Wilde, Whishaw and Weirdos: A Study of Celebrity

As Oscar Wilde once put it: ‘An optimist sees the doughnut; a pessimist sees the hole.’ Who ever said English degrees were a precious waste of time? Since I stumbled upon this little nugget a week or so ago, life’s taken on a whole new hue. What do I care if I’m harder up than HMV, have more essays than friends and a head flattened by driving rain?  Geek chic Student swag’s in right now, anyway. Do I care that Beyoncé mimed, that Zayn ‘cheated’ or that the typically earthier-than-grass Adele opted for a fruitcake baby name? Well, maybe marginally. The point, though, is how much brighter the day seems (even in the deep, dank Devon) when cynicism and naysaying’s put to bed. If optimists see doughnuts, my world’s one giant Krispy Kreme.

Curiously (not ‘unfortunately’), though, it doesn’t seem as if everyone’s quite ready to don my rose-tinted specs. In an interview with Mr Porter’s Journal magazine released yesterday, up-and-coming actor Ben Whishaw grumbles about the lack of privacy offered to today’s stars. Since appearing as the new, Topman’d version of Q in Skyfall late last year, Whishaw has no doubt seen a step-up in the level of fan hysteria, but his whimpering about celebrity culture (to a magazine, might I add) is by no means new news. In previous interviews, Ben has expressed bemusement about ‘why we turn actors into celebrities’, and he’s generally eschewed the daytime talk show/ red carpet route now a rite of passage for fresh-faced actors. This time around, however, Ben’s got a touch ballsier with his denunciation of the showbiz industry. ‘Someone was talking to me about that poor girl in the Twilight films,’ reads his interview. ‘Kirsten, is it?’ Thank Christ this guy only pretends to be in the Secret Service. ‘Kristen, that's right,’ he continues. ‘I wouldn't like that. Not at all. Living in hotel rooms and being mobbed. A terrible state of existing. Terrible.’

Grinning and bearing: Whishaw has lashed out at the concept of celebrity

Terrible. Terrible? Since opting into the Twilight franchise, lead Kristen Stewart has amassed a reported fortune of $55 million (and that’s going with the more miserly estimates), satisfied troops of Twi-hards with her performance as Bella Swan, and racked up recognition for on-the-side roles, too. She’s seen more of the world in her 22 years than most see in a lifetime, bagged (and somehow clung onto) a heartthrob boyfriend, and rubbed shoulders with the most critically acclaimed actors for generations. True: Stewart’s name has appeared in reams of magazine copy, her personal life adopted as public property. But would Kristen herself, even, describe her situation as ‘terrible’? Her continuing to accept high-profile roles, despite having the finances to live comfortably lavishly like Simon Cowell on a camp day says it all. Poverty is terrible. Kristen Stewart’s life isn’t even substandard.

Of course, it would be hard graft not to empathise at least partially with what Whishaw points to. The debate’s older than Hugh Hefner (and no less likely to ignite each time a pretty new starlet enters the frame): do we have a right to pry incessantly into the lives of famous faces? Does working with esteemed production teams necessitate a loss of privacy? Should anyone going for commercial roles, rightly or wrongly, only do so if they’re willing to go up against the media?

Rough ride? Kristen Stewart's no stranger to press intrusion

Written down, the answer seems an unequivocal, Whishaw-inspired ‘no’; when handed an access-all-areas pass, the industry loses every inhibition. Indeed, even Stewart’s experience, in this area, might just constitute ‘terrible’. When K-Stew’s tryst with married Snow White and the Huntsman director Rupert Sanders, 42, was exposed in the latter half of 2012, she underwent weeks on end of vilifying, both in gossip columns and on social networking sites. Laborious as it might seem to feel bad for a pretty millionairess home wrecker, the tirade of comments becomes a little more condemnable when one remembers that the articles were not only focused on Stewart and Sanders, but their nearest and dearest, too, including Sanders’ wife and young children. And the story is by no means rare. A cursory scroll through my Twitter feed sees Tom Daley being called a name that would make Exeter’s rugby team blush, one girl asking Ed Sheeran to ‘bang’ her, and Britney being told she’s ‘disgusting’, none of which has anything to do with diving, singing or…erm, sorry Brit. The point, to give Whishaw his dues, is a good one: would we dare, or even care to, make these extra-career remarks about anybody else? Would I tell my doctor who he should be dating, my lecturers that I hate their new outfit? (The fact that my lecturers probably haven’t had a new outfit since 1943 is, of course, neither here nor there.)

Where Ben and his reserve falls down, though, is in failing to accept the industry for what it is. It would be great for actors, singers, models (maybe less so for bloggers…) if cameras existed only in the studio, but it would also be great to be be a milkman without the early starts, or a hairdresser without the knits. Putting doughnuts aside, for a moment, if there’s another thing university drills into you it’s the need to keep your mind as open to jobs as ITV are to new shows right now (Splash I’d be willing to overlook, but The Secret Life of Dogs, really?). To take gargantuan paycheques and pout proudly in the glossies means that you should be willing to take the paparazzi and reporters on your days off. Press intrusion might be a function of the new, digital age, but interest in public figures is anything but; right now, for instance, I’m perilously avoiding an essay about communal conceptions of the monarch in Jacobean England (and yearning for Oscar Wilde already).

Of course, there’s also the fact that not everyone who leafs through the tittle-tattle of celebrity is Paul-Hamilton-mental. It’s like I was saying to Kristen as I scaled her bedroom wall last night…

Taylor Swift: I Remember When We Broke Up...Sort Of

Studying for a degree that demands six hours of reading for each hour of contact time, I’m no newcomer to procrastination. Until about ten days ago, in fact, I thought I’d seen every manner of dilly-dallying known to man, from the mildly remissible to the downright gratuitous (one chancer twice claimed the crumbs under the keys of his MacBook had made typing unthinkable). Last week, though, I unearthed a couple of avant-garde ways of not-working that I thought might just make it into time-wasting testaments everywhere. ‘It feels like the perfect night,’ warbles Taylor Swift on her latest album, Red, ‘to dress up like hipsters, and make fun of our exes, oh oh, oh oh’: surely better than fishing bits of bread out from beneath the spacebar, no? Alas, apparently not. Once I’d donned my best hipster garb (not my finest hour), it took me all of about twenty seconds to poke fun of bygone beloveds. Peeling off the tattered loafers and denim waistcoat (£3.75 I’m never getting back), I felt more cheated than R-Patz. What went wrong, I’m guessing, is the difference between what Tay-Tay and I would each thing of as ‘exes’. For me, it’s a pretty exclusive category: female prime-minister exclusive. For Ms. Swift, however, it’s a tad more inclusive.

Subliminal messaging: Taylor makes no secret of her quest for love

Taylor, now 23, strummed her way to UK favour in around 2008, long after trumping Shania Twain as the poster-girl for ‘country’ music in the States. Since, she’s stroked more chiselled chins than a Gillette advert. Kicking off with Joe Jonas, Taylor has enjoyed trysts with all-American teenagers Taylor Lautner and Connor Kennedy, as well as with the more seasoned Jake Gyllenhaal and John Mayer. Most recently, she’s rumoured to have parted ways with One Direction heartthrob Harry Styles (a Harry is for life, Taylor, not just for Christmas). What separates her from other young twenty-something serial daters, though, is that Taylor just doesn’t come across as the tarty type. Aside from the fact that her catalogue of former flames is more wholesome than an Abercrombie and Fitch campaign, there’s her instant affability (she’s the dorky-to-dream-girl type we all remember from school), her barefaced preference for commitment over steamy fumbles (‘He knelt to the ground and pulled out a ring and said…’), and her aversion to the rowdy melodrama of young celebhood (when Kanye West snatched her award away at the 2009 VMAs, she was gracious to the power of Kate Middleton). Indeed, it’s quite problematic to reconcile the weight of Taylor’s little black book tome with the somewhat diffident girl we get in interviews.

Coming on a little strong? Taylor has been known for her intense relationships

Whilst her good-girl image has thus far remained impervious to the string of Adonises (Adoni? See: procrastination), it seems progressively obvious that Taylor will soon have to compromise one or the other. First up, she said herself in an interview last October that she felt the level of pressure on her dating life was ‘abnormal…like a telescope lens’, and no wonder; with specific, often personal lyrics like ‘you made a rebel of a careless man’s careful daughter’, ‘what you’re looking for has been here the whole time’, and ‘today was a fairytale’, Taylor has never kept her love life off-limits. Second, there’s that giggling, gaggling core of schoolgirl fans, who no doubt want to see their spokeswoman get and keep the guy, and who can only be feeling a bit miffed that she keeps casting aside their pop-boy pinups. Then there’s Taylor’s own trepidation about coming to be known as LA’s answer to Katie Price (which probably wasn’t allayed at all when Selena Gomez recently branded her ‘experienced’), and the apparent effect it’s having on her ability to tie a guy down: rumours were rife that the split with Harry arose from her reluctance to, ahem, induct him into her hall of fame.

Exposure: Taylor sometimes encourages love-life attention

The snag, for Taylor, isn’t that she falls for guys fervently and frequently; her supposedly zealous, hard-and-fast attitude to love might be a little bunny boiler at times, but it’s surely preferable to the casual sexuality flaunted by the majority of her music-scene contemporaries. Plus, falling Swiftly doesn’t always mean falling stupidly (looking at you, Khlomar), and Taylor’s unbarred optimism makes her a much healthier role model than those who cultivate the screwed-up, contentious good-girl-gone-bad look. Where Taylor might be going wrong, instead, is the way she makes her private life more public than a Jubilee. Whilst penning (and even profiting from) tracks about teenage heartache might even be positive exposure for her fans, scrawling out numbers like Dear John mere weeks after ending it with Mayer and detailing specific breakups on chat shows (as Taylor has been known to do on The Ellen DeGeneres Show) might not be the wisest move for a girl keen to move away from documenting her high-profile dalliances. She can court and reject men all she wants, but when she courts media and fan speculation about those men, she’s asking for a messy breakup.

Taylor touched down in London earlier this afternoon, ready, people are either hoping or fearing (dependent on whether they’re a Taylorist or any other ten-year-old girl), for a ‘showdown’ and possible reconcilement with Styles. Whichever way it goes, let’s hope Taylor leaves this one off the next album; What Makes ME Beautiful might be a bit more than we can take.

Just Argue: Lady Gaga Takes on the Osbournes

I’m never Christmassing again. Two weeks into Blanduary and, already, I’m repenting every last sausage roll. Why is it that, year after sodding year, Saint Nick ambles out of town and we’re left holding the food baby? My qualms about December’s dumping ground don’t end with this new paunch I’m sporting, though, or with the China-sized hangover. Indeed, what riles me up most about the post-holiday blues is all this residue benevolence droll: it’s like last month’s peppy peace and goodwill, only it’s got all the pull and pizazz of Susan Boyle’s big toe. And it’s everywhere: only last week, I gave up a prime Sainsbury’s parking space because I couldn’t be doing with the bother of beeping my horn; Kat got practically let off her Derek-dalliance because Alfie just didn’t fancy the furore; and, most portent of all, the California Hamster Association have opted to forgive Justin Bieber for ill-advisedly giving his pet rodent to a fan, with a spokesperson clarifying that the organisation harbours ‘no ill will towards Mr. Bieber.’ I’ve seen bigger sparks fly in nunneries.

Who's laughing now? Kelly has made no secret of her dislike of Gaga's more zealous fans

Luckily, one story this week has dared to stick a middle finger to the slushy, sentimental drivel: the long running spat between Lady Gaga, the usual embodiment of studied nonchalance, and Kelly Osbourne, whose more recent public persona has been purged of pugnacity, has been reignited via a series of veiled online stings. It all started with the glitz of the 2012 Grammys last February, when Gaga, who was due to take to the stage for a rendition of her Marry The Night, snubbed the red carpet and its assembled paparazzi. Kelly, heading up E!’s Grammy Fashion Police coverage, was understandably a little miffed at missing out on the chance to pick apart Gaga’s tighter-than-George-Osbourne leather dress, and promptly took to the airwaves to criticise the Born This Way songstress. Regrettably for Kel (though less so for me and my current nice-nausea), Gaga’s so-called ‘Little Monster’ fans scuttled to her defence, beginning a barrage of abuse against Kelly and her comments. The tirade of tweets was pretty vile; amongst them were comments on Kelly’s weight and petitions for her to commit suicide. Since, understandably, she’s not spoken with cockle-warming love about La Ga’s extremist fans or the Lady herself, and the pair have traded catty asides on and off for nigh on a year.

Last week, Gaga once more entered the fray with an open letter to Kelly on her website. Jumping to her supporters’ aid following an interview in which Kelly once more told of their abuse, she wrote:‘While some of my fans have learning to do, most of them share the same values as I, and it's what bonds us together. And that bond is strong.’ Rather than using the note as an attempt to bury the hatchet, she opted to include digs at Kelly’s popular US show–‘I feel it culturally important to note that you have chosen a less compassionate path. Your work on E! with the Fashion Police is rooted in criticism, judgment, and rating people's beauty against one another’– and remind us all of why she, unlike Kelly, is a platinum reincarnation of Mother Theresa: ‘I choose to be positive and work towards a kinder and braver world with our community of followers.’

Force to be reckoned with: Sharon has waded into the row

What Gaga likely didn’t reckon on, however, was the repetition of a phenomenon X Factor producers were harping on about around about four months ago (and may well be again soon if recent Tulisa-less are to be believed): the return of the indomitable Sharon Osbourne. Not much of a wallflower type herself (she famously once boasted of how she would send packages of excrement to those who had dissed her family), Shaz quickly took Gaga to task with a public Facebook message: ‘I don't know what world you live in, but supporting disgraceful fan comments doesn't fall under the words "kinder and braver". It comes under the heading of bulls**t.’ Sharon admitted that she, not Kelly, had written to Gaga’s management over the pair’s feud, urging them to monitor the aggressive comments being directed to her daughter. She branded Gaga ‘a bully’ and dismissed accusations that Kelly had chosen a career that promotes negativity, writing simply: ‘Welcome to the real world.’ Gaga’s own Facebook account was updated shortly afterwards, with the star commenting: The "real world" can be cruel, why not try to change it into a better place? I am an activist. Nobody takes adolescents seriously, I do. My letter to Kelly Osbourne was open, because her statements on cyber-bulling were public & as a youth activist I'm compelled to be involved. It makes the Speidi/Rylan spat look like a kiss chase, really, doesn’t it?

Reviewing the blow-by-blow, I find it hard not to position myself firmly on Team Kelly (and that’s not just fear of receiving a Sharon poop-packet talking). First off, there’s Gaga’s sorry refusal to alienate her hardcore fans in spite of how many death threats they send. One can’t help but wonder, reading back over her letter, what it would take for the songstress to find fault with the people who buy her records. Their ‘bond’ might well be durable, but would such a self-dubbed ‘activist’ be so quick to excuse damnable tweets if they weren’t followed by the click of a download button? Then, as Sharon mentioned in her address, there’s Gaga’s astounding hypocrisy, not only in terms of condoning aggressive behavior whilst espousing anti-bullying laws, but also with regard to her entire public image. ‘Your show breeds negativity,’ she wrote to Kelly, ‘and over the years has even become comedic in nature. It glorifies you and Joan Rivers pointing in the camera, laughing, and making jokes about artists and celebrities as if we are zoo animals.’ This is coming from the woman whose more memorable outfits have included an ensemble made entirely of stitched-together Kermit the frogs, a cage headpiece (complete with chains), and that meat dress. Far from championing a life free from appearances, Gaga has founded her entire career on her appearance: Just Dance was forgettable; Pokerface downright bland; but everybody remembers the telephone-hat. Kelly, comedic? I guess that makes you Jack Whitehall, Gaga.

Not into appearances: Gaga at the 2010 MTV Video Music Awards

The little and monstrous amongst us might counter that Kelly’s cultivated a similarly superficial career. Did she not rise to fame off the back of her parents? Are her shapeshifting figure and chameleon-like hair changes not mostly responsible for her remaining in the public eye, along with (as Gaga pointed out) her part in a show fuelled by criticism? Maybe, but at least Kelly’s open and relatable when it comes to her looks: she speaks at length about her battles with the bulge in interviews and encourages healthy, balanced approaches to diets. When she’s sparring with a woman who chases outlandish, unobtainable styles and refuses to be interviewed without first being attended to by her bevvy of weirdo wardrobe assistants, Kelly seems about as vain as her mother is shy.

Either way, the duo has made my January a sliver more bearable. And where might it end? Picture it: Ozzy rehearsing off his best bat-biting snarl whilst Jack bungee-jumps into the fracas and Joan Rivers eyes up the ref. Or, perhaps more likely, a mightily peeved Gaga opening her morning mail…

UPDATE: Speaking to People magazine about Ga and their spat, Kelly revealed: 'All I have to say on this subject is that I love Lady Gaga! I made stupid mistakes when I was 25, as well, when I accused people of doing things that were wrong. We all live and we learn, and like I said, I'm a big fan of hers.'

February can't come quick enough.