inner personality, screen stars parasitize their own image to sell themselves
in another medium for economic gain. Sites like WorldLive.Com host
on-line diaries of megastars such as Melanie Griffiths, who receives hit-
money from each of the millions of fans who log on to her diary. But also
they might be enticed into buying jewellery from her ‘Goddess’ range of
products. Such marketing is more powerful than an advertising campaign
featuring the celebrity, as it proposes to overcome the symbolic inequality
between fan and star by the star divulging common everyday feelings,
but also by emulating a non-celebrity’s only avenue for achieving fame –
the personal web-page.LLoonneellyy aatt tthhee ttoopp Because of the fact that celebrities belong to a very restricted
visibility class, it is frequently difficult for them to associate with persons
of low visibility. They relate to each other, in the form of a kind of ‘status
closure’ that is bound up in image-making; many of them report the diffi-
culty of having ‘real relationships’. There is even a genre which provides
for this fact, films where a member of the media elite (or high-visibility
elite) wants to experience being a ‘real person’: for example, Notting Hill,
Coming to America, and Love Actually.^30 Two strong themes emerge in these
narratives. Firstly, there is the idea that a famous person needs to mas-
querade as an ‘ordinary’ (perhaps anonymous) person, or at least down-
play their fame, in order to see whether people appreciate them for reasons
other than just being ‘famous’. Secondly the celebrity finds the affections
of others superficial and suspicious, and seeks some way in which they
can view the ‘true’ behaviour of others.
But the ‘true’ behaviour of ordinary people must be experienced
candidly, without their being aware of celebrities, cameras and micro-
phones – a realm which is itself constructed by the culture industry and
formalized in ‘candid camera’ genres of television. Opposite the celebrity, the
ordinary media consumer cannot have access to an intimate or empathic
connection with their media hero either. To do so would be to transgress
a boundary that cannot be crossed in any open sense. According to
Meyrowitz (1994), however, there is a restricted sense in which this
becomes realized – where a fan accumulates a very private obsession with
a celebrity, to the point that they become ‘media friends’. In a culture
where electronic relationships can become as real as physical ones, some
categories of fans may come to confuse the two in strange ways, and live
their physical life in relation to the screen identification. Fans become so
obsessed with being like them that they take on their appearance, sur-
round themselves with their iconic memorabilia, or may even stalk the
same person, or, in the most extreme case of not being able to reconcile the
virtual with the physical, threaten to kill them, or actually succeed in their
murder (see Meyrowitz, 1994: 63–4).
Of course, when fans act out such behaviour ‘fanatically’ (which is
the root of the term applied to them), they become not friends but others,
as ‘strangers’ whose strangeness is inversely measurable alongside theTelecommunity 213Holmes-06.qxd 2/15/2005 1:03 PM Page 213