Perfection and Pedestals

And the Demise of Celebrities

To start off with, this post is an apology. I am sorry, that I did not post yesterday. I am preparing for important exams in a week's time, I have a huge art project due in two weeks, and my choir has doubled rehearsals. I also apologise. I know this blog's content has been a little lack lustre and more importantly, text heavy. I actually had a photography based post planned for today, and I had to do maths revision, and it's dark now. I am only human, and sometimes I am a disorganised human.

And that's just it. No matter how great a person, no matter how great their morals are, no matter how great a person someone is, they will fail. Not just once, not necessarily a spectacular firework show in which they cross the line between amazing and arsehole - but instead potentially a series of failures over and over again.

Human culture has put people on pedestals - in this video actor Jack Gleeson, AKA Joffrey from Game of Thrones speaks about why celebrity culture exists more eloquently than I ever could - and these pedestals not only mean that everybody knows who they are, but also create who they are.

Most people have heard of "shipping", in which two people, (or objects or other, I don't know anymore - look at Drapple!) are wanted to be in a relationship. This originally was an outlet for fans of books and films et cetera to creatively imagine scenarios. Since then, it has been picked up by mainstream culture, and now real people have been added into the mixture. Some fans go as far as to write fanfiction about real people. This is harmless stuff - until, of course, you realise that what you are writing is an alternative version of somebody's life. What you are doing, when you partake in this activity, is you are imagining a better version of somebody else's lifestyle and ultimately a better version of the person you idolise.

Even if a relationship is real, or canon, it still becomes property of the media. Trashy magasines are notorious for this - but it happens too in respectable newspapers. If a major celebrity splits up with somebody, the public has access to this information and it is perfectly common for conversations to exist of people who have no connection whatsoever with a celebrity, offering opinions on their lives.

Some would argue that in fact, the public does not control who the celebrity is, but instead controls their image. To an extent I would agree with this. Whilst the public has so much information about celebrities, they will never know them and all they share. Fans of Youtubers such as Luke Conard, Alex Day, Tom Milsom, Alex Carpenter and several others, were shocked to find out that they had been sexually abusive, manipulative, ephebophilic and in some cases rapists, on the basis that they felt like, due to the largely personal "vlogs" and content these people had produced they knew the people. Much of their audiences had forgotten that a three or four minute video a week is not an exclusive window to the soul.

But I would argue that the public still manages to control the hidden parts of celebrities lives in just that - they force the celebrities to keep parts of their lives hidden. When I broke up with my girlfriend, I knew that just my immediate circle of friends would know and that they would not offer judgement. If a celebrity couple wanted to keep their relationship a secret, or their breakup a secret, this would take - not only concious effort, but also considerable effort to achieve. By forcing celebrities to hide aspects of their life - to devote time to keep the public from finding out - the public still control portions of their idol's lives.

Is it any wonder then, that celebrities do fail, so often do they do so spectacularly? With the eyes of the world constantly on them, it's easily to lose a sense of self. And with a life seriously elevated above reality, is it any surprise that they can lose a sense of what is considered appropriate, by us, the people firmly on the ground. We raised them above our heads, gave them a world different to our own, but we still judge them by our morals. And rightly so - no human is exempt from behaving morally - but we need to be careful about raising people, often ordinary people with no exceptional talents so high from the ground, because they only have further to fall.

But what about the celebrities who don't crash and burn into the darkness? Who somehow manage to sustain a grip on reality? When they fail, no matter how good their intentions were, we judge them far more harshly than we might judge a friend. Perhaps it is not the individuals who do this - but when a person has an audience of millions, and all of them are offering mildly negative opinions about a person, en masse this becomes a lot more difficult to cope with as an individual.

So often the difference between the dying fireworks and those who live to sparkle another day is so simple. The sparklers apologise. Not just apologise - but acknowledge that they were wrong in the first place and make an effort to change. And this isn't just celebrities. This is all of us with any amount of friends.

A while ago I posted a post on victim blaming in which I posted, not maliciously, about a tweet that Carrie Hope Fletcher left. And I wanted you to see how profusely she apologised, and it made me want to remember how human these people are. There is a difference between judging someone by the same rules as everyone else, and hating on an idol because he or she slipped out. Just as there is a difference between raising someone on a pedestal and placing someone in front of the firing squad.