Fame : The Hijacking of Reality

We need to try to understand the problem of fame before it destroys us or kills us. Everyone had been failing to reckon with it for generations, as God and collective purpose were supplanted in the public sphere by collective spectacle and attention, but in this decade fame broke its old bounds and engulfed everything, and look where we are now.

There was a time in living memory when visibility and notoriety were difficult things to achieve. The proliferation of television channels made them easier, and the internet made them easier still. Even so, at the turn of this century, some people still worried this might be harmful. What might happen to the select few human beings who were being confined to spaces full of TV cameras and webcams, put under constant surveillance for the sake of entertainment?

No one ever established that those fears were wrong. Nevertheless, by the dawn of this decade, the technology was in place to make mass exposure available to everyone. In November of 2009, Twitter began to roll out the retweet button. In December of 2009, Facebook reversed its original terms of service, switching posts from private by default to public by default. Public by default! In October 2010, Instagram launched. By mid-decade, video streaming would be evolving—in the span of months—from a novelty to a standard feature. Everyone was a broadcaster; everyone was broadcast material. Anybody could be famous.

What is fame? In 2018, Justine Bateman wrote a book about it. The title of her book is Fame: The Hijacking of Reality. In it, Bateman, whose own stardom peaked in the ’80s when she starred on Family Ties, writes about the experience of becoming extremely famous (and gradually becoming much less famous) and what it was like from the inside. Fame, she writes (using a capital F), was “a sheath that I could look out of and see the world as I knew it before the Fame happened, but a sheath that now obscured anyone’s vision of me.”

Fame is a condition of being widely seen, while also not being seen in particular, human terms. It is a nonreciprocal transaction of interest or attention, on unequal terms of exchange. Bateman writes about what happens to celebrities, constantly exposed to people who keep asking them about themselves to keep them talking one-sidedly, so as to prolong the interaction: “The celebrity, the famous person, gets used to this. They get used to it and come to expect it … and you then stop asking anyone else about themselves. You just forget. It’s not part of the exchange anymore.” Bateman writes: “And you get used to this performance to such an extent that you forget to behave any other way.”

Now anyone with a smartphone has access to something like this, without needing to audition and be cast in a sitcom that reaches tens of millions of people each week. Everyone is on view. Did we volunteer for it? Yes, but also not really. I present my work in public, but I can count on one hand how many times a stranger has told me they’ve recognized me, anywhere outside a professional context. Possibly two hands. On the rare occasions it happens, it’s so uncomfortable I quickly put it out of my mind. The point is I’m not famous.

And yet: According to an archived snapshot of my Twitter page, my Twitter account had 85 followers in 2009. In 2010 there were 506. Right now Twitter says there are 33,800. I tried to guess before looking, and I was low by 6,000.  A lot of them are surely bots, and many of them have quit Twitter, and at least a few are dead, but that’s just what happens when the numbers are that size: It stops being personal. I’m not much of anyone, but when I get annoyed and type a passing thought, it happens in front of an audience the size of Fenway Park, basically.

It’s been possible, through the course of the decade, to feel the effects of this. Humanity doesn’t really translate at scale. It’s not just the Nazis and trolls, or even the inevitable context-jumping misunderstandings, but the impersonal quality of supposedly personal interaction. The proportion of genuine, reciprocal friends receiving your messages diminishes, as they’re drowned out by sheer numbers, or they drop out and drift away. The expressive range gets narrower—no more tweets about the family, less irony to feed into the irony-mangling machine. The old adage for politicians about never saying anything you don’t want to see on the front of the New York Times now covers everyone, and the front-page space is effectively infinite.

Performance is the response to surveillance; constant performance is the response to constant surveillance. Social media has added some third category to public and private—something equivalent to combatant status. People set about generating public selves that were necessarily separate from the private self or even the old-fashioned, conventional social self.

In a phone interview, Bateman said that she first noticed private activity becoming a public product when people started checking in on Foursquare around the turn of the decade. “When I saw that, because I had had a life prior, where people were taking note as to where I was going … the whole Foursquare thing just seemed horrifying to me,” she said. “I was so glad to be free of that. So the idea to me that you would volunteer for that was, to me, like an anathema to having like a kind of a free life. You know—why would you volunteer for that?”

But the other choice was obscurity while everyone else was becoming ever more visible. And so this mode of existing expanded until it couldn’t be contained by the internet. Storefronts occupied by new, uncanny kinds of establishments began to open, places that were notionally museums or shops or restaurants, but which had been built really as photographic environments. Tourists went in search of water that was vivid blue with toxic waste. Plastic surgeons began reworking people’s faces to match the settings on Instagram filters.

Everywhere, the irreality became concrete. People reportedly are decorating their own homes with photogenic walls so their guests can have something to pose against. Or they just buy and hang gold Mylar fringe curtains, if people are coming over, or lay down trompe l’oeil surfaces to put under their meals, so that everything may converge on the same range of visuals. Physical life is organized around the algorithmic average; the simulated environment becomes the only environment.

Not far past mid-decade, a man, who had already been famous under various older forms of media and publicity, hired a bunch of actors—a human Mylar curtain—to cheer for him as he declared his ambition to become the most important person in the world. He toured the country against staged backdrops, with the cable cameras angling away from the empty stretches of stadium to focus on the manufactured crowd behind him. He tweeted, and people tweeted back at him, until all of Twitter seemed like an extension of a single performance.

It succeeded, all of it. It replaced everything that had come before. The president of the United States exists as a fame-object, not a person; he could launch a nuclear device for the impression it would create, for his brand. Nuclear explosions were always first of all a form of display, so why not use the most impressive display at his disposal?

It’s easy and emotionally satisfying to say that the president has no internal self, but it does not seem true, based on the public statements of the people who say they have observed him. His internal self (by reputation) seems to be driven by a mix of terror and complacency, enfolding each other or cycling after each other. He cannot be secure, and he cannot be shaken.

What does seem to be missing is that intermediate layer, the social self, the self as it exists in relation to other people. Everything Donald Trump does is a performance, a projection of what sort of thing he wants other people to believe he is. The nation’s policies are a series of gestures, whose underlying substance or lack of substance is of no interest to him.

Under the conditions of acute and widespread famousness, any other form of meaning collapses. The role of Mr. Rogers has been taken over by unboxing videos and gamers on YouTube. The surviving Boston Marathon bomber appeared on the cover of Rolling Stone in a tousled and beguiling pose. People tried to get mad about the magazine packaging him as a heartthrob, but it was just his own selfie.

The old terms of fame were lopsided, but they had something under them. “You put a lot of effort into this work,” Bateman said, “and other people are like, ‘Wow, that really touched me’ or ‘I really enjoyed that’ or whatever. And then your exchange is complete. But if you don’t, if the product’s just you, I don’t know—what satisfies that? What’s the complete exchange? When is the exchange complete? And I would offer that the exchange is never complete. It’s an infinite loop. It’s never complete, because all it is, is please. Please what? Fill in the blank. Please pay attention to me? Please acknowledge me? Please make me feel that I am worth something?”

In 2014, an academic-turned-journalist felt free to argue in the Baffler that Beyoncé and Kim Kardashian should be understood to represent two forms of “the labor involved in the production of celebrity”—and that the distinction between them was that “Beyoncé’s labor is masculinized and legitimated, while Kardashian’s is feminized and denigrated.” Any other differences one might have wanted to notice between the creator of world-spanning hit music and the marketer of a semi-scammy app game were irrelevant. By the end of the decade, the Guardian was running the same argument about how the critically acclaimed bestselling authors Jia Tolentino and Taffy Brodesser-Akner were basically the same thing as a person named Caroline Calloway, who’d gotten attention after someone else wrote a long essay about the experience of ghostwriting Instagram captions for her. Whether a writer did any writing was as irrelevant as whether the president had any capacity to be president. They were all influencers, and what was there, really, in the world but influence?

The Decade in Fame. By Tom  Scocca. Slate, December  20, 2019.

This past summer, I booked a plane ticket to Los Angeles with the hope of investigating what seems likely to be one of the oddest legacies of our rapidly expiring decade: the gradual emergence, among professionally beautiful women, of a single, cyborgian face. It’s a young face, of course, with poreless skin and plump, high cheekbones. It has catlike eyes and long, cartoonish lashes; it has a small, neat nose and full, lush lips. It looks at you coyly but blankly, as if its owner has taken half a Klonopin and is considering asking you for a private-jet ride to Coachella. The face is distinctly white but ambiguously ethnic—it suggests a National Geographic composite illustrating what Americans will look like in 2050, if every American of the future were to be a direct descendant of Kim Kardashian West, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Kendall Jenner (who looks exactly like Emily Ratajkowski). “It’s like a sexy . . . baby . . . tiger,” Cara Craig, a high-end New York colorist, observed to me recently. The celebrity makeup artist Colby Smith told me, “It’s Instagram Face, duh. It’s like an unrealistic sculpture. Volume on volume. A face that looks like it’s made out of clay.”

Instagram, which launched as the decade was just beginning, in October, 2010, has its own aesthetic language: the ideal image is always the one that instantly pops on a phone screen. The aesthetic is also marked by a familiar human aspiration, previously best documented in wedding photography, toward a generic sameness. Accounts such as Insta Repeat illustrate the platform’s monotony by posting grids of indistinguishable photos posted by different users—a person in a yellow raincoat standing at the base of a waterfall, or a hand holding up a bright fall leaf. Some things just perform well.

The human body is an unusual sort of Instagram subject: it can be adjusted, with the right kind of effort, to perform better and better over time. Art directors at magazines have long edited photos of celebrities to better match unrealistic beauty standards; now you can do that to pictures of yourself with just a few taps on your phone. Snapchat, which launched in 2011 and was originally known as a purveyor of disappearing messages, has maintained its user base in large part by providing photo filters, some of which allow you to become intimately familiar with what your face would look like if it were ten-per-cent more conventionally attractive—if it were thinner, or had smoother skin, larger eyes, fuller lips. Instagram has added an array of flattering selfie filters to its Stories feature. FaceTune, which was released in 2013 and promises to help you “wow your friends with every selfie,” enables even more precision. A number of Instagram accounts are dedicated to identifying the tweaks that celebrities make to their features with photo-editing apps. Celeb Face, which has more than a million followers, posts photos from the accounts of celebrities, adding arrows to spotlight signs of careless FaceTuning. Follow Celeb Face for a month, and this constant perfecting process begins to seem both mundane and pathological. You get the feeling that these women, or their assistants, alter photos out of a simple defensive reflex, as if FaceTuning your jawline were the Instagram equivalent of checking your eyeliner in the bathroom of the bar.

“I think ninety-five per cent of the most-followed people on Instagram use FaceTune, easily,” Smith told me. “And I would say that ninety-five per cent of these people have also had some sort of cosmetic procedure. You can see things getting trendy—like, everyone’s getting brow lifts via Botox now. Kylie Jenner didn’t used to have that sort of space around her eyelids, but now she does.”

Twenty years ago, plastic surgery was a fairly dramatic intervention: expensive, invasive, permanent, and, often, risky. But, in 2002, the Food and Drug Administration approved Botox for use in preventing wrinkles; a few years later, it approved hyaluronic-acid fillers, such as Juvéderm and Restylane, which at first filled in fine lines and wrinkles and now can be used to restructure jawlines, noses, and cheeks. These procedures last for six months to a year and aren’t nearly as expensive as surgery. (The average price per syringe of filler is six hundred and eighty-three dollars.) You can go get Botox and then head right back to the office.

A class of celebrity plastic surgeons has emerged on Instagram, posting time-lapse videos of injection procedures and before-and-after photos, which receive hundreds of thousands of views and likes. According to the American Society of Plastic Surgeons, Americans received more than seven million neurotoxin injections in 2018, and more than two and a half million filler injections. That year, Americans spent $16.5 billion on cosmetic surgery; ninety-two per cent of these procedures were performed on women. Thanks to injectables, cosmetic procedures are no longer just for people who want huge changes, or who are deep in battle with the aging process—they’re for millennials, or even, in rarefied cases, members of Gen Z. Kylie Jenner, who was born in 1997, spoke on her reality-TV show “Life of Kylie” about wanting to get lip fillers after a boy commented on her small lips when she was fifteen.

Ideals of female beauty that can only be met through painful processes of physical manipulation have always been with us, from tiny feet in imperial China to wasp waists in nineteenth-century Europe. But contemporary systems of continual visual self-broadcasting—reality TV, social media—have created new disciplines of continual visual self-improvement. Social media has supercharged the propensity to regard one’s personal identity as a potential source of profit—and, especially for young women, to regard one’s body this way, too. In October, Instagram announced that it would be removing “all effects associated with plastic surgery” from its filter arsenal, but this appears to mean all effects explicitly associated with plastic surgery, such as the ones called “Plastica” and “Fix Me.” Filters that give you Instagram Face will remain. For those born with assets—natural assets, capital assets, or both—it can seem sensible, even automatic, to think of your body the way that a McKinsey consultant would think about a corporation: identify underperforming sectors and remake them, discard whatever doesn’t increase profits and reorient the business toward whatever does.

Smith first started noticing the encroachment of Instagram Face about five years ago, “when the lip fillers started,” he said. “I’d do someone’s makeup and notice that there were no wrinkles in the lips at all. Every lipstick would go on so smooth.” It has made his job easier, he noted, archly. “My job used to be to make people look like that, but now people come to me already looking like that, because they’re surgically enhanced. It’s great. We used to have to contour you to give you those cheeks, but now you just went out and got them.”

There was something strange, I said, about the racial aspect of Instagram Face—it was as if the algorithmic tendency to flatten everything into a composite of greatest hits had resulted in a beauty ideal that favored white women capable of manufacturing a look of rootless exoticism. “Absolutely,” Smith said. “We’re talking an overly tan skin tone, a South Asian influence with the brows and eye shape, an African-American influence with the lips, a Caucasian influence with the nose, a cheek structure that is predominantly Native American and Middle Eastern.” Did Smith think that Instagram Face was actually making people look better? He did. “People are absolutely getting prettier,” he said. “The world is so visual right now, and it’s only getting more visual, and people want to upgrade the way they relate to it.”

This was an optimistic way of looking at the situation. I told Smith that I couldn’t shake the feeling that technology is rewriting our bodies to correspond to its own interests—rearranging our faces according to whatever increases engagement and likes. “Don’t you think it’s scary to imagine people doing this forever?” I asked.

“Well, yeah, it’s obviously terrifying,” he said.

Beverly Hills is L.A.’s plastic-surgery district. In the sun-scorched isosceles triangle between the palm trees and department stores of Wilshire and the palm trees and boutique eateries of Santa Monica, there’s a doctor, or several, on every block. On a Wednesday afternoon, I parked my rental car in a tiny underground lot, emerged next to a Sprinkles Cupcakes and a bougie psychic’s office, and walked to a consultation appointment I had made with one of the best-known celebrity plastic surgeons, whose before-and-after Instagram videos frequently attract half a million views.

I’d booked the consultation because I was curious about the actual experience of a would-be millennial patient—a fact I had to keep mentioning to my boyfriend, who seemed moderately worried that I would come back looking like a human cat. A few weeks before, I had downloaded Snapchat for the first time and tried out the filters, which were in fact very flattering: they gave me radiant skin, doe lashes, a face shaped like a heart. It wasn’t lost on me that when I put on a lot of makeup I am essentially trying to create a version of this face. And it wasn’t hard for me to understand why millennial women who were born within spitting distance of Instagram Face would want to keep drawing closer to it. In a world where women are rewarded for youth and beauty in a way that they are rewarded for nothing else—and where a strain of mainstream feminism teaches women that self-objectification is progressive, because it’s profitable—cosmetic work might seem like one of the few guaranteed high-yield projects that a woman could undertake.

The plastic surgeon’s office was gorgeous and peaceful, a silvery oasis. A receptionist, humming along to “I Want to Know What Love Is,” handed me intake forms, which asked about stress factors and mental health, among other things. I signed an arbitration agreement. A medical assistant took photos of my face from five different angles. A medical consultant with lush hair and a deeply warm, caring aura came into the room. Careful not to lie, and lightly alarmed by the fact that I didn’t need to, I told her that I’d never gotten fillers or Botox but that I was interested in looking better, and that I wanted to know what experts would advise. She was complimentary, and told me that I shouldn’t get too much done. After a while, she suggested that maybe I would want to pay attention to my chin as I aged, and maybe my cheeks, too—maybe I’d want to lift them a little bit.

Then the celebrity doctor came in, giving off the intensity of a surgeon and the focus of a glassblower. I said to him, too, that I was just interested in looking better, and wanted to know what an expert would recommend. I showed him one of my filtered Snapchat photos. He glanced at it, nodded, and said, “Let me show you what we could do.” He took a photo of my face on his phone and projected it onto a TV screen on the wall. “I like to use FaceTune,” he said, tapping and dragging.

Within a few seconds, my face was shaped to match the Snapchat photo. He took another picture of me, in profile, and FaceTuned the chin again. I had a heart-shaped face, and visible cheekbones. All of this was achievable, he said, with chin filler, cheek filler, and perhaps an ultrasound procedure that would dissolve the fat in the lower half of my cheeks—or we could use Botox to paralyze and shrink my masseter muscles.

I asked the doctor what he told people who came to see him wanting to look like his best-known patients. “People come in with pictures of my most famous clients all the time,” he said. “I say, ‘I can’t turn you into them. I can’t, if you’re Asian, give you a Caucasian face, or I could, but it wouldn’t be right—it wouldn’t look right.’ But if they show me a specific feature they want then I can work with that. I can say, ‘If you want a sharp jaw like that, we can do that.’ But, also, these things are not always right for all people. For you, if you came in asking for a sharp jaw, I would say no—it would make you look masculine.”

“Does it seem like more people my age are coming in for this sort of work?” I asked.

“I think that ten years ago it was seen as anti-cerebral to do this,” he said. “But now it’s empowering to do something that gives you an edge. Which is why young people are coming in. They come in to enhance something, rather than coming in to fix something.”

“And it’s subtle,” I said.

“Even with my most famous clients, it’s very subtle,” the doctor said. “If you look at photos taken five years apart, you can tell the difference. But, day to day, month to month, you can’t.”

I felt that I was being listened to very carefully. I thanked him, sincerely, and then a medical assistant came in to show me the recommendations and prices: injectables in my cheeks ($5,500 to $6,900), injectables in my chin (same price), an ultrasound “lipofreeze” to fix the asymmetry in my jawline ($8,900 to $18,900), or Botox in the TMJ region ($2,500). I walked out of the clinic into the Beverly Hills sunshine, laughing a little, imagining what it’d be like to have a spare thirty thousand dollars on hand. I texted photos of my FaceTuned jaw to my friends and then touched my actual jaw, a suddenly optional assemblage of flesh and bone.

The plastic surgeon Jason Diamond was a recurring star of the reality show “Dr. 90210” and has a number of famous clients, including the twenty-nine-year-old “Vanderpump Rules” star Lala Kent, who has posted photos taken in Diamond’s office on Instagram, and who told People, “I’ve had every part of my face injected.” Another client is Kim Kardashian West, whom Colby Smith described to me as “patient zero” for Instagram Face. (“Ultimately, the goal is always to look like Kim,” he said.) Kardashian West, who has inspired countless cosmetically altered doppelgängers, insists that she hasn’t had major plastic surgery; according to her, it’s all just Botox, fillers, and makeup. But she also hasn’t tried to hide how her appearance has changed. In 2015, she published a coffee-table book of selfies, called “Selfish,” which begins when she is beautiful the way a human is beautiful and ends when she’s beautiful in the manner of a computer animation.

I scheduled an interview with Diamond, whose practice occupies the penthouse of a building in Beverly Hills. On the desk in his office was a thank-you note from Chrissy Teigen. (It sat atop two of her cookbooks.) As with the doctor I’d seen the day before, Diamond, who has pool-blue eyes and wore black scrubs and square-framed glasses, looked nothing like the tabloid caricature of a plastic surgeon. He was youthful in a way that was only slightly surreal.

Diamond had trained with an old guard of top L.A. plastic surgeons, he told me—people who thought it was taboo to advertise. When, in 2004, he had the opportunity to appear on “Dr. 90210,” he decided to do it, against the advice of his wife and his nurses, because, he said, “I knew that I would be able to show results that the world had never seen.” In 2016, a famous client persuaded him to set up an Instagram account. He now has just under a quarter million followers. The employees at his practice who run the account like that Instagram allows patients to see him as a father of two and as a friend, not only as a doctor.

Diamond had long had a Web site, but in the past his celebrity patients didn’t volunteer to offer testimonials there. “And, of course, we never asked,” he said. “But now—it’s amazing. Maybe thirty per cent of the celebrities I take care of will just ask and offer to shout us out on social media. All of a sudden, it’s popular knowledge that all these people are coming here. For some reason, Instagram made it more acceptable.” Cosmetic work had come to seem more like fitness, he suggested. “I think it’s become much more mainstream to think about taking care of your face and your body as part of your general well-being. It’s kind of understood now: it’s O.K. to try to look your best.”

There was a sort of cleansing, crystalline honesty to this high-end intersection of superficiality and pragmatism, I was slowly realizing. I hadn’t needed to bother posing as a patient—these doctors spent all day making sure that people no longer felt they had anything to hide.

I asked Diamond if he had thoughts about Instagram Face. “You know, there’s this look—this Bella Hadid, Kim Kardashian, Kylie Jenner thing that seems to be spreading,” I said. Diamond said that he practiced all over the world, and that there were different regional preferences, and that no one template worked for every face. “But there are constants,” he said. “Symmetry, proportion, harmony. We are always trying to create balance in the face. And when you look at Kim, Megan Fox, Lucy Liu, Halle Berry, you’ll find elements in common: the high contoured cheekbones, the strong projected chin, the flat platform underneath the chin that makes a ninety-degree angle.”

“What do you make of the fact that it’s much more possible now for people to look at these celebrity faces and think, somewhat correctly, that they could look like that, too?” I asked.

“We could spend two whole days discussing that question,” Diamond said. “I’d say that thirty per cent of people come in bringing a photo of Kim, or someone like Kim—there’s a handful of people, but she’s at the very top of the list, and understandably so. It’s one of the biggest challenges I have, educating the person about whether it’s reasonable to try to move along that path toward Kim’s face, or toward whoever. Twenty years of practice, thousands and thousands of procedures, go into each individual answer—when I can do it, when I can’t do it, and when we can do something but shouldn’t, for any number of reasons.” I told Diamond that I was afraid that if I ever tried injectables, I’d never stop. “It is true that the vast majority of our patients absolutely love their results, and they come back,” he said.

We talked about the word “addiction.” I said that I dyed my hair and wore makeup most days, and that I knew I would continue to dye my hair and spend money on makeup, and that I didn’t consider this an addiction but a choice. (I thought about a line from the book “Perfect Me,” by the philosopher Heather Widdows: “Choice cannot make an unjust or exploitative practice or act somehow, magically, just or non-exploitative.”) I asked Diamond if his patients felt more like themselves after getting work done.

“I can answer that in part because I do these things, too,” he said, gesturing to his face. “You know when you get a really good haircut, and you feel like the best version of yourself? This is that feeling, but exponential.”

On the way to Diamond’s office, I had passed a café that looked familiar: pale marble-topped tables, blond-wood floors, a row of Prussian-green snake plants, pendant lamps, geometrically patterned tiles. The writer Kyle Chayka has coined the term “AirSpace” for this style of blandly appealing interior design, marked by an “anesthetized aesthetic” and influenced by the “connective emotional grid of social media platforms”—these virtual spaces where hundreds of millions of people learn to “see and feel and want the same things.” WeWork, the collapsing co-working giant—which, like Instagram, was founded in 2010—once convinced investors of a forty-seven-billion-dollar vision in which people would follow their idiosyncratic dreams while enmeshed in a global network of near-indistinguishable office spaces featuring reclaimed wood, neon signs, and ficus trees. Direct-to-consumer brands fill podcast ad breaks with promises of the one true electric toothbrush and meals that arrive in the mail, selling us on the relief of forgoing choice altogether. The general idea seems to be that humans are so busy pursuing complicated forms of self-actualization that we’d like much of our life to be assembled for us, as if from a kit.

I went to see another Beverly Hills plastic surgeon, one who had more than three hundred thousand Instagram followers. I told the doctor that I was a journalist, and that I was there for a consultation. He studied my face from a few angles, felt my jaw, and suggested exactly what the first doctor had recommended. The prices were lower this time—if I had wanted to put the whole thing on my credit card, I could have.

I took the elevator down to the street with three very pretty women who all appeared to be in their early twenties. As I drove back to my hotel, I felt sad and subdued and self-conscious. I had thought that I was researching this subject at a logical distance: that I could inhabit the point of view of an ideal millennial client, someone who wanted to enhance rather than fix herself, who was ambitious and pragmatic. But I left with a very specific feeling, a kind of bottomless need that I associated with early adolescence, and which I had not experienced in a long time.

I had worn makeup at sixteen to my college interviews; I’d worn makeup at my gymnastic meets when I was ten. In the photos I have of myself at ballet recitals when I was six or seven, I’m wearing mascara and blush and lipstick, and I’m so happy. What did it mean, I wondered, that I have spent so much of my life attempting to perform well in circumstances where an unaltered female face is aberrant? How had I been changed by an era in which ordinary humans receive daily metrics that appear to quantify how our personalities and our physical selves are performing on the market? What was the logical end of this escalating back-and-forth between digital and physical improvement?

On Instagram, I checked up on the accounts of the plastic surgeons I had visited, watching comments roll in: “this is what I need! I need to come see you ASAP!”, “want want want,” “what is the youngest you could perform this procedure?” I looked at the Instagram account of a singer born in 1999, who had become famous as a teen-ager and had since given herself an entirely new face. I met up with a bunch of female friends for dinner in L.A. that night, two of whom had already adopted injectables as part of their cosmetic routine. They looked beautiful. The sun went down, and the hills of L.A. started to glitter. I had the sense that I was living in some inexorable future. For some days afterward, I noticed that I was avoiding looking too closely at my face.

The Age of Instagram Face. By  Jia Toletino.  The New Yorker, December 12 ,2019.

Caroline Calloway likes to be identified as a writer. She makes this abundantly clear in a post directed at Grace Spelman, formerly a content producer at BuzzFeed, during one of Calloway’s many forgettable spats with media workers whose criticisms she has found chafing.

“FYI I prefer ‘writer’, like you, Grace,” Calloway noted in a parenthetical within a wall of text (Spelman had called her an “Instagram blogger”, which, for my money, is pretty apt).

Elsewhere on her Instagram, Calloway posts a picture of Trick Mirror, the lauded debut essay collection from the New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino. The book makes her “insecure”, she writes, because she can’t seem to measure up to Tolentino’s pristine search results. “When you type Jia Tolentino into Google you get: Great writer! Benefit of the doubt! Kind assumptions! Media EGOT!” She contrasts this apparent luck with her own results, which yield unsparing (and, frankly, excessive) coverage of some poorly planned “creativity workshops” consisting of flower crowns, salads, and organized vulnerability.

Calloway’s writerly ambition had been to document her life in real time on a platform best known for sharing selfies, to pioneer a new genre of memoir while cultivating a loyal social media following. She had secured a book deal at one point but wasn’t able to deliver due to a worsening addiction to Adderall, so Instagram remained her literary venue of choice. And why not? Many writers – good writers – self-publish via newsletters or blogging platforms; the choice of the photo-centric Instagram merely makes the writer’s intentions of self-commodification more straightforward. There could not be any confusion about what was being sold: not just prose, but the person herself.

But to describe Calloway as a writer first and foremost would be extraordinarily generous. Her frenzied, disjointed dispatches beneath photos of her art-cluttered West Village studio floor are, in and of themselves, often myopic and uninteresting. It is the media-fueled mythos around her – the disintegrated book deal, the “scam” workshops, the sensational and damning the Cut essay from her former best friend and collaborator Natalie Beach – that have earned my attention and emotional investment. To my shame, I read every word Calloway writes.

But perhaps Calloway could be forgiven for conflating the work of writing with the work of marketing oneself as a writer. After all, to be a writer today is to make yourself a product for public consumption on the internet, to project an appealing image that contextualizes the actual writing. The women – and they are mostly women – who are most heralded in the media industry today are extremely online, starring in photoshoots and documenting their skincare routines and eating habits as much as discussing their process.

The influencer is insecure about not being the writer. But over this past summer of viral internet-fueled grifts and an equally intense barrage of high-profile book launches and interview tours, it struck me that there is functionally little difference between a lauded writer with a recognizable avatar and a prominent social-media influencer. The only difference is in the way each metabolizes the experience of influence.

The most famous writers have always been public figures with their own media-fueled mythos, of course. We have the glamorous mystique of Joan Didion, whose aspirational “cool” has made her a persistent object of reverence for white women with literary ambitions; the wild lore of Hunter S Thompson with his drugs and guns, the cigarette holder and aviators instantly recognizable even to those who haven’t read him; and the literary “Brat Pack” of Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerney, and company, who were themselves objects of fascination as extensions of their depressive, decadent, druggy fiction. Benjamin Moser’s new authorized biography of Susan Sontag painstakingly attempts to reconcile the writer’s contradictory private self with her glamorous persona as a public intellectual. The book’s many reviews grapple with the unreliability of biographical interpretation and the insertions of the biographer’s own biases and blindspots.

But the image management that once seemed incidental, or at least parallel, to the literary profession seems now one of its most necessary, integral functions. In the age of Twitter and Instagram, an online presence, which is necessarily public and necessarily consumable, seems all but mandatory for a writer who reaches (or hopes to reach) a certain level of renown, especially for anyone dealing in personal essays or cultural criticism. In the way that the influencer uses her image to sell her swag, the writer leverages her life to sell her work, to editors and audiences.

Naomi Fry, known for her sharp dissections of celebrity, social media, and meme culture at the New Yorker, is perhaps equally known for her own social media presence as a funny, astute documentarian of her personal life, though always within the context of her job at a prestige publication and with more than a whiff of irony. If celebrities who play well on social media do so by being funny and relatable but more glamorous than you, writers who play well on those same platforms do so by being funny and relatable but smarter and more successful than you.

Last year, Fry gave an interview to the Caret, a tech publication that interviews “innovators and visionaries shaping the digital landscape”, in which she took stock of her modest internet fame and connection to influencer culture. “When it comes to so-called ‘personal brand building’, even when you don’t think you’re doing it, you’re still kind of doing it,” she said. “So I’m not going to pretend it’s something I’m not totally aware of, as anyone on social media is. But I think it’s true that I have no interest in presenting my life in a way that’s idealized.”

Indeed, who in the irony-soaked world of New York media does? For all our talk of Instagram as a vehicle for curating an idealized self, we know grainy displays of self-awareness are the real ticket – filterless, sparse bathroom mirror selfies are infinitely cooler than the obviously posed and airbrushed. They denote a certain status, in fact, that comes with being in on the collective joke, with understanding the illusory nature of the medium and making use of it in a wry punchline at your own expense. You don’t have to look talented or elegant online – as long as you are, or could be.

If you aren’t already (internet-)famous, the lack of idealization, or the appearance thereof, could hurt you in the eyes of your peers or bosses. This is not a concern for the writer-influencer. On social media they joke about not writing, about their elaborate procrastination techniques, about getting high, about angsting to their therapists who don’t understand the internet. Like descendants of Carrie Bradshaw in her apartment with its designer shoe-filled oven, they are performatively, romantically messy.

I couldn’t help but wonder: if this self-consciously unadorned authenticity – the thing supposedly separating writers from the polished Instagram influencers they critique – yields status, followers, and an aspirational yearning in their fans, what’s the difference?

As digital journalism has converged with influencer culture, a whole genre of coverage has sprung up to account for it, including breathless book-launch coverage around star authors that feels more like celebrity voyeurism. We want to know what and how writers eat, which skincare products they smear on their faces, and what they’re reading when they’re not writing. And so we have the debut writer’s holy trinity of New York Magazine’s Grub Street Diet, Into the Gloss’s Top Shelf, and the New York Times’s By the Book. Jia Tolentino checked all of these boxes throughout her very visible book publicity tour over the summer – a relentless whirlwind of glowing press – and made self-deprecating jokes about saturating our newsfeeds (which felt very much in keeping with her public image we had come to know through these dispatches).

I asked Tolentino in an email about this exposure, about the cultivation of a public persona online, and the degree to which she goes about doing so consciously. She responded that she had been thinking about the question a lot lately, as she’d been “strapped to the soul-crushing (if also very fortunate) machine of book promotion”. She is distressed by the imperative to commodify herself to sell her work, but it is something she recognizes as inescapable.

“A good amount of my book is about how capitalism, the internet, the monetized self are all destructive to our functioning as real humans; yet, the better I express those ideas, the better I become a marketable object myself,” Tolentino explained. “I’ve spent a lot of time, while promoting Trick Mirror, wondering if the work that brings me the most meaning in life (writing) will always necessarily bring me deeper into the clutches of the things that I hate (capitalism, and a way of being in which external incentives seem more important than internal ones).”

She tries to navigate her life online “unconsciously, instinctively”, and without losing sight of the fact that her real life is more important than what she projects to an audience. “One of the worst things that the internet does is make us value representations of a thing over the actual thing itself, and I think I just try to stay tight to that understanding – that my actual self and life are a lot more important to me than the online representation of such, that my work is more important to me than any public idea of that work.”

Tavi Gevinson, the polymathic founder of Rookie, grapples with this duality between the work and the worker’s persona in a New York Magazine cover story on how Instagram fame shaped her sense of self and her career alike. “I think I am a writer and an actor and an artist,” she writes. “But I haven’t believed the purity of my own intentions ever since I became my own salesperson, too.” The more she focuses on her own work, embracing the archetype of the writer rather than the influencer, the farther away she stays from Instagram, delegating updates to an assistant.

But when it comes to the commodification of the self, the work and the public idea of the work are often conflated, just as the internet flattens everything else. It’s harder to separate the art from the artist, or the artist’s skincare. Maybe that is the natural endpoint of the influencer’s internet. Caroline Calloway’s great project is, ultimately, making her inner life into what she calls “digital art”, her life and its representation one glorious entangled mess. She has pursued the solidification of a public idea first and foremost; the body of work she has amassed in her posts project the persona she has made for herself. She knows she is a salesperson – both of Matisse knockoffs and of her actual self – and not only bluntly admits it but confidently conflates it with her creativity.

The self-disclosure required of an influencer whose brand is vulnerability, already unsettlingly close to the work-mandated social-media shilling required of most writers, can become almost indistinguishable from the work of an essayist who deals in the personal. In this way, the influencer could simply be a digital update of the confessional writer.

Shannon Keating at BuzzFeed recently wrote an essay exploring how the Calloway phenomenon has prompted her to re-examine her choice to write first-person essays. She draws a line, as I also did, from the dusk of the “first-person industrial complex” to the dawn of the influencer, what she considers to be an “even more complicated and ethically murky digital economy of self-exposure and service content”, spawned by a desperation for a clearly defined sense of identity. “We’re looking for answers,” writes Keating. “We’re looking for relatable (or even better, aspirational) role models who are willing to open their lives up to us for inspection, and social media has spawned an endless supply of them.” (It’s an arc that can be traced back to Emily Gould in the early days of Gawker, who documented her experience in a 2008 New York Times Magazine essay.)

The root of all this angst: Keating had recently written a viral essay for BuzzFeed about falling in love on a lesbian cruise, and the effects of that virality had rendered her a de facto influencer, which troubled her. Had she, through the act of writing, made her personal life into a public commodity? “The last thing I wanted was to turn Lynette and me into some sort of lesbian influencer couple, selling us as a desirable product … I’d much rather people check up on me to read my latest article, not to learn whether or not I’m still with my girlfriend,” she writes. “But as someone who mines her own life for content – who always has and probably always will – I know that’s a ridiculous thing to wish for.”

Calloway, for her part, does not seem conflicted about her self-exposure in the slightest; nor, really, does the journalist Lauren Duca, whose aggressive personal branding has propelled her to the level of living meme. Duca got famous for a Teen Vogue piece that, for better or worse, reintroduced the term “gaslighting” into our political and personal nomenclature, but equally for calling Tucker Carlson a “sexist pig” as her mic was cut. Then she sold T-shirts emblazoned with a catchphrase borrowed from Carlson’s sexist rant.

Still, she insists her public presence isn’t self-aggrandizing. She is furious at any comparisons between herself and Calloway, claiming they overshadow her “serious and important work”. But that work, at least after the initial Teen Vogue salvos and TV appearances, has undoubtedly been overshadowed by her own labor of peddling a persona. Like Calloway, Duca has drawn hundreds of thousands of followers not just through a body of writing but through the projection of a lifestyle that appears compelling in a not particularly radical or innovative way.

Highly paid talks, university teaching gigs, big book deals, and sassy clapback-style tweets is a pretty uncontroversial vision of success as a journalist that many of us would like to copy, whatever we think of Duca herself. But all of this external posturing has overshadowed any actual reportage: at some point, the “work” becomes the continued maintenance of the image.

To truly contend with a term I suppose we should define it. A social media influencer, according to the Digital Marketing Institute, is simply “a user who has established credibility in a specific industry, has access to a huge audience and can persuade others to act based on their recommendations”. This is a broad definition that could encompass everyone from Chrissy Teigen (a celebrity who effectively markets her relatability) to Shaun King (another alleged grifter).

When encountering the influencer, we must therefore determine how their credibility was established, in which specific industry, and to what end they deploy their powers of persuasion. The answers to those questions determine whether we view a person online as worthy of our reverence or our scorn. We can accept Jia Tolentino’s skincare tips because we know the work at the core of this brand is as solid as it gets, whereas Caroline Calloway becomes a punchline, because even the content that did exist was a ghostwritten illusion.

The problem comes down to the way we view work, and what we view as “work” in the first place. There is a perception that to simply exist in public space, to influence by living, is not work at all. These influencers who produce photos of themselves, who turn their wider lives into content rather than confining themselves to a byline, are thus dismissed as vapid and shallow, sources of pleasure and no more. The writer, by contrast, is viewed primarily as a purveyor of intellect and meritorious beauty. The writer gives us art, gives us insight and rigor, contextualizes the phenomena that confound us. Their labor is seen as more valid.

But these two imperatives are increasingly inextricable. The internet has become what Tolentino, in our exchange, called “persona-based”, which has sometimes worked to her advantage. “Having come into media outside New York, with no connections and no experience, I’ve always been aware that I owe a lot of my career to the fact that my temperament, my self, and my life all map well and easily onto the persona-based internet,” she wrote, “which has become a horrible substitute for a safety net for a lot of people, from medical GoFundMes to personal brands.”

One must have a persona on the persona-based internet, but the persona must be honest, or at least maintain the appearance of honesty. The cultural critic Sarah Nicole Prickett expressed a shrugging ambivalence on the matter of her public persona in an interview with Mask Magazine. “I very much have a public persona, even though it’s a small public, but I feel detached from it,” she told Mask’s co-founding editor Hanna Hurr, who had asked about Prickett’s Instagram presence, a cavalcade of sultry selfies, gallery installation shots, and party documentation with more conventionally famous friends. “It’s something I have, not something I am. It’s not even something I feel like I made with any intent, which is also not something I’m proud about.”

Gevinson echoed this insistence that existing online for her had never been a thing she agonized over. “I’ve always thought I could be myself in public pretty easily – by which I mean, speak without second-guessing myself too much on social media, in writing, in interviews.” Artifice was not just absent from her online persona; it was something she feared and actively avoided. “I never considered myself calculating – who does? – and when I did catch glimpses of my own ambition, I thought it was ugly, disgraceful, incongruous with my authentic self, who simply wanted to make things and connect with people and probably, one day, move to the woods.”

The great division between writers and influencers is the appearance of effort in exerting influence. It’s never cool to look like you’re trying too hard. Calloway raves about her shape-shifting acumen, her persona-building, her bottomless ambition to create herself for her own profit; Prickett professes to think very little about her persona, while posing for her own essay on structured denim in SSENSE and being featured as a “scene stealer” by Mac Cosmetics. If the end result is the same, how much does the division matter?

The writer-influencer’s identity must be quickly identifiable by the consumer, distilled to a meme-like essence in which content is the same as form. The writing is lifestyle, and vice versa. Tolentino as a cool girl who plays beer pong and smokes a lot of weed. Prickett as an aloof and modelesque bohemian socialite. Fry as a funny and enviably fun-natured lover of all things lowbrow, proclaiming her obsessions with reality shows and random celebrities. Cat Marnell as a romantically messy party girl, a blonde and waifish Bukowski. Olivia Nuzzi as a shoeleather politico, the hot girl in a boy’s club with the establishment boyfriend to match. Taffy Brodesser-Akner as likable and liked, relatable and intellectual at the same time, the woman who, right now, has it all. Taffy’s (she can only be Taffy) enthusiasm is even raised as a curious anomaly in journalism; a Punch profiler described her as “buoyant – a palpable, energetic presence that’s difficult to square with the typical image of a lurking or inconspicuous reporter”. In other words: she doesn’t even seem like a writer!

As a writer without much in the way of influence, I see these women and I feel an imperative to find the thing about me that could best be underscored, amplified, and repeated across platforms, the fragment of self that could become persona. I do not believe any of them to be calculating persona-crafters – I take them at their word that what they present is authentic – but I believe they have a very useful instinct, in addition to their talent for writing, for precisely which parts of themselves to share and how. Frankly, I fear that is an instinct that I lack but would do well to cultivate. The media industry is less stable than ever, and the one safe strategy seems to be the commodification of personality, turning your voice into followers and paid subscribers that no CEO can take away. We are all but forced to make ourselves, not just our words, the thing we sell.

If we’re lucky, like Tolentino said, the soul-crushing machine of self-promotion will come for us and the capitalist imperative we hate will become one with the art or work that we love. So maybe there’s something to be said for throwing oneself into it wholeheartedly, without shame, maybe even skipping the part where you fritter away underpaid labor in the hopes that someone higher up will notice you. How many women wrote revealing first-person essays and came up empty handed? If we’re not lucky, the machine doesn’t come at all.

I’m not immune to any of this. I am acutely aware that I lack Gevinson and Prickett and Fry’s effortless knack at existing online – that I am neurotic and prone to self-doubt in a way that stifles organic self-expression – and that makes me anxious. Then I think about what it would mean to supplant that natural instinct with an intentionally crafted persona, and that makes me hate myself. I consider being more vulnerable on Twitter, then I consider all the ways in which that could backfire; I consider posting selfies; I consider writing personal essays and then I consider how all the ways I could mine my life for content make me want to crawl into a hole. The fact that all of the above is agonizing for me to think about makes me feel I am not cut out for this industry in its current state.

I consider also how the women whose work I most admire, whose careers I most want to emulate, are also women who I want to be. Whether or not that is by design, I can’t help but feel it is no small part of what continues to drive me to click on their links and buy their books.

It does not escape me that I have been considering only women, that the question of how to optimally present oneself online feels distinctly feminine, and this feels unfair even as the skill is somewhat advantageous, but mostly it feels inevitable. We are socialized to be highly attuned to making ourselves palatable for an audience, to be pleasing to the eye and the ear. This is the case as much on Twitter and Instagram as the physical world. And so we are slotted into this category, seen as much for our apartments and outfits as our writing, left to compete on every level at once.

Meanwhile, the hard-bitten male longform journalist posting Instagram stories of unknown jungles is not treated or viewed as an influencer; he doesn’t even worry about his influence in the first place. Nor does the male blogger-turned-venture capitalist who tweets and podcasts constantly. Nor the male mid-level editor bragging about an obviously four-figure fashion purchase on social media. The age of the famous “dudeitor” – middle-aged bros casually dominating media in a laid-back, unaffected posture – is over, even though their domination no doubt remains in the background. (Anonymity is a luxury.) Instead we have the age of the woman writer-influencer, both journalist and celebrity.

I’m not sure that there’s an answer here, only that while I wring my hands over whether to press send on a tweet or make my private Instagram public, Caroline Calloway is meeting with producers interested in turning her Insta-memoir into a movie. I still do not think she is primarily a writer. I do, however, think we have entered a point of no return in the realm of media-industry success that necessarily brings us closer to her than we would perhaps like to admit.

Those who insist that the job of the writer is simply, only, to write are deluding themselves. Editors whose advice is to get off Twitter, put your head down, and do the work are missing something fundamental and indispensable about digital media. It’s that all the things that invite derision for influencers – self-promotion, fishing for likes, posting about the minutiae of your life for relatability points – are also integral to the career of a writer online. At least if you want to be visited by that holy trinity when it comes time for your book launch, you must be an influencer in all the ways that matter.

The journalist as influencer: how we sell ourselves on social media. By Allegra Hobbs. The Guardian, October 21, 2019. 

Justine Bateman, perhaps most famous for her seven-season run as Mallory Keaton on the NBC sitcom Family Ties, has written a book. She puts any idea that the compact, searing volume will be yet another logy, loquacious Hollywood quickie, written by an actor too young to write a memoir about a not-so-exceptional life, saying a lot but revealing very little, decisively to rest on page two.

“I fucking hate memoirs,” Bateman writes.

As the title Fame: The Hijacking of Reality more than implies, this is a book about the complicated aspects of all things fame; so much so that the word throughout the book is uppercase. As in “Fame.” What it feels like to have Fame. What it feels like to lose Fame. What it feels like to live in a country gone mad, a country obsessed with Fame, filled with those seeking to achieve it, and those unlucky enough to no longer be sheathed within its seemingly warm embrace.

Since Family Ties ended in May 1989, Bateman has become a renowned writer-director of short films, such as this year’s “Push” and “Five Minutes released this month, as well as features, like the upcoming Violet, starring Olivia Munn and Justin Theroux. She also earned a computer-science degree from U.C.L.A. and a pilot’s license. Yet for many, Bateman remains forever stuck in amber as the 16-year-old giggly, slightly ditzy Mallory on a hugely popular sitcom broadcast on Thursday nights after The Cosby Show and before Cheers, “Must See TV” at its peak—nearly half of all TV sets in use were tuned into Family Ties.

Vanity Fair talked with Bateman by phone in Los Angeles about America’s ever-growing obsession with fame, the advantages and disadvantages to being publicly recognized, and our often hostile relationship to the formerly famous, a sad reality crystallized last month when Geoffrey Owens, Elvin Tibideaux on The Cosby Show, was Twitter-shamed for having the audacity to work a regular job as a cashier at a New Jersey Trader Joe’s. The horror!

Vanity Fair: So you fucking hate memoirs?

Justine Bateman: I do. I have some very good friends who’ve written memoirs, but it’s not for me. It’s just not a format that I’m interested in.

VF : I’m imagining you must have been approached over the years, at least a few times, to write your own.

JB : The only time I was ever approached to write a book was when I was most famous. A publishing group wanted to do something in the late 80s, and I said, “Oh great! I’ve got this poetry and I’ve got these art pieces that I’ve done that sort of accompany it.” And they’re like, “Yeah . . . wouldn’t you rather like to write another type of book, like an exercise book for other girls your age or something like that?” And I was like, “That’s not for me.”

When I was going around pitching this book—first to book agents and then to publishers—there was this, I don’t know . . . I’ve never worked in the publishing world but if your book doesn’t fall within some category that they’ve commonly used, then it doesn’t seem easy for the publishers.

When it does fit, they know how to market it, they know who the audience is, they know what distributors to go to. It’s not as easy when it’s something that’s not specific to what they were looking for.

VF : It’s such a huge, huge topic: fame. Was it formidable to even attempt to tackle it in book form?

JB : It was, but I kept it specific. It’s a big conversation to have. I do touch on, of course, social media and reality shows and all that, but there’s a much bigger conversation to be had about fame. I could’ve started with, Where did fame begin, you know? And I could have researched all of that because my hunch is that it began with tribes. If you’ve got a guy in your tribe who’s the best warrior in the land, then you, by association, are sort of a winner. But that’s a big subject. I just really wanted to focus on that strange thing that happens in a room when a famous person walks in. And what happens after that famous person is no longer that famous.

VF : This fascinates me. Why are we, as humans, hardwired to be impressed by fame?

JB : So tell me more about how you feel that it’s hardwired. Because I say it’s more taught.

VF : Well, I'll give you an example. I went to elementary school in Maryland. My sixth-grade class all took a test to get onto a local TV quiz show. Everyone but me and another kid passed the test. They were all on the show; we weren’t. And I remember seeing my classmates on TV that weekend and then being with them on Monday morning and they looked different to me somehow. Bigger. They seemed more important.

JB : TV must have meant something to you. And it also depends on how other people were treating them, which might have informed your view, possibly. Did your teacher look at the kids differently? Did other adults talk about the event in a way that impressed you?

I think for each individual it’s quite complex, but I think generally nowadays people seek out fame, and respect it, because they’re assuming a sort of state of being that will solve a lot of the things that they dislike in their lives.

VF : You write in the book about the downside to fame—whether it was fans coming up for an autograph at an inopportune or personal moment—but you also write about the upside of fame; that there were certain advantages to it.

JB : You hear all the time it doesn’t solve anything. But the truth is, there is often money attached to fame. There is often health attached to it—you can have better access to health care. There is often better opportunity attached to fame, at least career-wise. But it’s a flash. You can’t control it. You can’t depend on it.

Most the time, you’re so overwhelmed with the fame that it’s hard to have your wits about you as it’s happening. And then it’s over quickly.

VF : It must be especially difficult to have your wits about you if you experience fame very young. I mean, what do any of us know at 16?

JB : The younger you are when you experience it, the more those things are going to be interwoven into the fabric of what you understand of life. Whether it’s abuse, or poverty, or a lot of money, or privilege, or whatever is, good or bad. It’s going to work its way into each person’s life differently. So when fame is introduced quite early, it’s almost impossible to unweave that aspect from how somebody understands how life works.

You can’t really fault people who are experiencing fame. They’re just making their way through and everybody around them is reflecting this fame right back at them. It’s strange. It’s as if everybody is suddenly calling you Roger and you fight it for a while and then you go, “Well, fuck. I guess I *am *Roger. I didn’t think I was, but I guess I am Roger.” And nobody’s offering you any alternative reality. It’s distorted.

VF : __It must have been surreal for you, to say the least. You were on a hit show that was playing on every other TV in America.

JB :  It was but it was also a different time as far as the public’s general understanding of the entertainment business. Imagine no Internet and about a fifth of the magazines we’ve got now, and a tenth of the entertainment-based shows on TV. Before I was famous, I had done two commercials but it was hard to catch them on television. You had to catch them live. I mean, the odds of catching one of your commercials live was . . . I don’t know, pretty thin. I think I caught them once or twice and it’s just one of those, “Oh, that’s neat.”

It was not that big of a deal. And then when I did the pilot for Family Ties, I didn’t know what a “pilot” was. I just knew I was going to be acting this thing out and they were going to film it. And then when they said, “Oh, it’s picked up,” and everybody was happy about that, I was like, “O.K. Tell me what that means.” But that was the general understanding everybody had back then.

It would be like me understanding the process of how a patent’s approved or how a paper is published in a scientific journal. I didn’t get it. It took a few years for the real fame to happen; when it became that high, high level of people screaming every time they see you. Actually, when the Cosby show first came on and started leading us in [1984–1985] and we had that to-die-for Thursday night lineup . . . we just dominated the ratings from then on. And then Michael [J.] Fox becoming unstoppably popular as well, with his films. It really got up there.

VF :  Fame wasn’t something you were looking for, even secretly?

JB : It wasn’t something I sought out. It wasn’t something I was hoping for from when I was a little girl. It actually never crossed my mind to ever be an actor, but I did fall into my vocation, for sure. When you’re 15 or 16, everything’s happening around you and you are just reacting. You can stop it. But you don’t know that then. You’re too young. You just keep moving forward.

And then as far as doing all of the publicity and everything, I really did feel an obligation. No one’s saying you have to do this. But you see how much money, how many people are working on this project, and to say no to anything takes a very strong will. People are dependent on you showing up. Adults are dependent on it. So don’t throw that wrench in that gear.

Vf : In the book, you describe fame as like being “encased in a sheath.” To me that almost sounds maudlin. In fact, you write, “When the Fame started to fade, I felt physically unsafe.”

JB : Yeah, the “sheath” is like some casing you’re in. And when people look at you, all they see is that casing; they don’t see you inside it anymore. They see the fame, not you. That physically unsafe feeling was really interesting. I hadn’t realized how safe I felt in every semi-dangerous situation when I was famous. The thing is, someone in that dangerous crowd is always going to recognize you, so you’ll be vouched for, you know what I mean? Everyone will then just except you. They trust you. They let you in.

VF : You write about the seismic shift concerning America’s obsession and relationship to fame arriving at or around the turn of the millennium. What do you think happened in 2000 that caused this very specific shift?

JB : I think it was this kind of perfect storm of entertainment-focused media outlets and reality shows that were then starting to explode. There were more publications and shows needing material. They needed more material and there are only so many famous actors and musicians and writers to fill that. And then there’s suddenly this whole batch of people on TV who are essentially game-show contestants—you know, reality-show contestants.

And then the public responded: “Oh, look! It’s just some mom. Anyone can do this. Anyone can be famous. And you don’t need to do a thing!”

I think that’s when it really took off. That whole type of thinking really paved the way for people’s obsession with all of it. And I do feel it’s an obsession. I think it’s a compulsive kind of thing to want as many followers as possible on social media.

I don’t recall it being like that before that point. And I’m completely fine to be proved wrong but that’s just what it seems to me to be. I remember feeling that there’d been a big shift right there. It was no longer, “Oh, you’re one of the most intelligent people I’ve ever heard speak and I would love to sit down to dinner with you and just hear you tell me about your ideas.” But rather, “Oh, I like him because he is similar to me.”

I personally don’t want that. I want somebody who’s got particular attributes that make them a talent and good at what they do. And that may not be things that are similar to attributes I’ve got. I want my plumber to know everything about plumbing. I’m not going to pick a plumber based on who’s most similar to me. We’re living a reality show and not a good reality show. This is what’s happened.

VF : I love the following quote in your book from Michael J. Fox: “The biggest prima donnas, the biggest pricks, are reality-show contestants.”

JB : Reality programs are the cancer of this particular country. An entire group of people who think they should just show up somewhere and get paid. And how did they get this idea? Well, because it happens. Because these people just show up and get paid. And the nastier they are, the more they become popular. It’s when they show the least level of intelligence, or maturity, or composure, or class. The less they show of those qualities, the more money they make. So this is the message we’re giving everybody. And if you’re really trying your hardest to exhibit the lowest level of all those qualities, you’re going to reach the highest office in our government.

There was a documentary about people winning the lottery. It was called Lucky [on HBO in 2010]. There’s a quote by one of the winners: “Winning the lottery is like throwing Miracle-Gro on your character defects.” And I think that’s a lot how fame can be for most people.

VF : That fame cycle—from nothing, to a peak, back to nothing—used to take longer, sometimes years. Now it’s cycling faster and faster, where it can happen in days, seemingly.

JB : And because they have no specific skill set, they have no specific talent, there’s nothing to carry them forward. They’re not like a professional violinist who’s incredibly popular at some point and then might become a little less popular, but is at least still a great violinist. That didn’t go away. But if the only reason you’re being focused on is because you shoot your mouth off, then people get tired of hearing the things you have to say, or your catchphrase, or whatever the hell it is. Then you’re back to where you started, which is what?

VF : It’s very American, this obsession with fame.

JB : It isn’t enough to just work hard and be a good person or anything like that. The American dream shifted over the years. It’s now either to win the lottery, be famous, or make as much money as possible—and make sure everybody notices.

And, case in point, the Geoffrey Owens story. Where they’re like, “Ha ha. Look at him! He used to be famous as an actor on the Cosby show! But now he’s working as a cashier in Trader Joe’s! Ha ha!”

Working a job like that isn’t looked at as doing good. Whereas it’s O.K. to be famous for just being an asshole on a reality show—at least you’re famous. So is that the barometer? Is that success? To me that’s not success at all.

We have a long, long history of mocking people after they’ve become famous and lose fame. In this particular case [with Geoffrey Owens], it was different. For a number of reasons, I suppose; one being that it cut just a little too close to the bone. It was, “No, no, no, wait a minute. Hold on, that crosses the line.” We can mock a woman for looking older. That’s cool, right? We can mock somebody for having a string of failed films, right? We can shame somebody for not being able to get work because they’re having a little bit of a drinking problem. That’s cool, right? I mean, I’m being sarcastic because it’s all fucked up.

My next book will all be about women’s faces and how people react to them as they naturally age in the public eye. I think the negative reaction is such a really sad thing that happens. And it definitely happens.

If anything, that has increased.

VF : Why do you think people are so quick to mock someone’s natural aging process?

JB : That’s what I’m exploring now. I think it’s because of the way it makes the public angry.

VF : Why angry?

JB : I don’t know. I don’t have it figured out yet. But I’m trying to.

VF : In your book, there’s a description of you self-Googling your name and finding Justine Bateman looks old. You were 43 at the time.

JB : Yeah, that was a huge mistake. The bigger mistake was clicking on it. And the even bigger mistake was, after not being able to relate to what they were saying, just kicking myself to the curb and deciding they were right and I was wrong. I then absorbed their view of me for a time, and it fucked me right up. Took awhile to get rid of that.

VF :

There are benefits to being famous. Even if it’s as small as acquiring a seat at a concert or a table at a restaurant. But when that’s taken away, I imagine it can be very difficult.

JB : Well, see this is where the public would go, “Oh, poor you. You couldn’t get a reservation anymore.” But it’s really more than that. It’s involved with everything.

It’s like when you soak the flowerbed with water. The water goes everywhere. But when you stop watering the garden, it changes everything. So it’s not just that you’re taking one rock out of your garden. It’s that you’re removing something that has flowed into everything. It’s flowed into your understanding of who you are, your understanding of who you are in society, your understanding of who you are to people who you know personally, who you know in your work. Everywhere!

And even beyond the personal aspect, fame is often necessary in order to get hired on shows and in movies. So when you start losing that, it’s not just, “Oh, this is an inconvenience. Now I’ve got to wait two weeks to get a table versus getting it tonight.” But rather, “Oh, wait. Now who am I?”

You have to start building certain muscles from scratch. And it doesn’t help when people are taking pictures of you and putting it out there and saying, “Oh my god. Look what he has to do now! Work in a grocery store! He’s fat! He’s old!” So yeah, your ego takes a beating and people do feel justified in posting that sort of thing because “you once had everything.” And I feel there’s a little bit of resentment that the public has for you at that point.

They almost feel as if you squandered something that they gave you. “How’d you fuck that up? Oh my god! You had everything! What happened to you?! I gave my heart and thoughts to this person and look at what they’ve done with their lives!”

VF : You describe fame as a smoke, a cloud, as it being mercurial, ephemeral.

JB : It really is because it sort of floats. When people come up to you, they’re not coming up to you, they’re coming up to that cloud. And they want to buy the things that you buy because they want to be close to that cloud because of how they imbued that cloud. They’ve imbued that cloud with magical things. Like, You can live a life free of worry. Free of financial worry. Free of worry that there’s going to be a lack of love or provision or support. And they’re like, “Oh, I want that!”

But really, the only way you can truly achieve that is if you trust that you’re taken care of by whatever you believe in—whether it’s the universe, or god, or the sun, or whatever your thing is. That’s really the only way you can get that feeling. It won’t be fame that gets you there.

VF : You tell an anecdote in this book that I find incredible. You attended a party around 2007 at a Los Angeles club where roughly half of the people were famous. It quickly became clear that those with more fame were literally leaning away from you, avoiding you entirely.

JB : I don’t think my story’s very unique. I mean, you notice that sort of leper effect; you see it happen all the time. It’s not an uncommon thing. It’s only startling, personally, where it occurs to you. Because you’re like, “Oh, wait a minute. This is happening to me now?” That’s true of a lot of things. That’s true of, I don’t know, the first time you’re treated like an older person. And you’re like, “Oh no, no. Now wait a moment, I’m not old, am I?!” Somebody’s like in their 70s and still living a full life or something and somebody maybe speaks at a higher volume because they assume they’re deaf.

Nothing gets a response faster from somebody who’s closer—or who used to be close—to the fame cloud than by insulting them. It’s like telling the pretty girl she’s fat. Now all the other guys that have said you’re pretty are not as important somehow as the one guy who tells you you’re fat. Because now you’ve got to convince him otherwise. And now he’s got you.

VF : But with a book like this, now you’ve got him.

JB : I do hope that this book will . . . first of all, I’m happy to let people know what it was like inside. And, in particular, to open up to what it’s like on the back side of fame. I don’t mean on the dark, fall-down-the-hill side of fame, but I mean post-fame. To know what that’s like because that’s not something that’s talked about very often. I think part of the reason is because people who have been well known are kind of spooked about even mentioning it. I think you have to have a really good sense of yourself to be able to talk about life post-fame. It’s like talking about a relationship that you know is kind of on the rocks. You don’t want to bust it open and examine it. Because then you know it will all just fucking fall apart. Or already has.

I say in the book that I don’t believe I’ll ever be that famous again and that’s 100 percent O.K. with me. I just want to do my projects. I want to direct. I want to create. I want there to be enough of an audience for me to do these projects. Enough of an audience that pays to see or to read these projects so that I can continue to do other projects. That’s all I want.

Justine Bateman Has Some Thoughts on the Fame Cycle . . . and Geoffrey Owens Working at Trader Joe’s. By Mike Sacks. Vanity Fair, October  2, 2018.