Normal Valentine’s Day ≠ Celebrity Valentine’s Day
The holiday of love is for everyone. Some take up baking and muster up the courage to tackle a tiered cake in their significant other’s favorite flavor. Others prefer to hand-make cards filled with corny, kept-private declarations of love to prove just how cheesy they’re willing to get for their favorite person. To put it plainly: People just love, love. It’s in our nature.
Amidst the celebrations of love this Valentine’s Day and of Valentine’s Days passed, it’s inevitable that we see our favorite celebrities and influencers posting about their loved ones, too. If you’re into celebrity culture and follow your faves online, you might swipe through an Instagram carousel of their favorite moments and see similarities you and your loved one share. Humanity, and what comes with it, unite us in ways we would otherwise overlook. What you probably didn’t do this past Valentine’s Day is release a Grammy-allegable album with your significant other, and make a good chunk of dough doing it.
Though Selena Gomez and Benny Blanco released their joint album last year, this Valentine’s Day post exposed something a bit sinister about the industry. Not only do Gomez and Blanco have the financial means and social standing to create a well-streamed album based on their love story, but they also use Valentine’s Day to market it! Sure, Valentine’s Day posts online typically “market” one’s love life, putting it on display for the rest of the world to see for whatever reason. Do they profit from it? Normal non-celebrities/influencers don’t. Everybody else? That’s fair game. If you aren’t part of a famous musical duo or have millions of screaming fans to wish Happy Valentine’s, you might be an actress married to a household name-pop star and get to sit in an empty arena before a night on their tour…
Justin Timberlake shared a heartfelt image of himself cuddling his wife, Jessica Biel, in an empty arena. The caption was “My love,” likely a nod to one of his most popular songs, “My Love.” As relatable as the head-on-the-shoulder thing is, this is major V.I.P. treatment. Are we all a bit salty that we’re not as affluent? Maybe. But there’s no way to hide the massive disparity between celebrities and influencers, and the rest of us.
Celebrities Must Feign Relatability to Remain Well-Liked
Many who participate in pop culture discussions or who are a part of fandoms typically seek idols who mirror them in some way. The economic disparity between celebrities and non-famous people is stark, especially nowadays, when people can barely afford their weekly groceries and electricity bills. There’s been an uptick in celebrity hate, an “eat the rich” mentality that’s only gained more traction in recent years. The celebrity at the forefront of this hate? The highest-grossing touring artist of all time and your favorite “English teacher” billionaire, Ms. Taylor Swift.
The Eras Tour alone grossed $2,077,618,725. That, paired with her egregious amount and cost of merchandise, Taylor Swift is making out like a bandit. She’s a hard worker and has built her fortune over the last 20 or so years; her wealth is well-deserved. You know… There is no such thing as an ethical billionaire. The problem isn’t the celebrity most of the time, it’s the wealth. Should anyone have that much money?
Swift sings songs about being the odd one out in high school and how lost in love a teenage girl can get when she’s in the thick of growing pains. However, Swift is no longer a teen girl from Pennsylvania. She’s an extremely successful pop star with more access to money and opportunities than nearly anyone else in the world. She may be busy planning her wedding with her football fiancé, Travis Kelce, but that’s as far as her relatability goes. When pondering a day in the life of a high-status celebrity like Swift, the gears start turning when you attempt to compare. While you’re on your morning commute to your underpaying job via public transportation, she’s too busy taking a private jet for a whopping eight-minute flight, just because she can. Celebrities rely on you not thinking about their daily proceedings because they only market their most digestible selves to you.
Some Try to Be Relatable, but Fail Miserably
Even their most digestible selves lose the plot, as seen in Jennifer Lawrence’s most recent confession during a profile with The New Yorker. Jennifer Lawrence is well-known for her quirky, heart-on-her-sleeve attitude. She doesn’t wait for the cameras to cut so she can go back to being J Law; she is J Law, all of the time. That is, until recently. Lawrence uses her profile with The New Yorker to condemn her past quirky self, going so far as to call the bit “annoying” and deem “that person” in old interviews “embarrassing.” Though The Hunger Games star explains that the person in those interviews is her genuine self, she claims that the hyper nature of her digital presence was a “defense mechanism.” The issue with this condemnation? Fans loved Lawrence because of this presence, not despite it. Though Lawrence is definitely one of those actors who help you have faith in the industry, this condemnation some years later feels a bit eerie. Now that she’s made a name for herself and must embody the highbrow demeanor that most Academy Award winners carry, she has abandoned her roots. Once in the lifestyle of an A-lister, it’s difficult to remember where you came from.
Speaking of Jennifer, remember when J Lo went viral last year because nobody knew what she meant when she told Vogue that her go-to bodega order included an “orange drink?”
Jennifer Lopez likely hasn’t indulged in an “orange drink” in recent years, and the public scrutinized her because they didn’t buy her “I’m just like you, New Yorkers” anecdote. This viral moment was fairly innocent. The internet laughed, J Lo laughed, and then she went back to her multi-million dollar home that she shares with Ben Affleck.
A-list celebrities aren’t the only ones failing to feign relatability. Social media influencer Mikayla Nogueira went viral a few years ago after posting a TikTok, lamenting how difficult her workday had been.
“I literally just finished work, and it’s 5:19. Try being an influencer for a day, try it.”
Nogueira would soon face backlash from the general public that nearly “cancelled” her and banished her to a life of irrelevance. Nogueira casually mentions her modest upbringing and regularly thanks her supporters for making her dream a reality. This video, which has now become a meme and permanently embedded itself in the internet lexicon, proves that money removes relatability from celebrities and influencers. Nogueira receives hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of PR gifts every year. There’s nothing remotely relatable about that.
Perhaps the point of celebrity culture is that feeling of unattainability. It influences us to dream bigger, strive for more. How long can the relationship between “us” and “them” prosper, if the disparate nature of the relationship is exactly why we watch them, but also why we dislike them?
