Dr. Donna Rockwell speaks on the negatives of being famous, and how to transcend the downside and leverage fame to do good.
Fame isn’t just glory and adoration. Fame objectifies people, creates mistrust of others, and eliminates privacy. Children whose parents help become famous bear a responsibility to help their kids not lose touch with reality. But ultimately, fame can be used to help others, by helping to solve critical issues in our world. By serving others, celebrities, and all of us, can give meaning to our lives beyond being liked, followed and admired for our material gains and popularity.
Dr. Donna Rockwell is a Mindfullness and Celebrity Mental Health Expert who has appeared on Katie Couric Show, been quoted in the NY Times, and whose articles have appeared in Huffington Post and elsewhere. Her paper, Being a Celebrity: A Phenomenology of Fame, looks at the effects of fame on 15 celebrities in various walks of life – from actors to business executives.
Excerpt:
Dr. Donna: It’s lovely to be here. Thank you so much for having me.
Jeffery: I’ve asked you to connect with me because I’m writing a book about how to become famous. It’s called This Book Can Make You Famous. So I thought it would be great to talk about some of your work because I’ve read some of it and so you can share your thoughts for the wider audience so you can give everyone listening, a realistic assessment of the experience of being famous. You’ve seen a lot of people, so what is it when people become famous? What happens to people? How does it change and their mental health?
Dr. Donna: In addition to seeing celebrity as Clinical Psychology patients I also did my doctoral research on the experience of fame by interviewing 16 famous celebrities; national and international. So a lot of my information about the actual experience of becoming famous, what it feels like to become famous and the effects of fame comes from scientific qualitative inquiry research into that experience specifically. So it’s not just from seeing clients and hearing what their life experiences are, which I think gives it a different edge.
But to answer your question, what’s interesting is that most of us don’t realize how precious or how valuable anonymity is, and when people become famous I find that the thing that they miss the most is this precious anonymity that the rest of us have in the sense that we can walk down the street in complete privacy, where as, a famous person sort of surrenders their privacy when they achieve fame and they spend the rest of their life sort of craving it again, that privacy, that anonymity.
There is a great quote I love from Harrison Ford who says that “being famous is like walking down the street with a skunk on your head”. Everybody wants to be famous but the intense scrutiny and the living under the microscope of society and especially today with the Internet it’s so intensified so quickly that it’s pretty hard to be famous actually. And the other thing that happens is the sense of losing trust, so who do I trust? What can I trust? So some pretty existential and fundamental issues come up.
Jeffery: Yeah, I was going to ask you about mistrust, absolutely, because you end up surrounded by people and you don’t know whether they’re really your friends or they just want to be with you because you’re famous.
Dr. Donna: Exactly, and there’s this notion called reflected glory, which shows that — and speaks to the fact that we all love to be around fame its a sort of a high, its a kind of a drug and it feels kind of trippy to be around famous people, to be in that world of fame. It’s very heavy, and so addictive and its own way for the celebrity as well for the friends of the celebrity.
And yes, I mean, I think the famous people — and they often speak to this, “why do you like me? Do you like me because of who I am or because of what I do?” And that feeling of mistrust never really goes away, both for real old the friends and for new ones. A A-list movie star I interviewed for my dissertation, for my research said that being famous when you go out with your friends — he said, “Fame sits between them on the table like a bloated cod,” you know, it’s always there and the feelings of jealousy mixed with envy, mixed with excitement at being amidst the spotlight and the reflective glory that comes from that can create incredible mistrust and sort of a lack of joy. People may look like they are partying, but are they joyfully partying?
Jeffery: So then why do you think people want more fame? So you’ve become a little famous, you get recognized for something, which is normal to seek recognition for your talent and so forth, but then, why do you want to more?
Dr. Donna: Your passion and your art, why do you want more? Well, why is it there such a thing as addiction? Why do we start out with a small amount feels good but then I need more? In many ways, it could even be about ice cream; but we’re not satisfied, our threshold rises and of course, as human beings we have a natural level of competition, so there is such a craze celebrity culture environment in which the petri dish in which were all living right now.
