The cultural iconography of the small-town girl turned big-time pop star is one of the most tried and true tropes of American popular culture. While it is a prevalent American dream, it often seems to turn young starlets’ lives into nightmares.
With the rise of social media, it’s easy for the public to feel like they’ve broken the fourth wall. We as consumers of celebrity culture and media love to claim our righteous take on authenticity and transparency. Of course, the media has caught wind of this and now, it seems nearly every celebrity is “authentic” and “relatable.”
They’re abandoning stage names, they’re doing live videos on tour, they’re inviting us into their homes and giving us makeup tutorials. Celebrities are using the same social media platforms we do to sell their authenticity to us.
We complain about being sold to, yet we always take the bait. This brand of pseudo-authenticity is still feigned, though. The live videos have product placements, as do the home tours and the makeup tutorials.
Celebrities are selling themselves to us. This isn’t a new phenomenon.
Christopher Terry, media law professor at the University of Minnesota, said celebrities’ names, likenesses and most notable attributes are protected under laws similar to copyright. This is called the right of publicity.
The right of publicity protects celebrities and public figures from being misrepresented, according to Terry. It distills their likeness down to their associations. Essentially, celebrities own rights to their persona because they’re famous for a reason.
Celebrities are hot commodities and have certain traits that define them, their trajectory and their marketability, according to Terry. Celebrity itself is a business and monetary asset that requires legal protection from misrepresentation. To a large extent, celebrities are brands themselves. In order to become famous, the 3-D of what constitutes a real person must be flattened into a few distinct, summarized and well-defined boxes to check.
This can mess with a person’s identity and legacy. Celebrities are known by the world for a few things that are usually not authentic. Those traits are used to define them, often for the rest of their lives and beyond.
An infamous case of this is Marilyn Monroe — or Norma Jean Baker.
Over the course of her lifetime, Monroe went from child bride to one of the most iconic women on the planet. She’s become synonymous with midcentury American femininity and her image has proliferated after her untimely death. Monroe became more of an icon and symbol than a person.
Ruth DeFoster, an assistant professor who teaches media and popular culture at the University, said Monroe and Norma Jean couldn’t be more different.
“It’s not her, it’s not who she was, the image of her,” DeFoster said. “The famous Andy Warhol shot for example, which I think is the one we all associate with her, that wasn’t her… she was this very laid back down to earth person.”
The discrepancy between who Monroe was and who she was made out to be lies at the heart of her exploitation, according to DeFoster.
“The way that she was really exploited as this vapid, dumb blonde,” DeFoster said. “That’s really the archetype of the character she played her entire life. There’s no question that she was subsumed by this character Marilyn.”
There is a new wave of change and awareness sweeping the public consciousness. A new star has risen this past summer. Chappell Roan, or Kayleigh Rose Amstutz, has had a meteoric rise over the past year.
The Missouri native broke the record for the largest daytime crowd at Lollapalooza, opened for Olivia Rodrigo on her Guts World tour, reached number four on the Billboard Hot 100 chart with her debut album “The Rise and Fall of a Midwest Princess” and has earned the unofficial title of “your favorite artist’s favorite artist.”
Within a year, Roan went from barely being able to afford rent to one of the most lauded figures of pop music’s last decade. Most recently, she’s come under fire for her anti-establishment attitude, particularly surrounding her stardom.
Roan’s stage persona is a very meta representation of the transformation required of celebrities. She wrote in an Instagram post, “When I’m on stage, when I’m performing, when I’m in drag, when I’m at a work event, when I’m doing press… I am at work,” Roan said. “Any other circumstance, I am not in work mode. I am clocked out.”
By having a drag persona, Roan implicitly separates her personhood from her fame. Kayleigh Rose and Chappell Roan are two separate people. One is a person and the other is an entity for public consumption.
Of course, stage names and name changes are nothing new in show business. There has been a precedent for a Jekyll-Hyde duplicity in celebrity women seen from Norma Jean (Marilyn Monroe) to Stefani Germanotta (Lady Gaga).
However, her likening of Hollywood to a day job is something notable. Roan is, in a way, protecting herself through her bluntness and refusal to play by the rules. Monroe and many other stars were exploited by the conflation of their public and private personas.
Roan won’t stand for it, and it’s unsurprisingly making waves.
By shedding light on the inauthentic nature of her fame, and celebrity culture in general, Roan is actually extremely candid and truthful. While a large public sentiment is that her mindset is naive and the 24/7 harassment and exploitation is part of fame, maybe it’s time we reconsider why we think that is.
Roan stated in the same Instagram post, “I feel the most unsafe I have ever felt in my life.” Why is it that she should have to put her life in jeopardy for simply being a performer?
A big part of Roan’s appeal is her authenticity and willingness to say the unsaid. Here, she’s saying something that the public really ought to know by now: celebrities don’t owe anyone authenticity, and frankly, have never tried to give it to anyone. Why should they?
Shouldn’t celebrities have some license to personhood outside of what they do for work, especially when we’ve seen time and time again how the conflation between celebrity alter egos and the people behind them has led to all kinds of exploitation? Why do so many people so desperately want to see another young star exploited by the entertainment industry? We’ve seen it for as long as the concept of celebrity as we know it has existed, from Clara Bow to Britney Spears.
Don’t we want to see real change, like we all performatively claim?
Fame in and of itself requires a transformation. Celebrities aren’t people, or just like the rest of us. They’re functionally brand mascots. We don’t care about what Ronald McDonald does outside of work. Why should we care what Chappell Roan does?