Gawker Stalker

Admit it: you can’t wait for Angelina and Brad to have their perfect baby, or to see how the Charlie Sheen-Denise Richards-Richie Sambora-Heather Locklear love quadrangle plays out, or to find out what Lindsey Lohan’s current hair color is and what this says about her state of mind. What they’re wearing, what their latest projects are, who their latest lovers are, what they’re naming their babies — there isn’t a facet of celebrity life that doesn’t fascinate us, even if it often veers into fascination of the car-wreck variety. Celebrity culture has come to permeate every part of popular culture, adding an extra layer of significance onto everything that pop produces: the cut of a dress is not half as important as who’s wearing it, and the only models that matter are the super kind; an album doesn’t just sound good or bad, it signifies the next step in a singer’s career and acts mostly as a soundtrack for her new look; a game-winning jump shot can only do so much to mend a basketball player’s strained relationship with the press.

We’re not just talking about manipulative agents and publicists pulling the wool over a guileless populace’s eyes, here; even as we take in every detail about Jessica and Nick that People sees fit to print, we are fully aware that we’re not reading a magazine so much as a catalog, one in which we select from an array of potential heroes, villains, and gods with which to populate our collective consciousness. When a film like American Dreamz makes a half-hearted attempt to satirize this process by which we crown kings and queens — to expose the connections between fame, power, and politics — it’s met with a yawn, because it’s not telling us anything we don’t already know.

Of course, any system that generates power through popular appeal will eventually result in a loss of power as that appeal wanes, which is why famous people and their handlers are so desperate to maintain control over the ways in which they are viewed by the people whose approval they depend on. The whole celebrity system — stars, publicists, editors, even paparazzi — is, to shift metaphors, more than a catalog: it’s a cathedral, a house of worship in which the god of the day is constantly changing, where one minute the man behind the pulpit is trying to convince you that Jennifer Aniston won’t let being wronged by Brad get her down, and in the next that Angelina was his destiny all along.

The Internet was pitched to us as an escape from this sort of system: a centerless, bottom-up bazaar, where everyone matters equally and where the people who matter are those who make substantive contributions, not those who have Graydon Carter on speed dial. Free to produce and consume content of their own choosing, people would shift their focus away from prepackaged celebrities and towards things that really matter to them. If Gawker Stalker is any indication, the pitch was only half right: power over framing and presentation has shifted away from the usual suspects, but as it turns out, we’re still mostly interested in using it to keep our eyes on the same old stars.

Gawker Stalker works simply: you see a famous person somewhere in Manhattan (the whirlpool of fame and fortune where the site’s parent, Gawker.com, is based and focused), you e-mail news of your sighting to the editors, and they spread the news to the masses. This short-circuiting of the normal channels by which celebrity gossip is spread was recently enhanced by the addition of an interactive map that lets you see exactly where each sighting occurred. On a good day, you can actually follow the trail of a particularly peripatetic star over the course of a lazy afternoon, tracking his or her errands and luncheons the way park rangers track a radio-tagged bear.

The map seems to be what has really gotten under people’s skin. A mere text-based blurb (even one with the catty commentary that often accompanies a Gawker Stalker post) is free publicity; a blurb with an address and directions is an invitation. In a “private” e-mail, sent to other stars’ publicists and carefully “leaked” to the press, George Clooney urged celebrities to combat this threat to both their privacy and their control over their image: “A couple hundred conflicting sightings and this website is worthless. No need to try to create new laws to restrict free speech. Just make them useless. That’s the fun of it. And then sit back and enjoy the ride.”

When the good and the great feels forced to engage in this sort of guerilla counter-spamming warfare against an irregular army of bloggers, they’ve already lost. The fight that they’ve lost isn’t over the right of stars to the same sense of privacy that the average citizen enjoys; it’s over the ability of celebrities to maintain the elaborately constructed aura of stardom that separates them from the teeming masses. Even the candid photos that the paparazzi take at intimate moments serve not to puncture this aura, but to reinforce it; after all, regular folk like you and me don’t have flocks of people with cameras hiding in the bushes outside our homes. What does puncture this aura is when the public — the audience that watches from afar the ongoing performance that is celebrity life — crosses the velvet rope that separates audience from performer and becomes an active participant in the show. Gawker Stalker doesn’t make celebrities any more or less famous, but it does change the way we see them and ourselves in relation to them; at the very least, it’s more interesting than another round of red-carpet interviews.