Is Elvis a God?

Abstract

The fame of major stars, and especially dead ones, has been entangled throughout the 20th century with a religious vocabulary: the figures of apotheosis, ritual, cult, and sacrifice are the staple of the most banal analyses of high celebrity. I ask whether the idea of a religious dimension to stardom can and should be taken literally, and what kind of rethinking both of stardom itself and of the methodological concerns of cultural studies such a move might entail. I explore various usages of the categories of the sacred and the numinous in order to ask whether they are formally empty or carry a set of meanings relevant to the sorts of transcendence peculiar to stars, and I seek to locate that transcendence in the structures of repetition and seriality in which the being of stars is grounded. I conclude by questioning the secularization thesis which has sought to explain away apparently vestigial religious categories, and by asking what it would mean for cultural studies to abandon it.