Celebrity. Andrea McDonnell

were a part of our everyday lives, like friends or family members. When we experience these feelings toward a media figure, this is called a “parasocial relationship.” Such relationships, in turn, produce “parasocial interactions” (PSI), which occur when audience members respond to media figures as if we were with them in a face-to-face social relationship, talking to or feeling empathy for that individual as though he or she were a personal acquaintance.70 Examples include when we might yell at a newscaster, or someone featured in a news story on TV, as if they could hear us, or when we know a character is about to walk into a dangerous situation and yell “Don’t do it!”

      Initially, as with early thoughts about fandom, some scholars saw parasocial relationships as a form of mental lack, a compensation for loneliness or deficiencies in one’s social life. As David Giles has noted, “The implication that PSI is ‘imaginary,’ or ‘pseudo-social,’ pathologizes viewers who form strong parasocial attachments.”71 Other work has disputed these claims, and examined the affective functions of this phenomenon. For example, our one-sided interactions with media figures (real or fictional) allow us to use and assess their behaviors and attitudes as ways of understanding and measuring our own lives, and this may be especially true for adolescents as they seek to use celebrities as role models for their own identity formation. In these ways, PSI can be seen as “an extension of normal social cognition.”72 Research has shown that PSI can be especially robust if our attraction to the media figure is strong and the program or film in question is especially realistic. Indeed, perceived similarity between the media figure and the audience member, otherwise known as identification, can be a very important factor in the strength of the parasocial relationship. Physical similarities, taste in dress, or shared hobbies and passions can make audiences feel that famous figures really are “like us.” And for parasocial relationships to be sustained, we need to believe that the celebrity is not so very different from people in our own social circles.73

      Giles sought to identify different types of relationships we might form with famous unknown others, which can help us understand why we might connect to some celebrities and not others, and to connect with them in different ways. First there is identification, when we recognize some characteristics in the media figure that we feel we share. Yet while we might identify with a star, we may or may not engage in PSI with him or her. There is also wishful identification, where we desire to emulate the figure with whom we identify, and affinity, where we like the media figure without necessarily identifying with him or her.

      But the kind of media figure the celebrity is, and how we are addressed, can shape our levels of parasocial interaction. Direct address to us—by talk show hosts, comedians, newscasters—can especially evoke strong PSI. The mode of address in celebrity gossip magazines is also intimate and direct: the magazine is your best friend with the latest insider, confidential info, talking to you, with headlines like “The Joan Rivers You Didn’t Know” seeking to lure us in. Unlike the New York Times, which would not have headlines like “What Was Andrew Wiener Thinking? His Secrets Inside!,” the questioning titles seek to engage you and immediately turn you from a passive recipient of information into an active adjudicator of the moral issues involved. And with each question, betrayal, triumph, or crisis, a judgment is required; it is a given that you are an authority on such matters and will bring your own social knowledge and moral compass to bear on the topic at hand. You are hailed as having every right to evaluate these rich and famous people, and to speculate about their futures.74

      Jackie Stacey interviewed female fans and she too found that they had various, often powerful, relationships with movie stars, from worshipping and adoring them to identifying with them. Some identified with stars with whom they felt some similarity, either in appearance, values, or behavior, and some used the stars—how they looked, dressed, and behaved—as resources for their own behavior, as a way to transform themselves, to play with identity, or to craft for themselves a mode of successful femininity. Others, however, loved losing themselves when watching a film as they imagined themselves taking on the role and identity of the star in the movie. There was a pleasure here for viewers in this “temporary loss of self” and of “sharing emotional intensity with the star.”75 Stars “serve a normative function,” providing “ideals of feminine attractiveness” but also ideals around self-confidence, self-assurance, strength, and sophistication that some viewers sought to emulate.76

      Melanie Green and her colleagues have called this type of escape “transportation.” Green et al. conceptualize transportation as a distinct mental process that melds our attention, media imagery, and feelings. Their concept, known as “transportation theory,” seeks to specify how it is that audiences take pleasure in the feeling of escape and loss of self that media texts may provide and the ways in which those texts facilitate transportive experiences.77 Their work on the mechanisms of media enjoyment also helps explain why celebrity culture and gossip can be so absorbing. Transportation is, they argue, a desired state; we want to be taken into alternative universes (we all know that feeling of disappointment when we can’t “get into” a book or TV show). We enjoy the feeling of being taken away from our mundane reality into a story world. Many audience members are eager to escape from their everyday lives into another realm, in part to leave our worries, stresses, and self-consciousness behind. We connect with media characters, and through transportation may temporarily inhabit or even adopt their thoughts, goals, emotions, and behaviors, developing an illusion of intimacy with them.

      Transportation expands our horizons, opens up new information, and provides us with opportunities for identity play. We can try on different personas, attitudes, and behaviors, and explore other possible selves with minimal real world costs. So we can use characters’ situations and experiences to understand our own lives and, at the same time, use criteria we typically apply in our own lives to evaluate characters’ actions and behaviors. Transportation is not always pleasurable in obvious ways; when we watch horror movies, or action films where the hero nearly dies multiple times, or desperate tearjerkers, transportation can be extremely scary or deeply upsetting. Yet these media experiences allow us to explore our ability to tolerate unpleasant emotions such as rage, fear, and sadness, and we may even seek out transportive opportunities to engage such emotions. In this way, there is “enjoyment from traveling to the Dark Side.” The delight in immersing ourselves in such narratives is their relative safety—by contrast, our real world is safe and nonthreatening, and if the hero survives the risks, so do we. “These safety modalities,” the authors argue, “interlock to banish the terror of death or failure.”78

      While Green et al. focused primarily on fictional narratives like novels or films and that feeling of being “lost” in a story, we can be transported into nonfictional narratives as well, and it is that powerful sense of being transported that enables us to identify so powerfully with certain celebrities. Transportation via years-long narratives—starting in 2005, for example, the ongoing “Brangelina” love triangle and divorce saga, later the endless Kardashian dramas—allow us to “get to know” and develop a sense of intimacy with their famous protagonists through our narrative immersion. So when we open a celebrity magazine, with shots of stars in sunny Southern California in features about them being “just like us,” we can be transported, however fleetingly, into this balmy and privileged world ourselves. And just as we enjoy the highs, we also can take pleasure in the lows; when we read an in-depth profile of a celebrity, particularly one who has been through a recent triumph or tragedy, we can inhabit their feelings and relate their experiences to our own, creating a sense of pathos and shared experience.

      Celebrity and Identity

      Our ability to relate to and identify with celebrities also allows us to use stars as a way of considering our own identities, values, and beliefs. In our media-saturated world, being a fan is often integral to our own self-formation. Teens, in particular, may be fascinated by stars, as they manage their own ideas and expectations of self and adulthood, a connection that may help to explain why young adults are major fans and followers of celebrity culture, pop music, and individual idols.79 Indeed, we all have to develop a story about who we are, what we care about and stand for, what we hope to do with our lives, and what we do not want to be like. The vast arsenal of celebrity profiles, successes, and disasters provides raw material, resources we can try on, weave in, or reject as we construct our self-identity.80

      But the lessons that