustrates how Dr. Fauci is a little bit of both of these. Dr. Fauci is a very accomplished Medical Professional who is the director of the NIAID who is doing great work to keep the United States of America healthy. This makes him an accomplished and respectable person who deserves to get recognition. However before the pandemic no one knew who Dr. Fauci was and he was not someone who got publicity at all until the pandemic. This makes him fit the second celebrity definition where the media system made him famous but he was not necessarily a celebrity worthy person before. When it comes to the society we live in, people who become celebrities are more often than not are people who have done something outrageous to get the medias attention. Sure Dr. Fauci's job is important and respectable but when it comes to being a celebrity he doesn't do anything that completely outrageous. But with the pandemic and political discourse happening it shoved Dr. Fauci into the spotlight which in turn made him a lot more famous. This shows how Dr. Fauci illustrates both of the types of celebrities in "The Assembly Line of Greatness"

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As Coronavirus Spreads, So Does Thirst for Dr. Anthony Fauci

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Kellner describes in

"Donald Trump And The Politics Of The Spectacle" that Obama "became a  master of media spectacle, blending politics and performance in carefully orchestrated

media spectacles." This to me is shown in this article because of the feeling of being inspired in this article. This article taps into the performance aspects of what Kellner is trying to say. There are photos of celebration and happiness that comes from the political discourse that had just transpired and is still happening today. This shows me how Vice is trying to play into the duality that Kellner is talking about by doing pieces on both the intense political discourse and resulting happiness of this election. This article specifically seems to be very cheerful and joyful.

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Almost immediately after the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden Saturday morning, giving him enough electoral votes to clinch the 2020 presidential election, impromptu parties popped up in streets and parks of several major cities.

And many of the celebrations lasted into the night and the early morning hours of Sunday.

After four days of uncertainty because of a slower than usual ballot-counting process, people across the country turned out to honor Biden and Vice President-elect Kamala Harris' historic win on the unseasonably warm November day. Biden is only the fifth candidate in U.S. history to defeat an incumbent U.S. president in the past century, and Kamala will become the country's first woman and woman of color vice-president.

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This Is How US Cities Celebrated Biden's Win-And Trump's Loss

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Almost immediately after the Associated Press called Pennsylvania for Joe Biden Saturday morning, giving him enough electoral votes to clinch the 2020 presidential election, impromptu parties popped up in streets and parks of several major cities. And many of the celebrations lasted into the night and the early morning hours of Sunday.

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The reason people still want to go look at wax figures of celebrities in museums instead of seeing the real person I think lies with the reading by Horton and Whol's called "Mass Communication and Para-Social Interactions." Fans form one-sided intimate relationships with celebrity personas. This means that people do not need to meet the actually celebrity in order to feel close to them because it is not the person they are obsessed with, it is the persona. So people going to Madame Tussauds makes a lot of sense because people are in love with the persona so this could excite them just as much as seeing the real person since they are in love with the persona showed to the whole world. Fans might even find themselves wanting to meet the wax figure more than the real person because a real person could be different than the persona that the fan fell in love with while a wax figure could not go against the persona that a fan has built.

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This post reminds me of the marketing techniques described in "Trump's 'Reality' Hustle by Hearn. The reading states that "The “reality” rules of self-promotion are simple: craft a notable persona, say what-

ever will set you apart and garner attention, break the rules of the game wherever possible, choose your message, and repeat it clearly and often." Drake has created a notable persona within the rap industry. Drake does not break rules very often at all but this article specifically exemplifies the act of choosing a message and reapeating i clearly and often. Drake;s earings represent the message and then Drake proceeds to enact the reptition section of this satement by posting a series of photos that have the earring present and there for everyone to see. This as well as all the other articles Ive written about shows a certain awareness that Vice has to the marketing tricks of celebrities and makes the choice to notify their consumer crowd of these tactics.

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Drake Won't Stop Posting Pictures of His Newly Pierced Ears

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The man has some fancy new earrings, and he wants everyone to know it!!!

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Chrissy Teigen's breast implant removal can be interpreted as a pseudo-event as described in Boorstin's "The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America." A pseudo event is an event that has 4 requirements which are, that it needs to be planned, its immediate purpose is to be reported on, it is designed to have more than one interpretation and finally to create its own narrative. To me all of these guidelines are met in Chrissy Teigen's breast implant removal. This event was planned out because first she would have to plan an appointment and consultation with a doctor in order to get this done and also she knew that the media would find out that she got a breast reduction from either her saying that she was going to get it done or by the paparazzi taking pictures of her smaller breast and making a lot of money off of it. The best decision would be to release it on her own and make money off of it for herself. This event was immediately reported on as soon as she announced she was getting a breast reduction. This decision was well informed for Chrissy Teigen's life because she wanted to do it for her own health and safety but such a statement in the community we live in today that consists of high beauty standards, this post immediately lead to many diverging interpretations, whether it be her doing it for her health and safety or her spitting in the face of beauty standards. This story definitely builds its own narrative as people began to speculate about the reason for her breast reduction and write stories trying to find underlying reasons as to why she would want a breast implant removal for any reason other than her health and safety.

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Chrissy Teigen attends the 2020 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 09, 2020 in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images/AFP.

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Chrissy Teigen Says She's Getting Her 'Boobs Out.' We Asked a Plastic Surgeon What This Means.

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Chrissy Teigen attends the 2020 Vanity Fair Oscar Party hosted by Radhika Jones at Wallis Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts on February 09, 2020 in Beverly Hills, California. Photo by Frazer Harrison/Getty Images/AFP.

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This article reminded me of the description of the Endorsement Industry in the reading "Economy of Celebrity" by Turner and "Unwatched Life is Not Worth Living" by Gamson. This article seems like its selling the fact that celebrities go to In and Out but in reality is criticizing the celebrities for taking pictures with the In and Out burger and converse in order to seem ordinary. In Economy of celebrity the Endorsement Industry is the industry at which sponsors and other product lines look use celebrities as a vessel for their product. In and Out and all the celebrities at the Oscars understand their relationship because In and Out benefits off of the Endorsement Industry side of this relationship and celebrities get to take pictures with the "animal style" burger that makes them look Ordinary to create a deeper connection with fans by seeming "ordinary."

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At left, photo via the author; at right, Getty Images.

Considering the industry's biggest bite on its biggest night.

It's territory as well-trod as the path up to the Griffith Observatory (you know, La La Land, the infamously not Best Picture winner of 2016) to talk about Hollywood, the physical place, as the ultimate manifestation of high- and low-brow contrast. Oscar night really puts this cliche in its sharpest relief. Where were you-perhaps right here, right now!-when you learned that the Dolby Theater, venue of Hollywood's Biggest Night, sits in a large shopping mall just an escalator ride away from a California Pizza Kitchen and a Skechers store? Every time, this blows my mind, though it is so exactly Hollywood. This year, from my friend's balcony just a few blocks uphill, I saw the post-show searchlights sear into the full moon sky, cast up from lamps located, at best guess, on a roof somewhere between the Cabo Wabo Cantina and the Hard Rock Cafe. Some would gaze upon this Hollywood Boulevard scene and feel inspired to say, "that's showbiz, baby." I think, more specifically, "that's...how showbiz babies are made."

Hollywood's glamour, of course, hardly exists in the exterior of these neon lowlands. The idea we have of "the industry" as consumers of its image all happens on the inside, insulated between the Dolby Theater and the Annenberg Center, shuttled between them by Escalades busy burning tomorrow's smog as they idle in the awards-permit-only zones that block off Hollywood & Highland. I know I'm a corny transplant, but it's still all so jarring to me-that optical fission between the most elite glitz we have access to through our TVs, and the boggling, fluorescent regularity of Hollywood's commercial district. What outrageously ripe an opportunity this offers for the lucky star pursuing relatability on this otherwise gilded night. So much normal stuff just beyond the edge of the red carpet, all right there for the Instagram-taking.

That brought me to the auspiciously located Hollywood location of the In-N-Out burger chain. I'd been sent to investigate the Oscars night scene, to nab the scoop on any post-win burger celebrations which have become such a tradition of celebs just doin' regular guy stuff, after all of that simply exhausting famous guy awards stuff. Just a couple of blocks south of the Dolby, if their chauffeur takes Sunset, it's exactly on the way from getting a winner's statuettes engraved to the exclusive Vanity Fair afters. If there was an In-N-Out drive thru in all of Los Angeles for me to stalk, feverishly snapping zoomed in pics of potentially famous hands emerging like whack-a-moles from the backseat windows of Escalades in an attempt to figure out by their jewelry who just ordered fries and a milkshake, this would certainly be the one. Who was going to show up and win tonight, for most relatable celebrity?

The awards season burger run stake-out is a fairly recent stargazing site in the constellation of Oscar night lore, codified into tradition sometime after Hilary Swank hit up the AstroBurger by the Paramount lot after winning Best Actress for Million Dollar Baby in 2005. That was pre-Instagram, back when the awards for best performances on screen ended there at the Oscars, not to continue ceaselessly into the night via social feeds. Now, it's a post-awards rite of passage to get your hands on a double-double, as Brie Larson did in Chuck Taylors (the hamburgers of shoes).

Like declaring a voyage to Disneyland after winning the World Series, going to In-N-Out after the Oscars is a cartoonish everyman's symbol of celebratory Californian consumption after winning an elite entertainment contest. It's one that brings the winner back down to earth with the rest of us watching along as you have the best night of your life. It's a sideshow performance of you-and-me-ness, and we love to see it: a total fantasy fairytale, punctuated by a drive thru five-dollar feast. At this point, it now seems almost like an unspoken requirement, like how politicians have to get beers with random people on the campaign trail. Are you even a human being if you don't celebrate your gilded trophy for extraordinary cinema with a hamburger? What kind of bordering-on-inhuman elitist cyborg scum would be satisfied with only celebrating the award of a lifetime with Wolfgang Puck's signature molded chocolate Oscar-shaped candy treat?

It looked like things could have been different, though, this year, as Hollywood bumbled through yet another one, lodged deeply in an era of its own high-key reckoning, with mostly increased buzzword usage and mild gestures to show for it. I wondered if this tradition would be such a thing in an awards season marked by the wave of menus going plant-based-Puck, whose catering HQ is on floor five of the mall (two floors up from Dave & Busters, in case you were wondering), catered his twenty-sixth Academy Awards with an exclusively vegan pre-show hors d'oeuvres round, followed by a 70% plant-based and 30% responsibly sourced animal-stuff dinner at the Governor's Ball. Hours before, Julia Butters, of Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood, brought a turkey sandwich to the red carpet in a crystal pink purse because "she doesn't like some of the food there." Relatable, the people retweeted. It me, et cetera.

Thing is, she's ten. What were the adults gonna do?

It was a bit after 8 pm, and as the Oscars headed into big boy award time, I was mapping out a plan to park my Prius at the In-N-Out overflow lot and investigate-it has perfect views to who's entering the drive thru, and even if I couldn't see who was beyond the backseat tinted windows, I could count the Escalades with awards permits on them to give me some kind of data point. Of course, I'd get a burger and scope the joint, too, but it seemed unlikely any star would go through the trouble of waiting in the indoor line. I begged my friend, the one with the Hollywood apartment, to come with me, as I suddenly envisioned my likely reality of sitting cold and alone for definitely almost two hours outside of a fast food drive thru. After some bargaining, I struck a deal with my sidekick, contingent on me buying her a double-double. "It will help my piece," I pleaded. She sighed. "Okay. If it's for your art, I'll go."

I looked up from my zoomed-in satellite view of the parking lot on my phone's map to watch the announcement for Best Actor on the screen. That's when my mindset shifted completely, when Joaquin Phoenix took the stage to collect his Oscar for being The Joker. In fact, he rocked my expectations to their core.
"We go into the natural world, and we plunder it for its resources. We feel entitled to artificially inseminate a cow. And when she gives birth, we steal her baby, even though her cries of anguish are unmistakable. And then we take her milk that's intended for her calf and we put it in our coffee and our cereal."

My god. After this potent beard-stroker, whom among us would dare find themselves in line tonight for a Stolen Mother's Milk-Shake or an Inseminated Beef Sandwich? Suddenly, the question at the crux of my Oscars night burger quest was completely rerouted. I now wondered, what would win out this year: performative relatability, or carnivorous guilt?

I parked in the lot to scout out my answer, and instead learned what it's really like at the In-N-Out on Sunset Boulevard after the Oscars: Drunk mid-thirties Hollywood bros in tuxes attempting to unlock Lime scooters outside and failing. Chauffeured college-aged children of studio execs in repurposed prom dresses (I can only assume) soberly post-game inside. Four to five sharply dressed, grizzly-bearded older men walk across the patio and in response to every one of them I shoot up and yell at my friend, "IS THAT AL PACINO?" It was never Al Pacino. Two absolutely too wasted to drive middle-aged men in suits screech up in a BMW next to us, get out, knock on my window, and ask my friend and I what we're going to order and if they'll see us inside. She is high off an edible, becomes very skittish about this, and crawls into the backseat to hide. I enter the In-N-Out moments later to see them chatting up two other young non-Oscar going women trying to eat their burgers in peace. One of the men's number is called, and he displays his fry-strewn tray in front of my face. "JEALOUS?" he screeches. I replied something to the effect of well, no, because I had just ordered my own, and I'm like, only three orders behind him. He staggered off, defeated.

I cruised the perimeter, looking to chat up anyone on the job on this peculiar Hollywood holiday. "In-N-Out! On Oscars night, am I right! You must have crazy stories?" According to the employees, it's actually a quieter night than your usual Sunday. That's mostly because the hullabaloo of closed-off streets makes navigating to the Sunset location a put off for most pedestrians. All the traffic cones everywhere. I had already ordered my own double-double animal style and chocolate milkshake when we first went inside an hour before, but now it was time to investigate the drive thru. I had questions for those staffers. Plus, my friend finally got hungry and I owed her one.

"Have you seen any celebrities?" I asked the paper-hatted teen serving the drive thru.

"Yeah! The director of Thor! I forget his name. Oh, and Russell Crowe."

"Tonight?!" That could be exciting, since that would be Taika Waititi, who had just won Best Adapted Screenplay for Jojo Rabbit, and who had reminded the millions watching that Hollywood was built on Tongva, Tataviam, and Chumash land.

"Oh, no, not tonight. Just like, in general, before today. It's Hollywood. You know." We both nodded and he took my friend's order.

Over the course of my couple hour perch (for journalism), I noticed that I wasn't the only one scouting the scene. There were a couple young looking dudes in tuxes that were just, you know, chilling, looking around with an air of waiting for something to happen. Whether it was a text with an after party invite, or a celeb sighting, I'm unsure. It was certainly more a destination for stargazers than the stars themselves, as the everybodies in line would do the is-that-guy-famous? squint any time the door swung open with another group in black tie attire. The reality is, actually going to the local In-N-Out after the Oscars is mostly a tradition for those in the balcony sections-your ABC people, your studio folks, your Academy members, et cetera-not the stars on the floor.

Those shots of Brie Larson or Reese Witherspoon or Priyanka Chopra or any other stunning celeb pulling the Effortless Cool Girl Card as they clutch a burger in their gowns? They all happen at the Vanity Fair afterparty, where every year for the last several years, the drive thru is brought to them. After the sit-down Governor's Ball supper, the stars roll up to the Annenberg, drunk and probably craving that Salt Fat Acid Heat vibe, where everyone knows what to expect. That would be the In-N-Out truck, hired to park outside every year, ready and able to dish out thousands of burgers to sloshy celebs who suddenly find Wolfgang's smoked salmon statuettes and vegan spring rolls unable to sufficiently support all of the champagne this deep into the night. Which seemed about right to me. What else is the most perfect capstone to the performance of the Academy turning plant-based to make a statement, so then Vanity Fair can say to its invitees, "You can have a little inseminated cow, as a treat"? Of course, Joaquin left Hollywood for Koreatown, where he could get a vegan burger at plant-based Monty's Good Burger.

I enjoyed my meal while sitting in my car and wondering, just like I do on any other night I find myself staring into space in that particular part of town, if any of this matters. The day before, the youth faction of Extinction Rebellion staged a die in at the Hollywood sign, on that same popular path to the Observatory. "There's no Hollywood on a dead planet," they chanted. "Will Hollywood declare a climate emergency at the Oscars tonight?" Later on Instagram, they applauded Joaquin's speech and the win of Parasite, but the answer, obviously, was no. The total impact was that Oscar guests enjoyed vegetarian canapés inside a ballroom while their drivers idled outside for hours in 14 MPG Escalades. There's no real net-morality equation that applies to anything relating to this town. A film about capitalism's inescapable game of brutality won Best Picture, then had its own after party at Soho House. Wolfgang went plant-based at 9 pm, so In-N-Out could sling burgers at midnight. Joaquin said "inseminated beef" out loud and I still ate some and liked it.

After my last straw disappointment of seeing yet another old dapper man who was not Al Pacino, I decided to call it a night. It was after 11 pm; the Governor's Ball had probably wrapped, and if any Oscars attendee was hungry before heading to Annenberg, they would have driven through by now. Since Hollywood Boulevard was still blocked off with traffic cone barricades, I took the longer way home down Sunset as the In-N-Out rumbled uneasily in my stomach. I drifted past the corporate office buildings where all the people who I'd actually seen at the fast food chain would show up to work tomorrow, and I wondered what the stars were up to. It was easy to imagine them in front of the burger truck, jokingly looking over their shoulder to see if Joaquin was judging, or whispering that they were still hungry after the catering, as they waited in line. Maybe they felt shy taking the post-awards burger selfies this year and the guilt won out. Maybe they suddenly felt weird about it all-the movie business, morals, meat, meaning. At the end of the night, if that were to be true, wouldn't that the most relatable content of all? To exist here in Hollywood, and feel both In, N Out of all of this at the same time?
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An Oscars Night at the Hollywood In-N-Out Parking Lot

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At left, photo via the author; at right, Getty Images. Considering the industry's biggest bite on its biggest night. It's territory as well-trod as the path up to the Griffith Observatory (you know, La La Land, the infamously not Best Picture winner of 2016) to talk about Hollywood, the physical place, as the ultimate manifestation of high- and low-brow contrast.

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Just from the title you can see that this article directly relates to the reading "Unwatched Life is Not Worth Living" by Gamson. I found this artcle to be extremely interesting because this is the first time I have seen any news platform address this behavior of celebrities trying to make themselves seem normal. This article shows the parallel behaviors to what the reading describes. Gamson believes that seeming more ordinary makes celebrities ideas more valuable since now we as the consumers can find a more meaningful connection with them. The article states that celebrities are doing " a PR spin on "authenticity" invented after the global financial crisis to bridge the obvious and ever-widening gulf between the celebs and the plebs by convincing us we’re the same, actually. " this to me shows that both Gamson and the author of this article recognize that the reason celebrities participate in this behavior is to create a connection to the consumer to make the consumer and the celebrities lives more "relatable" or "ordinary."

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK.

As I watched Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Kimmel interview each other about wallpaper for almost ten minutes, I thought to myself: 'I feel nothing. Less than nothing, in fact; I have negative feeling. Feeling has been drawn from my body and spat out, like a poisonous venom.' Every time a blonde supermodel bravely opens up about her love of a global fast food chain, a deep and dreadful sense of boredom washes over me, like a kind of death. Whenever James Corden wears a shit polo shirt on television I can feel my organs failing.

In the past, celebrities were strange, faraway creatures with unclear beliefs, intimidating speaking voices and and charisma that entered the room like a bottle of smashed perfume. Now, we know too much. The undercurrent of every late-night talk show appearance, cover story, social media post and award acceptance speech is "relatability" - a PR spin on "authenticity" invented after the global financial crisis to bridge the obvious and ever-widening gulf between the celebs and the plebs by convincing us we're the same, actually. We've heard their daily routines, we've seen their toilets in the background of their bathroom selfies and we've watched them do burpees on Instagram live. The spell is broken.

"Celebrity culture is burning", declared the New York Times ' art section a few weeks ago, rejecting A-list America's recent efforts to boost morale during COVID-19 - Gal Gadot and friends doing a cloying rendition of "Imagine", Ryan Reynolds sitting in a barn, imploring America to "#PlankTheCurve" and so on. Relatability doesn't count for much in a crisis, it seems. But did it ever?

THE BIRTH OF THE RELATABLE CELEBRITY

As the world economy crashed in symbiosis with the rise of social media, a new audience emerged: one that was broke, depressed and online. Self-made celebrities - who were also broke, depressed and online - began to occupy more of our time and attention. Influencers took over reality TV, former reality TV stars took up politics. Jobs, prospects and sanity fell off a cliff-edge. We plugged the holes by live-blogging our frustrations and traumas, hoping for the balm of having some of them mirrored back. Somewhere in this great pivot to voyeurism, the glory - the fun - of fame lost its currency. Celebrities having public breakdowns and racking up DUIs became sad and shameful. Aspiration surpassed admiration as the nature of popular entertainment turned its attention from impossible fantasy to the banal realities of those left unscathed by the crash. If people escaped the Great Depression through the formidable footwork of Fred Astaire and Ginger Roberts, we escaped the financial crash watching millionaire families eat big salads in athleisure.

In a way, it was a necessary change. Celebrity culture in the 2000s was rapacious and desperately cruel, with very little humanity to balance it out. So, as celebrities moved online along with everyone and everything else, the instant access gave way to a certain degree of transparency on their terms. Celebrities have anxiety, we learned. They struggle with their body image, they fritter away the hours replying to egg accounts on Twitter, they use dating apps. They are, at heart, just like us.

Unfortunately, the people who needed to hear that most continue to publish six news stories a day about Adele's weight, while the rest of us are treated to performances such as "contrary to my slim figure and modelling career I actually love carbs", "I was weird at school" and Chrissy Teigen.

WHY IS THIS STILL HAPPENING PLEASE, IT'S 2020

My best guess is that "relatability" is a safe bet for today's celebrities. We're all constantly vying for their attention, and it's worse now that we might actually get it. This false sense of intimacy has led to an over-reliance on them to embody our values, opinions and visions of integrity, because no one in charge of anything seems to, and when they don't we spend a week dragging them to hell. When licking a donut and saying "I hate America" embroils you in a controversy spanning national pride and the obesity epidemic, it's better to tread lightly and stick to tepid banter about texting. We're as much to blame as they are, but the charade has gone too far. For the most part, celebrities just want their humanity recognised, and we just want them not to do stuff like claim Ebola is a form of population control or covertly set up a fracking empire. It's not hard.

The entire point of celebrities is that they are, crucially, not like other people. There's something special about them that justifies why they are rich and famous and the rest of us just sit around all day thinking up viral tweets about them. Why would I want a celebrity to be anything like me? That's what influencers are for. I actively want celebrities to be completely unlike me, better than me - or at least to act like it. Otherwise, why do they deserve to be a celebrity at all? I wouldn't expect an athlete to pretend to be out of breath after running to catch the bus just to make me feel better about myself. If being so normal is all it takes, why aren't I a celebrity? If I wanted to hear moneyed white women oversharing about their bowel movements and how often they fall down the stairs I'd simply go to Hampstead Ladies Pond.

I want peculiar celebrities, annoying celebrities, celebrities who aren't so desperate to appear ordinary they spend £300 on a grey T-shirt from the Normal Guy Store For Normal Guys. I want celebrities who are so out of touch it doesn't even occur to them that they have anything to overcompensate for. I want them to tweet deranged statements regarding their own genius, call their children " X Æ A-12 Musk" and dismiss getting shot in the stomach mid-interview by saying "it was not a significant bullet". At least they're being themselves.

When Madonna posted that sombre video of herself naked in a bath full of rose petals the other week and called COVID-19 the "great equalizer", I was thrilled. Not because of what she said, which is stupid, but because the entire display was so disconnected from any accepted form of reality that I had no choice but to respect it. 'Thank god,' I thought to myself, 'a real celebrity.'

THE TWO TYPES OF RELATABILITY: INHERENT RELATABILITY VS FARCICAL RELATABILITY

There's a big difference between someone begging it on Graham Norton because they have an album out and someone who became someone through the sheer force of their personality. The latter is "inherent relatability", and refers to celebrities who are equally famous for who they are as what they do. It's a rare quality coveted by the entertainment industry, but typically only found in (approx) three reality TV stars per franchise. Gemma Collins, Charlotte Crosby, Ovie Soko: all relatable, all beloved. The same goes for The Rock, Cardi B and Stormzy. Adele and Lewis Capaldi have it, Lily Allen and Ed Sheeran do not. See what I mean?

The interesting thing about inherent relatability is that a celebrity who has it isn't necessarily "relatable" at all; fundamentally, they aren't, and they know that. It's more that their personalities are recognisable; exaggerated versions of a combination of people we've encountered in real life. They're like superior avatars we've elected to represent society, like a collective response to the question "who would play you in a film".

Conversely, we have relatability as farce - a neoliberal perversion of the form especially common among women who embody traditional beauty standards and feel guilty about it, older celebrities who don't quite understand the internet, and politicians. See: Change UK going to Nando's, Hillary Clinton's tweets and Rishi Sunak having a really showy cup of tea. As a result we have celebrities who act increasingly like politicians, politicians who act increasingly like celebrities, an endless procession of Marvel films and about three elected representatives who can string a sentence together without lying.

A BRIEF INTERLUDE REGARDING ROBERT PATTINSON AND PERFORMATIVE UN-RELATABILITY

The inverse of farcical relatability is performative unrelatability, i.e. people pretending to be eccentrics for attention. This is a very rare but no less real phenomenon. See: Katy Perry showing up to various high profile events dressed as a burger or whatever, and Robert Pattinson spending a large portion of the interview for his recent exploding a microwave he's "mistaken" for an oven while recreating a meal he's invented out of sugar, cornflakes and pasta that looks "like, the hair bun on a girl".

Robert Pattinson has always been an evasive man who is either transparently trying to cultivate a sense of mystery around himself, pretending to be transparently trying to cultivate a sense of mystery around himself for a laugh, or is just a bit anxious and clever. It doesn't actually matter which, because the end result is the same: you never come out the other side of an interview knowing more about Robert Pattinson, the man. You are simply given more tidbits of information that contribute to the concept of Robert Pattinson, the concept.

Depending on where your sensibilities lie, this is either infuriating, amusing or a bit of both. Personally, I rate it. It might not be sincere, but if you're going to deflect by dedicating to a "bit", at least it's more interesting than cosplaying any old ninny who had to delete Facebook due to a Farmville "addiction".

THE FINAL BOSS OF RELATABILITY: TRUE RELATABILITY

All that said, there is such a thing as a relatable celebrity - but it cannot be found in one person as a whole. The most relatable celebrity stories of our age are not calculated performances or cultivated personalities, but unintentional occurrences. Fleeting, flash-in-the-pan moments where humanity appears like a Marian apparition, unquestionable and sublime: Harry Styles throwing up on the side of the road; Ben Affleck becoming a walking embodiment of the abject nature of our times whenever he sparks up a cigarette; that screenshot of Kim Kardashian in bed staring at the ceiling that deserves to be the Oxford Dictionary definition of ennui.

These are the acts that comfort us, these are the times when celebrities are able to meet us on our own level - wallowing, hungover and knackered, in the void. This is true relatability, and it can only be achieved through accident or serendipity. Like all things good, it cannot be forced.

As the era of everyman cosplay comes to a close, let's give it up gracefully. Find your role models in real life and let celebrities do what they're supposed to do best: entertain us and be beautiful. Think of it this way, do you want to live in a society where Madonna has informed and constructive things to say about Covid-19? Would anyone even expect her to, if the crisis wasn't being grossly mishandled? No. Madonna is here to make good music, suddenly start wearing an eyepatch and then give several completely different answers as to why. I want Madonna to be Madonna, and I want competent governing bodies so that when there's a global pandemic on for example we don't need an urgent broadcast appeal from Ryan Reynolds.

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The Reign of the 'Relatable' Celebrity Is Over

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This article originally appeared on VICE UK. As I watched Ellen DeGeneres and Jimmy Kimmel interview each other about wallpaper for almost ten minutes, I thought to myself: 'I feel nothing. Less than nothing, in fact; I have negative feeling. Feeling has been drawn from my body and spat out, like a poisonous venom.'

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This article exhibits behaviors mentioned in the reading "Economy of Celebrity" by Turner. In the beginning of the article the author goes into the interviews of multiple woman who played into the role of being a "dumb blonde" Aisleyne, one of the women who was interviewed, specifically states that she is smarter than what she seems but she will keep playing the dumb blonde in order to achieve fame. This behavior is something similar along the lines of what Paris Hilton was doing. Even though Aisleyne knows that she is smarter than what the media makes her out to be she decides that she will use that to her advantage and keep branding herself that way in order to achieve the fame she wants. This to me shows the codependence of the industry and the celebrity because the industry needs Aisleyne in order to use her as a commodity to sell other products and make money off of her brand of being a dumb blonde and Aisleyne needs the industry in order to be able to build up her career and give her brands so that she can be exposed to more people and business oppurtunities.

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Collage by Marta Parszeniew. Images:

, Everett Collection Inc Alan Edwards , Keith Mayhew / Alamy Stock Photo

The stereotype dominated the cultural imagination in the 00s, but where are they now? Did they disappear, or have they been rebranded as entrepreneurs?

When the 22-year-old Page 3 and promo girl Chantelle Houghton went on Big Brother in 2006, she said some really dumb things. During a conversation with the Labour MP George Galloway, Chantelle asked: "Does that mean you work in that big room with the green seats?" When working out the house's weekly shopping budget she said: "Eleventy-twelve pence? I don't get it. How much is that then?" Chantelle also didn't know what a gynaecologist was, or capitalism, and she thought Dundee was in Wales.

Speaking over the phone from her home in Essex, Chantelle tells me she would feel "mortified if she met an adult who didn't know all that now", but back in the 00s she was far from the only blonde known for her ditziness. From MTV to Nuts, practically every time you turned on the TV, opened a magazine, or went to the cinema there was a blonde saying something dim like "what's tzatziki? Is it a car?"

Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie spent the whole of The Simple Life rehashing the same gag about not knowing how to use a mop, on Newly Weds Jessica Simpson couldn't tell the difference between chicken and tuna, and Jodie Marsh once asked a reporter "is an egg a vegetable?" Meanwhile in film, every chick flick from Legally Blonde to Mean Girls to Clueless featured a bimbo with DD's and zero brain cells. Starting out as April in Hot Chick, Anna Faris managed to carve an entire career out of playing stupid. As Erica in Friends she gasps "that sounds just like my name!" when Monica and Chandler tell her they're calling their child "Erica", and in House Bunny when Faris' character Shelly is accused of turning the sorority into a brothel, she recoils: "A brothel? I'm not here to make soup."

Of course, the dumb blonde wasn't invented in the 2000s. Historians assert that the trope started all the way back in the 18th Century with the play Les Curiosités de la Foire. The French satire followed the misdemeanours of the eternally flummoxed and slow-talking blonde courtesan Rosalie Duthé. Fast forward to the 50s and Marilyn Monroe's performance as Lorelei Lee in Gentlemen Prefer Blondes saw the actor reinvent the airhead for a post-WW2 audience. The bleach-topped diamond obsessed showgirl reached peak bimbo when she announced: "I can be smart when it's important, but most men don't like it."

In the 60s, Barbara Windsor and her bleached beehive made wit out of witlessness through her Carry On films, in the 70s Goldie Hawn made dumb blondes groovy for the hippie era, and in the 90s came the "Essex girl" jokes - e.g. "What's the difference between an Essex Girl and a supermarket trolley? A supermarket trolley has a mind of its own'' - a trend that became so prevalent The Independent ran a piece in November 1991 calling it a "craze". But it was only with the 2000s, and it's onslaught of fame-for-fame's-sake celebrity, that dumb blondes fully took over our cultural imagination.

They are still around - remember the moment in Love Island 2018 when blonde Liverpudlian Hailey explained that Brexit would "mean we don't have any trees"? - but they're much less prevalent. When we see glamorous blondes on-screen today, we focus more on their role as entrepreneurs; women capable of monetising their personality and looks to sell MissGuided's £1 bikinis or build wash-off fake tan empires. So, where did all the dumb blondes go? And why did we suddenly start taking the ones who are left so seriously?

When Chantelle came off Big Brother, the tabloids laid into her perceived lack of intelligence. In one particularly nasty Daily Mail interview, the interviewer asked Chantelle whether she thinks she's smart, and when she replied: "Well I got seven GCSEs and I was once offered a job by NatWest - and you don't get a job in a bank unless you are clever, do you?" The writer laughed: "Heavens. I bank with NatWest. What a terrifying prospect. I try to imagine Chantelle - queen of the Reality TV epidemic - in a NatWest uniform. Nope, it cannot be done."

"The criticism didn't really bother me at all because I was secure in who I was," Chantelle responds when I ask how she dealt with endlessly being patronised in this manner. "There were a lot of good things going on in my life that I could focus on instead."

A lot of the press thought Chantelle was feigning ignorance to get attention or attract men, but speaking to her now she maintains that she really wasn't putting it on. "I didn't have a very good childhood," she says. "Like I didn't grow up with much money at all. When the neighbours were out my Dad would fill a bathtub up for me using their garden hosepipe. I didn't get the education to know what the house parliament was like, or the colour of its seats. And I didn't know what gynaecologist was because I'd never been told about one. I'm not blaming my parents for that, but that's how you learn, isn't it? By being told?" Chantelle pauses. "I don't know, I suppose it's a bit of a laugh to some people."

The tabloids might have called her "Paris Travelodge" and dubbed her a "wannabe footballer's wife", but Chantelle won Big Brother by a landslide and, after a series of magazine spreads and brand endorsements, become a 20-something millionaire (£300,000 of which came from a deal with OK! to let the magazine cover her wedding to The Ordinary Boys frontman Sam Preston). Granted Chantelle wasn't clever in an academic sense, but her actions demonstrate a shrewd sense of business knowhow.

"Getting fame (not infamy) isn't easy and holding onto is even harder," Nicole Lampert, a former showbiz reporter for The Sun's Bizarre gossip column, writes to me over email when I ask whether the dumb blondes ever were really "dumb". "If they were in the public eye for more than a few weeks they obviously got something right, and it wasn't because people were laughing at them but with them. Every time we laughed, they cashed another cheque." For Nicole the only dumb blondes were the ones you never hear about any more: "They believed in their fleeting fame and were nasty divas which quickly meant no one wanted to work with them again."

Aisleyne Horgan-Wallace - known largely for squaring up to Nikki Graham and shouting: "know yourself, you better know yourself if you're talking to me, little girl" - was another Big Brother contestant characterised as a bimbo by the tabloid press. Aisyleyne says she was much smarter than the papers made out, but played the bimbo because she knew it would guarantee her fame. "The paparazzi were really bad back then and they would follow you everywhere," she tells me. "I used to be in the papers looking like a drunk hot mess, Paris Hilton style. I didn't mind because I knew that it would sell papers. It wasn't my best look, but I utilised it as much as I could. I would always get bookings off the back of being the dumb blonde."

Chantelle might have been genuinely ditsy and Aisleyne might have been playing it up for the cameras, but not every woman is blonde and not every woman is dumb. So why were bimbos so often the only type of woman visible on screen?

A lot of it has to do with who got to decide who got on TV, and - surprise! - the executive producers, commissioning editors, and essentially, all the decision makers, were often men. Men who liked women's IQs low and their boobs pushed up high.

"At that time clever women - of all hair colour and age - were not really appreciated outside of academia (and probably inside it too)," Nicole explains. "It was still an extremely macho society. Most women in the public eye at that time were either seen as beautiful and stupid like Jordan, or the slightly less stupid 'ladettes' (Zoe Ball/ Ulrika/ Sara Cox) who weren't as stupid because they were more like boys because they drank. Then there were the serious intellectuals who weren't pretty and therefore weren't interesting."

The 2000s, for all its cries of "post-feminism", was not much more enlightened than the years that preceded it. The tokens of progress - Margaret Thatcher as the first female prime minister, the Spice Girls' Girl Power! message emblazoned in glitter across school lunchboxes - facilitated only the illusion of equality. Men were still calling the shots, and a lot of men like women that make them feel clever.

They might have generated ratings and headlines, but not everyone was a fan of the dumb blondes. P!nk's " Stupid Girls" entered the top ten and earned a Grammy nomination with bimbo-bashing lyrics like "Looking for a daddy to pay for the champagne/ (Droppin' names)/ What happened to the dream of a girl president?/ She's dancing in the video next to 50 Cent". J.K Rowling (sigh) wrote a blog post in support of the track saying that she didn't want her daughters to become "empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones".

As the decade wore on, journalists authored comment pieces equating the stereotyping of blonde women with the experience of homophobia and racism. "I'm not a dumb blonde, I'm an angry one" was the headline to one such piece in The Telegraph. "We blondes face prejudice every day of our lives" began another by novelist Anna Blundy in The Spectator, before asserting that "no other minority would stand for this cruel stereotyping".

Even among the liberals there was outrage, as prominent critic Ariel Levy penned the manifesto Female Chauvinist Pigs - an account of how "pornified" culture had made it so that "bimbos enjoy a higher standing in our culture than Olympians right now."

Aside from slasher movies and anything on after 10pm on MTV, there aren't quite so many dumb blondes around anymore. As society starts to treat women in a moderately less shit way, more diverse roles have opened up for them on screen. They can be weird, funny, self-obsessed and needy (though they will always fall asleep with a full face of makeup on).

These days if there's going to be someone dumb on the box it's more often than not going to be a man. Gone is the bimbo, and now cometh the age of the himbo - a gentle giant with big arms and small brains. Take the UK's most beloved show Love Island: Molly-Mae isn't exactly a PHD candidate, but it's Tommy Fury who didn't know what the capital of France was, thought "refreshify" was a word and tried to cut up ice with a butter knife. It was Molly-Mae who corrected him.

As for the dumb blondes who do continue to thrive in public life, we have more awareness of the ways in which they leverage their personalities to achieve fame. One of the many stark revelations in Paris Hilton's recent documentary, This Is Paris, was that her public-facing persona is fake; her baby voice invented to get what she wanted. According to her sister Nicky she always knew how to use a mop, she just knew it would get people talking if she pretended she didn't.

Now that Paris has an $100 million business empire, it seems ridiculous that we ever believed anything different. Jessica Simpson, Nicole Ritchie and Katie Price have all had similar career trajectories. The dumb blonde has morphed into a #GIRLBOSS who idealises Richard Branson and talks about maximising profit margins. There's no better example of this than Netflix's Selling Sunset, where meticulously preened women sell property porn through multi-million dollar retail company The Oppenheim Group. They might have fake tits and lip fillers, but when they're explaining why poured floors are better than tiles, their greying tech mogul clients are hanging off their every word. You could call these women plastic, as they are by their own admission, but you certainly couldn't call them dumb.

"Women are taking control of their own lives and becoming much more powerful," says Aisleyne. "We are much more respected. I like the fact that there's a lot of influential women that are blonde with big boobs that have made a success of themselves. Everyone stereotyped us as only good for marrying a rich older guy, but so many of us have thriving businesses and are sitting at the head of boardroom tables."

Aisleyne likes being more respected, but it does mean she can no longer profit from playing dumb. Pretending to not know what "analyse" means doesn't really work when every redtop has reported your thriving sun bed shop and massive real estate portfolio of houses.

Chantelle says she's a lot smarter now, but unlike Aisleyne finds that people continue to underestimate her due to her appearance. "I keep up with the news by reading The Independent," she says, her voice tightening as she grows defensive. "I read about 3-4 books a week. Most of the time I fall asleep at about 10pm with a book on my head. I think that would surprise a lot of people."

Thing is, Chantelle need not worry, because the only dumb person in this situation is the one who doesn't take the time to realise that being a "dumb blonde" doesn't mean you actually are dumb. More than likely it means you are smart enough to let people think you are stupid when you need to get something from them. "It's their loss," Chantelle sighs down the phone, and it really is. How much of a punchline can you be when your personality has taken you from working in NatWest to laughing your way to the bank?

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Collage by Marta Parszeniew. Images: , Everett Collection Inc Alan Edwards , Keith Mayhew / Alamy Stock Photo The stereotype dominated the cultural imagination in the 00s, but where are they now? Did they disappear, or have they been rebranded as entrepreneurs?

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This article exemplifies  different concepts that are listed within the critic of Aufderheide's "Capitalist Culture Beat." The fourth technique of being media literate within this reading states that most media in the United States needs to make money and to ask yourself "who is paying for this?" or "what is the economic structure underpinning this piece of work?" When I applied these concepts to the article from Vice I realized that most of their views are highly democratic. Vice has 2 subsections dedicated to Republican news and Democratic News and the democratic news talks of trump not being able to steal the election and surprisingly the Republican information on Vice says the exact same things with some of the exact same articles as the democratic page. This says to me that Vice's brand is heavily reliant on being extremely democratic. This article also helps back up this belief because what better way is there to prove that you are a democrat than to bash the Republican President who is a celebrity because of the way he marketed himself. Vice will not want to go against any Democratic views because their brand relies so heavily on it and if they begin to agree with Republican views they could lose money which would be detrimental to the news platform. This reading helped me apply some media literacy skills that helped me better assess this article and how it relates to Vice.

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U.S. President Donald Trump listens during a roundtable discussion in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Aug. 23, 2018. (Photo: Yuri Gripas/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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Trump's Post-Presidential Criminal Nightmare Begins Now

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U.S. President Donald Trump listens during a roundtable discussion in the Roosevelt Room of the White House in Washington, D.C., U.S., on Thursday, Aug. 23, 2018. (Photo: Yuri Gripas/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

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"The Negotiated Celebration" is an article that to me best relates to this relationship between politics and celebrities .  It is a very thin line because celebrities need to pick up as many people as possible to follow them and showing any sway to a political side is a very easy way to narrow that pool of people you can reach. to me this is a typical way that celebrities can get involved without minimizing their potential followers. This shows how celebrities have to carefully brand themselves in order to keep a certain image up to make the most money. This is also an example of using a celebrity as a vessel to best sell who they are which is constructed by the industries.

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"Sexing Elvis" by Wise talks about how people who are fans of celebrities are aware of their obsessive relationship they have with that person and how it connects and effects their lives. In this article Sailor Moon fans are being described as the best people on earth. To me this truly shows that people can be aware of how their relationship with a persona can effect your life because their is no real person that these fans can attach themselves to. Sailor Moon characters are animated women who can do magic and in this article people are obsessed with them. Elvis fans have the potential to mistaken their love for his persona as love for him while Sailor Moon fans do not have the option of attaching their love for the persona to an actual person. This to me shows exactly what Wise is talking about because these people understand they will never meet Sailor Moon and that she is not real but they still recognize and feel a connection to the characters persona and are aware of their relationship.