Chris Atkins (2009)
This invective against today’s celebrity culture and the role of the media in driving and deepening it is likely to be preaching to the converted rather than enlightening audiences. Unless, that is, celebrity addicts are so badly hooked that they’ll pay to see Chris Atkins’s documentary simply because it’s about celebs. Atkins doesn’t distinguish different kinds of audience – he says that each one of us is incurably infected by the fame virus. Atkins parades anthropologists, psychologists and social scientists to attest to this although none of them supplies from personal experience an example of her or his own enslavement. This we-are-all-guilty line is disingenuous. Starsuckers is narrated by a half-comical, half-sinister American voice, which uses the first person plural to represent the collective of newspaper, film and television giants who exploit this inherent human weakness. It’s hard not to conclude that Chris Atkins is addressing another unified group – the ‘we’ who know better and can rise above our celebrity hunger, but who will swallow anything that a film like this tells us.
For the first hour or so, I kept thinking of the Basil Fawlty aphorism ‘Sybil Fawlty: specialist subject – stating the bleeding obvious’. Star-making through reality TV, what parents are prepared to put their children through in the pursuit of fame, how low British newspapers will go to dig dirt, the morality of Max Clifford – these are easy targets. That’s not to say that the film’s exposure of the tabloid journalists and Clifford isn’t enjoyable. During the months of making their film, Atkins and his team fed a succession of untrue stories to red tops. Some of these stories not only appeared in print but really took off. In one sequence, Atkins poses as someone with information for sale about shaming cosmetic surgery undergone by A-listers. The Sunday Express (rather to my disappointment) is too ethical to go further – Atkins is told they can’t touch the story because unauthorised use of medical records is a criminal offence. None of the Express‘s (more successful?) competitors is so scrupulous. A hidden camera films Atkins’s meetings in Caffè Nero etc with a succession of thick hacks, cheque books at the ready, as well as an interview at Max Clifford’s home. (It’s not clear what the pretext for Atkins’s visit there was but the sequence seems to have done its job well: Wikipedia claims that Clifford’s solicitors are threatening an injunction.)
Watching Atkins ridicule people on the outside of the celeb world – and looking in longingly – isn’t so agreeable. In a shopping mall, he and his crew set up a hoax project (‘ExploiTV’) which offers children the chance to appear on television. If I heard right, the pitch to the kids’ parents includes something about looking into social issues – if so, it seems unfair then to suggest that all those who took the bait were motivated by nothing more than a desire for fame. Once in the ExploiTV tent, the kids are asked to do something gruesome (I’ve already forgotten what exactly). In a later sequence, Atkins interviews applicants for a job as PA to a celeb and probes the extent of what they’d be prepared to do: one young man says he would take a bullet if necessary. As with some of the dupes in Brüno earlier this year, these set pieces chiefly demonstrate how far people are prepared to go to give someone in a position of power the answer they think they want. Even in Brüno, I felt that Sacha Baron Cohen was cheating; but it’s one thing for a comedy fiction to invent situations in which to push its satirical point, another for a documentary filmmaker to do the same. Chris Atkins isn’t excused by the fact that the bit in Brüno in which parents eagerly sign up their infants to pose for crucifixion photos eclipses the ExploiTV sequence in Starsuckers. It’s essentially the same technique: setting up a hoax which goes beyond what’s (so far) realistic in order to expose the ‘truth’ about celebrity psychosis.
Starsuckers is not as coherently structured as its division into a set of sarcastic textbook instructions – (1) start them young, (2) keep them hooked etc – might suggest. The second section features Wesley Autrey, who in 2007 became a national hero by throwing his body onto a New York subway track and saving another man’s life, and John Smeaton, the baggage handler involved in thwarting a terrorist attack at Glasgow airport (also in 2007). Neither man seems to illustrate the heading of the second lesson. I don’t know whether Smeaton and the media overstated how much he did to foil the terrorists but when the film starts showing Sun stories in which Smeaton’s three colleagues at the airport claim he did nothing and they did (but were less photogenic as well as less self-serving than Smeaton), Chris Atkins might just as well be reflecting a different and undeniable feature of celebrity culture – the way in which it breeds envy and a desire to destroy reputations. Wesley Autrey has used his popularity to launch and sustain a new and lucrative career as a public figure (we’re told he never turns down an interview invitation and that the tally of interviews is now in the hundreds). Autrey seems not to have been wealthy before fame struck and he wasn’t looking for stardom. My reaction was ‘Good luck to him’ but Atkins uses Autrey as an illustration of fame as an addictive drug. A professor of gambling studies confirms that experiments-have-shown-that the part of the brain that goes into overdrive when what we think of as pernicious addictions are feeding the human system is the same part of the brain that’s excited when its owner is ‘performing’. (A drawing of a head with pulsing lights inside it appears on the screen.) Atkins and the professor don’t say at this point whether it’s a different part of the brain that lights up when a sporting champion or a brilliant actor or singer or dancer is performing.
Starsuckers is designed to demonstrate that the phenomenon of celebrity is entirely pathological and mostly manufactured. But in the course of the film enough famous faces appear on the screen to remind us that some people become stars because they’re exceptionally talented. I don’t think Atkins does enough to distinguish our obsession with celebrities from our need for heroes. (André Gide regarded the need for heroes as a sign of sickness too but it’s a different sickness.) There’s also a bit in the film about using celebrities to sell things. If advertising works at subliminal levels, I obviously can’t prove that I’m immune to it but I’m always sceptical about claims of how much we buy products as a result of their being advertised, and I’m confidently sceptical that I would ever buy something because a celebrity had encouraged me to. I know that if I see someone I really admire doing a commercial I’m less inclined to buy the product as a result – I’d feel that doing so was degrading to the object of my admiration. Having bought Gillette shaving foam for years, I didn’t stop last year when the Gillette advert with Roger Federer (and Tiger Woods and Thierry Henry) appeared but I was actually relieved that it was the razor Federer was advertising, not the foam. I’ve experienced something similar recently seeing Paul Whitehouse doing Aviva ads – even if it’s naturally a bit different when it’s an admired actor (not as himself) rather than a sporting hero in the ad. (Even when it’s an actor as himself I feel easier. Most commercials at the cinema are so noisy and protracted that the Nespresso one with George Clooney a few months ago seemed a masterpiece of wit and economy, and that was mainly thanks to its star.) Chris Atkins would probably tell me that these reactions are illustrating celebrity obsessions in a different way – my reactions take account of the star status of the person doing the advertising – but they also reflect, as well as a basic antipathy to being told what to buy, an understanding of why I like the individual concerned – because he excels in a particular sphere – and a sense that I don’t want that being infected by his appearance in a different context which doesn’t depend on his special talent.
The anthropologist Robin Dunbar explains at one point that a ‘group’ rather than a ‘loner’ mentality has been hard-wired into our brains in the course of human evolution. Atkins shows footage of monkeys intently watching other monkeys which demonstrate our follow-the-leader proclivities; the narrator’s voice reminds us how difficult it is for humankind to thrive in complete physical and mental isolation. While the last point is obviously true, it seems quite a jump to suggest, as Atkins seems to, that people can’t be relatively and contentedly solitary and immune from inducements to express pack or herd instincts. We’re told that we’re obsessed with celebrity because we all want to be celebrities too. Then a condescending academic from Brunel University talks about ‘parasocial’ relationships between celebrities and their fans, in which the fan knows as much as they can about the celebrity and the celebrity probably doesn’t even know of the fan’s existence. Does parasocial interaction really demonstrate that the fan wants to become a celebrity? Isn’t it a reflection of the fan wanting to maintain a distinction from, as much as a connection with, their idol?
The film gets more interesting in its last two sections. The first of these describes how a group of celebs got together to form the ‘Celebrities Party’ in Lithuania’s national elections in 2008: they’re now the second largest party in a coalition government. This is immediately shocking though not that surprising (Atkins hardly needs to show footage of Arnold Schwarzenegger to drive home the point). Britain’s first-past-the-post system would presumably prevent its happening here but you know that a collection of stars standing for parliament would get plenty of votes. There are already in this country several manifestations of the underlying syndrome which the Lithuanian experience illustrates in an extreme form – people famous for one thing must therefore be good at whatever else they want to do. You see it in the book industry (celebrity gardener novelists); in the assumption of transferable star skills that informs many television roles (the chat show host who got the job on the back of reading the news). The mistaken belief that someone who excels at a sport has to be able to talk well about others playing it is a different kind of example. Real political parties parading their celebrity supporters are part of the same phenomenon.
I wasn’t sure what point(s) Atkins was making in the Lithuania section – if he was implying here what is an explicit point of the last section of Starsuckers: that controlling media interests are (for their own politically partisan reasons?) keen to distract public attention from real political issues. That surely wouldn’t work in the Lithuanian scheme of things unless the neo-politicos continued to see themselves mainly as entertainers – and that’s evidently not the case with at least one of them, a gruesomely pompous ex-news anchor, who clearly regards himself as a very serious politician. (Watching this man, I couldn’t help being reminded that people in his line of work were trying to be MPs in this country half a century ago – Robin Day, Ludovic Kennedy et al.) Another of Lithuania’s new political stars, ex-host of the country’s Who Wants To Be A Millionaire?, demonstrates a penchant for soundbites. ‘It’s ironic’, he reflects, ‘in my previous job, I was giving away a million – now I am taking away millions through the public expenditure cuts we have to make’. And: ‘I used to be on television one hour a day, five days a week – now I’m on television five hours a day’. Atkins cuts to the Lithuanian parliament to show the man in action there. Is he still getting the same viewing figures? (I guess we’re supposed to assume not that the Lithuanian people are so devoted to the celebs they’ve voted in that they’re now glued to parliamentary proceedings – but that they’re developing allegiances to the stars filling vacated places in the public eye and who are thus the government of the future. I’m not sure, though.)
In the final part of Starsuckers, Atkins goes behind the façade of the ‘Make Poverty History’ agenda in 2005 – or at least the Bob Geldof-Bono-Richard Curtis part of the movement. The MPH spokespersons interviewed by Atkins, who deplore the ways in which MPH events which reflected the movement’s tougher political demands were marginalised or cancelled, are measured and convincing. Because Geldof’s and Curtis’s contributions to the enterprise are widely regarded as sacrosanct, Atkins seems to be stepping into riskier territory here. He’s pushing it when he establishes a connection between Curtis and Rupert Murdoch (at about four degrees of separation) but some of the points hit home. It’s interesting to know that an ‘objective’ BBC documentary vaunting the success of MPH/Live 8 was made by a production company owned by Geldof. At the Live 8 concert in Hyde Park, Geldof presented to the crowd a young African woman whom he claimed had been saved from starvation thanks to Live Aid, twenty years earlier. It transpires that the girl’s life had been saved in 1984, the year before Live Aid took place. Although these aren’t unforgivable sins, they do have the effect of sharpening your sense that, when Geldof gave the G8 leaders environmental marks out of ten, it was a breathtaking example of rampant celebrity arrogance.
Once Atkins has got his teeth into Geldof, however, he won’t let go; and, by this point in Starsuckers, he’s exposing dark secrets so mechanically that he can no longer judge whether their exposure has any coherent connection to his main theme. He discovers that some of the resources sent to Ethiopia post-Live Aid were used to assist a programme of ethnic cleansing – that many people died as a result of Live Aid. Yet he’s not, of course, suggesting that that was Geldof’s purpose or – one assumes – that Live Aid was a bad idea. It’s unclear that this last revelation has much to do with the vices of celebrity culture. Atkins here reminds you more of people who tell you not to buy charity Christmas cards because not all the money goes where you think it’s going.
An academic from Harvard quotes a statistic that in 1988, in a poll of young Americans, 80% thought themselves a person of importance – a huge increase on the corresponding figure in a poll taken twenty or so years earlier. What shocked me about the 80% figure was that it was so out of date – it must surely be in the high nineties now in this twittering world (T S Eliot was truly clairvoyant), a world in which most people are not just self-important but seem to feel that anything they do or say must be interesting to everyone else. (One of my favourite New Yorker cartoons shows a man speaking on his mobile in an empty train carriage. The caption reads: ‘I’ll call you back when there’s an audience’.) All in all, though, I ended up much less horrified by Starsuckers than I think I was meant to be. This is partly because the most noisome examples of the pathology of celeb culture are so familiar, partly because the film is blatantly tendentious and Chris Atkins piles on evidence for his thesis pretty carelessly, and partly because I think more people are more aware and discriminating than Atkins suggests. There’s an interview with young women in a crowd watching the arrival of stars on the red carpet at some London premiere. I didn’t even know who the celebs were but their fans were likeable. One of them says that she caught the eye of her idol and that, ‘I’d like to think there was some connection there’. And she says it ironically, and laughs. It doesn’t mean that she wasn’t thrilled to see him but she realises that her assuming she’s special to the celeb in question is a foolish fantasy (even if it may also be a sustaining one). Her reaction suggests that the thinking ‘we’ to whom Chris Atkins seems to be addressing Starsuckers may be a bigger constituency than he thinks.
2 November 2009