The Way We Treat Famous People is Bizarre and Ugly

Creeping on the famous is still creepy

As a young boy, I had a few moments where my Dad would explain some practice or concept to me, and it immediately struck me as absurd - like when he told me you need permission from the council before you can build what you want on your own land (I still think that’s dumb! I own this place. I should be able to build a go kart track on it if I want! Fascists!). Another one of those moments was when he explained the Paparazzi to me. Some famous person, maybe it was Britney Spears, Kate Moss, or another appropriately noughties public figure, was being harassed by people with cameras as they walked down the street. I knew we had laws around stalking and harassment, and felt how the person was being treated contradicted all that. In fact, a lot of my discipline up to that age took the form of being told to leave my siblings alone when I was annoying them. Why was it bad when I did it, but these adults were being paid to do it? It made no sense; but then I was a mere 6 year old, and couldn’t even do multiplication yet - so it must’ve been something I would understand when I’m older.

Surprise! It wasn’t. I’m 28 now, can do all my times tables, and still think it’s insane that the Paparazzi are even allowed to exist. Imagine every time you left your house you had someone shadow you, jamming their camera in your face, desperate for you to make some kind of slip up or gaffe. Not only would you be justified in calling the police, the police would certainly come to break the whole thing up. They may even arrest them for harassment. Yet, that’s a privilege only we enjoy. If you’ve ever been in a successful movie or band, you get no such protection.

I would share footage of the sort of altercation I’m referencing, but I think it goes against the spirit of the article. I can’t really critique the behaviour while sharing the videos that come from it. However, you’ve probably seen some run ins that are stressful and chaotic to say the least. Tobey Maguire not being able to see while driving because of paparazzi flashing their cameras at his window. Tom Hank’s wife being pushed over by a crowd as he left the airport. Justin Bieber’s fans waiting for him outside his home. What the hell are we doing? Why does the fact these people are on TV mean it’s okay to treat them like this? It’s as if we’ve watched them from behind a screen for so long, we forget they can see us in real life.

They asked for it!

One explanation you often hear is that celebrities knew what they were getting into. They signed the Marvel contract for Dogman 6 or whatever is coming out now, and knew it would mean their privacy was no longer going to be respected.

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“For Phase 26, Jeff Bridges will be in the third reboot of The Man with the Jean Shorts: Into the Cut Offs Realm Part 2”

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There’s a couple of problems with this response. Firstly, a lot of celebrities don’t choose to become famous. A lot of them are children when they become well known, and couldn’t give informed consent. There are also other artists whose wade into the mainstream was unexpected. Maybe they were in an indie movie that did particularly well, or had a single blow up on TikTok.

Most importantly though, it doesn’t justify treating someone cruelly just because they could’ve expected that cruelty would happen when they pursued their work. When retail workers apply to their job, they can expect that the general public will be rude to them sometimes, but that doesn’t mean it’s not morally problematic to disrespect retail workers. It’s a shame that they have to expect that, and things would be better if they didn’t.

They want attention!

Sometimes people say that actually, celebrities secretly like the attention, and they’re all narcissists anyway. I don’t doubt that most famous people enjoy the positive attention they get. Walking down the red carpet, having people say nice things about you, and being treated as a demigod is probably good for the ego - but there’s clearly different types of attention at play here. Just because you feel happy when a good review comes out, doesn’t mean you want people filming you when you walk your dog. Hell, I like it when I get positive attention from the things I do, but I don’t want people hacking into my private emails (I don’t need anyone knowing how often I forget my password). It would be really weird if after protesting that, someone said “Don’t you have a blog? I thought you want people to see what you have to say!”.

There are also cases where the person obviously doesn’t want attention. We’ve seen plenty of videos of famous people yelling obscenities at paparazzi from their houses. That’s not the behaviour of someone who wants to be seen right now - and it’s hardly surprising. They’re at their home. I would hate it if someone was snapping pictures through my window when I play Helldivers 2 in my pants. That’s a sacred and special time. Just for me.

Boohoo! I wish I was that rich.

There’s also a lack of empathy for famous people because outside of the various drawbacks of celebrity life, their lives are very good. They are usually rich, live in wonderful homes, and get invited to fancy parties. I bet they’re even allowed to stay up late on school nights. Why should we care if they get bothered on the street when the rest of us have to struggle to get by?

Well, there’s a premise being snuck in here that if someone’s life is significantly better than ours, it’s not worth criticizing the mistreatment of them - but I don’t know why we would think that. If someone has a good life is it not wrong to harm them? Why? It would be odd if I got a promotion at work, and people felt they were suddenly entitled to flick my balls. The badness of harassment does not diminish when it’s aimed at people whose lives are going well.

It’s also worth noting that anyone who says this on the internet almost definitely has a privileged life. If you went to school, have a smart phone, and have used a washing machine, you’re doing better than an enormous number of people. However, I imagine you’d be a bit pissed if we all wrote articles about the time your pants split in Starbucks. Even if we justified our harassment of you on the grounds that your life is very good when compared to people in poorer countries, you’d rightly think that’s crazy - because the relative goodness of someone’s life is irrelevant when determining if it’s permissible to follow them home with a Dictaphone.

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I once visited a rural part of Indonesia and would be stopped everywhere I went, because white people were an abnormality. I even had people sneak photos of me when I sat to eat. At first, it was funny and a bit bewildering. After 2 months, it made me want to walk into oncoming traffic. No individual person ever had malintent, but when everyone treats you like that all the time, you are desperate to fade back into the background. I imagine that must be a taste of what it’s like to be famous. It was getting quite stressful, and I only had to put up with it for 2 months. If I had to live my whole life with it, I’d want to build an opaque dome around my entire home just to get a little peace. Stupid council probably wouldn’t allow it though.