Owning celebrities

Have you ever noticed how some people sometimes think about celebrities as if they own them? They make comments, accusations, and they judge their behaviour or the way they lead their lives as if they had the right to decide on what they do.

Sometimes people even make stupid or rude remarks at celebrities that they would probably never make face to face to a perfect stranger. We wouldn't ever say to a stranger on the street: “that shirt makes you look awful”, “cut your hair, you look stupid”, “that girlfriend/boyfriend doesn’t suit you, dump her/him!”, “you’re playing/acting like shit, get a grip on yourself!”. We would never say that in our normal daily life because that type of comment would be considered just plain crazy, or at the very least, ill mannered. But people sometimes do say stuff like that to their idols when they meet them by chance. And why do they do that?

I think to most of us celebrities are at the same time objects of worship and objects of envy. We think about them, we pay attention to what they do and some more passionate of more obsessed, follow their lives, inspect their actions, and even try to imitate them. So in the end we don’t see them like flesh and blood persons. They become in our eyes objects, demigods, or metaphors of the dream we would like to live, but not real people.

But the bottom line is that they are human beings. They are made of flesh and blood just like everybody else. And even if their daily life is very different from our own; even if they have more glamour, heaps of money, tons of fame and seem in our eyes the luckiest people alive, they are still people. They have doubts, they have dreams, they feel fear, they feel miserable, they feel happy, they laugh, and they are sometimes as confused and stressed out just like the rest of us. And no matter how frequently they get inside our houses through the TV screen, we don’t really know them. No matter how much knowledge or information you have about someone you cannot know who they are until you really talk to them and interact socially (in fact you may even spend years with someone and in the end find out you never knew that person for real! But this would be a whole new ball game to be dealt with in another page of thoughts!).

My point here is that we sometimes overreact about celebrities because we tend to get sucked in by our passion, and hence we delude ourselves into thinking we can ‘sort of' live their lives through them. But although it’s ok to admire someone and follow their career, we should never forget that the real stars in our lives are ourselves, and ours are the only lives we can change for the better if we really want to!

A.C., Lisbon, August the 27th, 2006