The Celebrity Clock Is Getting Rewired

This is an edition of Time-Travel Thursdays, a journey through The Atlantic’s archives to contextualize the present. Sign up here. “I think of celebrities as the transient royalty of a democracy,” Thomas Griffith wrote in The Atlantic in 1975. “While reigning, they live like kings, with paid and unpaid courtiers to show them little attentions. But their powers and privileges last only during their flowering period.” Unlike royals, who pass their prominence on through bloodlines and establish long-lasting dynasties, many celebrities “become only half-recalled names in trivia.” Ouch. But Griffith wasn’t wrong: Fame famously lasts for only 15 minutes, as the Andy Warhol axiom goes, and then it’s off to the land of pub-quiz deep cuts. Stars “live with the constant, terrifying possibility that their special gifts or their celebrity will vanish, exposing them as the insecure mortals they are in their own experience,” the psychoanalyst Sue Erikson Bloland, the daughter of the well-known German psychoanalyst Erik Erikson, wrote in The Atlantic in 1999. That fear leads some people to clutch their crown with both hands, even if it means saying yes to things they would’ve balked at before (see: competing on Dancing With the Stars, hosting a reality show, doing viral dances on TikTok). Their decline into obscurity can be delayed but not avoided—some celebrities whose spotlight is fading exhibit “an offstage melancholy that must come from what they see in their own mirror,” Griffith noted. In the modern era, this “offstage melancholy” looks different. Many people, after reaching the peak of their fame, don’t go offstage at all. Instead, they parlay a past hit TV show into a nostalgia-bait podcast, or move from TikTok fame to making an album. Others reemerge in the zeitgeist for reasons they don’t explicitly control—TV shows that were moderately successful on cable might stream a decade later and meet new and bigger audiences, and money-making franchises birth reboot after reboot. The longevity of some celebrities is extended beyond life itself: CGI and AI enable them to appear in films—and to hawk beauty products—even after their death. Marilyn Monroe’s visage is selling lipstick; a hologram Whitney Houston sings her hits in Las Vegas. When Michael Jackson died, in 2009, some commentators lamented that he would be the last true celebrity—that the advent of the World Wide Web would splinter people’s attention too much for one star to rise so far above the rest. The same year, Richard Florida argued in an Atlantic essay against that idea: “There’s good reason to suspect that, sooner or later, new technology will spawn an even bigger mega-star with even more global reach.” Innovations in technology and media have indeed augmented star power over the course of American history: Rudy Vallée’s singing voice was “amplified by the invention of the electric microphone,” Florida writes; Frank Sinatra “was one of the first to capitalize on tie-ins between radio, albums, and feature films.” Today, streaming and social media have removed many restrictions to fame’s reach—although whether any recent star has achieved Michael Jackson levels of ubiquity yet is hard to say. But just as new technology has changed the scale of celebrity, it has also rewired the celebrity clock. Even though the attention economy pushes people to jockey for just five seconds of a viewer’s time, some celebrities are also staying famous for longer. When someone can repeatedly reinvent themselves, relying on different platforms and audiences to boost their profile at different points, fame may not feel as fleeting as it once did. Ultimately, the celebrity clock is just a measure of how willing the public is to hear from the same person over and over. Fame is never entirely in the famous person’s control; it is invented as much as it is earned. (Case in point: Andy Warhol likely never actually said the thing about 15 minutes of fame, but once the phrase became associated with him, that didn’t matter.) A celebrity can try with all their might to hold on to the good old days. But they still meet the same end: Stars “have a spectacular passage across our skies,” Griffith wrote. Then they fall.