Celebrities: they’re aspirational, inspirational and currently inescapable. Suddenly, they are everywhere in TV docos purporting to lift the lid and pull back the curtain to take us behind the scenes of their lives.
Look a little closer, though, and it’s clear that when something is described as a tell-all doco, it will tell all that the star wants you to know and no more.
But it’s easy to be deceived by docos that apparently highlight the faults in our stars. Talk about having our close-up and eating it. These sudden lapses into self-deprecation have the effect of making us admire them not just for their success, glamour and truckloads of money, but also for their heart-rending candour in sharing with us how little that success, glamour and money are worth when you are riddled with self-doubt. I suddenly feel a lot better about my own life, don’t you?
The stars get to bask in their own glow. What looks like bracing confessional honesty is ego tripping nevertheless, because its message is: if I am strong enough to share this with millions of strangers whom I will never see, then, truly, I must be amazing.
Beyoncé, whose prodigious talent would seem to need no massaging along these lines, made a landmark confessional documentary in 2013 with Life Is But a Dream. Whatever its faults or strengths, she had only herself to blame or credit, having produced, written, directed and narrated it. Oh, and starred in it.
And yet it was a struggle, as she revealed: “I always battle with: How much do I reveal about myself? How do I keep my humility? How do I keep my spirit and the reality? And how do I continue to be generous to my fans and to my craft?” It’s so hard knowing just how relatable to be.
In a sense, the tradition of documentaries that dim stars’ lustre can be traced back to the muckraking gossip magazines that arose in the early days of Hollywood and grew alongside it. There is nothing new or Kiwi about the tall poppy syndrome. As long as people have been put on pedestals, others have been standing by ready to take a sledgehammer to them.
Even then stars were known to control the release of information by swapping a less dangerous titbit for one that might have had a serious impact on their popularity.
Journalist Israel Daramola, writing on defector.com, describes interviewing a subject who thought he should only be asked the questions he wanted to answer. Eventually he had enough and walked out, sneering, “Why should I talk to y’all when I can just film my own movie, so I can tell my story the way I want to and get paid for it.” Why, indeed?
What we are currently seeing are not tell-all documentaries, but tell-all-that-I-am-happy-for-you-to-know documentaries. The moments we see carefully chosen and cut down from hours of actual candour.
And yet, even as we know we are being horrendously hornswoggled, we continue to watch, fascinated. “Look – it’s David Beckham’s actual wardrobe!” “That’s Robbie Williams’ actual bed that he’s lolling around in feeling sorry for himself.”
Other celebrity docos make little claim to be informative. Much of the enjoyment to be had from watching The Family Stallone was trying to remember who among the perfectly groomed, almost identical blonde women in the immediate vicinity of Sylvester Stallone was his wife and who were his daughters. There wasn’t a lot else going on.
The shows are not only the stars’ advertisements for themselves – they are cheap advertisements, which makes them beloved of the streaming services on which they can be seen and which have a voracious appetite for content. Producers don’t have to look for stars for their shows - the stars are there from the start, often with high-profile friends tagging along for cameos.
The docos are an example of the phenomenon of parasocial relationships, in which we believe we have some sort of relationship with people we don’t actually know. It’s seen at its most extreme in the outpourings of grief when a celebrity dies – Matthew Perry, for instance, to use a recent example.
Apart from his friends, family and staff, no one’s life will really be changed now he is no longer with us, but millions apparently mourned the passing of a stranger. In some ways it’s easier to have this connection with a stranger because we don’t have to deal with them as people and they can’t hurt us the way our real-life relatives do.
When a nagging family member dies, there’s always a bit of a relief mixed in there as well. But Matthew Perry? He never told me I’d put on weight.
