You hit the charts with a bullet. You're on tour. Your video
is one of the most requested on TV. Your film is number one. Your TV show is a
hit. You're one of the most admired sports personalities in the world.
Thousands of fans admire and adore you. You should be happy. You should be
ecstatic….yet you're not. You have success, but you don't really feel
successful. Or worse, you can't enjoy your success because you're so worried
it's going to leave and you'll be right back where you started. You're stressed,
you're frazzled and you're exhausted.
"It's no wonder many celebrities, especially those in
the music industry are stressed, exhausted and frazzled a good portion of the
time," says Frank. "They need to stay up late because they need to
unwind after a show, get up early to catch a plane, have to answer the same
interview questions day after day, not eating right because they're on the road
and the list goes on. There is a constant, around the clock pressure. Some try
to fix this by overindulging. Others just ignore the situation until it is too
late." It is important to look at the way fame is experienced by celebrities
over time.
A research was carried out based on seven themes:
- Temporality
- Spatiality
- Bodyhood
- Causality
- Materiality
- Relationship to self
- Relationship to other.
Fame is generally experienced by celebrities, as a progression through four phases:
1.
a period of love/hate towards the experience
2.
an addiction phase where behavior is directed
solely towards the goal of remaining famous
3.
an acceptance phase, requiring a permanent
change in everyday life routines
4. and finally an adaptation phase, where new
behaviors are developed in response to life changes involved in being famous.
Celebrities, who participated in this research, described this
temporal aspect as unfolding from the first moment of being famous throughout
the rest of the lifespan.
Love/Hate:
At first, the experience of becoming famous
provides much ego stroking. Newly famous people find themselves warmly embraced.
There is a guilty pleasure associated with the thrill of being admired - in that
participants both love the attention and adoration while they question the
gratification they experience from fame. “I enjoy parts of it, but I hate parts
of it, too,” was a generally reported theme.
Addiction:
Te lure of adoration is attractive, and it
becomes difficult for the person to imagine living without fame. One participant
said, “It is somewhat of a high,” and another, “I kind of get off on it.” One
said, “I’ve been addicted to almost every substance known to man at one point
or another, and the most addicting of them all is fame. ” Where does the celebrity
go when fame passes; having become dependent on fame, how does one adjust to
being less famous over time? “As the sun sets on my fame,”one celebrity said,
“I’m going to have to learn how to put it in its proper place.” Te adjustment
can be a difficult one.
Acceptance:
As the attention becomes
overwhelming and expectations,temptations, mistrust, and familial concerns come
to the fore, the celebrity resolves to accept fame, including its threatening
phenomenal aspects.“You learn to accept it,” one celebrity said. After a while,
celebrities report that they come to see that fame is “just so much the
will-o’-the-wisp, and you just can’t build a house on that kind of stuff.”
Adaptation:
Only after accepting that “it comes with the
territory” can the celebrity adaptively navigate fame’s choppy waters. “Once
you’re famous,”a participant said, “you don’t make eye contact or you keep
walking . . . and you just don’t hear [people calling your name].” Adaptive
patterns can include reclusiveness, which gives rise in turn to mistrust and
isolation. “I don’t want to go out if I don’t feel good about looking forward to
meeting anybody or just being nice to people,” another celebrity reported.
Source: http://www.dealingwithfame.com/
Journal of Phenomenological Psychology - D. Rockwell, D. C. Giles