Being a celebrity has never looked so unappealing

Helen Coffey, The Independent

As much as the superstars love their fans, fans are predators.” So said the late Dr Donna Rockwell, a clinical psychologist and one of the world’s leading experts on fame and celebrity, during an interview with The Face in 2019. “In a way (fame is) almost like an excommunication because now you are an object. People are watching you.” Her words were an eerie foreshadowing of a sentiment recently expressed by Chappell Roan, the American singer who shot to stratospheric fame this year.

“If you saw a random woman on the street, would you yell at her from your car window? Would you harass her in public?” Roan said in a social media video calling out fans’ behaviour in August. “Would you stalk her family? Would you follow her around? Would you try to dissect her life and bully her online?”

In the raw, unfiltered post, Roan railed against such “weird” behaviour, calling it “creepy”: “I don’t care that this crazy type of behaviour comes along with the job, the career field I’ve chosen. That does not make it OK, that doesn’t make it normal.” The diatribe split opinion — some praised her for setting boundaries, others poured scorn for what they perceived as a rude and entitled outburst — and even garnered enough attention to be parodied in a Saturday Night Live sketch featuring Bowen Yang dressed as viral hippo Moo Deng. Since then, she’s hit the headlines for telling off a photographer who “yelled” at her at both the VMAs and Olivia Rodrigo’s GUTSWorld Tour film premiere, earning the nickname “Chappell Moan!” from some quarters. But her perceived temerity for daring to question the accepted “non-negotiables” of being in the public eye is shining a light on the, at times, distinctly unpalatable reality of being a celebrity.

Though her own trajectory from relatively under-the-radar artist to Gen Z superstar has been whiplash-inducingly fast, Roan is not the first to draw attention to the pitfalls of “parasocial” relationships. This term describes a one-sided connection with a celebrity or public figure — one in which the famous party is completely oblivious to the “connection”.

Actor and singer Keke Palmer shared a troubling experience with a fan in 2022, whereby they started filming her against her wishes. “No means no, even when it doesn’t pertain to sex,” she tweeted.

Popstar Justin Bieber took the decision in 2016 to turn down photo requests from fans. “It has gotten to the point that people won’t even say hi to me or recognise me as a human,” he explained in an Instagram post. “I want to be able to keep my sanity.” That same year, actor Jennifer Lawrence outlined why she had also started turning down selfies: “I think that people think that we already are friends because I am famous and they feel like they already know me — but I don’t know them. I have to protect my bubble.” While the modern notion of celebrity is credited with having its earliest roots in the late 19th century, the internet and social media have fundamentally altered the nature of fame in the last decade or so. There has always been a darker side to the sparkle of hitting the big time — an issue that’s poignantly explored in a forthcoming BBC documentary, Boybands Forever, on Nineties groups. The difference is that Roan and her ilk aren’t retrospectively looking back and reflecting on the madness, but openly speaking about it in real time, while their star is still on the ascent.

The additional challenges of navigating celebrity in the digital age are also more apparent than ever: “fans” increasingly feeling like they have ownership over the object of their obsession; the mental health implications of overnight or overwhelming fame; the scrutiny and subsequent cancel culture inherent in reaching never-before-possible numbers of people via social media. Dr David Giles, a reader in media psychology at the University of Winchester who’s written extensively about fame in his two books, Illusions of Immortality and Twenty-First Century Celebrity, tells me that the landscape is changing due to media and technological change.

“One of the things I often talk about is the importance of the medium, and the affordances of that medium,” he says. “Twitter/X affords something quite different from TV/radio. If you’ve grown up with social media and are used to negotiating lots of followers you can probably tolerate small increases in your fame, but suddenly having to deal with thousands of followers is a different matter. So even ‘social media natives’ can struggle with the increasing demands — you get used to a particular rhythm of communication and then it all changes, and you’re getting different types of communication (abuse, etc) and you have to have a plan to deal with it.”

Online abuse, he theorises, is often “opportunistic”, because “people still can’t quite believe they’ve got this level of access to celebrities.”