Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston in happier times: their lives are an obsession for millions, and evolution may be to blame.
Credit: Boris Horvat/AFP
In the checkout queue at supermarket recently, I was busy pigeonholing people based on the contents of their shopping trolleys. Then Jennifer caught my eye.
The truth is, I'd been looking forward to seeing Jen all week. And since the tinned-fish-and-legumes aisle, I hadn't been able to get her out of my mind. How was she feeling about Brad and Angelina? And how was she wearing her hair?
Jennifer Aniston, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie have been the highlight of my weekly shop for some time now. Every Tuesday, I feign irritation at the length of the checkout queue, sighing and rolling my eyes as I reach for the magazine stand, pretending it's a desperate last resort in the battle against boredom. But secretly, I take delight in that temperamental barcode scanner up ahead and the intermittent but predictable delays caused by price-checking. Because it means I'm able to spend more time with Jen.
Far from being a trivial pastime, interest in Jen has become one of the hottest new topics of scholarly debate. In September 2005, more than 100 academics descended on the town of Ayr in Scotland to exchange ideas about the cult of celebrity, from fan conventions to assassinated stars. Hosted by the school of media, language and music at the University of Paisley, the conference dragged the likes of David Beckham, Michael Jackson and Kate Moss out of the gossip mags and into the journals.
In fact, over the past few years, a wealth of academic literature has cashed in on our relationships with the stars. And - depending on what you read -my absorption with Jen could define me as a victim of a poorly understood epidemic that's ravaging the Western world … or it could be one of the savviest aspects of my personality (from a Darwinian point of view); the start of a downward spiral into depression, anxiety and addiction … or the quiet workings of some very robust genes.
IN 2003, NEW SCIENTIST magazine reported that one-third of Americans were suffering from something it called "celebrity-worship syndrome", which it abbreviated as "CWS". And the journalists said the proportion of the population affected by CWS seemed to be continuing to rise.
Scientists everywhere were shocked when news of the epidemic broke - not least the researchers studying a scientific survey called the Celebrity Worship Scale, which up to that point had been the recognised meaning of the CWS acronym among academics. James Houran, clinical psychologist and joint creator of the Celebrity Worship Scale, explains: "A reporter saw the acronym and decided it should stand for celebrity-worship syndrome. So a new psychological disorder was invented, and credited to me and my team".
In fact, Houran reckons low levels of celebrity worship are good for you. "It's a form of social bonding, stress reduction, escapism and entertainment. At low levels, people tend to be happier, more personable and more outgoing." While he shies from the idea of a "syndrome", Houran concedes that at higher levels, celebrity worship has been linked with depression, anxiety, body-image problems and addiction.
After the accidental invention of the syndrome, Houran and his team changed the name of their survey to the "Celebrity Attitude Scale" (CAS) to avoid confusion. Houran describes the CAS as a thermometer of sorts, which can measure a person's degree of interest in a celebrity. Volunteers agree or disagree with a series of 34 statements ranging from, "I love to talk with others who admire my favourite celebrity" to "I consider my favourite celebrity to be my soul mate".
Before the CAS, fans used to be lumped into two distinct groups. The first were harmless admirers who enjoyed their celebrity's talents from afar: people who marvelled at Jen's comedic timing (and her hair), those in awe of David Beckham's ball skills (and his hair), and others who harnessed a deep desire for Paris Hilton's … um, well … hair. The second group of fans were the obsessive letter writers and the stalkers - including John Lennon's killer, Mark Chapman - people who were literally "fanatics". But the CAS broke down that dichotomy, describing celebrity worship as a continuum, a sliding scale that saw us pushed along by external forces. As Houran confrontingly puts it, "There's a stalker in all of us, given the right set of circumstances".
So what is the 'right' set of circumstances? What could possibly slide me along the scale from checkout-queue-gossip-mag reader to house-breaking-bunny-boiling fanatic? While certain personality traits keep our celebrity worship in check (happy extroverts generally stay at the lower end of the scale, while anxious narcissists tend to slide on up), external circumstances can give us a shove in the unhealthy direction. According to Houran, going through a traumatic experience that challenges our identity, for example, being fired, going through a divorce or grieving over losing a loved one, we can go sliding up the scale.
But why are we drawn to celebrities in the first place? It certainly seems that most people in the Western world are on first-name terms with Jen, not to mention Kylie, Russel, Nicole, Britney and (sorry Jen) Brangelina. On-screen, they play out our collective dreams about love, hate, good and evil. Off-screen they do it even better. But why the fascination? Why do we care about the personal lives of people we've never met?
Social psychologists agree that the reasons are complex, but some issues seem to recur. One is that we're bored, and living through movie stars is a way of alleviating that boredom. Another is that we're searching for identity, the evidence for which is that teenagers (those lost souls of adolescence) usually score highest on the CAS. Social fragmentation might also play a part: as family and community values are crushed by the cult of individualism and an omnipresent media, perhaps fantasy relationships are becoming easier to form than real ones.
John Maltby, a lecturer in psychology at Britain's University of Leicester, has found that people who spend more time fantasising generally score highly on the CAS. Lynn McCutcheon, associate professor of psychology at DeVry University in Illinois and one of Maltby's collaborators, relates the story of an actor who for several years played the role of a physician in a U.S. television series. "People would stop him on the street and ask for medical advice, as if they couldn't separate the role from the person."
