Frequent food television host and food writer Nigella Lawson found herself on the front page of British tabloids over the weekend when paparazzi photographs appeared to capture her husband, advertising mogul Charles Saatchi, with his hand on her throat at a London restaurant. This isn’t the first time that Saatchi has appeared to behave less than well to Lawson in public. There’s a 2012 photograph of him putting his hand over her mouth while they’re at an outside table at a restaurant, both with expressions on their faces that make it hard to tell if what’s passing between them is nasty, or a bit of private theater that might be misunderstood. But the image of Saatchi seeming to choke Lawson is much more decidedly disturbing image, and though Lawson hasn’t filed criminal charges yet, Scotland Yard is investigating the incident.

It’s also raised questions about whether the celebrity photographers who captured images of the events should have intervened to help Lawson. The debate over whether photographers and other journalists should be willing to take action after they’ve photographed people in danger, or whether they should take action rather than photograph people in danger, is hardly limited to paparazzi, or to situations where violence is imminent or occurring. Kevin Carter, the South African photojournalist who captured the galvanizing image of a small, starving girl being stalked by a vulture in Sudan during the terrible famine there, was sharply criticized for not making sure that the girl reached a feeding center, though he did reportedly chase away the vulture watching her. In other words, this sort of reaction isn’t just limited to celebrity gossip or to the much-reviled paparazzi. Perhaps because photography is so visceral, it’s hard for some audiences to see images of an obviously news-worthy event like the Sudan famine, shot by a hard news photographer, and understand why someone would capture images rather than try to save a starving child, even if photographing that child will do important, long-term good in terms of mobilizing public action and changing public opinion.

But while it’s easy to think that the paparazzi should step in, even if we don’t like to acknowledge that they might be bound by journalistic ethics not to intervene, however loose, it’s harder to tell if, in Lawson’s case, they actually could have done any good. The photograph of Saatchi’s hand on Lawson’s throat is frightening. It captures her choked expression, her face filling the frame. But that doesn’t mean the person who took it was actually close to her, just that they had access to good telephoto lenses. By the time they put down a camera, got into the restaurant (where they might not have been allowed in any case), and attempted to intervene on Lawson’s behalf, Saatchi could have taken his hands off her, or already done whatever harm he intended to do. In the interim, there were people in the restaurant with Saatchi and Lawson, some of whom have already talked to the press about how upsetting it was to witness the incident, and who might have been in better proximity to intervene on Lawson’s behalf if they thought she was in real danger. It’s fun to talk about the evils of the paparazzi. But when domestic violence, if that is indeed what this proves to be, takes place in public, bystanders, not just photographers, have obligations as decent human beings, too.

Much of the Republican National Committee’s Growth & Opportunity Project report is dominated by concerns with demographics. But throughout the report there are concerns about how Republicans can better engage with media and popular culture, from the suggestion that Republicans be more willing to go on programs like The Daily Show, to questioning how the party can better use its celebrity surrogates, to arguing for better use of data in determining ad buys. But wishing for these things to be done doesn’t make it so, and the Republican party faces some fundamental challenges trying to rebrand itself, among them these problems:

1. Republican celebrities are less appealing than Democratic celebrities: One of the first suggestions in the report is to “Establish an RNC Celebrity Task Force of personalities in the entertainment industry to host events for the RNC and allow donors to participate in entertainment events as a way to attract younger voters.” The problem is that the most visible conservative celebrities aren’t particularly engaging one on a broad scale. Ted Nugent is useful for firing up a small base of gun owners. Hank Williams Jr. appeals to conspiracy theorists who think that President Obama is secretly Muslim. But I can’t think of anyone with the Q score of a Jay-Z or a Meryl Streep who’s solidly identified with Republican values. The party may have to figure out its platform before it can even begin to recruit the kinds of celebrities who would be a draw.

2. Self-deprecation is a difficult skill to instill in politics: The report says that “Republican leaders should participate in and actively prepare for interviews with The Daily Show, The Colbert Report, MTV and magazines such as People, UsWeekly, etc., as well as radio stations that are popular with the youth demographic.” The idea of “radio stations that are popular with the youth demographic” is kind of funny given the state of commercial radio. But beyond that, the structures of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are set up in a way that makes it easier for liberals to succeed in those venues than Republicans. How do you respond when the person interviewing you is a parody of your own values, or when the person interviewing you is regularly outraged by the kinds of thing you’re trying to sell them? Are you prepared for the kinds of mass reactions liberals get when they venture into conservative media? It’s not just about being willing to accept invitations. It’s about doing the right kind of preparation, both for the interview, and for the news cycle after it.

3. Matching television spots to the most popular television content isn’t easy: The report notes that “On television, Obama ran at least four separate media schedules, each with a different series of creative executions. Pollsters, ad producers, and media buyers working together can determine the right mix of creative executions and media weight.” The ambition to run different ads for different settings is a good idea, of course, but that means you’ve got to have arguments, first, and find content where it might be a good fit. It’s one thing to roll out a traditional message about, say, opposition to gun control during Duck Dynasty, but what’s the pitch during NCIS, a show that’s succeeded in part by being somewhat politically neutral? Or how about 2 Broke Girls—are you going to pitch self-reliance for people in debt at the same time party leaders are attacking federal student loans? Are you going to be able to make fun of yourself, rather than simply trying to mock Democrats, given that self-referentiality and self-deprecation are often valuable tones in advertising, particularly to younger viewers?
Read more

Over at Vulture, Amanda Dobbins has an interesting post responding to the criticism of Life Is But A Dream, the documentary Beyoncé Knowles produced about herself and largely drawn from footage she either shot of herself via webcam and had shot for her as part of her efforts to archive her life, that it’s boring and stage-managed, a testament to Beyoncé’s perfectionism rather than genuinely revealing. Dobbins suggests that it’s a rebuke to the culture of celebrity meltdown:

Life Is But a Dream is nothing but an exercise in public togetherness; even the webcam confessionals and a tender speech about her miscarriage can’t hide the obvious calculation behind the self-directed film. This is Beyoncé propaganda, a 90-minute self-paean to a pop star whose name is synonymous with control. What’s interesting — interesting enough that Beyoncé feels the need to address it in her own hagiography — is that “control” has become a bad word.

“I don’t have to kill myself and be so hard on myself,” Beyoncé says of her perfectionism at one point. You can take that as a stab at self-improvement, or you can interpret it as a savvy attempt to answer her critics in the middle of a film designed to reinforce her Perfect image. It’s probably a little bit of both — if anything, Life Is But a Dream teaches us that Beyoncé is not much more than a construct of recorded footage. (She is filming herself all the time, after all. Even in the elevator.) But it highlights a troubling celebrity truth: Somehow, being perfect — onstage, on-camera, even at home — is not enough. We expect to see our pop stars fade, even as we shame them for it. We want Britney to fall apart again on national television. We want to lecture Rihanna about her romantic choices. We want unfiltered and “real” celebrity access until we get it, and then we want to punish the celebrities for it, because humanity is a pop-star sin, too.

Tyler Lewis, a dear friend of the blog, and a non-Beyoncé fan had a rather different reaction, that Life Is But A Dream gave him his first real sense of who she is, and how it affects her music:

I didn’t get the sense that she wasn’t interested in being truly vulnerable so much as unpracticed at it. I have this profound sense that this is a 31-year old woman who has never allowed herself, or been allowed, to feel deeply. So this film is an exercise I think in watching her learn to be vulnerable. There’s that moment where she says, almost surprising herself, that she can’t do it alone. Or the way she conveyed more deeply the hurt she feels that people would think she would fake a pregnancy than she does relating what it must have been like to have had a miscarriage.

Read more

As any reader of gossip sites knows by now, while exiting a limo on the way to a Les Miserables premiere, a paparazzo snapped a picture of Anne Hathaway’s genitalia and sold it. Hathaway’s always struck me as a classy and smart person. So when Matt Lauer, in an exceptionally gross moment, noted that we’ve “Seen a lot of you lately,” as if Hathaway had deliberately decided to go flashing her nether regions around New York for the laughs and to satisfy an exhibitionist streak, she responded by explaining where the blame for the incident should lie:

It was obviously an unfortunate incident. It kind of made me sad on two accounts. One was that I was very sad that we live in an age when someone takes a picture of another person in a vulnerable moment, and rather than delete it, and do the decent thing, sells it. And I’m sorry that we live in a culture that commodifies the sexuality of unwilling participants.

It’s refreshing to see Hathaway give no quarter to any potential criticism of her. When crotch shots seemed to be a regular occurrence, there was a lot of moralizing about whether starlets should simply adapt to the new, invasive media environment and permanently adopt underwear with a coverage area equivalent to that of tennis shorts. But while that may be wise, it’s depressing, and Hathaway was right to back up the conversation to a place that requires photographers and the people who consume them to consider accepting some responsibility.

Hathaway isn’t the only young actress to react to nude or exposed image of her gone public with aplomb, rather than acting ashamed or trying to reestablish a sense of her virtue. When The Newsroom actress Allison Pill accidentally tweeted a topless picture she intended to Direct Message to her fiance Jay Baruchel earlier this year, she responded to the incident with another tweet: “Yep. That picture happened. Ugh. My tech issues have now reached new heights, apparently.” He didn’t treat it like a big deal either, calling her a “hilarious dork” online.

Crotch shots are an inevitable result of the paparazzi era. Misdirected messages are an inevitable result of the rise of relatively insecure social media as a major means of communication. Hathaway and Pill are smart enough to know that the mistakes and embarrassments that happen are not about them, even if Matt Lauer isn’t wise or self-aware enough not to know that, and to hold back from embarrassing himself.

It’s been four years since John McCain tried to tarnish President Obama by suggesting that the candidate was a celebrity–as if all famous politicians aren’t–rather than a man of substance. The tactic didn’t work. If anything, the first Obama term in office was evidence that we were ready for a president who was a celebrity, whose wife’s fashion choices were scrutinized and imitated, whose pop culture tastes made headlines and drove viewership, and whose administration became the subject of pop culture itself, from Leslie Knope’s Joe Biden obsession on Parks and Recreation, to Comedy Central’s sketch show Key & Peele, which built its audience in part on the strength of Jordan Peele’s Obama impersonation and its Anger Translator sketch. And now that the 2012 election is over, it’s clear that the dynamic worked in the opposite direction. Campaigners on both sides used these three entertainment industry tactics during the election. And I’d predict that we see more of them in the future:

1. Campaign movies: In 2008, the Obama campaign aired a thirty-minute primetime special in support of his candidacy. This election featured movies even more prominently. There was the so-called “King of Bain” documentary, When Mitt Romney Came To Town, which was produced and distributed by a Super PAC supporting Newt Gingrich’s candidacy:

In the general election, 2016: Obama’s America, a so-called documentary by conservative pundit Dinesh D’Souza about Obama’s supposed radicalism, made $33 million at the domestic box office. Dreams From My Real Father, a hilariously paranoid attempt to prove that President Obama’s real father was a Communist and deeply terrible beat poet named Frank Marshall Davis who purportedly seduced Stanley Ann Dunham, was mailed to voters in swing states.

Mainstream movies that tried to capture the spirit of the campaign had more mixed success. Butter, an attempt to satirize both Midwestern butter-carving, and Michele Bachmann, ended up doing only $73,000 in domestic box office in a very limited run: condescension and Bachmann’s fading political star proved not to be a winning combination. Jay Roach’s The Campaign, the Will Ferrell-Zach Galifianakis vehicle about a suddenly-competitive House race, did better, taking in $86 million. The combination of Ferrell’s star power and a more generalized indictment of political dishonesty was probably always going to be a more potent bipartisan draw. In the future, I wouldn’t be surprised to see mainstream movie studios starting to produce or acquire documentaries about the candidates themselves. 2016 is the kind of thing that might be an embarrassment, but it demonstrated that there’s real money out there in catering to politically-engaged audiences for the studio that wants to reach out and grab it.
Read more

I don’t think that people do anything just because celebrities tell them to do so. We may have positive associations with famous people, but those ties tend to be relatively weak. But I do think that they can do something more limited: tip us over on decisions we were already considering making. If you were already going to buy vodka but don’t have a brand loyalty, spotting Aaron Paul in a Ciroc ad might be activating. And when celebrities with very particular personas and specific followings directly ask their fans to do something they might have done anyway, it might be more effective than if they try to reach a broad audience on a shallow level through something like an advertising campaign. It’s an approach that’s evident in at least three viral campaigns to turn out the vote this year, each of which rely on what makes the three different actors starring in them so compelling.

First, there’s Steve Carell’s spot for National Voter Registration Day, which turns turns his fundamental decency into a tool of shame—he probably will not actually box your ears, but the sense that he’d be gravely disappointed in you is somehow so much worse:

Then, there’s Sarah Silverman’s Let My People Vote project, which is the follow-up to her Great Schlep video from 2008 in which asked young Jews to encourage their grandparents to vote for Barack Obama, is vintage Silverman: naughty, baby-voiced, scatological, and with the conclusion that we should get our grandparents gun licenses to make sure they’re covered on photo ID on election day. It’s also brutal about the impact of voter identification on likely Obama voters in only the way Silverman’s faux-naif could pull off:

Today sees the release of Samuel L. Jackson’s Wake The F**k Up campaign, which for him has the advantage of both encouraging voter turnout and enthusiasm, and boosting Jackson’s audio-book rendition of the “children’s” book on which the campaign is a riff. It’s filthy, aggressive, and strangely adorable—nothing warms my heart more than feisty little girls who are into politics:

I don’t think any of these campaigns are going to swing the election. Eminem couldn’t, after all, get us a Kerry administration. But they may prove good models for celebrities who want to have a deeper, more targeted impact, a reminder to play to your strengths and to pay attention to who your real, true, core audiences is.

Man, I love me some Madonna, but her endorsement of President Obama in Washington, DC is half an illustration of why celebrities can make powerful spokesmen and half an illustration of why they are at risk of going terrifyingly off-message:

There’s the narrative she gives of of American evolution on race, which, if presented with some poetic license, fit nicely together with the on-message idea that “we are still a work in progress.” There’s her reminder of Obama’s personal evolution on gay rights, a well-tailored shout-out to the target audience they care.

And then, there’s the cheery reminder that it’s awesome that Obama is black…and Muslim. Which she means in a completely enthusiastic, affirming way. And to a certain extent, I’m with FX late-night host W. Kamau Bell: if the United States was in a place where we could elect a Muslim person president, no matter their race, it would be a sign of our improved national mental health. But Madonna’s apparently in enough of a bubble to not be aware that President Obama is not Muslim, and the accusation that he is secretly Muslim has been one of the most pernicious lies told about him in an attempt to emphasize his foreignness. It’s a striking reminder of how isolated the most famous people in the world are from the news cycle and from the rest of us, and of how their celebrity can ricochet off in directions they don’t intend, like light off a mirror that can blind and confound as easily as it can illuminate.

Normally, I would pay absolutely no attention to anything Paris Hilton says, except that her anti-gay meltdown yesterday and her apology today are a perfect example of how the media’s learned to process offense. The hotel heiress found herself in headlines again after a New York taxi driver clandestinely taped her speaking with a friend in a cab, in itself a totally gross thing to do, no matter how gross whatever he captured is. And the exchange between Hilton and her friend is both unattractive and ignorant:

“Say I log into Grindr, someone that’s on Grindr can be in that building and it tells you all the locations of where they are and you can be like, ‘Yo, you wanna fuck?’ and he might be on like, the sixth floor,” the friend explains. “Ewww. Eww. To get fucked?” Hilton replies. “Gay guys are the horniest people in the world. They’re disgusting. Dude, most of them probably have AIDS.” “I would be so scared if I were a gay guy,” she adds. “You’ll like, die of AIDS.”

Of course, she’s apologized immediately, releasing a statement through GLAAD:

As anyone close to me knows, I always have been and always will be a huge supporter of the gay community. I am so sorry and so upset that I caused pain to my gay friends, fans and their families with the comments heard this morning. I was having this private conversation with a friend of mine who is gay and our conversation was in no way towards the entire gay community. It is the last thing that I would ever want to do and I cannot put into words how much I wish I could take back every word.HIV/AIDS can hurt anyone, gay and straight, men and women. It’s something I take very seriously and should not have been thrown around in conversation. Gay people are the strongest and most inspiring people I know.

Everyone involved here benefits. Hilton gets herself back in the headlines, and doing something that makes her look comparatively classy: apologizing and praising the resiliency of gay people is an upgrade from getting thrown out of Nelson Mandela Bay Stadium for smoking pot, or turned away from Japan for drug convictions. GLAAD gets its position as the arbiter of publicly (or in this case, privacy-violated ) expressed speech about LGBT people and its role as a redemption engine reaffirmed. And anyone who falls into the category of people who still care about Paris Hilton’s opinion and felt harmed by her speech gets reassured she doesn’t actually mean it. I suppose it’s a good thing that these mechanisms exist. I just wish the standards for making amends were higher, and produced more meaningful results than publicist-brokered apology statements. If we’re going to make famous people go through the motions of bringing their attitudes in line with what’s publicly acceptable, we might as well get more meaningful commitments or donations of time and energy out of them than that.

It seems like the leaking of nude photos of famous women has become a routine occurrence, a perhaps-inevitable consequence of the social media age and human error. But the publications of two sets of topless photographs of celebrities this week, a phone camera photo actress Alison Pill intended for her fiance, Jay Baruchel but accidentally tweeted publicly, and a set of paparazzi shots of the Duchess of Cambridge, Kate Middleton, illustrate that while we may have come to expect to see women in public life naked, we’re a long way for establishing where the zones of privacy lie—and how far we should go to enforce them.

When Pill accidentally Tweeted out a playful picture of herself topless in bed, she apologized, but didn’t agonize. “Yep. That picture happened,” she tweeted. “Ugh. My tech issues have now reached new heights, apparently.” Baruchel added “My fiancee is an hilarious dork. #imustjgladitdidnthappentomefirst…Smartphones will get ya.” Pill may be embarrassed, but both she and Baruchel seem to have accepted that her mistake is the kind of inevitable risk people take when they distribute intimate shots of themselves on pieces of technology that are perhaps too powerful for our own good. Nobody’s suing. Nobody’s outraged. It may not have been tasteful for news outlets to publish the picture after Pill released it, but no one suggested it was a gross violation of privacy for them to do so, or that the photograph itself tarnished her reputation.

By contrast, the pictures of Kate Middleton sunbathing that the French magazine Closer published weren’t taken by her and leaked, or hacked, accidentally tweeted, or as was the case with pictures of her brother-in-law, Prince Harry, naked after a game of strip pool, taken by so-called friends and sold. They were taken by paparazzi photographers. Closer maintains that Prince William and his wife were on a balcony that was visible from the street, though “full view of a public road” may mean rather different things to the naked eye and to one enhanced by an extremely long-range telephoto lens.

While strict British press laws have generally protected the Duke and Duchess of Cambridge from the publication of photos of them in private moments at home, Closer apparently felt secure enough in its interpretation of French privacy laws to print the pictures, though it may face a suit from the royal family. But individual countries’ speech, publication, and privacy laws mean much less in the age of the internet, and while Afghanistan may demand that YouTube be blocked in response to the anti-Islam video that’s contributed to protests in a number of Middle Eastern countries, privacy violations are hardly likely to spark similar complains. It’s not just the internet—camera technology, be it embedded in smartphones or available to enhance a DSLR body, makes the terms of existing law up for debate.

That gets at a larger issue. Press and privacy laws, whether we think they’re desirable or not, function less to prevent the publication of the images of famous people than to help establish the market for them. When celebrities sue magazines and newspapers that print images like the ones of Middleton, the speed with which they act and the damages they request set precedents that help publications calculate whether it’s worth it to run the pictures, whether they can sell enough copies and garner enough clicks to make the cost of the pictures and the cost of the damages worth it. But those laws don’t, and never have, curbed the efforts of professionals to get pictures of famous women or of amateurs to sell them, and they certainly can’t protect us from mistakes in handling the photos we take of ourselves. Alison Pill will probably take better care with her camera phone in the future, and the leak may dispel whatever curiosity existed about what she looks like naked. But Kate Middleton has a bigger problem: it’s one thing to try to affect the supply of pictures of her, when the conversation about demand is the one that we’ve always needed, and that we’ll never meaningfully be able to have.

I think a lot about our relationship to celebrity and to culture, and while I think Antiviral, the first movie from Brandon Cronenberg (son of David) may get at the intensity of our obsession, I’m not sure it looks like it’s got the equation quite figured out:

With intense fandom, I think most people tend to dream of living inside the fictional world they’ve become attached, or to inhabit a persona, but when it comes to actual famous humans, while a small number dream of inhabiting their lives, mostly what strong fans want is for those people to live out their fantasies of what those people’s lives should be like. When Kristen Stewart cheats on Robert Pattinson, people are angry because they believe the two have some sort of obligation to them to live out a fantasy. When utterly unfounded rumors swirl that Gillian Anderson is living with David Duchovny, Scully and Mulder fans’ hearts beat a little faster, because it’s as if a fantasy has stepped out of viewers’ brains, as if there’s a weird kind of power to the wish. When people threaten Ellen Page for dating Alexander Skarsgard, it’s not because they think he should be dating them, but because Page fails to live up to some sort of bizarre standard for the kind of woman Skarsgard ought to be dating. For the most part, we don’t want to consume these people’s flesh or feel what they feel. We want them to be our paper dolls, a desire that’s tyrannical even as it distances us from the real lives of the people we’d like to command, off-camera and on, for our entertainment.