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Power in Literature

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Web Literacy

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Fame and Power

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[ bird caws ]

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Why would a celebrity use their power for good?

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This all depends on what drives

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the desire to be famous to begin with.

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If your goal is to become famous

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because you wanna live the celebrity lifestyle,

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you're probably not going to be philanthropic.

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If your goal is to be famous

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so that you can make a difference in the world,

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then you're probably gonna become famous

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and then do good.

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There are plenty of celebrities

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who are just saying like,

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"Oh, yeah, I have enough cash.

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Let me throw some money at this."

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They don't really care about the issues

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or, you know, they don't act

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the way they tell other people to be acting.

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But that kind of brings up this idea of --

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There's a few reasons why someone would desire fame

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and I think the most common one is probably just that people

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want to be seen as having value.

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You know, if you grow up in a house where

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maybe you're not the smartest sibling

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or maybe you're not the funniest or the most interesting

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or whatever the case is.

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You kind of want to be like,

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"Hey, look! I'm valuable too!"

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And so becoming famous is a way

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to prove to yourself

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and to everyone else around you,

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whether it's your family, your friends,

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or just kind of everyone,

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that you're a valuable person.

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And those people also

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might not be doing the philanthropic thing

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or the do-gooder thing,

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because they just wanted to get to that point to say kind of,

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"I told you so."

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Well you have sort of a bifurcation of personalities.

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So let's pull one example out of thin air.

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The Kardashians, who, if they do stand for anything good,

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I don't know what that is.

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You see them focused a lot on sexual practices

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and divorce and a lot of really odd entertainment things.

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And then, at the other end of the rainbow,

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is Princess Diana,

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who famously went to Africa during the very beginning

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of the AIDS scandal,

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and was purposely photographed carrying

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black babies who had AIDS.

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And basically telling the world,

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"It's not Ebola.

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It's not even close.

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And we need to take care of these people."

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And she is cited, I think, pretty broadly

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as someone who is truly courageous,

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who used her celebrity and fame

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and the royal brand and everything else

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in the right way, the way you're supposed to do things

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in this world when you're truly, sincerely trying to do good.

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So how does that operate

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in a very odd press that we have today?

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That today, Princess Diana,

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if she'd gone to the Ebola victims in Africa,

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I don't think there'd be a whole lot of press attention to it.

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But Kim Kardashian puts on 20 pounds

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and wears tight jeans, that's the cover of People.

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What is that saying about our world and sort of

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what drives all this?

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Yeah, I think it comes back to the reason

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we obsess over celebrities.

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And, as I said, it used to be

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this kind of -- Princess Diana's a perfect example

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because she actually is royalty and was a celebrity.

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But, you know, it comes back to this idea of

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what we used to value in celebrities,

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in royalty, is that they were just

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beyond anything we'd imagine.

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They inspired awe in us, kind of like

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you know, you compare Christians,

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who might say like,

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"God is this untouchable -- Can't understand him; he's an enigma."

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Same with celebrities.

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You know, they're the secular God.

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We look up to them and we're like,

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"We can't even -- Whatever they do,

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we can't possibly understand it."

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So it kind of started like that

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and then now, as you're saying, you know,

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what pair of shoes is someone wearing.

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It's more just kind of

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whether they're people, too.

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They have worse lives than us.

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The daily grind of getting away from our problems

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and kind of escaping by looking at other people's problems.

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So that whole process seems to me to be very ephemeral,

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meaning it evaporates quickly.

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There's no foundation.

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It's not like owning a building in Manhattan

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that you know is gonna be around a while.

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Paris Hilton.

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She was Kim Kardashian

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eight years ago, I think.

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And now you see kind of an aging

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not, I guess, that hot anymore gal

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doing a revamp of a cheeseburger commercial

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where she's in a bikini sitting on a car

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and it's kind of just very depressing.

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How does that play out in like...

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Yeah, what you're talking about is

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people who are famous because they're famous.

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And that's a new thing.

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For the most part, that's a new thing.

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Paris Hilton is one of the earliest examples of this

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that people in our generation would think of -- our generation.

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- [ laughs ] - Of course. Yeah.

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But yeah, being famous for the sake of being famous is --

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That's Paris Hilton, that's Kim Kardashian.

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That's the Real Housewives.

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They're famous because they're famous.

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The difference is

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there are plenty of people who are famous because they're talented,

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or because they discovered something amazing,

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or because they're running a country,

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or whatever the case is.

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So there are differen kind of categories

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of fame and this Paris Hilton type of fame

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is very ephemeral.

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It does kind of go away.

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Nobody has forgotten about

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every president, up until now, of the United States.

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We can name them all -- Hopefully, you can name them all.

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But, you know, probably 20 years from now,

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you're not gonna be able to remember Paris Hilton's name.

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So that's the difference.

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And people who achieve fame by actually doing something memorable,

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those are the ones that are actually going to be remembered.

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But it doesn't really matter because, you know,

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Paris Hilton is in her heyday now

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and who knows if

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maybe that'll get her through the rest of her life

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and she'll have all the money she needs

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and have the fame and she's kind of over it

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and then she can go live a secluded life.

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So the money is an interesting thing.

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I think most people are shocked at how little money

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celebrities actually make.

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[ record scratch ]

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Once you get to a point where you can

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launch your own line of clothing,

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then the world's different.

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But there's maybe five, ten of those people in the world.

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Whereas there's hundreds of celebrities

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who you'd recognize -- Go through the last year's worth

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of People magazines, you'll see them all there.

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But most of them don't make that much

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for a TV series.

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Really weird dynamics in this perception of great wealth

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that people associate with power

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when it's really an illusion.

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And so much of Hollywood

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is incentivized to have celebrities spend all their dough

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because then they need the infrastructure,

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meaning the agent, the manager, the next job.

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Yeah, and you do hear about a lot of celebrities going bankrupt, right?

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That's like one of the common stories

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is the celebrity goes bankrupt.

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So those people who have --

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They probably didn't save their money well.

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The seven million a year

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would have gotten them through.

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Well this is seven million in one year, at the end.

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It wasn't like that for years and years.

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Right, right.

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But that celebrities who do make millions

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can still go bankrupt

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shows you that the people who get into

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the celebrity lifestyle

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for the wealth,

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which is another reason that people wanna be famous,

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are probably -- that type of personality

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probably isn't gonna have you maintain your wealth.

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Absolutely. And what a lot of people don't understand is

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so many celebrities come from small towns in the Midwest

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and they came out here desperate and hungry and pretty

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and got an acting job through whatever process was involved.

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A really nice home in Kansas City

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is $400,000.

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Well, $400,000 in Beverly Hills

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doesn't buy you a parking spot.

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So a lot of times,

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what they think -- In Kansas City

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on a million dollars, I don't know,

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you can probably retire and live nice.

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But a million dollars in California -

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no, not even close.

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So it's a very different dynamic

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and a lot of them are not financial gurus

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and so they go bankrupt

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and it's incentivized by their managers and their agents

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to keep them on the edge of going bankrupt

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so that they need the next job

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so they have a client to sell into the next deal.

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So, a very sad thing,

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but that's, I think, why so many go bankrupt.

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Pro athletes, you obviously see that a lot, too.

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Why do people wanna be famous in the first place?

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What do celebrities do with their fame?

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How has our perception of celebrity changed?

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[ jazzy musical flourish ]

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Part 1B - The Revenge.

Full Transcript