Addict Nation (15 page)

Mom
: Why are you crying?

Cody
: Because I love Justin Bieber . . .

Mom
: Why do you love Justin Bieber?

Cody
: Because I know he loves me back . . .

Mom
: Honey, we don’t have to cry because we love Justin Bieber.

Cody (still crying)
: Yeah we do . . . sometimes . . .

Mom
: What do you want Justin Bieber to do?

Cody
: To be one of my family.

The video, which racked up more than 15 million views, comes to an end when the phone rings and the toddler smiles for the first time, saying, “I bet that’s Justin Bieber!”
⁷
The innocent child articulates what adults secretly desire but are too embarrassed to say out loud. We want the celebrity to call us back. We want them to be part of our lives. And they are . . . in our fantasies.

We all desperately want to be near greatness. We want to be an original. But that’s a scary place to go. So we let these genuine stars take the risks while we hang on for the ride.

Addiction Always Gets Down to Motive

The big question is: Why are we so interested in the celebrity? What’s our motive? If it’s because we respect their talent and enjoy their artistry, that’s what I would consider healthy admiration. But if our obsession with the star is a form of escape, a way to numb ourselves, a vehicle to distract us from the pain and regret we feel about our own lives, then we are “using” the celebrity as a drug. And when we do that too often, we become addicted to the escape of focusing on their lives and not our own. Flipping though the gossip magazines while getting your nails done is one thing, but if you’re fretting over Angelina Jolie’s relationship with Brad Pitt, you’ve become a bit player in your own fantasy life.

The Celebrities We Love to Hate
Give Us the Biggest Pleasure Hit

Since the mission of my cable show
Issues
is to dissect topics average Americans talk about around the office water cooler, whatever they may be, I am constantly immersing myself in the smarmy details of the increasingly transparent personal lives of stars in trouble, be they A-list or D-list. I’ve covered Mel Gibson’s racist rants and Lindsay Lohan’s never-ending dramarama as she Ping-Ponged between court, jail, and rehab after a pair of DUIs.

July 6th, 2010,
Issues

VELEZ-MITCHELL
: The party is over for Lindsay Lohan. Today, judgment day. The troubled starlet broke down and wept. The party-hardy actress was at the center of a heated, furious hearing that dragged on all day long. Lilo boldly blew off the judge’s very simple order: attend alcohol education classes once a week. Lindsay broke down and, tearfully sobbing, insisted she did everything she was told. Check out the waterworks on this one.

LINDSAY LOHAN, ACTRESS
: I just wanted to take a minute to say that, you know, I—as far as I knew, I was being in compliant (sic) with my program. Having said that, I did do everything that I was told to do and did the best I could to, you know, balance jobs and showing up. I’m sorry. I wasn’t missing the classes just to—I wasn’t doing anything like that. I was working mostly. I was working with children. It wasn’t a vacation. It wasn’t some sort of a joke. And I respect you and would take it seriously.

And I appreciate the program has done so much to help me finish early because I wanted to make sure that I would come back here making you happy and the court system and show that I meant everything I put into it. It’s just been such a long haul, and I don’t want— (Lindsay begins weeping) I don’t want you to think that I don’t respect you and your terms, because I really did think that I was doing what I was supposed to do. I mean that with all my heart.

VELEZ-MITCHELL
: You’ve got to hand it to her. That was a performance of a lifetime! Luckily, the judge did not buy it.
⁸

We soon learned that, during Lindsay’s courtroom
tour de force,
she had “fuck you” written on her fingernails. “Lindsay Lohan’s fingernail” quickly became the nation’s number-one search item, sparking a
Washington Post
opinion piece headlined W
HY
I
S A
MERICA
G
OOGLING
L
INDSAY
L
OHAN’S
F
INGERNAIL
? Good question.
⁹

If only I devoted this much space in my brain to world history, I could be calling myself Dr. Velez-Mitchell by now. But I’m not the only one stuck in a celebrity time-suck vortex. At a time when an obscene amount of oil was spilling into the Gulf of Mexico, when obscene numbers of people were dying in Iraq and Afghanistan, when obscene numbers of children were living in makeshift tents in Haiti, why did America make Lindsay’s obscene nails the top priority? Why is Lindsay Lohan a ratings bonanza?

The Real Cost of Cheap Celebrity Gossip

Let’s face it. There are only so many hours in the day. We’re already being inundated with and distracted by TV, Internet, cell phones, texting, e-mails, social networking, and so forth. The days of leisurely reading the newspaper from cover to cover are gone for most people. Our addiction to technology has shortened our attention span. Add to that an obsession with celebrity that has cheapened our intellectual priorities. My dad used to say, “Third-class minds talk about people, second-class minds talk about things, and first-class minds talk about ideas.” While that’s a sweeping generalization, there is something to be said for taking the time and mental effort to tackle complex, abstract ideas, be they of a philosophical or a scientific nature.

Time
magazine
,
in a cover story on Thomas Edison, writes, “Inventors like Edison helped build America’s unparalleled scientific and technological dominance, a dominance that, more than any other single factor, made the 20th century the American century.”
Time
contrasts that with what is happening today. “American students seem to be losing interest in science. Only about one-third of U.S. bachelor’s degrees are in science or in engineering now, compared with 63% in Japan and 53% in China. ”
¹⁰

Clearly, there are many factors that contribute to this ominous trend. But I think it’s fair to ask: if we’re focusing on trivial gossip, do our minds lose the muscle to process difficult material? We’ve reached the stage where people are more interested in voting for an
American Idol
contestant than they are in voting for a member of Congress. Whether it be Barack Obama or Sarah Palin, it seems the few politicians who do inspire passion are precisely those who have broken through to a superstardom that eclipses politics. They are celebrities first, because in America today, it’s personality first, policy and principles second. That means image trumps ideas. In sobriety, we say, “Principles before personalities.” So, clearly, we are trapped in an addictive mind-set.

Clearly, this mass psychosis of celebrity obsession is affecting the national dialogue. Everybody seems to have a strong opinion about Michael Jackson’s death, John Edwards’s love child, or Tiger’s slew of infidelities. It’s a lot easier to master the facts of those stories than it is to develop an opinion about . . . say . . . how to rescue the more than 1 million Haitians displaced by the January 2010 earthquake.
¹
1 Could our obsession with celebrity be a form of self-medication that ultimately undermines America’s dominance as a culture?

Erratic, defiant, out-of-control celebs like Lindsay give us a supercharged pleasure hit. Ditto for Mel Gibson. His infamous insults against Jews, blacks, Latinos, gays, and women should’ve made him persona non grata to most Americans by now. But we’re absolutely mesmerized by these superstar train wrecks. We get to tell ourselves that maybe our mundane lives aren’t so bad after all.
Look at Mel: he’s handsome, rich, famous, powerful, and a great actor . . .
and yet, he seems like a miserable, hateful human being. Look at Lindsay:
she’s beautiful, young, and famous . . . and yet, she seems like a lost soul. I
guess my life’s not so bad after all. I guess I’m grateful for what I have.

“Everyone’s dream is to be rich and famous. The biggest curse in someone’s life is to be young, beautiful, and rich because there is only one place to go from there . . . down.”

—Howard Samuels, Psy.D., licensed clinical psychologist,
founder, and CEO of the Hills Treatment Center in Los Angeles

We Love to Watch Them Fall

We build stars up. We put them on a pedestal, and then we observe them as they become increasingly out of touch and start to assume that they’re untouchable, that they “own Malibu” (to use Mel’s phrase).
¹²
And then we wait . . . wait for them to slip and reveal their all-too-human character defects, be they alcoholism, drug addiction, sexual perversion, rage, or bigotry. Then we knock them down and crush them under our feet.
You’re not such a big shot anymore, are you?
This is just how it is. It’s human nature. Smart stars realize all this and understand that the price of fame and glory is living in front of a glass window with no curtains.

Today Celebs Have Nowhere to Run, Nowhere to Hide

As the number of celebrities has swelled, so have the number of media outlets reporting on them, further accelerating our obsession. From 2002 to 2005, I worked as a reporter for the nationally syndicated TV show
Celebrity Justice,
the granddaddy of these celebrity- focused media outlets. That show has now morphed into the wildly popular TMZ, which stands for Thirty Mile Zone, the theory being everything happens within a 30-mile zone in Hollywood. Harvey Levin, my dear friend and mentor, is the brainchild behind TMZ.com (and the TMZ TV show) and was also my boss at
Celebrity Justice.
Every morning at our 7:30 AM story meeting, Harvey would ask the same two questions: “Where’s the celebrity?” and “Where’s the justice?” That was the criteria for every story we did. When
Celebrity Justice
first started, plenty of skeptics actually wondered if we’d have enough material to fill a half hour every day. It quickly became apparent that Harvey was a visionary who grasped America’s slide toward celebrity obsession just as the trend was about to take off and metastasize into mob madness.

Every Scandal Is a Cautionary Tale

As a journalist, I’ve always made it a point to scour these salacious scandals for socially relevant information. At
Celebrity Justice,
we went to great lengths to explain the serious legal issues underlying celebrity cases to give the viewers practical pointers about the law. That way, someone watching at home, perhaps contemplating divorce, can learn something useful watching a story about a nasty celebrity divorce. On my show
Issues
,
I use these celebrity scandals as a springboard for sharing vital information about drug addiction, alcoholism, sex addiction, and codependency, issues which so often are at the heart of a star’s disgrace. The phrase
Addict Nation
was a banner we frequently used on
Issues
long before it became the title of this book. In a perfect world, would I like to use all my television exposure to discuss solutions to the escalating and interrelated threats of pollution, global warming, overpopulation, world hunger, and overconsumption? Of course! And we do weave in those issues whenever we can. But my challenge is squeezing out useful knowledge from the stories that capture the popular imagination. Those are, increasingly, accounts of celebrities in hot water.