Celebrity is annoying. It’s annoying because it’s a part of our culture that is all but unavoidable, and especially for those of us with an interest in movies and television and pop culture, the world of celebrity causes an abundance of mixed feelings. On one hand, it’s a substantively vacuous world of dull material excess, a shameless public display of personal spectacle that is as phony as it is pathetic. On the other, it’s a world of intriguing power, allowing freedoms that the select few in our society get to enjoy, and is at least partly desirable for all of us if we’re truly honest, even though each one of us knows if we ever got really famous we’d of course use that power in good and interesting ways. It’s why most people, if they thought long and hard about it, would change places in an instant with a person like Ryan Gosling.
The emotional attachments people and individuals develop with specific celebrities are complicated and vary greatly, and they’re always weird, because it’s like, they’re someone you don’t know. At all. Like not in real life. So what people are actually attaching themselves to when they have any kind of feelings towards a celebrity persona—whether it’s love, hate, purposeful indifference that actually reveals jealousy and inner insecurity—is not a real person but a character like any other character you’d have affection (or whatever) for in a movie or a novel. Like Katniss Everdeen. Or whoever. That’s the way I’ve come to rationalize and come to terms with the confusing and involuntarily opinions I have, as I’m sure most other people have, about various celebrities. Like Ryan Gosling.
That’s out of the way now. Let’s go over 6 of the reasons that, deep down, we wish we could be Ryan Gosling for a day or maybe forever.
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