Fame has always been a trap

The last time The Atlantic put a modern pop star on its cover was 2008, when Britney Spears, clad in oversize sunglasses, occupied a piece of media real estate usually devoted to probing the fate of democracy. Her appearance shocked many readers. “Everyone Officially a Tabloid or About to Become One,” read the headline to an incredulous Gawker post about the cover, expressing concern that the internet was pushing the media in seedier directions than ever. (A bit rich from them, no?)

But our Spears story was not tabloid fare; it was about tabloid fare. In a reported feature titled “Shooting Britney,” the writer David Samuels embedded himself with the paparazzi who were chasing the 26-year-old Spears around Los Angeles at the height of her public struggles with fame and family. Shortly before the story was published, those struggles led a judge to put her in a conservatorship for 13 years, under which her father and others controlled her personal and financial affairs. Samuels described the all-American economic forces underlying the aggressive snooping. The paparazzi tended to be entrepreneurial types, many of them immigrants. Their work satisfied a deep-seated public yearning—not just for gossip, but for reassurance.

“The paparazzi exist for the same reason that the stars exist: we want to see their pictures,” Samuels wrote. “Happier, wealthier, wildly more beautiful, partying harder, driving better cars, they live the lives that the rest of us can only dream about, until the party ends and we are confirmed in our belief that it is better, after all, not to be them.”

The article came to my mind recently when Chappell Roan—the 26-year-old pop sensation who’s influenced by Spears—sent the public a stern warning: “Please stop touching me.” In a blunt social-media video, she emphasized the bizarreness of strangers coming up to her as if they were her best friend: “I’m a random bitch; you’re a random bitch—just think about that for a second, okay?” To some critics, these comments seemed ungrateful. To others, they called attention to toxic, even dangerous fan behaviors that, in the most extreme cases, can escalate to stalking or violence. Fame worship appears to have become more intense than ever in recent years, judging by the rise of neologisms such as stan and parasocial relationship. Amateurs with smartphones now act a lot like paparazzi, tracking the movements of Taylor Swift’s jet or leaking details about Bad Bunny’s dating life to the gossip account Deux Moi.

A review of The Atlantic’s archives offers a reminder that being beloved hasn’t ever been easy. Back in August 1973, The Atlantic’s cover featured one of Spears’s spiritual predecessors: Marilyn Monroe. The article was an excerpt from Norman Mailer’s posthumous biography of the actress, who died in 1962. The opening passage focuses on Monroe’s 1956 trip to the U.K., where admirers and journalists swarmed her, and judged her. “The British do not care if she is witty, or refreshingly dumb, but she must choose to be one or be the other,” he wrote, describing her first press conference in the country. As Mailer saw it, the tragedy of Monroe was that she hungered to be respected, not just ogled. She wanted to make “a film that would bestow upon her public identity a soul,” but the admiration she received never matched the validation she sought. Monroe, Mailer surmised pitilessly, lost the “biggest bet of her life.”

The challenges of fame would inspire another Atlantic cover in November 1999, though this one was centered on a relatively un-glamorous figure: the psychoanalyst Erik Erikson. His adult daughter, Sue Erikson Bloland, wrote about being raised by the scholar who had coined the idea of an “identity crisis”—and who eventually suffered from one himself. After the publication of his acclaimed book Childhood and Society in 1950, Bloland noticed a change in how people regarded her dad: “In his presence they became mysteriously childlike: animated, eager, deferential.” The fascination even extended to her. She wrote, “Upon first learning that he was my father, someone might say, ‘Really? Can I touch you?’”

But her dad never seemed satisfied with the fame, and his personal relationships suffered as a result. Bloland, a therapist herself, theorized that people like her father were driven to seek public recognition in order to compensate for their own flaws and insecurities, creating an image that “reflects what the private person most longs to be.” But that performance has limitations. Bloland speculated that her father couldn’t escape feeling like a fraud who might be exposed at any moment.

But what about Erickson’s admirers? Why do normal people try to make gods out of mortals? Bloland saw fannish impulses as a seductive psychological coping mechanism: “We imagine that our heroes have transcended the adversities of the human condition,” she wrote. We want to believe “that achieving recognition—success—can set us all free from gnawing feelings of self-doubt.” But the idealization of others rests on a fantasy, one that comes at great “cost to interpersonal relationships.”

That cost seems to be inherent to fame in any era. Mailer certainly thought that the public idealization of Monroe heightened her own insecurities and unhappiness. Today, Roan has made a point to say that she thinks of herself as a drag queen; she is, in essence, trying to set a hard boundary between her persona and her personhood. But the division between the private and the public is exactly what entices people to scrutinize celebrities so fiercely in the first place. Fans want to scratch the veneer they admire and get to the truth of the person who’s underneath. And being scratched, as many stars have learned, doesn’t feel so good.