Celebrity Culture = Consumerist Culture

The first day of spring was a week ago today, so you know what that means! It’s the beginning of wedding season! And celebrity weddings are starting to make headlines!

Reese Witherspoon got married to talent agent Jim Toth this past Saturday in supposedly “Hollywood’s biggest wedding of the year.” E! News has the latest below.

I love hearing about celebrity weddings – who doesn’t? They’re a happy occasion involving romance and love, not to mention beautiful people. It was interesting, though, to watch this E! News piece, and here’s why:

After having discussed celebrity culture in our Mass Communication class, I am more critical of what I watch on TV, especially the news and all things related to celebrities. We talked about celebrity culture as a function of the capitalist consumer culture we have in the U.S. Celebrity culture, in fact, celebrates consumption and materialism.

This short clip about Reese’s wedding, I realized, is a great example of celebrity culture as expression of consumerist culture. The main details in this clip were material in nature…

• The wedding was held at Reese’s extravagant ranch in California
• Tons of A-list celebrities were in attendance
• She wore a beautiful Monique Lhuillier gown to match her 4k diamond engagement ring

But what’s strange is I felt satisfied with the clip. When I hear about a wedding, I want to know where it was, what the bride wore, and how huge her rock was. I have been trained to care about the material aspects of weddings versus what a wedding should really be about – the vows, the couple’s relationship, etc.

Celebrity gossip is riddled with subtle references to our consumerist culture. Karl Marx would say that this is because the proletariat needs to be kept distracted from reality (that the capitalists are ruling the world and exploiting the workers). Constant reinforcement of consumerism enables our capitalistic society to continue functioning without retaliation. 

I'm thinking Marx was certainly on the right track here - because I totally buy into (no pun intended) the stories in the gossip magazines. Watching celebrities live extravagant lives makes me want to strive to do the same.

Now I'm going to go email my boyfriend pictures of Reese's 4k diamond, hint hint ;-)