gossip arrives

Back in April, after the New York Times ditched its BoldFace column in the wake of the Ron Burkle non-scandal, I joked “NYT Ditches Gossip Column, Goes Tabloid.”

At least I thought I was joking. Today, however, I note that gossip has gone mainstream: in today’s Times, Caryn James devotes an entire article to analyzing the ups and downs of movie star Angelina Jolie’s popularity during the past few months.

Before she set a toe on the red carpet at the Golden Globes last week, Angelina Jolie’s carefully molded image as humanitarian and mom was already showing some cracks. The Internet had been flooded with reports, picked up from European interviews, that she had called her biological daughter “a blob” with less personality than her two adopted kids, and had criticized Madonna’s adoption of a baby boy from Malawi. Women’s Wear Daily reported she was being difficult about designs from St. John, the staid company whose ads she appears in and whose conservatively elegant gown she wore to the Globes.

By the time she reached the end of a haughty, humorless walk down that red carpet on Brad Pitt’s arm, the Good Angelina image had crumbled to dust.

There are sure to be squeals of distress from media critics, who will cluck about how the Times has clearly lost its way. What has gotten into them? Since when do Times readers care about movie star gossip?

Let me pre-empt them. The gossip is a) fun and b) instructive in a world where the manufacture of images—be they of movie stars or of political stars—is important to understand. Caryn James says this outright [emphasis mine]:

Once famous as a tattooed wild woman, Ms. Jolie has soared to the saintly realm and plummeted again in record time. Madonna, her only rival in shape-shifting, has maintained the devoted wife and mother image for more than six years now, despite her recent adventures in adoption. Good Angelina didn’t even last two. That shattered image, a lesson in the limits of spin, is the product of a lethal combination: a public that never bought into the reformed persona and a star who may have bought into it too much.

The backlash had been building all along, and not simply because, while married to Billy Bob Thornton, she wore a vial of his blood around her neck. (No fair blaming the press for her vampirish image.)

At least that’s how I’d answer the critics if I had to defend James’s piece. Indeed, I’d write a lot more in general about the celebrity-manufacturing aspect of politics and of all public life. Celebrities have enormous power to grab and hold the attention of the public, and thus to persuade the public; it is only fair that they—the real people behind the public images, that is—be subject to scrutiny.

This applies, of course, to media stars such as Osama bin Laden and Mahmoud Ahmedinejad and Hassan Nasrallah much more than it does to, say, the Jolie-Pitts. But the star-making machinery behind both kinds of celebrities operates on the same principles. You can read all about the celebrity-making machinery in sociologist Joshua Gamson’s Claims to Fame and also in Rein et al’s High Visibility.

Or you can read Caryn James and extrapolate a bit. But there’s a lot more to this. As the mood strikes, I’ll write about it.