Overexposure

Ben Affleck's high-wattage affair with Jennifer Lopez was played out in the media to the detriment of his career. (Kevin Winter/Getty Images)

No current chronicle of celebrity is more telling than Us Weekly’s regular feature Stars, They’re Just Like Us. The photo spread features candid shots of the fame-oisie picking up their dry cleaning, eating Big Macs, padding barefoot into public washrooms and — best of all — reading the tabloids. Its genius is in how it manages to be at once reverent and spiteful, holding up stars as objects of fascination even as they’re captured looking unkempt and doing boring things. This is what happens when a culture of over-sharing elopes with new technology like camera phones and blogs: there is no aspect of a star’s life — no matter how mundane — that is off limits.

And woe to the celebrity who refuses to play along. The notoriously private Matt Damon was recently chastised in a cranky column by Variety editor Peter Bart, who criticized the actor for his reticence with the press and his refusal to use his private life to promote his films and social causes. “Stars should be mythic,” Bart wrote, “forget the up-close-and-personal stuff. With this in mind, you breezed through the star-hungry Toronto International Film Festival, carefully avoiding media scrutiny. In fact, I never knew you were there.” Damon’s desire to present himself to the press as “boring and elusive,” Bart wrote, is “mildly pathological.”

Of all people, Bart — who was suspended in 2001 after a magazine profile quoted him uttering racial slurs and revealed that, against company policy, he once shopped a script while on the Variety payroll — should understand the hazards of speaking to reporters. Yet he took great umbrage over an August profile of Damon in GQ, in which the actor made the case for playing his cards close to his chest: “In my experience, the more you say, the dirtier you feel later when you look at it. Because it’s personal… [And] the reality is, from a creative standpoint, it hurts. Because the more I say, the harder it is for you to accept me as anything other than the person you know.”

It’s tough to argue with that. No matter how penetrating the performance, the more their personal lives play out in the press, the more challenging it is to see the Angelinas and Brads and Toms and Georges as anything other than their superstar selves. What’s lost for the audience — and this is no small injury for film lovers — is the possibility of being startled by a performance, or of watching an actor disappear completely into a role. In the same GQ article, Damon says that it was Ben Affleck’s high-wattage affair with Jennifer Lopez that scuppered his career: “If you end up in [the tabloids’] crosshairs, you’re really f---ed. Because there is an absolute relationship between how f---ed you are, if you’re on the cover of their magazines, and what happens to you as an actor.” In other words, give the public too much of what it wants and it will abandon you when it gets bored. So far, Damon’s proven to be a better actor than Affleck, but maybe that’s just because he’s made smarter choices — not just in his roles, but in how he’s handled his fame.

Britney Spears, seen here leaving a party, has become a pop-culture punching bag. (Chris Polk/Associated Press)

So, just how much does an actor or singer owe an audience beyond a good performance? And when does our own need for inside information become as “pathological” as Damon’s desire to be left alone? There’s a wide streak of cruelty in the current fascination with celebrity, as though people are so disgusted with their own interest in the tawdry and tragic affairs of stars that they’ve turned on the very people they admire. In the modern-day gladiator arena — the online gossip sites and glossy entertainment weeklies — the combatants aren’t wielding swords or fighting lions, but flashing hairless ladybits and hoovering drugs. Celebrities — particularly young women — have become convenient punching bags for a culture that’s pulled one way by greed and aspiration and another by envy and resentment. Witness the creepy thrill some seem to feel at the downfall of Britney Spears. Like Lindsay Lohan, and Amy Winehouse, she’s a sacrificial non-virgin, who must pay again and again and again for the sin of being young, famous and foolish.

No wonder former child star Jodie Foster has long kept a vow of silence about her private life. With the release of her latest film, The Brave One, she’s once again on magazine covers and once again refusing to answer questions about her sexual orientation. A decade ago, I thought Foster’s don’t-ask-don’t-tell policy was ludicrous, since her silence seemed a tacit coming out, anyway. Now, I think that Foster — who spent her college years at Yale being stalked by would-be Reagan assassin John Hinckley — might be the smartest and sanest person in Hollywood. Her coyness might have cost her some fans and cover stories, but the respected actor and two-time Oscar winner has never had to issue a statement to the press to announce a romantic breakup, nor watch her two sons become glossy fodder like Suri Cruise and the Brangelina brood.

The loss of privacy has always been the trade-off for fame. That’s the contract: In exchange for money, attention and adoration, stars must sign autographs, pose on red carpets, endure press junkets and live down the occasional scandal. At one time, before the explosion of online gossip sites, camera phones, celebrity stalker maps and the total tabloidization of entertainment journalism, that was enough. Now, a divorced dad’s voicemail eruption at his young daughter can be listened to by millions, and the world can spy on a vulnerable man recovering from a suicide attempt. That’s no longer a trade-off, but a deal with the devil.

Rachel Giese writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.

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