Claims to Fame: Celebrity in Contemporary America

Rating:
Summary: THIS book
Review: Sometimes when people read a book and then review it, the review reflects what it is that they wanted the book to say and do rather than what the book in fact sets out to say and do. (And when academics review a book, instead you get an essay on what they would say if they wrote the book. But they didn't, so back to the book at hand.) Gamson's treatment of celebrity is not Berger or Spengler's or anyone else's...it is his. And it is pretty good.

Rating:
Summary: People immitating media immitating people
Review: This book is unapologetically about triviality. It begins with the rise of popularity of the trivial, illusion and fakery, in America since the time of P.T. Barnum. It is about the creators and consumers of illusion who replaced 'survivors' in after the transition to life in the megalopolis in America. John Berger has pointed out that zoos, stuffed animals, pets and eventually Disneyworld emerged as mankind became divorced from the fight to survive against nature, where animals were essential. The book does not explain why, in its appetite for illusion and triviality (consumerism, consumption of the media) America is so advanced with respect to Europe (the decline is there, if slower: the worst Hollywood films are extremely popular among Europe's youth). Gamson informs us of Holmes' expectation that photography would lead to the triumph of superficiality, and of Boorstin's description of the celebrity as a person who is well-known for his well-knownness. Political campaigns are accurately described as pre-packaged media affairs, where the participants have become game-players and the events themselves, like talk-shows, have become pseudo-events. People immitating the media immitating people. The future is trivial because trivial expectations determine the future via pre-packaged daily behavior. Gamson does not explain why we have evolved to this state of super-triviality, and why we seem to be stuck with it. This was more or less explained poetically by Spengler, and also poetically in still fewer words by John Berger, who informs us clearly and concisely on the subjects of Gamson's discourse: "It would ... be possible to talk of the 'homelessness' of the bourgeois with his town house, his country home, his three cars, his televisions, his tennis court, his wine cellar-it would be just possible, yet nothing about his class interests me, for there is nothing left to discover." Gamson's book is precisely about the people, and their admirors, about whom there is nothing worth discovering.