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Topic for #64: Celebrity, with guest Lucy Lawless

September 12, 2012 by Mark Linsenmayer 10 Comments

Lucy LawlessIt has occurred! On the evening of 9/10/12, we talked with actress Lucy Lawless about fame. Listen to the episode. She's been a great supporter of the Partially Examined Life, and if she is to be believed (and her piercing stare will make you believe it), our little discussion group product inspired her to go back to school and study philosophy, in between flying back from New Zealand to the states to film things, saving the arctic, and tweeting. She was a great sport, and regular listeners will be pleased that the recording came off much more like a regular PEL episode than a fawning celebrity interview. Much as when we have had a comedian or artist on in the past, Lucy was there to provide a reality check on our wild speculations about that divide between the numinous and the civilians.

The jumping-off point for our discussion was a 2010 book, Fame: What the Classics Tell Us About Our Cult of Celebrity by Tom Payne, who's a British classics dude who wrote book reviews for The Telegraph and now teaches classics (i.e. not philosophy) at the Sherborne School in Dorset, England (here are some of his articles at Huffington Post, to get a flavor of his writing). The book combines stories about Homeric heroes and Roman emperors with discussions of people like Britney Spears and Kate Winslet. His thesis is that celebrities fill a social need, an outlet for our collective aggression, that we can trace back to ancient times, where young maidens were lavishly bestowed with fineries and then sacrified. We idolize them, but set them up to disappoint our expectations, at which point we turn on them and raise up a fresher, younger replacement. The book is fun to flip through, and transmits and applies some interesting ideas, largely from anthropologist James Frazer's The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion (1890). From wikipedia: "Its thesis is that old religions were fertility cults that revolved around the worship of, and periodic sacrifice of, a sacred king." Another key source is Walter Berkert's Homo Necans: The Anthropology of Ancient Greek Sacrificial Ritual and Myth (1972). Also from wikipedia:

The book's core thesis is that when paleolithic man became a hunter, in spite of the generally omnivorous orientation of the great apes, lack of a predator instinct was made up for by turning patterns of intra-species aggression against the prey: Homo necans means "man the killer". Thus, the animal hunted by ancient man automatically acquired aspects of an equal, as if it were of one of the hunter's relations. In a first attempt at applying ethology to religious history, Burkert confronts the power and effect of tradition in uncovering traces of ancient hunting rituals so motivated in historical animal sacrifice and human sacrifice (by his thesis unified as deriving from the same fundamental principle) in specific historical Greek rituals with relevance to human religious behaviour in general.

As a warning, Payne's is not a book that claims to be philosophy, so while the comparison of these ancient rituals to our treatment of celebrity is interesting and has a nice Freudian feel, it's not developed in the book so much through argumentation as through a cavalcade of anecdotes. Payne's knowledge of philosophy seems limited to the ancient Greeks (and in that, it's got a classics bent, in that knowing the allegory of the cave is much different than slogging through the Theaetetus) and things that literary critics learn about, e.g. he brings up Saussure and Levi-Strauss at one point. This may explain why the stylistic organization is a bit disconcerting; it's not always easy to figure out what the point of a chapter or some of its contents is and how exactly it relates to the overall thesis. It might be easier to think of the book as variations on a theme: musings about celebrity culture in light of cool historical and literary tidbits.

Still, it gave us a platform to ask questions like whether celebrity worship is necessarily aggressive and whether the rise of famous individuals is a natural byproduct of the associations that make up a society (along the lines of our Aristotle's Politics discussion). Maybe wanting to be a celebrity, and wanting to take them down are simple matter of Will to Power a la Nietzsche. Is the behavior of stalkers and Internet trolls representative of the extremes of a tendency that we all share, or are they just nuts? Do celebrities occupy the same brain space in our lives as people we actually know? If you're talking to a celebrity, should you let on that you already know what they're telling you about their lives because you read it online? Does Tony Danza think that Lucy has some splainin' to do? All these answers are revealed, and more!

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Filed Under: General Announcements Tagged With: lucy lawless, philosophy of fame, philosophy podcast, tom payne

Comments

  1. Adam Dreaver says

    September 12, 2012 at 1:29 pm

    This is epic. Well done Guys. I hope she inspires a bunch of us young kids to explore philosophy.

    Reply
  2. dmf says

    September 12, 2012 at 5:42 pm

    maybe a future podcast on Marshall McLuhan would help in working thru media-ted social networks?

    http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~hdreyfus/html/paper_kierkegaard.html

    Reply
  3. Laura says

    September 13, 2012 at 9:44 pm

    Looking forward to listening to this ep though I’m pretty sure there was some fawning as I doubt Mark hasn’t stopped dreaming about her since she said when she grows up she wants to marry one of the PEL guys. You know I’m right Mark…hehe…

    Reply
  4. dmf says

    September 18, 2012 at 7:18 am

    http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/classical-worldrichard-jenkyns/4252470

    Reply
  5. Wayne Schroeder says

    September 19, 2012 at 11:19 am

    So, If Lucy needs some tutoring in philosophy, I will altruistically volunteer. No fawning here.

    Reply
  6. Patricia Saunders says

    March 9, 2019 at 2:51 am

    Celebrity and Fame may not be the same concepts. Celebrity usually has an element of admiration, hero-worship , ego-ideal.Fame flows very easily into infamous: Most people know who Ted Bundy was, but only psychopaths admire and want to be like him. The episode focused more on the psychology of celebrity. Lucy’s point that the “hero” is the product of many professionals working together on a fantasy person, mirrors the fact that fans will see,admire,even love what that “person” has touched in them. Lucy’s Xena really did inspire thousands to self-reflect and change their lives. As a woman, Xena said” Go, girl-be your best self,” which fit right into my becoming a young adult in the 1960’s era where love and redemption were major themes. Self-exploration and reflection, kindness to the suffering and sometimes losing it, were all 60’s values that Xena embodied. Courage and love were the twin pillars of Xena and the majority of my peers still drool over Woodstock and the guts to rebel against authority we thought was unfair,irrational or bigoted. And we did. Lucy pulled some aspects of herself/her experience/thinking into her acting Xena that was charismatic: inviting us to participate in her experience playing her role as Xena. That is one of the factors that makes her a great actor. She comes across as just another smart person when she is talking-putting those two aspects of her were alluded to in the article about meeting Robert Redford, and has been my experience in meeting and talking with her. After a while, I find that her being my hero sort of shifts into the background and it’s Lucy, not Xena.-funny as hell and sharp.

    Reply
  7. Ian Walsh says

    January 23, 2020 at 12:50 pm

    The Kindle version of Fame by Tom Payne is free on Amazon, by the way. 🙂

    Reply

Trackbacks

  1. Fun Things Coming Up with PEL | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    October 2, 2012 at 11:48 pm

    […] the Lucy Lawless episode is nearly done percolating. Most of you are going to really like it; a small percentage will be […]

    Reply
  2. 15 Minutes of Fame | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    October 9, 2012 at 12:04 pm

    […] you’ll remember from our fame episode with Lucy, Payne puts forth the thesis that “celebrities fill a social need, an outlet for our […]

    Reply
  3. Partially Examined Life Ep. 64: Lucy Lawless on Fame | The Partially Examined Life Philosophy Podcast | A Philosophy Podcast and Blog says:
    July 10, 2013 at 10:12 am

    […] Read more about the topic and get the book. […]

    Reply

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