I’m Dr Dan Laughey, PhD: media & pop culture expert, author of Music & Youth Culture, Media Studies, & the well-known textbook Key Themes in Media Theory. Here you’ll find opinion & resources in the long tradition of media thought. Follow me @danlaughey
Here’s a news item, to which I contribute, about the dangers young people face when leaving digital footprints for all to trace. It was broadcast on ITV’s Tyne Tees News on Monday 3rd June and will be re-broadcast on ITV Yorkshire’s Calendar News on Thursday 6th at 6pm. To find out more about Jade Weatherhill’s admirable project, visit her page on the Fixers website.
Although I’ve no personal views on the matter, it seems Gwyneth Paltrow can count herself among a select posse of celebrities who divide public opinion. Like Margaret Thatcher, Madonna, Elton John and a few more besides, Paltrow followers fall into two distinct factions: lovers and haters.
Paltrow’s divisive media persona is the subject of a recent article, to which I contributed, in The Daily Telegraph: Is Gwyneth Paltrow the Marmite of Hollywood? In the article I argue that the main stimulus behind this love/hate relationship is the emulative dimension to celebrity – especially with regard to women celebrities. The reason why some people hate Paltrow is the same reason why others adore her: because, at fortysomething with a successful acting career, happy family, money to throw around and looks that would do justice to a woman twenty years her younger, she’s the archetypal Golden Girl living the Hollywood/American Dream. So you either respect, admire and look up to her; or you compare her to yourself (assuming you are vaguely ordinary) and feel personal dissatisfaction coupled with envy bordering on jealousy.
It’s a no-brainer that some people will turn against this Golden Girl persona. Some of Paltrow’s earliest acting roles, in films like Seven and Shakespeare in Love, consolidated that enduring image of the goody-goody paragon of virtue (beauty is truth, truth beauty and all that Keatsian rhetoric).
And the real Paltrow, moreover, can afford all the luxuries of expensive cosmetics and carefully tailored diets and personal training programmes that most ordinary mortals cannot, which is why envy/jealousy quickly turns into feelings of low self-esteem. What the majority of Paltrow haters neglect to understand, however, is that the airbrushed version of Paltrow they encounter most of the time bears no resemblance to the real human being. Celebrity culture is all about constructing an illusory reality and profiting from people’s obsession with a fantasy ideal; one that doesn’t actually exist behind closed doors.
Yesterday I was interviewed on BBC Radio Leeds about the death of Margaret Thatcher. The word I used to define her was ‘divisive’. More than any other politician in the contemporary era, she divided public opinion. You either liked her or most certainly did not. In this part of the country, for instance, she decimated coal-mining communities to the south of Leeds and into South Yorkshire; and yet the nouveau rich who benefited from privatisation and the freeing up of stocks and shares thought Mrs Thatcher was the best thing since sliced bread.
Her media persona was equally divisive, but in a different way. Her early years as leader of the Conservative Party and then Prime Minister were quite different from the presidential style of politics she performed later. At first she appeared almost timid and felt insecure enough to hire a voice coach to deepen the pitch of her delivery.
The Falklands Conflict was the game-changer. In fact, Thatcher would have almost certainly lost the 1983 General Election had it not been for the patriotic fervour that she whipped up during Britain’s defeat of Argentina. Thanks to the Falklands, she won a second term in office and bought the time to hone that Iron Lady public image that came to define her later years. Tony Blair, Alistair Campbell and New Labour became fine architects of political marketing and spin, of that there is no doubt: but Thatcher was the pioneering media-savvy PM.
The final question I was asked: why do you think so many young people are taking to the streets to celebrate the death of a former Prime Minister of whom they have no memory? I may claim to be an expert on some aspects of British (youth) culture, but even I had to plead ignorance on this issue. Social media technologies like Facebook allow for fast and efficient organisation of events in our interconnected world, unquestionably, but the personal motivations that drive individuals to participate in forms of protest that they know little or nothing about are truly baffling.
This blog also appears at the Leeds Met Media Centre: http://mediacentre.leedsmet.ac.uk/media-and-popular-culture-expert-dr-dan-laughey-reflects-on-the-death-of-margaret-thatcher/
tweets @danlaughey