Originally Written for Research Strategy and Design at the University of Leeds, taught by Dr. Nick Emmel
Karen Sternheimer’s Celebrity Culture and the American Dream does exactly as the title suggests it sets out to do: to explore the ways in which celebrities both shape and reflect american society. Through the developed themes of morality tales, class and consumption, and class unconsciousness, Sternheimer shows that celebrities and the media surrounding them are reflections of the greater american society: an ideal that we should strive for and a representation of the american dream “rather than journalistic accounts of how celebrities really lived” (18).
Throughout the 271 page book, Sternheimer, a sociologist at the University of Southern California, points out and studies themes from approximately 600 issues of eight fan magazines, published between 1911 to 2014 (accessed through USC’s Cinematic Arts Library). These magazines would be considered precursors to our now known and maybe-not-loved tabloid magazines such as The Sun and People (of which she uses for analysis in her final two chapters). Sternheimer uses “qualitative descriptions of the thematic shifts” (19) to draw attention to eight distinct time periods, in which the purpose and representation of celebrity was constantly changing. The purpose of these fan magazines, and later of focusing on People rather than “gossip-centered sources such as the National Enquirer” (19), is to provide analysis of what the public and fans believed and viewed to be “official” celebrity stories. The book is focused on what the industry wanted the public to believe to be true, and how both power dynamics and political issues shift that perception over time. In positioning her analysis in this way, Sternheimer succeeds in providing a historical and contextual overview of celebrity culture in the US, using advertisements and articles as a reference point for what issues were common across different times.
There are a few instances in which the book has less success, however. While Sternheimer at times discusses celebrities as being at once aspirational and “just like you” she spends limited time on, what I thought, was one of the most interesting arguments in the book. This was related to the concept of class unconsciousness—that celebrities become representatives for the “real” elite class that doesn’t get the press and fame, even if they’re the ones actually doing good or bad things that impact our world.
One of the largest limitations Sternheimer faces is a direct result of her sample: she is only able to analyze what the magazines she has access to discuss. As such, there’s next to no analysis of how the American celebrity industry reflects or influences the rest of the world, nor is there insight on how the American Dream extends far past the boundaries of the United States (Weber 2013). So too, issues arise simply from the breadth of time she seeks to analyze. The book studies over 100 years of magazine articles and advertisements, but is only able to dedicate about 20 pages to each time period, looking at a myriad of sources within a few paragraphs. In doing so, she’s unable to unpack the differences of individual fan magazines, and the nuance of the time periods she’s looking at. For example, only one section of chapter really dedicates any time to look at race (178-184). Though this is largely due to the fact fan magazines didn’t cover non-white actors for the greater part of her data, more analysis could have gone into how celebrities have continued to be classified and written about differently based on their race.
She also, again limited because her sample originally only looked at actors, doesn’t spend much time looking at the ways types of celebrities are different to one another. Towards the end of the book, there’s discussion about how athletes in particular represent the rags-to-riches and story of hard work, talks about the “new” reality star, and mentions YouTube as a method of showing off young singers talents, but doesn’t dig into the breadth of different type of celebrity other than, just lumps everyone together once she argues that a new era of celebrity has been born.
Finally, much of her analysis is somewhat surface level or introductory—she positions this as being on purpose with her goal of creating a more accessible study of celebrity and American society. It would be nice, however, to have a companion book written for a scholarly audience to provide those deeper analyses. So too, her level of writing assumes an immaturity in thought of her audience. I don’t think she’s giving “lay readers and undergraduate audiences”(XIV) enough credit in their understanding of the complex issues she is whizzing through and glossing over.
Despite these drawbacks, however, there are some really novel and interesting points that the book makes. Across the book, Sternheimer looks at the repeated and changing understanding of a woman’s place in economic life and in regards to social mobility, sometimes with celebrities serving as a representation for what women should be, other times as a warning of what they could end up like. Throughout the time of her sample, advertisements and articles shift from promoting being good housewives (39), to going out and aiding the war effort (113), to a return to domesticity (141), to warnings of what happens to promiscuous young women (201). These show an interesting and varied account of how womanhood itself is a construct based on constantly moving goal posts. She also places emphasis on the place of consumption in regards to greater shifts in America’s economic landscape, discussing how celebrity sometimes existed to show the dream of American suburbia (141) and other times existed to show off extravagance as mental relief and distraction during times of depression (86). These points were well-explained and analyzed, and served as continual themes to analyze within each individual period.
Overall, this book accomplishes what Sternheimer set out to do, and it is useful as an overview of how celebrity impacts the greater society. And while there are limitations based on the research sample and places that were subsequently overlooked, it wouldn’t be too difficult to take this text and find mirrored experiences in other celebrity landscapes, and could be particularly useful for comparing one culture to another. Celebrity Culture and the American Dream also does the legwork of looking into the past at what celebrities were then, and discusses the shifts in how celebrities are managed and how much autonomy they’ve had over time. And, as Sternheimer points out in the introduction, there’s a breadth of other, more in depth, scholarly research on celebrities (including her own articles) that one can read if they so choose.
References
Sternheimer, Karen. Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Mobility. New York, NY: Routledge, 2015.
Weber, Brenda R. “Celebrity Culture and the American Dream: Stardom and Social Mobility, by Karen Sternheimer.” Celebrity Studies 4, no. 1 (2013): 105-07. doi:10.1080/19392397.2013.750136.