Celebrity Status: What Teens Think

Students are returning from mid-winter break, and dinner was very lively.  The students in the play (we are doing a HS rendition of the musical Grease) were sitting around chatting about the Grammys, and I told them about the recent activity on this blog concerning the actor Gerard Butler.  Some of them also have me for English, so they saw his performance of "Beowulf and Grendel."  The gaming students (who are mostly in theatre, too) saw him in 300 and in Law Abiding Citizen.

We talked about the nature of fame.  Our school has an elite basketball team, for example.  Currently, we are ranked #1 in the country for HS Boys' Basketball.  These players are awesome, and most of them are headed to big schools to play college ball and then, if history repeats itself, some of them will head off to the NBA.

So, the students said there is a difference between famous actors, famous musicians, and famous athletes.  Fame treats them differently, they report.

They felt that actors are held to a super human status because they are judged by the roles they portray.  One student reasoned that she would expect Butler, for example, to be a "just" man because he was just in all three movies she saw him act in (B&G, 300, and LAC).  So, because he picks roles that have good (but somewhat tortured) men in them, he must identify with that kind of man.  She said the proof is in his current three films.  In Machine Gun Preacher, he plays a man on the edge that is doing good; in Coriolanus, he plays a tortured man trying to do good; in Of Mavericks and Men he is a tortured man trying to be the best at his sport.  They felt that he plays extreme roles, and he has extreme relationships, because he is an extreme guy.  I asked what proof they had about his relationships, and they agreed that they had no proof of that aspect of him because the media is not reliable.  They did find it interesting that he had weights brought to him while he was working on movies.  Working with two trainers at 6 hours a day is intense, so they felt that was proof, too, of an extreme and dedicated personality.

I am not sure if he is an extreme person or not, and, sadly, I won't ever get a chance to ask him, but their ideas about him were very mature and considered.  As one kid said, "BRG, you are what you eat.  If you eat roles that are beyond human, people see you as beyond human."

For athletes, they aren't tied to portraying others; they are playing a game.  Their fame comes from how they do on the court or field.  People like to talk about their personal lives, but not as much as they do for actors and singers.  I guess that might be true.  I don't know anything personal about any of the Philadelphia Flyers.  None of the guys I have ever watched Hockey with in college knew a thing about who these guys were shacking up with at the end of the night.  No one cares what they wear to the store.

For musicians, there is a mixed bag.  They definitely felt that rappers have a higher visibility than other musical artists.  People care more about what Rihanna is doing than Taylor Swift, for example.  They see rappers as having more of a jet set life.  Some of them believed that rappers live like they are on a reality TV show and want the attention in ways that other actors, like Butler, avoid.

They sure had a lot to say about fame.  They felt that fame, and the dwindling of fame, was the true downfall of Whitney Houston.  Because she could no longer sing like she once could, and she couldn't be that glamour girl of the 80s and 90s, she felt she had nothing to live for anymore.  They believed that actors and musicians feel this pain more than athletes because athletes know their shelf life is short on the court and field.  They go into it knowing they will only have a few years to shine.

So, these are thoughts of modern teenagers sitting around a table at dinner in a small corner of the world.  I wonder if others agree?