KumariFall2016

On Contemporary Celebrity Culture

Ashanka Kumari

Berardi’s work offers a glimpse at the problematic and complicated nature of spreading our beliefs in a culture driven by competition, where those that are not trending are often invisible to the greater public. Self-marketing or branding ourselves requires an understanding of the values of our audiences. Franco “Bifo” Berardi, in Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide, articulates this value system as grounded in pragmatics, described as the

methodology for social communication, particularly in the age of pervasive media: when information flows are pervading every space of the public discourse and imagination, simulation takes the central place in the emanation of the shared hallucination we call the ‘world’.¹

In other words, people are increasingly more interested in material they can use or exchange to compete and get ahead in the world.

It is in theory possible for almost any person to attain fame and spread their message in today’s age. Access to broad audiences through social media outlets give new meaning to what it means to be a social entrepreneur—people with cutting-edge solutions to social problems—and even more so, what it means to be a celebrity. However, having accounts on social media sites is only one step toward becoming recognized by mass publics. Along with regularly interacting within the communities we desire as our audiences online, we are tasked with the necessity to create relevant and engaging content to motivate audiences to pay attention to us. This work comes with the challenges of first determining the kind of content with which audiences are more likely to engage. But what if we can’t get the attention of our desired publics?

Celebrity-status is also attained regularly in the form of viral videos or blog posts, but this path to fame typically takes control of one’s identity away from the viral-celebrity and into the hands of the audience or public that responds to these videos or posts. For instance, consider the fictional example of Andy Bernard, a character on the U.S. version of the hit show The Office. In the final season of the series Andy desires fame. He goes as far as quitting his job as manager of Dunder Mifflin—the fictional paper company that serves as the setting of the show—and attempts to get on a singing competition show. Unfortunately, he fails at wowing the show’s judges and ends up humiliating himself, crying dramatically on the fictionalized “live” show. This failed audition leads to a ridiculed viral video. As evidenced by this narrative arc, craving for celebrity can remain unsatisfied by—or even harmful to—those who can’t crack the viral-media code.

In his book, Berardi analyzes the mass murders and suicides proliferating within contemporary culture as extreme strategies for acquiring celebrity. Though it is not the intended goal of his book, reading Berardi’s text alongside the reality of attaining instant-fame illuminates the problematic nature of what it means to communicate as a recognized person or celebrity today. By taking severe measures, murderers like Seung-Hui Cho (Virginia Tech Massacre); Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold (Columbine High School Masscare); and Pekka-Erik Auvinen (Jokela school shooting) produce their own instant paths to celebrity or, rather, infamy. These men took their own lives after taking the lives of innocent people, leaving media channels in a frenzy as they speculated about the lives of these criminals and, in turn, propelled them to household names while their victims were often left forgotten, unnamed, or unrecognized. This rejection of an “ordinary” life favors a more spectacular media self.

As Berardi details in his book, the criminals behind tragedies like these often suffer from a “psychopathic need for publicity and also to find a suicidal exit from their present hell.”² Berardi describes some of the preparation that came prior to these mass suicides as well as the desire of some of these murderers to be a part of the media spectacle as being similar to celebrity culture. For instance, Harris and Klebold were interested in accentuating their belief that the world operates under the—as Berardi calls it—neoliberal notion of natural selection but understood that this idea was not the way the present world worked, so they chose to move through a suicidal form. By moving through this “I’ll kill and I’ll win; then I’ll die” series of actions, Harris and Klebold were able to express their feelings for the way society should function at a national and not-to-be-forgotten scale.³ In another case, Auvinen announced his attack via a YouTube video a few hours before he opened fire at his school. Through this channel, Auvinen left an impression of his suffering as well as his wishes to incite revolution.

These arguments are not to say that a thirst for celebrity or sharing one’s message are negative pursuits or to make light of these mass murders and suicides, but, rather, they offer a means to consider why we must be attentive to these strategies to obtain iconic ends.

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1. Berardi, Franco. Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. New York: Verso. 2015. 25.

2. Berardi, Franco. Heroes: Mass Murder and Suicide. New York: Verso. 2015. 3.

3. 50.