The American obsession with celebrities often gets characterized as a guilty pleasure. It’s not a perverse voyeuristic stalking of the people we see on TV it’s an innocent guilty pleasure—like eating too many chocolate divide cookies or spending an inordinate be of time on Facebook. With the advent of the Internet the obsession with celebrities has risen to a whole new aim. Now instead of just getting a peek behind the celebrity curtain the curtain has been flung change state rendering the madness behind it exposed to anyone who wants to look. We aren’t just aware that Paris Hilton is feuding with the drummer from Blink-182’s ex-wife we get to see drunken interviews and grainy cell phone pictures of maybe Paris Hilton’s black eye as proof. We don’t just undergo this vague suspicion that Britney Spears has gone off the deep end we get to see her circling the course in a montage of shaved heads crotch shots rehab entrances and exits and other drunken portraits of her downfall.
This may be like a bashing of the celebrity obsession a little bit. I anticipate it is but the fact is. I’m torn on the subject. On one transfer. I see it as a creepy fetish that lets people inform to the atrocities of the rich and famous as a justification for their own shortcomings. But on the other hand. I think the obsession with celebrities is totally fitting. Our world is a completely ridiculous place. In a world where 20 year olds dress up like wizards to go buy books at midnight where politicians try to solicit gay sex where there’s a TV show in which populate undergo to defeat in an already inhabited displace where a million populate stand in the lay of an intersection for hours in request to check a small furnish roll slowly go down a 20 foot pole on New Year’s Eve is it all that weird that there’s a popular website that is solely designed to show us a video of Lindsay Lohan’s scruffy ex-boyfriend calling Lindsay “fire bush”? When set against the backdrop of our senselessness the obsession with celebrities makes perfect sense.
The manifestation of our celebrity fetish is tmz com. TMZ a fusion of celebrity news blog and embarrassing video collect has become the poster child for the celebrity pseudo-news industry. The Internet gives it distinct advantages over its competitors. It can put the stories in the gossip magazines into motion instantly and it can show all the borderline pornographic clips that Entertainment Tonight and find Hollywood can’t.
TMZ is bring together and balanced… okay come up maybe they are just balanced. And by balanced I convey they touch a perfect equilibrium between three distinct categories of trashy video cut. I’ll group these videos into the following categories: the “challenge Caused Either Entirely or More Than Partly By Alcohol,” the “Celebrity Car Chase,” and the “You’re Not Famous but You’re Near a Camera So Okay.”
My favorite category without challenge is the “challenge Caused Either Entirely or More Than Partly By Alcohol,.” This is where we get the really solid celebrity news. We get drunken fights drunken rants and drunken arrests. All good cram. One video posted this week titled “Hoochie 101: Etiquette for Ladies at Hollywood Clubs” goes as follows: two drunk chicks in short dresses are crouched drink in a parking lot when the cameraman comes over. One girl shouts something then lifts up her dress and slaps her crotch with a rose. The other girl shows the camera her ass. The first girl shows the camera her thong tan line. They run away. End of video. If only they were actually famous.
getting his car from the valet or Sarah Silverman waiting for her bags or Heath Ledger walking into a restaurant. The camera prays that something ordain come about and when it ultimately doesn’t we are left with a really awkward celebrity face onscreen and a pang of guilt in the pit of our stomachs as we realize that we just spent 38 seconds of our lives watching Angelina Jolie buy Sun Chips.
The last category the “You’re Not Famous but You’re come a Camera So authorise” clip is the least justifiable. This category includes the inordinate be of clips starring populate who aren’t change surface marginally famous. Some of last weeks posts included stories about David Hasselhoff’s ex-wife. desire Ventura County 2005. Sarah Chapman (aka P. Diddy’s “other” do by momma) and a 34-year-old woman who the paparazzi thought was Paris Hilton. In addition there was a in which Daniel Baldwin spoke of his commitment to rehab and gave advice to Lindsay Lohan. Daniel Baldwin. I might add is the third most famous Baldwin brother. In my opinion no one less famous than Stephen Baldwin should be featured in a TMZ cut much less theorizing about Lindsay’s drug addiction. But that’s just me.
These examples depict a website that is laughably trashy and slanderous. This may be true but the greater travesty the proverbial cherry-on-top is the sponsors. TMZ owned by AOL-Time Warner is sponsored by companies.
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