Imagine No Celebrities — It’s Easy If You Try
Celebrity culture. The ultimate ruse. Our most palatable form of capitalism: ultra-rich and beautiful, they make money from our idealistic obsessions, and we are constantly gagging for it. Like characters in our favourite novel, we consume them, embody their styles, and make-believe about their mysterious lives. It’s a hierarchy we enjoy. Although we catch ourselves wishing that they were more like us, or more likely, that we could be more like them, celebrities’ power lies in their ability to be imaginary. If they were us, we wouldn’t want them. It’s a delicate balance for these folkloric creatures; we want them in our world, but overstep the mark, and they are no longer folkloric, but everyday. Becoming everyday is the worst fate for a celebrity. Their power lies in their unattainability.
Yet when something huge happens in our world, celebs insist on being involved. In the 2016 presidential elections, almost every famous liberal got involved in the fight to beat Donald Trump — arguably hurting Hilary Clinton’s campaign, making her seem elitist to your average American. Now, of course, something even bigger is happening. As COVID-19 sweeps our world, celebrities are itching to be noticed. Even vanity can’t be curtailed in a pandemic. We’ve all seen the car crash that is the Imagine video. In case you haven’t, allow me to summarise: Gal Gadot, the beautiful Wonder Woman actress and former Israeli soldier, took a break from shooting cardboard cut-outs of Palestinian children in her back garden to make a montage of celebrities, singing a song for the world to heal. She sits smiling into her iPhone, a jaguar in human form, stunning and predatory, like she might let you stroke her pore-less skin for a moment before she rips out your throat. Among her choir of well-meaning dolts were a dishevelled Will Ferrell; Sia, who left her wig at the door and let us see her face (lucky us!); and Zoe Kravtiz, looking as if someone tied her hands and feet together, and instructed her to sing for the people. And the song? John Lennon’s Imagine. Yep, that one. The one where they say, ‘Imagine no possessions’, and ‘No countries / Nothing to kill or die for.’ Touché, Gal. Tou-fucking-ché.
This video was immediately met with ridicule. A handful of British comedians including Noel Fielding and Harry Hill made a new version, singing, ‘Imagine all the bastards / It’s easy if you’re a bastard!’ It was widely accepted that a bunch of super-rich people singing about the world coming together and holding hands was a slap in the face to real people with real problems. So what role, if any, do celebrities have in this crisis? What can they do without looking like a bunch of out of touch idiots, crying in their mansions while nurses die on the front lines?
For a start, they can be entertaining. Dance, monkey, dance. A few of them get the gist: Chrissy Teigen baked banana bread and exchanged it for a lettuce in a car park with a stranger from the internet — her cutesie I-am-so-zany-this-is-not-at-all-a-performance schtick even worked on me in this instance. Her husband John Legend gave a free concert to his followers via Instagram Live; other artists like James Blake have also been performing free musical livestreams. John Krasinski has set up a Youtube channel called Some Good News, on which he Zoom-called a little girl who missed seeing Hamilton due to the pandemic. Oh, and he added Lin Manuel Miranda and the entire cast of Hamilton to the call, who all sang to her. I won’t lie, I cried at that one. Quarantine is getting the better of us all.
Others are simply shelling out cash, like Blake Lively and Ryan Reynolds, who donated $1 million to food banks. (Imagine having one million dollars hanging around, that you could easily part with? Just imagine). I’m fine with all this. If you’re rich, you’d better give some money. If you’re a wealthy artist, make your art available for free. Do what you do best, accessibly — or if you can’t, get out your cheque book. No excuses.
A lot celebs have gravely missed the mark, which is unsurprising, considering their job is to be rich, not nice and charitable. Kim Kardashian, between being married to a walking, talking PR disaster and having the bronzer smacked off her face by her sister on television, used COVID-19 to advertise her shape wear line, SKIMS. She wrote, ‘What you’ve been waiting for. With this restock, SKIMS will be able to help bring relief to those affected by COVID-19 by committing to donate $1M to families in need.’ Selling clothes that make you look thinner, all in support of a cause, but mainly padding out Kim’s own pockets? You can’t say she isn’t clever. Her sister Khloe, not the brightest bulb in the tanning bed but always up for a cash-grab, followed suit with her denim brand Good American. High School Musical sweetheart Vanessa Hudgens went a step further, ridiculing the lockdown on Instagram, saying, ‘The virus, I get it, like, I respect it — but at the same time, even if everybody gets it, like, yeah, people are gonna die. Which is terrible. But, like, inevitable.’ At least she ‘respects’ it, although I’m not sure even Miss Rona would stoop as low as to respect her back. Poor Vanessa needed something interesting on her name — peaking in 2008 must be difficult for her.
Outside of the celebrity realm, this unprecedented global pandemic is creating new normals for everyone. Many people are experiencing economic uncertainty, while others find themselves working from home, housebound, trying to homeschool their children. Single parents are struggling; elderly people are totally isolated and health care workers are in terrifying danger every day. Plus, we’re all still trying to get our heads around Tiger King, which is no less than a full time job. The role of celebrities is a trivial one — we essentially consume them, like any other product we use — and when we find ourselves in a serious circumstance, our enjoyment of their rich lives might understandably dwindle.
The extortionate levels of wealth we have come accustomed to seeing day-to-day, and even enjoy fantasising about, suddenly seem sickening in the wake of real global economical crisis. As a society we have come to accept their unfairly hoarded cash because it’s motivational, right? Attaining celeb status is the ultimate capitalist wet dream: grind harder, eat less, work out more, stay relevant! But in crisis, our aspirations shift drastically; a month ago, Kim Kardashian’s loyal fans might have spent their nights thinking about that holiday they’d like to go on, or their dream apartment. Now we all lie awake thinking about our families, and what might happen if someone we love gets sick. We dream about ventilators over our faces; we have to put our phones down to prevent panic attacks. We think about losing our jobs, feeding our kids and paying the rent.
It requires a certain level of privilege to spend time dreaming about entering the realm of the super-rich, when many citizens dream only of safety and basic wellbeing. The uncertainties we all now face, both economic and physical, are the lived experiences of minority groups who’ve been fighting to be heard for a long time. Many people live our temporary “COVID-life” every day, and it’s time we listened to them. It’s far overdue that the voices of disabled people, those who are subject to the benefits system and people of colour who are routinely targeted by police, are listened to. And when those voices finally come to the forefront of our cultural consciousness, the notion of ‘celebrity’ might become nothing but a bizarre historical subsection of a society that can, and will, do fine without it.
Written by Madeleine Goode
Madeleine Goode is a writer, tutor and barista from Manchester. She can be found cute-wrestling any dog she sees, watering her houseplant collection or making cheap jokes on Twitter. She likes to write about current affairs, neoliberalism and feminism, as well as poetry and journal entries. You can find her personal site at www.seizeyourlife.blog; on Instagram and Twitter she is @goodegracious.