Not much good can be said of 2020. Perhaps we needn’t remind ourselves of that. But as such a testing year draws to a close we ought to dwell on the silver-linings; the unexpected but not unwelcome by-products of an otherwise irredeemably bad trip around the sun.
The cult of celebrity is in crisis, catalysed by a pandemic that revealed a vast chasm of experience between the rich and famous, and everyone else. Through ill-advised stunt after ill-advised stunt, celebrities began digging the graves of their appeal. And thanks to an endless barrage of tone-deaf messages from all manner of stars throughout the Covid-19 crisis, any goodwill we harboured for A-listers is fast dissipating.
Celebrities, it is worth a guess, have probably had a better year than most. It is not a controversial assumption (though most of us are unlikely to be speaking from personal experience) that weathering a pandemic from a mansion in the Hollywood Hills is a ten-fold more appealing prospect than languishing in a flat share, or even in an averagely sized family home.
Madonna – sitting in a milk bath sprinkled with flower petals – claimed coronavirus was 'the great equaliser' between rich and poor, the famous and the common
But in another sense it has been an annus horribilis for celebrity culture. In March this year the New York Times ran an op ed titled Celebrity Culture is Burning. It was prescient – but even the greatest cynic among us may have failed to predict that celebrity culture would be reduced to mere ashes by the year end.
Since the dawn of social media celebrities have been granted with a particular purchase on our lives: accessible at our fingertips; feeling perversely proximate; talking and interacting with the laymen like us as though we were their friends. The dizzying glamour of their lives is as aspirational as it is inaccessible. But through a crafty social media strategy for a fleeting moment we can feel part of it.
Bad news for celebrities all round however – the public aren’t buying it any longer. In fact, it is remarkable that they got away with it for so long.
In March, Madonna – sitting in a milk bath sprinkled with flower petals (exactly as baffling as it sounds) – claimed coronavirus was “the great equaliser” between rich and poor, the famous and the common. But since the advent of the pandemic it took little time for that already paper-thin veil to fall, revealing what has always been true: celebrities are not in fact “just like us”; Covid-19 does discriminate; the hyper privileged will always have an easier ride of a global catastrophe; there is little common experience between the Hollywood elite and their fans. All of this remains true despite Madonna’s protestations.
There have been a few standout moments, consolidating this welcome decline. In early March a cohort of A-Listers (and some barely pushing the C-List) bandied together to produce a montage performance of Imagine by John Lennon - each famous face singing down the camera from their own isolation quarters. Actress Gal Gadot kicked off proceedings by musing: “You know, this virus has affected the entire world. Everyone. Doesn’t matter who you are, where you’re from – we’re all in this together.” Before launching into the opening bars of the nauseatingly saccharine song.
It is no surprise that we may have different understandings of 'normal' to the Kardashians
The tone-deaf stunt (in both senses) featured our own Chris O’Dowd and Jamie Dornan, and was rightly the subject of widespread mirth. But it was the hubris of the whole affair that heralded a popular revolt: the performers seemed to possess an unshakeable belief that this was a great act of service for their fans who were anxious about the state of the world. Noli timere! Everything will be alright. Gal Gadot said so.
Jon Caramanica put it better than anyone in the New York Times: “You might say that every crisis gets the multi-celebrity car-crash pop anthem it deserves, but truly no crisis – certainly not one as vast and unsettling as the current one – deserves this.”
He was not wrong, but we were not ready for the horrors to come. Imagine-gate was merely the first in an innumerable list of incidents we have been confronted with over the past 10 months – each chipping away at the foundation of the celebrities’ appeal until eventually the entire structure collapsed before our eyes.
Any residual faith we may have held in the notion of celebrity was torn to shreds by further celeb-misadventure. Kim Kardashian kindly stepped up to the pedestal: “After 2 weeks of multiple health screens and asking everyone to quarantine, I surprised my closest inner circle with a trip to a private island where we could pretend things were normal just for a brief moment in time,” she wrote on Twitter.
It is no surprise that we may have different understandings of “normal” to the Kardashians, but even the least sceptical among us must have dropped their jaw at such a staggering lack of self-awareness (spare a thought for those who can only afford a trip to a private island when there is no pandemic raging, Kim).
We have accepted the cult of celebrities over-weening presence in our lives for too long. As a yuletide treat to ourselves we ought to refuse to indulge it any longer.