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Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America
``` [I submitted this review to an academic journal, but through a failure of communication they sat on it for a year and ended up not publishing it. Perhaps it will be of some interest.]
Review of Joshua Gamson, Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
By Philip E. Agre, Department of Communication, University of California, San Diego, La Jolla, CA 92093-0503, USA. pagre@ucsd.edu.
[Note: Italics are marked by asterisks.]
In the helpful "Theoretical and Methodological Notes" appended to his new book, "Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America", Joshua Gamson acknowledges some of the inherent challenges in writing a book about the phenomena of celebrities and fame. His central question is, given the hyperbole of the Hollywood star-making machine, is stardom wholly a matter of artifice or does it reflect genuine talent? It is a topic on which everyone is an expert and to which little respect is normally accorded by academics or the general population. He accepts these challenges with good humor and has written a book of great clarity and precision that will surely provide a baseline for future sociological inquiry into the production and consumption of mass-mediated personae. Even so, his project ultimately falls prey to its own inherent dangers.
The exposition is divided into three parts, corresponding to celebrity texts, the production of celebrities, and the consumption of celebrity images by ordinary people. This division, and the thoughtfully heterogeneous methods he brings to analyzing them, are worthy of credit in themselves. The two chapters about celebrity texts discern two corresponding periods in the stories told about stars, with the dividing line between them corresponding roughly to the antitrust breakup of the Hollywood studio system in 1948 and the subsequent rise of television. Before this time the images of celebrities in popular publications were generally seamless; stardom was presupposed to reflect in a straightforward way the immanent talents of the star. Afterward, though, there arises a more complex type of narrative, in which the machinery of stardom is increasingly brought to light, both as generalized expose and as part of the treatment of individual celebrities.
The second part of the book reports an ethographic inquiry into the world of Hollywood star-making. Chapter 3 briefly describes the star system as a well-oiled industrial machine of marketing. Chapter 4's complication of this picture, though, is the intellectual core of the book. It depicts in a fascinating way the complex and highly structured struggles over a star's image that take place during the promotion of each successive vehicle. In particular, it describes the "puff/dirt dilemma" facing journalistic organizations mired in the sharply contested economics of celebrity information. The producers of publications and programs need novel information about celebrities, but this information is controlled by publicists, who only release it within a quid pro quo that ensures that the resulting stories portray the celebrity in a consistent and desired light. Journalists who go along with this deal are accused of producing "puff", whereas journalists who effectively steal information about celebrities (most notably the tabloid press) are accused of producing "dirt". While not entirely surprising, this analysis is a valuable contribution to the empirical study of the interplay between journalism and public relations. Completing the analysis of celebrity production, Chapter 5 counterposes an amusing account of the laborious production of enthusiastic studio audiences with numerous interview fragments explaining why the celebrity producers that Gamson spoke with do not wish to understand their audiences in great detail, preoccupied as they are with the subtle internal politics of their profession.
The third part of the book explores audiences' understandings of the star-making process. And it is here that the book's weaknesses come to the fore. Recall that the question organizing Gamson's research is whether stardom is a phenomenon of artifice or talent, artificiality or naturalness, arbitrary or deserved rewards. This is obviously a difficult question to answer, given the underspecified, indeed deeply problematic, status of these opposed pairs of categories. Gamson seems unaware of the problem, though, and his frequent restating of the questions persistently places him in the same position as the audiences he studies, grasping at straws in the search for stable meanings beneath the shifting array of media surfaces.
The book escapes the worst aspects of this dilemma by focusing on relatively well-defined epistemological issues. When Chapters 6 through 8 ask what uses audiences make of celebrity images, they are really asking the much narrower question of what understandings people have of the machinery that produces these images. This is an important question, of course, and Gamson has some useful things to say about it. Chapter 6 offers a brief and amusing account of the celebrity-watching tourist circuit, whose central goal is the sense of reality obtained by catching an unmediated glimpse of a celebrity's person. Chapter 7 then gets down to business, offering a helpful four-way typology of epistemological approaches to celebrity. Gamson asserts that the least common stances toward the reality of celebrity talent correspond to the stances most commonly posited in the academic literature, namely an uncritical "traditional" realism about celebrities' lives and qualities and a "postmodernist" presupposition that all is artifice. More common, he tells us, are two more complicated and interesting positions. One of these, the "second-order traditional" stance, acknowledges that celebrities' images are covered with layers of artifice but nonetheless discerns, often through great labor, a set of real talents and qualities underneath. The other, the "game player" stance, entails full participation in the game of celebrity gossip and speculation while disavowing any concern with whether any of it is real. Chapter 8 explores these games of as-if belief in more detail.
Despite the value of this exercise, the book's underlying tensions come back to the surface in the conclusion. If so many people have some awareness of the machinery, Gamson asks, then why do celebrities continue to exert such fascination? His interactions with his research informants, unfortunately, have not equipped him to answer the question. He can only provide a fragment of an answer, which is that the world of celebrities is safe: you can gossip about a movie star all you like without facing any consequences. But this is surely not enough. To begin with, it does not begin to explain the specific contents of celebrity images or the specific investments that individuals make in particular celebrities and celebrity stories. Gamson's analysis draws no distinctions among celebrities and no distinctions among the consumers of celebrity images beyond their epistemological stances toward them. Although he has assembled an impressively diverse collection of informants, we learn nothing about their lives and little about the specific relationships they have to other people or to celebrities. Do people with marital difficulties pay extra attention to tales of celebrity divorce? Are women more likely to regard female celebrities as agents with their own projects and dilemmas? Do people discuss celebrities' relationships in order to try out ideas about their own relationships? Do people discuss celebrities' behavior in order to negotiate norms of behavior for their own groups? Do gay celebrities have different uses from straight ones? Does any of this depend upon the race and class of the people involved? Do the fashioners of celebrity images have any views about these things? And if so, how do they influence the images themselves? Save for a few stray comments, the questions are not even raised.
To a great extent, of course, these are simply matters for another book, as they have been matters for the books of others. Within the structure of Gamson's book, though, they mark the contours of an absence in the middle of his enterprise. The elusive qualities of talent that are so often proclaimed by celebrity hype serve an obvious ideological function in distracting from the processes through which the hype is produced. But they also serve a deeper ideological purpose, which is to posit an objectivity and a commensurability to the qualities supposedly discovered in stars -- to confer a conceptual unity upon stardom itself -- and thereby to naturalize the domination over this realm of an equally unified machinery for administering these qualities and profiting from them. Gamson admirably reveals some of the economics of this machinery, but in doing so he simultaneously conceals some circuits through which different energies pass -- the contested negotiation of meanings in the representational marketplace. ```
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