Celebrity worship is peak cringe

By Ben Olson
Reader Staff

After college, I spent about five years living and working in Los Angeles. The plan was to break into writing and directing movies, but the highest level I achieved was working as a low-level grunt on TV commercials, documentaries and music videos.

Living in L.A. meant running into celebrities from time to time. I drank a shot of tequila with Quentin Tarantino and he told me he was working on a “kung fu movie” (which turned out to be Kill Bill, Vol. 1). I sat next to Michael Keaton at a bar in West Hollywood and felt pained for him as I watched everyone come up, jostling him with claps on the back, saying, “Batman!” He was polite about it, but I could tell it was something he grew tired of decades ago.

Usually, I made an effort not to react when encountering a celebrity in the wild. Even if it was someone I followed, it was not my style to go up to them and make a fool of myself. 

The one time I abandoned this tactic was one of the more embarrassing encounters, when Reader Editor Zach Hagadone and I attended a book signing for Hunter S. Thompson in Hollywood shortly before he took his own life. While waiting for the Doctor to show up, I saw Benicio Del Toro waiting for him. I deliberated and fretted, but finally walked up to him and interrupted a conversation he was having to say, “Hey man, I really love your, uh, work, Mr. Del Toro,” and he just looked over at me with annoyance and nodded his thanks, then returned to his conversation.

I vowed then and there I’d never again react to a celebrity, only violating my rule when I saw the seminal author Howard Zinn about 20 years ago in Park City, Utah. I had a fairly normal conversation with him and thanked him for his work. He was gracious and surprised that someone in their 20s would recognize him.

Fast forward to today, I feel the same about celebrity worship as I did back then: It’s peak cringe for the human race. 

It’s natural to be excited when you see someone famous, especially when you grow up in a small town like Sandpoint where our resident “famous people” were dubious characters like Ben Stein and Mark Furhman, the latter famously moving to Sandpoint after the O.J. Simpson trial captivated the world.

Today’s celebrity worship is out of control. Look at the Taylor Swift phenomenon, with her screaming fans attending football games in droves just to catch a glimpse of Swift and her new beau, Kansas City Chiefs tight end Travis Kelce. I don’t dislike Taylor Swift for any particular reason other than the fact that I can’t stand having to read about her every single day when I’m scrolling headlines. I feel like living your life — personal relationships and all — in front of the entire world would be exhausting and I wouldn’t wish it on my worst enemies.

One would think the interest would die down over time, but it keeps ramping up. One outlet reported that interest in Kansas City Chiefs tickets has increased by 150% since the Swift/Kelce relationship became public. Social media went into a frenzy after Swift changed the lyrics to one of her songs to include her NFL boyfriend. 

It’s gotten so bad that USA Today/The Tennessean and their parent company Gannett announced last week that it had hired a reporter for the sole purpose of covering the “Swift beat” (and I thought it was bad covering county commissioner meetings). This 35-year-old “journalist” is solely tasked with writing about and reporting on Taylor Swift matters.

USA Today also hired another reporter to exclusively cover Beyoncé. Perhaps this newly dedicated reporter will write about how Beyoncé was paid $24 million to perform a one-hour set in Dubai in January, meaning she earned more in one minute than many of us will likely earn in an entire decade.

Pre-teens screaming at pop stars is nothing new, but it’s reached a new low point. It’s made me wonder why we’re so infatuated with these stars of the stage and screen. What is it about entertainment that appeals so intensely to us right now? 

To find the answer, simply look at the “large world, the world that people know about,” as former-President Donald Trump said in one of his many recent head-scratching statements. The world is burning right now and rampant idolatry is spreading. Perhaps as a coping mechanism, people have turned in greater numbers to entertainment to soothe the feelings of disconnection many experience with our world today. 

As George Barnard Shaw said, “Without art, the crudeness of reality would make the world unbearable.” Amen.

And so it goes. We have become inundated by a generation of people who are tuning out from the world at a record pace, instead focusing their efforts on banal TikTok dance crazes, memes on social media and worship of everything uber pop stars like Swift and Beyoncé do with their lives. 

What a time to be alive.