The Five Stages of Losing a Public Figure
STAGE 1: DENIAL
I’d come out to the garage to play guitar, but I wasn’t doing that. Instead, I was scrolling through Reddit. Every new piece of evidence I saw felt like a wave slamming against the hull of a ship I was struggling to guide to shore: grooming allegations, BOOM. Abusing a power imbalance, WHOOM. Text messages, screenshots, audio recordings, BOOM, WHOOM, KACHOOM.
It wasn’t like I hadn’t been exposed to it before. Revelations of sexual assault, manipulation, or non-illegal-but-malicious harm perpetrated by a male artist I look up to are semi-regular occurrences in my social media feed — sexual predation by people in power is an old tale, but in our new age of Me Too and (relative) accountability, we often know when and how it happens, whereas before we were able to float along in peaceful ignorance. You’d think our familiarity with the process would help us get used to it. But it doesn’t — and, to be honest, it probably shouldn’t. Every time an artist I’m a fan of is reliably accused, it’s upsetting in a new way. Part of the art dies. It’s no longer something I want to show to my friends, or aspire to, or use to define myself — it’s a mere point of vague shame, bitter anger, and wasted potential. To those who Know, the art has become a beautiful, infuriating con, and its creator, a con artist — it serves as a potent reminder to those in power of the consequences of… well, being a bad person.
In my experience, just as inevitable as the torrential disappointment is the uncontrollable desperation to find proof that the whole thing was a fraud. It stuck me to my seat in the garage, banished all other thoughts from my mind, propelled me to sit in front of my computer for the rest of the night, clinging to something I’m not sure was ever there. The person being “cancelled,” so to speak, was intertwined with countless memories, snapshots that summed up who I was and how I felt about the world; their story, derived both from their work and their philosophy (absorbed through podcasts, interviews, and their social media), was one I related to and was inspired by. I was never under the illusion that I was drawing the shortest straw in this situation — sexual assault is on a far different scale of hurt than being disappointed by your heroes — but impactful nonetheless, in a way I wouldn’t fully recover from for a while. As puerile as it felt, I didn’t want to have to reconcile this perverse new image (one more realistic and balanced) with the one I’d already established: that of a good, genuine person who made good, genuine things.
When it comes down to it, I was throwing a tantrum. I just wanted everything to go back to normal. But my version of normalcy never really existed.
STAGE 2: ANGER
If you’ve spent time on the Internet, this whole process is probably very familiar. I have what’s called a parasocial relationship — a one-sided relationship between me and a person who has no clue I exist — and, in fact, I’ve got a bunch of them. These relationships are built entirely on interactions with a person’s work and public image — as a result, they’re not “real,” per se, since they’re grounded in whatever personality the person has decided to show on camera, but they feel real. Therein lies their appeal — and their popularity. “Hanging out” with nonexistent buds provides us with a sense of comfort not unlike the kind we get from hanging out with a real friend, except without the burden of having to carry part of the conversation. This kind of obligation-free social contact can be incredibly relaxing, especially on days where we just don’t feel like talking to people.
Relationships like these have been around forever. It’s not hard to imagine people fanboying over Mozart back in the day, or wallpapering their bedroom with posters of the latest, hottest 70s boy band. These relationships can get to be so powerful that one forgets they’re not real, and they’re never led to believe otherwise — they’re encouraged (in a way that’s often psychological and hard for a person with a growing brain to control) to put complete emotional trust in the hands of people they don’t know and will never know. Solutions are in short supply: a public figure is never going to put their worst face forward because that’s unprofitable. All we can do is trust that they won’t abuse it.
But they do. Often. Harm caused by misplaced trust in a celebrity exists on a spectrum: on one end is disappointment in the crappy deeds of an idolized figure, and on the other is sexual and psychological abuse, grounded in an irreconcilable power imbalance. Sometimes, it’s intentional and sinister (think Harvey Weinstein and Louis C.K.), but sometimes, it can be accidental. The artist, who’s stunned and flattered by all the sudden attention, decides its their right to reap the benefits of their hard work (and often encouraged to by a culture that’s written off these astonishingly unprofessional and damaging practices for centuries — think hooking up with “groupies,” which many view as a perk of the job).
The abuse can go the other way, too. Abigail Thorn, a YouTuber who creates hybrid philosophy lecture/theater videos on the channel Philosophy Tube, speaks from personal experience in her video “Artists & Fandoms.” She describes her fandom as a sort of ecosystem where, despite an abundance of perfectly normal, respectful viewers, a few nasty players seek to take their nonexistent relationship with Thorn to the next level. She constantly receives emails filled with uncomfortable personal details, demands to “debate,” or even pleas for help. She’s even had her share of stalkers and assaulters, the majority (“and certainly the most serious”) of which are women who “get too deep into a parasocial relationship and start asking me to abuse it… [for instance,] the people who turn up to my live theatre shows in skimpy outfits, get into the changing rooms, and solicit me for sex.” She goes on to describe how often she’d be encouraged to take advantage of that — it’s free sex! — but how deeply malicious it would be to do so: “they are making themselves vulnerable on the basis of a relationship that is not real.”
Thorn’s case is a perfect segue into analyzing the cause of a recent and dramatic increase in the power of parasocial relationships. Gen Zers and younger millennials appear just awful at handling them, even compared to the worst cases of previous generations — sure, we can partially attribute this to our young age and naivety, but I can’t help but feel like there’s something else at work, something that has to do more with how content is made nowadays, how we consume it, and how personalities form as a result…
STAGES 3 & 4: BARGAINING AND (very literal) DEPRESSION
It’s the Internet. Shocking, right?
“The Internet that was once an escape from real life has become a platform embodying an ongoing epidemic of loneliness.” The quote opens YouTube user Glink’s video “The Parasocial Problem with Livestreaming,” a thoughtful examination of the phenomenon of Twitch personalities and what it means for people on both sides of the screen. Most of the video concerns itself — as it should — with the abundant negative effects of these thoroughly parasocial settings: many audience members (many of whom have mental illnesses like anxiety or depression) use Twitch and other online content as a total replacement for friendships, romantic relationships, and even just casual interaction. In most cases, this worsens the problems the viewer was trying to fix, as it lets loneliness grow into a mold of genuine social interaction — it’s able to imitate it, and maybe even satisfy it sometimes, but it always ends up leaving a person worse off.
Plus there’s social media, through which very little can pass without getting the rose-colored lenses treatment. I follow Shakey Graves, one of my favorite musicians, on Instagram, and he uses his Stories to tell goofy personal tales about touring the Planters NutMobile or having lengthy text conversations with scammers who (obviously and laughably) tried to dupe a friend while posing as him. I don’t know the guy, but I love what he’s doing, and following him on social media makes me feel like I’m in on the joke. Now multiply that feeling times infinity, for every platform, and you might get a sense of why the heaviest users — us zoomers — are having problems separating real people from a barrage of positive, personality-based content. Reality and fiction have become harder and harder to distinguish: fiction bleeds into reality so subtly that, sometimes, it’s impossible to tell that we’re being manipulated. That makes us vulnerable.
It’s very much a problem of the time — and, moreover, it feels more like a permanent handicap of the Internet than a healable wound. The only real way to “solve” unhealthy parasociality is to make platforms less addictive (an achievable, if distant goal) and encourage users and audiences to actively guard against harmful mindsets (an unachievable goal).
But do we even need a “solution?”
STAGE 5: ACCEPTANCE
There’s a flipside to Glink’s video. Most of the streamers Glink interviews touch on the genuine joys of creating a community of like-minded people, point to online friendships that turned into real ones, and underline the vast amounts of viewers who do not overstep their boundaries. The same goes for traditional media, like music: we shouldn’t forget that so many songwriters are personal in their work because it has a positive effect on listeners. We feel “seen,” even if we don’t know the person doing the seeing, and one can only imagine the genuine joy a musician experiences when they hear their fans recite their songs word for word — they probably feel “seen,” too. That’s what makes art so special, for cripes’ sake! To do away with it would be to do away with some of art’s most vital strengths.
Balance is what we need. There are plenty of healthy ways to engage with public figures — balancing time spent watching online personalities with physical social interaction, for example, or simply keeping track of the mindset we’re in when we’re audience-ing. This is hard, of course, especially for kids. And it’s likely that it’ll always be devastating when someone we’ve become invested in — in one way or another — is revealed to be a scumbag. A degree of investment is impossible. But it’s up to us to manage that degree and keep it within reasonable bounds; perhaps it shouldn’t be our responsibility, but it has to be, for our sake.
When I woke up the following morning, I felt much more clear-headed (if a little sleep-deprived). Nothing had changed — a person I once looked up to had done a shitty thing, and that still hurt — but, the more time I spent thinking about it and getting used to the new information, the easier it was for me to remove myself from the situation, to imagine my life continuing without the parasocial tie. I do still nurse a love for the art they’ve made, even take inspiration from their success story. But I’m not their friend. I both knew and couldn’t really accept that; it’s almost silly, in retrospect, to consider how devastated I was.
Here’s an analogy: when we move between homes, we realize how little of the crap we’ve accumulated is actually essential to our existence. So we ditch most of it, toss it in the “For Goodwill” bag, laugh at how difficult this would’ve felt six months ago when we didn’t have to carry everything we owned up and down three flights of stairs. As we do this, we start to learn from what we keep. Maybe we figure out what we actually needed all along from the Ownership of Things, which often transcends the price tag, or shininess, or the familiarity that comes over time.
Maybe, next time, we’ll pare down. Maybe the next moving day will be easier. If not, we’ll learn again. And again. And again.
