Just call us Eolus

Excerpts from New York Magazine – Celebrity and its Discontents

To a celebrity, narcissism is a rational response to a world that functions as a mirror, amplifying one’s positive self-image, the sense that one is in the absolute centre. It arrives later than classical narcissism—which sets in between the ages of 3 and 5, once a realistic view of the world begins to develop—but the disorders are indistinguishable, with patients exhibiting the same grandiose fantasies, excessive need for approval, lack of empathy, anger, and depression (how fabulous). Fearful of exposing the real them, narcissists project a glorified self that becomes so ingrained it becomes impossible to tell what’s real and what’s made up. Speech becomes impressionistic and lacking in detail—a symptom celebrity profilers well recognize.

It’s so hard to be a star—and no one cares. Stars are not just like us. According to researchers, celebrities are four times as likely to commit suicide as noncelebrities and live, on average, thirteen years less than Joe and Jane Sixpack. Celebrities may experience more insomnia, migraines, and irritable-bowel syndrome. Celebrities are twice as likely to develop a serious alcohol problem.

The psychological community is coming to terms with celebrity psychopathology. The modern medical term—the famous term, the celebrity term, the superstar of psychological monikers—is acquired situational narcissism.

Celebrity, as John Updike wrote, is the mask that eats into the face. A study has shown that pop stars use personal pronouns in their song writing three times more once they become famous; another study claims that the more famous one gets, the more one checks oneself in the mirror, and the more one’s self-concept becomes self-conscious. It’s a problem, to be both self-involved and self-conscious.

Trapped in their bubble, celebrities experience arrested development. The celebrity becomes an adolescent, a developmental stage that is non-age-specific. The time is the time before the blows to self-esteem that lead to a mature, realistic view of one’s weaknesses and strengths and a capacity for love that transcends self-love (Paris Hilton time).

No one has ever been safe in the House of Fame, though. Leo Braudy’s definitive study of fame, The Frenzy of Renown, traces the earliest mention of this house to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, where it rests on a mountaintop at the meeting point of land, sky, and sea.

In Chaucer’s fourteenth-century poem "The House of Fame", the house has become a castle with as many windows as snowflakes, packed with sorceresses and jugglers, magicians and wizards, celebrated singers like Orpheus and humble minstrels with bagpipes. A half-foot of solid gold covers the ceiling, walls, and floor of the great hall, where Fame herself presides from a throne made of ruby, her head extending to heaven and her body covered with as many "tongues as on bestes heres". Her herald, Eolus, the god of wind, holds a trumpet of Praise and a trumpet of Slander, blowing from them as Fame pleases.

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