Celebrity Infatuation

“Brittney’s New Diet”, “Tom & Katie: All About The Baby” “Nick & Jessica: Now What?” These are just a few headlines of magazines I recently observed while standing in line at the grocery store. Six out of eight magazines that were displayed near the checkout stand were celebrity gossip related tabloid magazines. Us weekly, Entertainment Weekly, Star, People, National Enquirer, all situated at the top of the row, while Time Magazine, Newsweek and a couple health related magazines held a place below. The reason for their placement is quite obvious; gossip magazines are superior in sales. There’s a reason why the first photograph of Gwyneth Paltrow holding her newborn baby was sold to a dozen different magazines at $30,000 a piece, earning the photographer more than a quarter of a million dollars for one photo. Americans continue purchasing these magazines, the paparazzi will continue snapping photographs and the celebrities continue to cash in. Movie stars get paid more than doctors & scientists, and soldiers trudging through the sand with bullets overhead are lucky to get a shiny nickel. These tabloids play the role of a drug, feeding societies cultural syndrome of celebrity infatuation. The passionate imaginary relationships through media and fantasy are a characteristic of contemporary American society. So why and how are we infected?



Celebrity figures are precisely packaged through makeup, camera angles, airbrushing and film editing giving them godlike qualities that a human cannot maintain. There is a certain extreme some celebrity obsessed individuals will go to, and that extreme is trying to aquire their physical characteristics by going under the knife. Societies infatuation with celebrities and our desire to acquire these features has taken plastic surgery to a different level. There’s even a television show on MTV called “I Want A Famous Face”, where every week 2 individuals decide to go through plastic surgery to look like their favorite...