Wait a second!
More handpicked essays just for you.
More handpicked essays just for you.
Celebrity and scandal essay
The effect of Hollywood
Celebrity and scandal essay
Don’t take our word for it - see why 10 million students trust us with their essay needs.
Recommended: Celebrity and scandal essay
I. Introduction
“The extent and quality of celebrity news in the media appears especially inordinate today, multiplying and intensifying at such a rate that “legitimate” news has fallen in precedence.” a website author revealed of celebrity news promotion in the media. Meanwhile, Aleister Crowley described Hollywood stars to be “cocaine-crazed sexual lunatics”. Eminent historian Daniel Boorstin defined “celebrity” in his 1961 survey The Image, which he considered American devolution, as a person who is known for being well-known. Moreover, Newsweek contributor Neal Gabler stated that celebrity or fame is a new art form that competes and triumphs over more traditional entertainments such as books, plays, television shows and movies. Out of thousands of these said celebrities, not all were remembered by people. Some shot to superstardom for they had real talent to showcase and had remarkable contributions to the industry as the celebrated actress Meryl Streep and “Hollywood nice guy” Tom Hanks for their impeccable performances. They became popular not because they had sensational or salacious lives but because of their skills that people want to hear or read about. On the other hand, others achieved instant popularity only through what they label as scandals or controversies. In addition, a scandal may be expressed as a slayer of public image of an individual which is based on disgraceful events about his private life while a controversy is a dispute where there is strong disagreement. In Hollywood or the so-called “Tinseltown”, this is when bizarre acts are done or secrets are disclosed through diverse ways. These may include leaked private videos, salacious comments and illegal behavior.
Every celebrity has the possibility t...
... middle of paper ...
... Scandal Like Winona Ryder”. E-How.
“How To Recover From Scandal Like Mel Gibson”.E- How..
King, Susan. “Sex scandals that rocked Hollywood: Celebrities have a long tradition of lurid acts”. The Calgary Herald. 2009 Oct 19.
Gabler, Neal. “In defense of our Brangelina-loving, Jon and Kate-hating, tawdry, Tiger- taunting culture.” Newsweek. 2009 Dec 21.
“Lindsay’s Bodyguard Bares All: Her Sick Secret World”. Star. 25 June 2007.
Rosenfield, Paul. The Club Rules: Power, Money, Sex and Fear. How It Works in Hollywood. New York: Warner Books. 1992.
Cross, Robin and Marriot, John. World’s Greatest Hollywood Scandals. Bounty Books. 1997.
Many people might say that stars are merely a product of the Hollywood system needing to make a profit; Hollywood manufactures a product and creates the demand for it. A star's image is processed through advertisements and promotions and has little to do with what the audience wants and needs from entertainment. There is a widespread mentality that any Average Joe can become a star with enough resources backing him up. Richard Dyer points out, however, that even movies full of stars fail, and stars can and do fall out of fashion (12). A star's economic worth is not invulnerable to audiences' opinions. The audience isn't so easily controlled.
The free dictionary online defines knowledge as “an awareness, consciousness, or familiarity gained by experience or learning”. Power, on the other hand, means “the ability or official capacity of a person, group or nation to exercise great influence or control and authority over others”. In Voltaire’s “Candide”, Goethe’s “Faust”, and Shelley’s Frankenstein, the quest for more knowledge and power sets the stage for the story yet the characters, Candide, Frankenstein, and Faust remain unhappy after acquiring the much desired knowledge and power. It can be said, therefore, that knowledge, and even money, often times twists and corrupts the mind because of the control (power) it gives people over others.
Marshall P. David (1997). Celebrity Power; Fame in Contemporary Culture. May 16, 2010. Electronically retrieved from
It disclosed people’s despair, fears, cowardice, as well as other negative feelings in front of difficulties and challenges, and exposed their stupidity by illustrating their ugliness and laughter as they watched wrestlers sabotaging one another and good friends turning against each other. Chris Hedges depicted a pseudo-world where people tend to seek comfort from other people’s misfortunes and care about nothing but fame and money. Under the “enormous positivity” created by the spectacle, the reality is actually a dead end. As it is said, “The modern spectacle depicts what society can deliver, but within the depiction what is permitted is rigidly distinguished from what is possible.” In the celebrity culture, fame and money are the images, pursued by the public, forming numerous social networks among people engaged. People will get lost alongside the road, yet he/she may not notice, because as it is said, “the spectacle is both the outcome and the goal of the dominant mode of production.” Images are unlimited goals, coming with countless outcomes. The spectacle keeps developing itself, as more and more people need no realities but more detailed
“Posts.” Fame is a dangerous Drug: A Phenomenological Glimpse of Celebrity.” N.p. ,n.d. Web 15. Feb 2014
The Hours is a novel that deals with the various cultural aspects of life. Michael Cunningham's writing reflects the various nuclear families, the different economic conditions, and the social issues involving the three women in the novel.
A celebrity is not a person known for his/her talent or achievement, but an individual recognized for his/her reputation created by the media. The phase of stardom is slippery, and media may choose to represent celebrities varying from exaggerated admiration to mockery. The three texts chosen, movie "Sunset Boulevard", feature article "Over the Hilton" and television show "Celebrity Uncensored Six" are texts presenting different perception of celebrities than their usual images - either corrupted by the encircling media, overloads oneself with self-indulgence, or just mocks celebrity in a broad spectrum. Such media items empower and impresses the audience by perceiving celebrities as people who pay the price of privacy to gain well knowness, signifying the vanity of stardom from the commonly accepted images.
Introduction: The Goal, written by Eliyahu M. Goldratt and Jeff Cox, is a management-oriented novel that illustrates the process of ongoing improvement. The novel revolves around several significant characters, including the main character, Alex Rogo, who is a manager in a manufacturing plant. Another prime character is Mr. Bill Peach, the vice president of the manufacturing plant. Lastly, the key character in the novel is the physicist, Jonah, who was a former professor of Mr. Alex Rogo. There were some other characters too, but these were the most fundamental ones.
Society always wants to keep an eye on their favorite celebrities’ life. It is fundamental. Every little detail the public wants to follow like what and where they are eating, whom they will marry, or what they are doing all day –such a vicious cycle.
Stints as a child model and commercial actress brought Lohan into the spotlight at the age of three. As she transitioned from childhood to adulthood, it was becoming much more difficult to make such an appearance in the media that she had as a child. “The mass-media sets the public agenda; they are the ones who, as a result of their social event selection and focusing system, assign the priority of the discussion topics on the agenda” (Pachef, 2010). Thus, everything she had done in her personal life the media had documented, making sure the public masses were aware of Lohan. From her drug abuse to her nightlife stories, the media had it. When she even knew she had enough, the media couldn’t let go because they had absorbed so much popularity and power from the public masses from all the stories behind Lohan. Instead of focusing on her recovery, she wanted to feed the media through her actions because it was her only choice to steal the spotlight. The media as well had distorted the image of Lohan on and off the screen, whether it was shooting a new film to having lunch with her parents, by making her look like this “Scarlet A” individual whom society dislikes. The mass media establishes the topics that are worth being acknowledged, and the public is interested in the topics that circulate in the mass media.
There was once a time when there were more simplistic views on life; where truth and justice prevailed above all and the main concerns of society were much more primitive. However, those times have long vanished and have now been strategically replaced by the commodity that celebrity culture fully encompasses. Guy Debord writes in The Society of the Spectacle, that the “spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation amongst people, mediated by images” (Debord, 4). By this, he simply means that the spectacle is constructed by the daily images devised by celebrities, reality television, and pseudo-events. And those images have altered and strongly influenced the way people perceive themselves and others, as well as the social
We are part of a generation that is obsessed with celebrity culture. Celebrities are distinctive. Media and consumers alike invented them to be a different race of super beings: flawless, divine and above all the real moral world. In a 1995 New York Times article “In contrast, 9 out of 10 of those polled could think of something
The gossip industry has become popular in the last few decades. Our society enjoys knowing about the lives of celebrities. We obsess over celebrities on gossip websites, and even obsess to the extent of stalking these celebrities. This industry has impacted our culture immensely. It has tainted our culture in several ways from creating bad role models for our children to making stalking an everyday affair; either way, the media has changed our society greatly. The gossip industry has brought new entertainment for our pleasure, but it has come with negative consequences.
Movie stars. They are celebrated. They are perfect. They are larger than life. The ideas that we have formed in our minds centered on the stars that we idolize make these people seem inhuman. We know everything about them and we know nothing about them; it is this conflicting concept that leaves audiences thirsty for a drink of insight into the lifestyles of the icons that dominate movie theater screens across the nation. This fascination and desire for connection with celebrities whom we have never met stems from a concept elaborated on by Richard Dyer. He speculates about stardom in terms of appearances; those that are representations of reality, and those that are manufactured constructs. Stardom is a result of these appearances—we actually know nothing about them beyond what we see and hear from the information presented to us. The media’s construction of stars encourages us to question these appearances in terms of “really”—what is that actor really like (Dyer, 2)? This enduring query is what keeps audiences coming back for more, in an attempt to decipher which construction of a star is “real”. Is it the character he played in his most recent film? Is it the version of him that graced the latest tabloid cover? Is it a hidden self that we do not know about? Each of these varied and fluctuating presentations of stars that we are forced to analyze create different meanings and effects that frame audience’s opinions about a star and ignite cultural conversations.
Napoleon Hill once said, “Think twice before you speak, because your words and influence will plant the seed of either success or failure in the mind of another.” This quote should be frequently used in society’s everyday lives. Celebrities influence people’s lives on a day-to-day basis and they do not even realize it. People use reality T.V. and commercials to figure out what they are supposed to wear or how they are supposed to live, but what they do not realize, is that the majority of media is fake. As a whole, we need to figure out how to tell if what the media is portraying is realistic. Adults and children cannot be comparing their lives to millionaires.