Abstract
In American culture, is the celebrity a divine figure, or just another commodity in the marketplace? The author maps a series of strategies for the study of celebrities within the study of religion and America, focusing on the concomitant production of Britney Spears as a religious figure, a religious sacrifice, and a consumer product.
The 19 November 2007 issue of the American tabloid US Weekly included no fewer than eight specific citations of one woman: Britney Spears. First, there was a financial reminder, the announcement (US Weekly, 2007: 14) that Britney’s perfumes “Curious” and “Fantasy” have earned more than $84 million (scented sales superior to those of Jennifer Lopez, Elizabeth Taylor, and Sarah Jessica Parker). Second, there was an inter-galactic invocation, wherein one star pointed to another one: “The paparazzi kind of figured out that we’re quite boring and Britney’s far more interesting, so they go to her house,” remarked Victoria Beckham (p. 18). Beckham, onetime Spice Girl, ongoing fashionista, and wife to soccer star David Beckham, here indebts her relative domestic privacy to the paparazzi invasion of Spears. Third, the magazine itself honored “Brit Look-alike Winners!” (p. 20). Readers of US Weekly submitted Polaroids and digital photos to demonstrate their costumed imitation of iconic Britney’s famous performances with photos of American every-girls flaunting Britney “post-shave” pink wigs and “classic” video getups. Fourth, in a regular column of stalking commentary about which restaurants starlets frequent, the magazine notified readers that Britney visited a tanning salon on 3 November (p. 23).
Consider these four uses of the names “Britney” and “Britney Spears” as inaugural examples of the consumption of the celebrity. Britney’s stories—the stories of her life, the stories in her songs, the stories of her Hollywood rise and fall, the stories in her videos and movies and television shows—contribute to the consumption of her production. But the abbreviated form of these US Weekly invocations underline that the stories of Britney are only a part of the story. It is her name which is consequential in the marketplace of celebrity consumption. No matter what the content of her stories may be, “Britney” supersedes herself; she is “Britney” as an economy. The issue includes an astrological reminder to Scorpios that they have a “perfect excuse” to clean their apartments, recommending that they “blast Britney’s new CD” as they follow the stars (p. 53). Later, in a section titled “This Minute You Want To Know About,” editors recommend the “80s-Music Recycling” of “Britney Spears” paying tribute to the Eurythmics in “Everybody” (p. 77). According to these citations, she needs no introduction. She is a solicitation for a cosmetic procedure, a scent, an imagined horde of cameras, and an impersonation. She is background music and iTunes accessory. She is what you need to know to consume this product, US Weekly. She is also what you need to know—and what you want to have—to listen, to clean, to beautify, and to be of the tabloid now.
She is also, it seems, a problem. That same November 2007 issue—the one relying upon Britney for product endorsement and reader response—marks a historically low moment in the stories told about Britney. The cover of the magazine declares that her parenting coach had declared her “SICK!”. The cover defines sickness with quick exclamatory descriptions, explaining that “mental illness signs worsen” as Britney “leaves boys in car while shopping” and “denies them trick-or-treating” and, inexplicably, “swaps clothes with bartender.” Deep inside, reporter Kevin O’Leary offers a six-page answer to the headlining question: “Does She Even Care?” The replying evidence suggests that she does not, as O’Leary and the US Weekly editorial staff collage pictures of “zombie-like” Britney “chugging” a Red Bull, shopping for two $18,000 chandeliers, and engaging in “interactions with her boys […] that were not child-centered” (p. 55). Note here how her consumer success with perfumes, albums, and concerts is replaced by a consumer decay of purported chugging and suggested overspending. In the same issue of a single magazine, Spears is producer and consumer, productive and consumptive, consuming and consumed. O’Leary’s intervention is not an ironic one. Readers are to understand that this is for Britney’s betterment, and that this investigative reporting serves to describe her malady, not merely profit from her maudlin decline. The narrative zigzags between her aesthetic (“deteriorating personal appearance”) and her psychology (her “emotional disconnect,” her “delayed adolescence,” and her “prolonged apathy”). It is hard, though, to know where the sale of experience ends and the intervention begins. It is hard to tell if we are to repudiate or imitate the Britney under survey. Readers learn: “She’s Wearing Tops As Dresses!” “Runs Over a Cop’s Foot!” “Parties Till 3 A.M.” (pp. 56–7). These are advertisements of demise, but also advertisements of verve. The collapse of a pop icon accompanies her persistent foist onto our radar as a single-name brand that readers consume as a producer of the things they want and as a consumer of the things her mediums sell.
In scholarship on contemporary media cultures, the celebrity is repeatedly described as a commodity. In particular, the celebrity is a media effect reliant upon the acquisition and publicity of that individual’s private life (Marshall, 1997; Schickel, 2000; Turner 2004). The violence of this transformation, from human to celebrity, is worth pausing upon even as it has become axiomatic. Transforming flesh into commodity has a long history, a history that includes far less voluntary formats of commodification than those experienced by Britney Spears. Invoking prior practices of human trade may beg differentiation from the elective auditions and self-making of modern celebrity. But to make what is human something that is marketable—to convert from raw material a Louisiana girl, for example, to consumer good (that “SICK!” cover damsel)—is, undeniably, a procedure of atomization, valuation, and dehumanization. Anatomizing the processes by which this modus operandi transpires should be a focal point of academic research.
Such investigations will find that there is always a historic fact or incident that compels this procedure to begin. A celebrity may emerge from a single video, television episode, or performing incident. That celebrity is then confirmed and perpetuated through the parsing of the ineffable of that moment—the performer’s incomparable talent or her uncanny timing, or both—into more translatable bits of possibility. A star is born, but then to sustain her celebrity life her gifts (such as they might be) will be chopped and repackaged into capitalizing cover shoots, singular accessories, or transcendent features (a mole, a smile, a dance move, a growl in a song). The overlap here between the characters celebrities play and the characters of their publicized “private” lives is difficult to discern. What began as a person becomes a story line in which the character of the performance is deployed to interpret the character of the person (and vice versa). Meanwhile, the converted human also becomes a composite sketch, with parts and pieces and accessories easily redacted and packaged, remembered and satirized (Dyer, 1979). The celebrity may repeatedly fight to deny that they have undergone such a conversion, that they are—to borrow from a US Weekly idiom—“Just like US!”. Their repeated construction of that quotidian humanity is a necessary component of their ongoing commodification as an object of glamour, of exclusive talent, and of outsized personal drama. Claims of accessibility only underline just how remote they have become.
What, then, is the relationship between this process and the terms of religion? Writing about late Roman society, Peter Brown remarked that “The holy man was deliberately not human” (Brown, 1971: 91). In a consumer society, the transformation of men and women into celebrities has inspired some scholars to remark upon the divinity of celebrities themselves (Frow, 1998; Rojek, 2001). This suggests that in American culture, the celebrity functions as a component of a pantheon which exists to dramatize social concerns, endorse certain forms of normative behavior, and fulfill narrative fantasies of an inchoate, disconnected, and ostensibly secular public. Drawing such quick lines between the gods of Greece and the stars on Hollywood Boulevard is less rigorous than the complexity of celebrity and their consumption demand, however. Any connections made between religion and celebrity should first be considered in a specified research program. Casting Angelina Jolie as the queenly Greek goddess Hera, for example, would fall into the pursuit of celebrity as religion. In such a set of studies, scholars might examine consumer behavior around celebrity consumption—the reading of tabloids in a ritual manner, for example, or annual home parties on Oscar night. Observing too how celebrities become invocations of certain social problems, or how individuals might identify (even impersonate) a beloved celebrity could show researchers how celebrity has become a form of ritual practice, moral commentary, and identity development in ways correlate to religious behavior.
Studying celebrity as religion is just one area of the territory necessary in the exploration of these categories. Any study of celebrity as religion must also account for the usages of those terms—celebrity and religion—within the media and structures of celebrity and religion. Scholars must then also consider the religion of celebrities, like the popular investment in the Church of Scientology by many prominent actors, or the frequently invoked loyalty to Christianity by certain musical genres and individuals. How has the Church of Scientology come to be understood as a “celebrity religion”? How might the principles of that faith correlate with experiences of celebrity? How has the institutional religion responded to, perhaps engendered, the participation of celebrities in their religion? Answers to these questions would not merely offer sociological, anthropological, or biographical data useful to the analysis of the religions of celebrities, but also reveal the meaning of celebrity and the meaning of religion in the country and chronology in which we investigate. Because of the way late-20th century tabloid culture penetrates and specifies, nothing about the celebrity—from their choice of dog leash to their choice of denominational home—is insignificant to the interpretation of the culture in which they appear. Similarly, pursuing celebrities of religion would complicate our sense of what celebrity and religion might be in that same cultural location. Remarking that television evangelist T.D. Jakes or Unity Church doyenne Marianne Williamson are religious celebrities encourages a comparative approach, wherein we might consider what training, talent, narrative tropes, and social structures have concocted their religious celebrity vis-à-vis that of Tom Cruise or Julia Roberts within the seemingly secular realm of entertainment. Linking the ways in which celebrities are consumed in a possibly religious manner, in which celebrities worship themselves in a religious manner, and in which religions construct and produce leaders in a celebrity stride would begin to identify a profile in the religion of American celebrity.
This is to underline the interconnectedness in America of ideas about religious institutions and ideas about celebrity success, the links between media of celebrity formation and propulsion and the media of religious missions and organizational development. Divisions between religious groups and celebrities exist, yet in the American context the rise of the celebrity as a commodity and the dynamics of modern religion have been inextricable. Examples of this commingling may be found in recent works describing the life and ascent of Mary Bakker Eddy, Billy Graham, Aimee Semple McPherson, Ronald Reagan, Martha Stewart, and Oprah Winfrey, all of which indicate that American religious history and charismatic celebrity are deeply collaborative through the media, style, and sentiment that comprise the collective American public sphere (Gottschalk, 2005; Wacker, 2009; Sutton, 2007; Kleinknecht, 2009; Leavitt, 2001; Lofton, 2008). Celebrity culture informs the religious imaginations of its consumers, and the consumption of celebrity increasingly formats expectations of religious leadership and its distribution and communication.
Into such a terrain of scholarly pursuit, where do we place Britney? The figures cited immediately above merit scrutiny because they led large movements, helmed nations, or garnered awards through long, notable bodies of work. To this convention of heroes we add Britney Spears. Britney tempts our interest not because her body of work is marked by musical innovation or choreographic genius but because, by any definition, Britney Jean Spears (born 2 December 1981) is a celebrity. She is a celebrity by her own engine of labor, from her appearance as a 1992 contestant on Star Search and as a cast member on the Disney Channel’s The New Mickey Mouse Club (1993–1994) to her signing of a Jive recording contract in 1997. She took the steps and sold her wares, accepting corporate cajoling and crafting to produce her debut album … Baby One More Time (1999). Within a year, she released her second album, Oops! … I Did It Again (2000). At the turn of the twenty-first century, Britney helmed the bubble gum brigade that brought back boy bands and teen pop as viable Billboard superstars. According to Zomba Label Group and Sony Music, as of 2009 Spears has sold over 85 million records worldwide from her six studio and four compilation albums. On 11 December 2009, Billboard named Spears the second best selling act of the 2000s based solely on album sales and the eighth overall best act of the decade based on album sales, chart success, and cultural relativity.
By such metrics of profitability and cultural pervasion, Britney Spears is a celebrity. Studying the relationship between her celebrity and American religion would include several stages of research, including, first, a profile of her proclaimed religious identity. Researchers might then gather Spears’ early Christian testimonials, where she connected her pink sweetness to her Bible Belt Southern Baptist youth. One might further examine the ways the Southern Baptist Convention constructed womanly piety, paving the way to Spears’ style of coy dress, wet-lipped cosmetics, and proclamations of virginity. The religious history of Britney would unfold further once she immersed herself in her Hollywood life and celebrity networks, finding in 2004 a connection to the Kabbalah Centre of Los Angeles through tutelage from her childhood idol and pop predecessor, Madonna. The journey would jag again when, in 2006, she immersed herself in a new form of domestic adulation, stating on her website, “I no longer study Kabbalah, my baby is my religion” (Walls, 2006). Once established, Spears’ chronology (Baptist, kabbalist, baby-ist) could be usefully deployed to model a classic plot in American religion from denominated faith to seeker spirituality to, finally, a religion based entirely on service to self (Bellah et al., 1985). Britney Spears as celebrity, as a subject whose details are sold for our tabloid pleasure, becomes then an icon of an American ideal, the freely wandering consumer of religious possibility.
Another related avenue of research would be the religious response to Britney Spears. In such a venture, the emphasis might be on usages of Britney Spears in sermons, or prohibitions on her later, raunchier music by certain parishes. With her early-career promises to protect her virginity, Spears became an icon for the True Love Waits pro-chastity movement. Scholarship on this resurgence of evangelical piety in America, especially as it related to the election of George W. Bush, might then deepen Spears’ invocation as an iconic innocence with a broader project of national sentimentalism in which girlhood was reborn and recast through promise rings, chastity balls, and new international missionary interventions. That the post-9/11 American evangelical militarism collided too with Spears’ personal decay—her multiple marriages and parenting mishaps—should not be seen as a mere politicizing of her product. Her product would always remain herself. Her collapse heightened the attention she received from religious quarters, as worry about Britney inspired the senior pastor of an 8,000-member megachurch in Kentucky to collect “letters of love and support” to send to Spears amid her reported custody battles and drug problems. “Take a few minutes and write a note to Britney Spears,” the pastor explained in a September 2007 sermon to parishioners at Southland Christian Church in Lexington. “No preaching. No criticizing. Just love. As a church, let’s love Britney the way Jesus loves her” (Garcia, 2007). Pursuing such religious replies to Britney Spears might convey the potency of celebrity iconicity, the accessibility of her domestic struggles, and the activist outreach and cowboy capitalism of late-twentieth century evangelicalism (Connolly, 2008).
Finally, Spears as a subject of religion would return us powerfully to the problems of consumption. Within her arc of American ascent, Spears struggled and staggered, becoming a cautionary tale of corrupted purity. If celebrity functions in part as a form of religion, consuming Britney might be in part a consideration of sexual mores, female ambition, or modern domesticity. Without also weighing the ritual tones of this consumption, scholars miss an opportunity to view the production of celebrity—and its resultant consumption—as a large-scale ritual of its own. Scholar of religion Jonathan Smith speaks of ritual as a “focusing lens” where “everything, at least potentially, is of significance” (1982: 54–6). Ritual is a controlled environment, a ring for spectatorship. While there are many rituals at play in the religions of Britney Spears’ celebrity, perhaps the most tempting is that of sacrifice. Britney Spears rises and falls, time and again, is plumped for the slaughter then primed for the comeback. Watching those declines and ascents might be productively read as a sort of public sacrifice, a Eucharist consumed by a public needful of something as an ironical counterpart to current claims of sacral nationhood and moral family re-making. This is a sacrifice made on behalf of a social body, a sacrifice which centralizes communication with, and thinking about, the legitimate social order (or relationship to divinities, to ideals, to higher principles). The circle of paparazzi creates a fishbowl for viewers and readers to watch the banal, torturously slow procedure of the kill. It is, then, a religious violence conducted under the guise of media consumption. Whether or not Britney Spears actually dies from her wounds—from the stalking photographers, or from her self-immolating behavior—the fact of our consumption of her journey on and off stages comprises the essential subject for religious analysis of celebrity. The stories told about celebrities, the stories that are purchased and circulated about celebrities, are embedded deeply in the mechanisms which propagate them, and in the consumer practices which compel the fan to believe, time and again, that there is no obvious harm in their return. The consumption of celebrity as a commodity is never disconnected from the religious practices of the subject, or the celebrity dreams of its believers.