I’ve always been a huge fan of documentaries, but for some reason I never had any desire to see HBO’s Teenage Paparazzo. Even after I ordered HBO for a month so and my boys and I could watch the station’s December boxing line-up, I let weeks go by before I finally decided to take in one of the twice-daily airings of the documentary. But when I finally did sit down to watch it after coming home from a family dinner on Christmas day, I was presently surprised.
I initially questioned the seriousness with which the Adrian Grenier might tackle such a complex and layered topic. But to my surprise the film was a thought-provoking mediation on celebrity obsession in America, complete with insightful commentary from scholars and researchers of media studies and popular culture. The movie examines people’s desire to get close to celebrities and to know about their lives, but it also deconstructs the very common desire of individuals to become celebrities themselves. I found the latter discussion particularly fascinating.
We tend to take for granted that it’s normal to want to be famous and be adored by millions of fans around the world. But what material benefit could this possibly offer us. It’s true that most celebrities are wealthy, but there are much more reliable and lucrative paths to wealth that don’t require you to become a public figure. Clearly there is something about being loved by the masses that people find really attractive.
One of the experts in the film argues that this is a uniquely human trait. While many other animals require attention, humans are the only ones who need to be acknowledged. He also notes that back when humans lived as hunter-gatherers, everyone was a celebrity, because the entire universe was effectively contained within ones own village. Therefore (and I’m paraphrasing here) everyone who existed, as far as you were concerned, already knew who you were. So now that we live in what some would describe as a global village, all but a tiny number of us are absolute nobodies to 99.999999% of the population.
I suspect there may be some evolutionary advantage to having this appetite for eminence embedded within our genome (if indeed it is genetic). But at the same time, I think this desire reflects a major deficiency within ones character. The fact that so many of us need to be loved by people who we don’t know, who have virtually no impact on our lives whatsoever, and for whom we can never reciprocate that appreciation, speaks to a collective insecurity within all of us. And as Adrian Grenier points out in the film, the more celebrity you attain, the more you seem to need. Perhaps it took a celebrity (i.e. someone who suffers from an addiction to fame) to present such a poignant distillation of the celebrity phenomenon.
One of the essential ingredients in a good documentary is brutal honesty. Teenage Paparazzo offers a healthy dose of honesty, and that’s what makes it work as a film.
