“Kill Yourself for Recognition”: The Odd Future of Young Celebrity

One of the first movies I remember seeing at the cinema was Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. There were a handful of other movies before that, but none rivaled the impact of this one, and in particular, its scene of Walter Donovan waning rapidly into dust. Donovan, played by Julian Glover, greedily drinks from a golden cup he believes will allow him to live forever. Yet his decision is not wise, and his sip accelerates the aging process in a gruesome manner. This is a frightening image for a child to see.

As an adult, I’m able to appreciate the scene for what it is: a dramatic turning point for both hero and villain, rendered in special effects that are not entirely convincing by today’s standards. Though the shock of the scene has worn over time, there is a deeper fear at its core. Donovan’s disintegration quickens the signs of declining and goes straight to the point: vigorous to dead in less than 60 seconds. The speed of the process is extraordinary. His turning to dust reminds us of the inevitability of death.

The Importance of Being — and Staying — Pretty

Much of our modern global culture goes to great lengths to deny the decline of youth and the certainty of death. We don’t search for holy grails or transfer our decay onto portraits, but we do support cosmetic, pharmaceutical, and self-help industries devoted to solving the problems of getting old. In 2005,ABC News interviewed Dr. Andrew Weil during the White House Conference on Aging. Well-known for his support and practice of alternative medicine, Dr. Weils said: “My concern is when people do things — you know, whether this is Botox or cosmetic surgery for the purpose of making it easier to pretend that aging is not happening. I don’t think that’s mentally healthy. I think it’s healthy to observe the fact that we’re aging, that we’re moving along this continuum of life. I don’t think it’s good to deny that.”

The news and entertainment media offer contradictory messages on the subject. We are surrounded by images and messages that reflect what Dr. Weil calls an unhealthy denial of age. Entertainers’ faces are frozen in time or permanently altered, their older, modified selves vaguely recognizable as their former, younger selves. Publications (both respectable and tabloid) routinely engage in handwringing over cosmetic surgery and eating disorders, yet simultaneously depend on the images of constantly refreshed, fresh-face stars to attract viewers/readers and stay in business.

The effect of this mixed messaging is a generation of celebrities (and their followers) under pressure to rejuvenate their appearances at earlier ages than ever before. Young women in their early 20s, such as Heidi Montag and Bristol Palin, represent several weeks’ worth of stories for a duplicitous publication like US Weekly, which revels in both the before and the after, the success and the disaster.

This trend is neither strictly American nor entirely new. In 2002, Time’s Chisu Ko wrote an article called “Peer Pressure Plastics”, which concerned cosmetic surgery in South Korea: “It wasn’t too many generations ago that South Korean kids had no control over their looks. Their hair, for example, was considered a gift from their parents — never to be cut. But today, kids drop into the plastic surgeon’s office after school, and when they get home their folks can barely recognize them.”

In Los Angeles, in Seoul and beyond, the attraction to cosmetic modification in young people has more to do with becoming or staying attractive and competitive than it does with stopping age in its tracks. But the search for slimmer bodies and ideal eyes and noses is one that often begins and ends in media. Seoul surgeon Dr. Lee Min Ku says in “Peer Pressure Plastics”, “They [teenagers] end up handing you a magazine…and asking for T.V. star Kim Nam Ju’s eyes.” Montag and Palin likely also handed their surgeons magazine wish-lists, and in the coming weeks and months other young women will walk into the doctor’s office with pictures of Montag and Palin, now featured models in those very magazines. And so on.

In spring 2011, we may have already reached the nadir of this cycle with the now widely- reported tale of Kerry Campbell, a mother who injects her eight-year-old daughter Britney with Botox. Quoted by Dulcie Pearce in The Sun, Kerry says, “What I am doing for Britney now will help her become a star.” For her part, wee Britney says, “My friends think it’s cool I have all the treatments and they want to be like me. I check every night for wrinkles, when I see some I want more injections…I also want a boob and nose job soon, so that I can be a star.”

We should question whether the news media is right to give any attention to people like Kerry Campbell. On one hand, the coverage has led to an investigation by San Francisco Child Welfare Services, who will determine whether Kerry is endangering her child. Yet the attention is precisely what this mother seeks, so in some warped way, her featured segment on Good Morning America validates the extreme measures she’s taken to make Britney a star. Campbell’s most recent claim, that she’s actually named Sheena Upton and fabricated the entire story at the prodding of a reporter, calls into question exactly how this non-story ever made it into major network news programming in the first place.

To figure out why the story gained traction is, sadly, very easy. In this day and age, the media and its audience found something plausible in the tale. Chalk this up to two related trends in popular culture: In the name of celebrity, the old take extreme measures to stay young, the young are encouraged to grow up too quickly, and both groups race one another to a dissatisfying middle.

That these attempts to stop and/or otherwise manipulate time are increasing is no accident. When we first hear of a mother injecting botulism in her eight-year-old’s face, we’re shocked, so we can’t look away. But then we look for so long that the image becomes normal and Good Morning America and its advertisers swoop in to give us more of what we want. Regardless of the truth of Britney’s story, other mothers and daughters are part of the show’s audience, and in a certain percentage of that audience, the outrageous story represents an opportunity for the spotlight.

Better Grow Up — Fast (Just Don’t Look Like You Did)

In many ways, modern information and Internet technologies are defined by their temporal qualities. There’s a correlation between the speed with which information is distributed, the hyperactive cycles of news and entertainment, and the time it takes for a subject to rise and fall in the public’s estimation. Established careers become vulnerable via viral video (Lars von Trier), leaked recording (Mel Gibson), or social media message (Gilbert Gottfried). And for a decade now, the Internet has been young performers’ intended path to the spotlight. In short, the Internet has the power to both give life and to ‘kill’. The veracity of its information means little if the hits keep climbing.

Other factors to consider are the amount of exposure and access to celebrity. Adult stars have long faced the nuisance of paparazzi, but the draw of youth has in recent years begun to dominate that industry, as well. Gone is the tacit acknowledgement of a teen star’s disposability, which saw young celebrities fade (comparatively gracefully) into obscurity with the onset of adolescence or young adulthood, only to emerge on cable TV years later in reminiscence or in memoriam.

In contrast, the coverage of modern teenage celebrities carries the whiff of, “let’s get this over with”, trumpeting the emergence of the star as a means of precipitating scandal and eventual downfall. Lindsay Lohan has long been an easy target, but she’s made so by enabling parents and a predatory press. Media consumers now expect to look behind the curtain, between the legs, and into every aspect of young stars’ lives as they inevitably flame out. Bad behavior becomes the way to stay relevant. Rihanna’s Good Girl Gone Bad basically spells out this process.

This “kill your darlings” approach to young stardom is beginning to have an effect on the stars’ outward embrace of decay, violence, and death. In Rihanna’s case, promoting the relationship between sex and violence has become a successful way of capitalizing on the good will she received after crazed Chris Brown battered her. It’s difficult to say how much this move toward the macabre has to do with budding self-awareness on the part of the young stars. In all likelihood, their handlers and managers are the ones delivering them into “danger” as a means of staying in the press.

Regardless of how the violent images are being produced, their origin (the public’s press-conditioned appetite) is of a piece with the trend that pushed youngsters into heretofore-unprecedented displays of young sexuality on magazine pages and television and Internet screens across the world. There’s something decidedly creepy about the media excitedly sharing pictures of a shirtless Justin Bieber kissing his teenage girlfriend in early 2011. The shirtless kid was 16 years old. Is this as egregious as reading about eight-year-old Britney Campbell’s alleged “virgin wax”? No. But neither piece of visual or textual information should appeal to any reasonable adult consumer, so the demand for such content is disturbing.

The same goes for supposedly nobler uses of teen sexuality as viewer bait, such as NBC’s infamous New Jersey shore episode of To Catch a Predator. Sal Cinquemani wrote in his review of the show for Slant Magazine: “Those involved in the making of the program probably believe they’re doing something good, but it’s difficult to imagine that the producers weren’t tempted to secure the rights to Britney Spears’s “Oops!…I Did It Again” for that particular segment or that they didn’t giggle proudly in the control room after stumbling upon a repeat catch.” Cinquemani’s observation rightly ties together the various motives involved in the production, most of which play upon the very predatory kind of attitudes the show outwardly professes to combat.

Yet ever since the 1998 watershed moment when Ur-Britney bared her midriff in a schoolgirl getup, images of sexualized teenagers have entered the mainstream at a steady pace, and many of the most popular examples — such as the GQ / Glee photo series — foreground the youth angle in a way designed to play upon the desires of the old for the young. After all, teenagers aren’t buying GQ.

Perhaps It’s Best if You Just Die Young

The next celebrated frontier within this nexus of youth, sex, and living dangerously seems to be death itself. Entertainment writers and pundits question with varying degrees of seriousness when we should expect to hear of the next star or starlet’s demise. The intense spike in popularity of both Heath Ledger and Brittany Murphy following their deaths provides some sort of anecdotal evidence of a connection between dying young and ensuring celebrity status.

Yet when anticipation of death combines with the cult of celebrity, stars are pressured to literally give up the ghost or produce the effect through artistic means. This is a slippery slope, to say the least. In his fantastic study, Death in Classical Hollywood Cinema, writer Boaz Hagin literally “adopt[s] the term ‘cult’ to refer to this group that retains the memory of the deceased, that makes sure that the dead do not simply retreat into an anonymous mass.” Present day fandom is, in many ways, beset by thoughts of mortality. For figures like Ledger and Murphy, there are quasi-shrines and remembrances all over the Internet, dedicated to the memory of young celebrities that most fans never met, but for whom these dedicated masses work to keep them alive.

On the other hand, there is a more sinister impulse that wishes death upon stars that arouse the anger and resentment of observers/consumers. Teen pop stars are among the most regularly targeted celebrities. In an MTV news article about infamous “Friday” viral video star Rebecca Black, “cyber-security expert Parry Aftab” says, “A death threat is actionable in every state, and when someone like Justin Bieber (his girlfriend Selena Gomez) or Rebecca Black gets them, they tend to brush them off as someone who is on the Internet and doesn’t matter, but you don’t know the difference between someone wearing Pokemon pajamas and living in their mom’s basement who is harmless and people who are really nutty enough to kill you.”

Considering that online bullying is a common part of the average modern teenager’s life, it stands to reason that those legitimately in the public eye receive elevated, more intense threats. What’s surprising are the range of responses to those threats and the ease with which that bloodlust crops up around, and transfers to, every next big thing. YouTube user “trizzy66”, who posted the official video for Black’s “Friday”, has disabled adding comments to the video, and old comments are no longer visible. Prior to this disabling, the video (which is nearing over 150 million views) was subject to a torrent of hateful language and loads of spam.

One could argue that Ark Music Factory (the machine behind Black and other stars-on-demand like preteen CJ Fam, whose “Ordinary Pop Star” video is by far more distressing than “Friday”) is setting these very young girls up for career murder-suicide by putting such little effort into the songs and videos they produce but then allowing the girls to be the public face of the work. Yet stars such as Black and Fam, who would stand little chance of success with mainstream record labels, rely on vanity labels such as Ark Music Factory in order to “play” famous at all. Now legitimately famous as a result of their product’s badness, these girls are subject to a collective desire for torment.

Without its status as a viral video, “Friday” was dead on arrival, but Black had a shiny video she could show her friends. Now a viral smash, the video and its star(s) are celebrated for being widely hated, and she can’t escape its long, dark shadow and the threat of violence therein. Ark Music Factory should not be expected to offer protection for these artists, whose parents sought and bought the very visibility that has now succeeded/backfired beyond their wildest dreams. Yet it will be interesting to see if the label changes its approach in order to protect future teens from derision. If it continues to make a mediocre product (or worse, attempts to intentionally sabotage these girls), then blame will rest squarely with guardians that choose to subject their children to the humiliating effects of Ark Music infamy.

There’s another, more active sort of Internet-age aggression that enables detractors to enact, rather than simply wish, violence against young stars. Nonlinear editing tools are so readily available that virtually anyone with a computer can repurpose footage to their own ends. A YouTube user called “SaladUK” posted a popular video that remixes Justin Bieber’s appearance as a killer on CSI. The character’s death scene as aired on network television is already effectively bloody. However, in SaladUK’s video, titled “Dubstep Hits Justin Bieber Harder Than Puberty!” the young star is shot again and again, without contexts of narrative or character.

As operatic violence goes, this is not The Wild Bunch. This is not Bonnie and Clyde. This is a facsimile of Justin Bieber, being murdered in a brutal fashion for the entertainment of the viewers, who form a cheering section in the comments that appear below the video. The decision to cast Bieber as a murderous villain on CSI was almost certainly arrived at through a great deal of calculation regarding the “edge” it would lend the pop star as he makes the leap to a more mature part of his career. Though I wonder if the adults guiding his career ever stopped to consider the death scene as a permanent and malleable artifact. Did they consider that audience members like SaladUK would delight in re-killing his effigy with just a few clicks, and then offer that same violent pleasure to others?

No Future

The most extreme example of contemporary teen pop stars’ immersion with violence is rapper Tyler, the Creator. The foremost member of Los Angeles rap crew Odd Future, the now-20-year old Tyler has been making music critics swoon for a couple of years now with nasty lyrics that fall into line with any number of other hip-hop veterans like the Geto Boys or Eminem’s Slim Shady character. Despite his protestations against the horrorcore label, Tyler and his Odd Future mates stick firmly to lyrical and visual shock tactics that the Washington Post’s Allison Stewart dubs, “skate rat torture porn, riveting in its best moments, unlistenable in its worst and ultimately closer to Saw II than to Scarface.”

Stewart’s is the minority opinion, however, as the youngsters from Odd Future have for the past year received some of the most worshipful and nearly unanimous press fawning in recent pop music memory. The precise reasons for this response are unclear, but one could sense within the critical reaction the same desire for danger and nihilism that inspires millions of anonymous Internet users to incite violence in comment threads and message boards. There’s something profoundly dismal about grown-up critics wanting so desperately to escape their mundane circumstances that they would want to live vicariously through a figure like Tyler, the Creator, who angrily raps at times about raping and murdering, and other times about murdering and raping — a real repertoire.

There are inspired moments in the Odd Future catalogue — low-budget horror videos, a no-holds-barred performance on Late Night with Jimmy Fallon — but Tyler’s latest album Goblin sounds like minor league Def Jux without the wit. And the 10 million hits and counting video for single “Yonkers” is the crest to that critical wave on which Tyler rode to mainstream visibility.

Wolf Haley’s starkvideo for single “Yonkers” is a perfect fit for the therapy-obsessed Tyler. The black and white clip finds him narrating his shocking thoughts to the camera as if confessing during a therapy session. There is the requisite Odd Future gross-out gag and vomiting. Then, at the climax of the video, a noose drops into the frame and the rapper appears to hang himself. The camera lingers fetishistically on his legs and feet, his suicide act shot in the gorgeous contrast of a perfume commercial. After the critics’ groupthink/approval of Tyler’s hateful, violent output, is this the promised end?

No, because Tyler’s a character and a super star and now a label head. But on the receiving end of the screen, there are viewers who might struggle with the same disturbed thoughts and fantasies as their star rapper who plays the role of the lawless kid. The extreme conclusion of identification with his brand would involve taking those troubled thoughts to the limit, as he appears to do in the video. As Hagin writes, “A ‘beautiful death’ is problematic if it tries to claim that the living share some quality of the dead which could only be proven by death.”

To be clear, I’m not suggesting that teenagers are defenseless against negative and violent images. Nor do the images, in and of themselves, cause harm. There’s little to be gained from simply blaming the media when violence erupts in real life. Yet the causal connection between life online and life outside continues to become more concrete, as sad cases like Megan Meier and Tyler Clementi involve the very brew of factors mentioned here: media distribution, youth, immersion in the virtual, bullying, fragile emotions, and the threat of violence.

It’s Not All Bad

The emergence of violence in the public image of teen pop stars does have a positive dimension, insofar as the content enables discussions to take place at home, in schools, churches and other venues for youth and yes, even within a media willing to look in the mirror. Some young artists are taking control of the message in a positive way. One very funny viral video — “The Shooting” / “Dear Sister” from Saturday Night Live’s Digital Shorts series — uses violence to satirize melodramatic gunplay on teen soap opera The O.C..

The principal actors of the sketch (and guest star Shia LaBeouf) shoot each other, and are shot, multiple times in an opera of violence set to “Hide and Seek” by Imogen Heap. The song combines with dry performances and expertly comic picture and sound editing to shatter the hermeneutic and proairetic codes in the cause of absurd comedy. In a highly ironic fashion, the formal qualities of the sketch make an argument against arbitrary violence in drama. Multiple remake videos online showcase young people engaging in their own “Dear Sister” shootouts, and the tone is far removed from the bloody excesses and nihilism of the Bieber and Tyler videos.

Finally, another young pop star is engaging the issue head-on. Taylor Swift’s new video for “Mean” (directed by Declan Whitebloom) showcases a series of young characters being bullied, but then triumphing later in life. Sure, this is a literal-minded concept for a song about combating meanness. Yet the positive goal of the video, and its ability to reach millions upon millions of viewers, make it a welcome addition to the current crop of videos involving the pressures facing young people.

In “Mean”, visibility and acceptance aren’t gained through being the plastic actress, the cherubic pinup, or the baddest rapper. The video’s confidence-inspiring vignettes are a refreshing exception to media that would have young people focus (and indeed capitalize) on hurt, aggression, and impudence. To quote E.B. White, her video provides some “saving radiance” to counter the “unbearable disturbance” found on the pages, stereo speakers, ear buds and screens surrounding us.