Last Sunday, as avid Elvis fans, my mum and I took a little tip to the cinema to watch the highly anticipated, at least in our household, ‘Priscilla‘ film. The insight ‘Priscilla’ promised to give us into the relationship and subsequent marriage and divorce shared between Priscilla and Elvis only heightened our intrigue and excitement. And the Lana Del Rey-esque aesthetic and catchy soundtrack just made the film feel even more like a ’24 must-watch.
The fact ‘Priscilla’ taps into our need to be feed anything celebrity and pop-culture made it delicious. It played into various tropes in Hollywood and cinema, whilst having some basis in reality. At least in the sense that it’s based on Priscilla’s own memoir. By nature, the film feeds our craving for insight into celebs’ lives and our desire to conjure up their reality, or our fantasy of such, and feel somewhat in-the-know.
Though, as much as I enjoyed the film, I wondered whether it’s appropriate to speculate about celebrities’ relationship dynamics and if we can derive, or should, anything from them to apply to our own dating lives.
Is it problematic to speculate?
Given that we don’t have any genuine insight into the relationships of celebrities at all it seems a bit problematic to speculate anything about them. But there’s just something so tempting about doing so. It feels like a magnified version of local or uni gossip and the glamour of it all is just so appealing. Plus, as a fan of recent fiction such as ‘The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo’ and ‘Daisy Jones and The Six’, there’s just something a little bit gorgeous about imagining the lives of celebrities and finding a popular romance trope to cast upon their relationships.
Marie Claire Australia points out that, according to psychologist Elisabeth Shaw, we often take interest in celebrities and their love lives because their ‘elite’ status acts as a filler for how we have the tendency to look up to ‘real’, aka. people we actually know, people in our daily lives. It’s basically just a heightened, more glamorous version of having a parent or older sibling to look up to. It also is a projection of our own fantasies, ideas relating to and love for gossip and drama.
Yet, speculation around their relationships and their personal lives creates a unique problem. Such a problem is known as a ‘parasocial relationship‘ — whereby we create notions and effectively storylines about celebrities, their personal lives and their relationships ourselves based on little fact and mostly fiction. Effectively we create a made up friendship with them and ourselves, as though the image we have of them and their lives is reflective of that which we have with an acquaintance or even of a close friend. As fun as it is to theorise about celebrities and their relationships, we have to consider that such theories are just that, theories. They’re never going to be fully true and so it’s difficult to claim we know the workings of their relationships just on the basis of pop culture and current affairs.
Can we use celebs’ relationships to help our own?
The question remains, though. Can we really use celebrities and how their relationships appear to us to help us aid our own? Is this just as inherently problematic as it is to make truth claims about their personal and love lives?
Well, I think that would depend on the approach you take. What I would say is that as long as you treat the image you have of celebrities and their relationships as mostly fictional and not as fact, there’s nothing wrong with doing this. You can treat the image of their relationships in pop culture and the media as being able to inform you as to how you can treat or resolve your own.
There’s nothing wrong with taking interest and opening up conversations about celebrities and their love lives as this can help you unpack your own thoughts and feelings on situations you’ve experienced in your own relationships. What’s vital is you don’t take everything you consume in the media as being canon and true.
The notions we have about celebrities and their relationships aren’t going to reflect reality purely because we don’t fully know the truth. And unless we come to know them personally, this isn’t likely to become known to us. What we can know and come to know though is how we would react if we were put in the position we are surmising to be true. This has the potential to enhance both our own critical thinking skills and the way in which we respond to various situations which arise in our personal relationships and lives.
So whilst we should take caution when surmising about celebrities and their relationships, maybe if we take the right approach then there’s some beauty in our curiosity after all. That or we’re all just naturally very nosey people trying to justify our nosiness, haha.