Why Has The Nature Of Fame And Hollywood Celebrities Changed In Modern Times

Hollywood celebrities in the USA have constantly given us an outlet for our imagination

, just as the gods and demigods of historic Greece and Rome once did. Hollywood celebrities are our myth bearers; carriers with the divine forces of good, evil, lust, and redemption. "The wish for kings is an old and familiar wish, as well-known in medieval Europe as in ancient Mesopotamia," writes Lewis Lapham in his book The Wish For Kings. "The ancient Greeks assigned trace elements of the divine to trees and winds and stones. A river god sulks, and the child drowns; a sky god smiles, and the corn ripens. The modern Americans assign similar powers not only to whales and spotted owls but also to individuals blessed with the aura of celebrity."

Historically, renowned people were recorded in stone and in paint. Alexander the Great was the first famous person in the modern sense, contends Leo Braudy, Ph.D., professor of English at the University of Southern California and writer of The Frenzy of Renown. "Not only did he want to be unique, but he wanted to tell everybody about it, and he had an apparatus for telling everybody about it. He had techniques for doing famous things. He had historians, painters, sculptors, gem carvers on his battles."

Heroes, all of us may perhaps agree, bring intrinsic benefitthe essence of the heroic and the noble. Durable gods serve to lift our vision above the mundane.

But fame just isn't what it used to be. Hollywood celebrities are borne aloft on photographs marketed, sold, and distributed with a swiftness and cunning unimagined by the heroes of old, and then just as swiftly cast aside.

"We're in the Kleenex phase of fame," states Braudy. "We see so much of people, and in all branches of the media. We blow our nose on every new star that happens to come along and then dispose of them." Each and every year brings a brand new Sexiest Man Alive. Technology has changed fame so that it's considerably more immediate and instantaneousand our fascination with it has become a lot more fickle.

Where once the renowned attained an almost godlike reputation, one that seemed impermeable and historic (think Lincoln or Washington, Charles Lindbergh or Jesse Owens), today Hollywood celebrity exist for and by an information age. In our global and atomized planet of bits and bytes, where information is immediately available and enormous in its quantities, and as perishable as an electronic picture, Hollywood celebrities help personalize that content. They put a person's face on it. Nevertheless, they are diminished in the process. The difficulty is, so are we.

Information can come at us with amazing velocity, in innumerable changing faces and stories, on Court TV, on CNN in 24-hour play. We've got much too much information about Hollywood celebrities these daystheir love affairs, their private conversations on cellular telephones, the colour of their underwear, how many nose jobs they've had, how many intestinal polyps our presidents have had taken out. However the surfeit of news strips the famous of the sacred and heroicthus our culture and our own livesas heroes reflect what we feel is best in ourselves.

by: Treena Nichalson

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