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
PERHAPS FAME is the new religion, and celebrities our gods. When John Lennon said The Beatles were more popular than Jesus, perhaps he was onto something. After all, throughout history and across cultures, people have always worshipped idols. With all its myth, ritual and power to immortalise, celebrity could well be filling a similar cultural niche.
Psychological research lends some weight to this theory: Maltby and his colleagues have found that the more a person subscribes to a formal, institutionalised religion, the less likely they are to worship a celebrity. Chris Rojek, professor of sociology and culture at Britain's Nottingham Trent University and author of Celebrity describes the religious overtones as "pretty obvious".
He points out that when The Beatles were at the height of their popularity in Britain, the front rows of their concerts were reserved for the handicapped. "The idea was that after the show, The Beatles would come down and touch these people and heal them."
Houran goes so far as to suggest that, "maybe there's a worshipping trait in all of us … as human beings, we're hard-wired to worship something".
It may all go back to the savannahs of Africa, some time in the Pleistocene (between 500,000 and 1.8 million years ago). According to evolutionary biologists, far from being a nasty epidemic, aspects of celebrity-worship behaviour may be among the smartest things we as a species can do.
Hundreds of thousands of years ago, there was a much stronger evolutionary advantage to knowing who was an 'enemy' and who was a 'friend'. Back then, an enemy was less inclined to, say, let the air out of your tyres than, for example, run you through with a spear. So gossip in those days was a matter of life and death - it was a means of reinforcing social bonds while keeping track of who could be trusted. Anyone with a familiar face had to live nearby - so they were the ones worth keeping tabs on.
As cave painting has given way to more pervasive media, including print, television, film and the Internet, faces have been delivered, transmitted and downloaded to our living rooms from all around the globe. Familiarity is no longer a sure sign of proximity, but our neural hard-wiring has been slow to catch up. So, on some innate level we might feel as if the Neighbours we watch on television, are actually our own.
"For millions of years humans sat around the campfire and talked about people they knew in common," according to Helen Fisher, professor of anthropology at Rutgers University in New Jersey and author of Why We Love. She describes the modern media as "the global campfire", and isn't at all surprised by our tendency to gossip about the celebrities. "These days, we don't know a thing about our neighbours … celebrities are the people we know in common. So we're doing the same thing - we're continuing to talk to each other about people we know."
Mark Schaller, lecturer in psychology at Canada's University of British Columbia, takes things one step further. He thinks we feel as if celebrities belong to our family. Our ancestors used two main cues - similarity and familiarity - to determine kinship. And famous people are obviously very familiar. "I've seen Bruce Willis around for years. I've seen him in his underwear, in bed with his wife … I've seen him in my own house dozens of times." While Schaller admits that rationally, he knows Bruce isn't family, he describes the neural processes operating as "the highly-automatised, non-conscious residue of our ancient evolutionary past".
While not so crucial for survival now, social psychologists agree that gossip - whether about family, friends, neighbours or celebrities - still plays an important role in cementing social bonds and improving an individual's status within a group. Fisher also points out the importance of gossip as a forum "for expressing our ideals, interests, hopes, dreams and moral systems". Which all sounds good and healthy.
But celebrity worship, as we've seen, isn't just about gossip. In 2004, People magazine profiled fans who'd gone to extraordinary lengths to emulate their idols. From J-Lo inspired 'gluteal augmentation' and John Travolta chin-dimpling to demands for Britney-like boobs, it seems that undergoing surgery in a quest to resemble a favourite celebrity is far from uncommon. The trend has even spawned a gruesome reality-television show, MTV's I Want a Famous Face, which follows contestants through their surgical mimicry. While most people don't take their interest quite so far, imitating the hair, clothing, and habits of celebrities is pretty standard fare.
From an evolutionary viewpoint, it makes sense for us to copy high-status individuals, according to Francisco Gil-White, lecturer in psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. Among our ancestors, people with high status tended to reproduce more, so copying their techniques was a way of improving our own fitness. In fact, Gil-White reckons imitation is one of the smartest and most remarkable things Homo sapiens do. While other animals learn functional associations - a chimp can learn that reeds are associated with extracting termites from a mound - we are the only species capable of imitating specific motor patterns, and so acquiring technique.
Which leads us to Gil-White's theory of "kisser-upperers". According to this theory, ingratiating yourself with highly skilled individuals is advantageous because it gives us access to their superior techniques. As a result, we've learned to flatter high-status folk just so they'll tolerate our proximity.
It makes sense then, that one method of locating successful people is to key into the "posse of kisser-upperers" around them. When someone appears in a magazine or on TV, and there's an implicit posse of millions of kisser-upperers, "this person is a huge deal. A 'deal' like nobody's ever seen before in the history of time." And so we turn to the rich, beautiful alpha-folk of Hollywood for our cues.
