The strength of these feelings is one reason why our celebrity culture is so frequently linked with older traditions of worship. For that ecstatic possibility of transcending the ordinary and glimpsing the infinite hardly originates in the twentieth century, but is a universal longing reflected in almost every spiritual tradition. The historian Karen Armstrong describes it as an “essential craving” of all humanity to be connected with the “extraordinary”: “It touches us within, lifts us momentarily beyond ourselves, so that we seem to inhabit our humanity more fully than usual and feel in touch with the deeper currents of life.”
Such transcendence of the mundane condition has since ancient times been identified with heroes, demigods, and saints, humans who occupy a somewhat exalted position yet also remain accessible, allowing us some taste of another realm. At one time, this was also true of royalty (and in a few places it still is). What is particular to modernity, then, is not the existence of such individuals but rather the idea of constructing an industry based on the demand for feeling some communion with them, on our willingness to idolize them (literally)—an industry that monetizes their capacity to capture our rapt attention.
Perhaps, as the sociologist Chris Rojek theorizes, this is “secular society’s rejoinder to the decline of religion and magic,” for in the “absence of saints or a God to look up to, for many people in western societies the void is being filled by celebrity culture.” Of course, this is hardly to suggest that celebrity culture actually is a religion. People and other celebrity pantheons do not aim to provide cosmogonies, or ethical teachings, even if celebrity manners do have a depressing tendency to become normative.
The point is simply that whatever the neurological basis of religious experiences, something of the same mechanism seems to be activated by the existence, and particularly the proximity, of the most illustrious. That perhaps explains why, for some, celebrity culture is so abominable; it is the ancient disgust with idol worship, triggering an atavistic emotional reaction, like the rage felt by Moses when he burned the golden calf, ground it into a powder, and, scattering it on the water, forced his people to drink it.
In 1956, two psychologists, Donald Horton and Richard Wohl, would conclude that television’s representation of celebrities was carefully constructed to create an “illusion of intimacy”—to make viewers believe that they actually were developing a relationship with the famous people on TV. Certain techniques particular to variety but also the chat shows produced this effect: recourse to small talk, the use of first names, and close-ups, among others, acted to close the gap between the audience and the guests, engendering the sense in the viewer of being “part of a circle of friends.”
The two coined the term “para-social interaction” to describe this “intimacy at a distance.” So it is that, for many people, celebrities have become part of their built attentional environment, allowing them regular glimpses into that other world inhabited by magical creatures who look something like us, yet are beyond us. Our deities are of course nothing like the God of Abraham, or even His saints. They are, rather, more like the pagan gods of old, prone to fits of anger and vindictiveness, petty jealousies, and embarrassing bouts of drunkenness. But this only lends to their illusion of accessibility, and at least for commercial purposes makes them more compelling to follow.