Why do we love the stars?

They are rich and famous. They are young, or appear to be. In their lives, something happens that will never happen to us: they dress with the best couturiers, defile along the red carpet in Cannes, sunbathe on their own yachts. It would seem, what can we care about them? However, when we hear that at a party a 50-year-old film star in a tight dress looked no worse than ten years ago, we involuntarily turn up the volume of the TV or radio.

We get the latest celebrity news from their scandalous autobiographies, TV talk shows, as well as from the tabloids, which are growing day by day. “I get terribly tired at work, and in the evening, in the subway, I don’t want to read anything serious. So I just buy a magazine about the life of stars in a kiosk and leaf through it on the way. And for some reason, it always makes my soul feel better,” says 32-year-old Natalya, a web designer. What else are smart and educated people looking for, plunging into high-society gossip with pleasure?

stars like us

“I am pleased to know that Madonna also had failures in her personal life or that Demi Moore, like me, lived with a man much younger than her,” says Ludmila, 37, an advertising manager at a small publishing house. “The attraction of celebrities is that they are real, living people – just like us. This is the whole point, ”explains psychologist, director of the Institute of Group and Family Psychology and Psychotherapy Leonid Krol.

Indeed, they, like us, drink and smoke, take their children to school and worry about their successes and failures. They are treated for depression, quarrel and reconcile with relatives. They speed, park in the wrong places and steal small things in supermarkets. They are funny and weak. In a word, they are extraordinary people leading an ordinary life.

Moreover, it turns out that sometimes they have even worse than us. When a famous actor and allegedly exemplary family man is caught with a prostitute, he immediately becomes much more attractive to many. “We are not looking for heroes in the stars, but for anti-heroes who are closer to us,” says sociologist Ivan Klimov. “There is little interesting in the lives of happy people, which is why we love most of all when a fairy tale takes an unexpected, unpleasant turn and becomes like a real story.”

We lack strong emotions

“Something happens all the time with actresses, not with one, but with another,” says 20-year-old student Yana. They have such a busy life! Novels, luxurious weddings, dramatic divorces – and again novels. When I hear about this, it seems to me that I somehow participate in all this. That this is all a little bit about me. Although in reality I just study a lot and work a lot – nothing dramatic, no special adventures.

We get used to our life, we stop feeling its taste, and therefore we want something brighter, richer and more original. The life of stars allows you to experience feelings that are not in reality. “We ourselves drive ourselves into a situation where emotional hunger overtakes us,” explains psychotherapist Yuri Frolov. “We forbid ourselves to love and suffer, because when we were very young and trusting, we were told that this is not the most important thing.”

Who among us does not remember these words: “First finish school, and then …”, “Start working, and then …”, “Throw it out of your head, because …” Our loved ones always had rational explanations that pushed our true feelings aside and desires to the second, and even to the third plan. And now, when we have grown up, we ourselves say the same words to ourselves and forbid ourselves to lose our heads.

“As a result, our feelings are not in demand, and we experience emotional hunger,” continues Yuri Frolov. “But hunger is hunger, and if we cannot satisfy it with real emotions, then we have to be content with their surrogate.”

In the wonderful world of the stars, we are saved from everyday life. Everyone perceives the same story in his own way: he focuses on one or another part of it, adds his own problems to it, colors it with his own life experience, dreams and expectations. The stories of someone else’s life allow us to safely satisfy desires that we cannot fulfill in our own.

“Celebrities give us a theater with which we are freed from our passions,” explains psychoanalyst Andrei Rossokhin. “His actors love and suffer for us.”

Usually we do not have the slightest desire to cause real harm to our relatives or friends, but sometimes latent, not quite conscious thoughts about this still come to our minds. And in this context, the stars for us are nothing more than a means to throw out our aggressiveness, jealousy and other base impulses, without feeling guilty: they seem to guess our secret desires and realize them for us.

By mentally relating ourselves to Naomi Campbell who beat up the maid, or Charlie Sheen who broke his girlfriend’s arm, we are freed from the desire to push ourselves beyond the boundaries of socially acceptable behavior. “All these emotions that we try on ourselves are very strong, because they are experienced by real, not fictitious characters,” Andrei Rossokhin continues. “Having cleansed in this way, we become calmer.”

We are looking for a reason to communicate

“She is pretty, but she dresses terribly!”, “She looks ten years older – she was not lucky with the last lift” … Such conversations unite. Firstly, they do not oblige you to anything, but they perfectly help to overcome the awkwardness in communicating with unfamiliar people.

Secondly, celebrity discussion is a way to talk about yourself, to talk about your life in a roundabout way – with the help of well-known characters. Retelling this or that gossip from the gossip column and accompanying it with our own commentary, we sometimes tell a lot more about ourselves than if we spoke openly.

And, finally, thirdly, awareness of what concerns the life of celebrities sometimes gives us a feeling of our own superiority and even power over others: we feel our chosenness, involvement in some information that is inaccessible to others.

“I like to know who is dating or getting divorced,” confides 23-year-old appliance salesman Boris. “And it annoys me terribly when everyone is already aware of some event, and I alone missed everything.”

Identification options

We need someone to imitate. “Identification is the earliest mechanism that underlies human development. With its help, the child begins to form personality traits and behavioral stereotypes, value orientations and gender identity, – says psychoanalyst Andrei Rossokhin. – A small child identifies himself with his father or mother, unconsciously imitates – first the sounds they make, and then the manners. Growing up, he finds other examples: teachers, friends and … celebrities.

We are looking for people who help us in the creation of our own personality. After her divorce from Prince Charles, Princess Diana has become almost an idol for many women who have experienced a similar drama and are trying to find themselves in a new life.

In modern society, there are few genuine moral, intellectual and other “high” authorities, and therefore sometimes we simply have no one to rely on. In such a situation, we take an example from celebrities – after all, their “stardom” serves as confirmation that the behavior strategies they have chosen are reasonable, convenient, and will certainly lead to success.

“They tell us the course of life, play the role of advisers, who can be listened to or, on the contrary, criticized to smithereens – fortunately they are far away and will not be offended,” comments Leonid Krol. “They justify our decisions and actions in the eyes of other people and in our own.”

“The stars help me build my image, look for and find my style,” says 25-year-old Anna, an employee of a PR agency. Flipping through magazines is like consulting a stylist. I mean not only clothes, makeup or, say, the style of the interior, but also a personal image: someone presents himself as a sex bomb, someone as an intellectual, someone as a “bad girl” … I use these techniques, because I myself would never have thought of them.

Stars are able to make this or that lifestyle fashionable. Once upon a time, rock stars proclaimed the slogan “Live fast, die young” – and drugs have become almost an indispensable attribute of a free creative person. Today, on the contrary, recipes for steamed fish are heard from the Hollywood Olympus, low-fat yogurts and a personal fitness instructor are recognized as good form – and now we buy a juicer and do not have dinner after five.

Forgivable Weakness

We are loaded with work, we live in a state of eternal time trouble and we are well aware that, finding out all the heartbreaking details of the next stellar romance, we are wasting time on trifles. However, we cannot restrain ourselves and deny ourselves this pleasure, and therefore every time we leaf through an entertainment magazine, we feel awkward.

Who among us has not been tempted to hide a bright page under a more serious analytical journal? Who has not tried to convince himself and those around him that high society gossip does not interest him at all? However, let’s try to look at the problem from the other side.

Of course, the precious minutes we spend studying the lives of celebrities could be used in other ways. However, if this harmless activity gives us the opportunity to relax, calms us down and allows us to find a foothold in the unstable world around us, then we should not blame ourselves for this tendency. In the end, the love of the stars is that forgivable little weakness that we are not at all obliged to report to fellow travelers on the subway and work colleagues.