“IT is often said that celebrities are the new gods, attributed powers and abilities beyond the gods of Mt. Olympus. But they are phony gods, gods sought by us to fill the many voids in our own lives. They are the creatures of our collective wishes, beings who populate the country of our popular imagination. They can even acquire cultic status, functioning for us as surrogate saints and martyrs. James Dean’s hometown and burial site (Fairmount, Indiana) is a pilgrimage site, where the faithful come to ‘worship’ at the grave of the departed but curiously immortal youth, now immune from time. Marilyn Monroe has become a feminist icon, the girl goddess who was martyred by the system of exploitation that made her into a celebrity in the first place but could not make her happy. She was a victim of the phony love transacted between her and her fans, which brought her much lust and notoriety but no real love. In death, Elvis Presley has become a cult figure, and the tabloids regularly report the latest sightings of “St. Elvis,” including his intervening to comfort the troubled and heal the sick. These extremes suggest that celebrity worship is a phony religious experience, an idolatry of fame that leads ordinary people to seek sacred experience.

“The confusion of religious and celebrity worship stems from the fact that the famous exist in a kind of status of transfiguration. They live in ‘the context of no context,’ a mass-mediated world of play, figurative rather than literal existence. Celebrities do not work, they play; they do not live out textual lives, they romp in contextual limbo, the never-never land of nowhere. The celebrated country of Nowhere is their true home, the elysian fields of fame to which only the gods of celebration are admitted. (Michael Jackson built a fun park, complete with merry-go-round and miniature railroad, on a ranch he named Neverland.) But it is a phony world full of phony creations, all of whom are anxious about enhancing the one thing that differentiates them from other and unheralded human beings, their claim to fame. We should remember the fundamental concept of celebrity epistemology: if we the people do not see them, they do not exist.”

— James Combs, Phony Culture

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