A former celebrity explains why being famous is terrible
Former American TV star Justine Bateman recounts how fame completely altered her reality.
In the early 1980s, when she was just a teenager, Justine Bateman was cast for the NBC sitcom House Keaton. It seems like a long time ago, without the streaming services and the incredible offer that we have today. At the time, tens of millions of people were watching the same thing at the same time. And that's how Bateman became very famous.
In his book, Fame: The Hijacking of Reality, Bateman recounts his experience, and the result is the book that scared me the most this year. It sounds like a horror novel, in which success is a threatening entity that distorts reality, makes you doubt yourself and turns friends, family and audience into fearsome enemies.
"It's as if you weren't there, as if you weren't there," writes Bateman. "Everything changes when you walk into a room, but at the same time nobody notices you. People talk about you, but you are a 'non-person'. Everyone feels entitled to destroy you, you are not real anyway. in movies when someone kills a human-like robot. Should we really feel guilty, morally? "
I talked to Justine about her book, success and what it means to lose it. The interview has been edited for clarity.
VICE: Was being famous as bad as you tell in the book? You say people would approach you at the supermarket and tell you that they masturbated thinking about you, that you had stalkers and that people talked about you as if you weren't there. Was it really like living in another dimension than everyone else? It has been difficult?
Justine Bateman: Every experience is different, I think. But I've never enjoyed it. It was success that controlled me. I was just trying to survive. I was also quite young. At 16, but also 20, you let yourself be carried away by events. You are not determined as an adult. And especially when everything happens so quickly, as in the case of success: interviews, photo shoots, new job opportunities arrive, everything goes very fast.
Then, there are also the positive things. People listen to what you say. You have many opportunities, and when you are 20 and you manage to get into all the clubs you want without effort, being famous is beautiful. But managing everything was difficult. It's like running a marathon in hellish heat while someone tries to show you a photograph or something beautiful, you can't concentrate because all your energy is already elsewhere.
Was it difficult to write this book? In some parts, you make it clear that you don't want to be pitied or seen as someone complaining about losing her privileges.
That's because I know the audience reactions well enough to expect those kinds of responses. And that's okay. So yeah, it was definitely not my goal to write a grievance book. Today I no longer experience that problematic situation. The idea was to show people what it means to be very famous, try to understand why people behave like this in the presence of success, and try to explain the sociological theories that apply to these situations. I wanted to talk about the cycle of success and examine why we value fame so much.
You still hang out with famous people today, and you have a brother who is very well known. How do you think success has changed since you were famous?
When I was famous, there was a strong distinction between who was famous on TV and who was famous in the cinema. I don't think there is still this difference today. The characters are much more transversal and then — even if, I repeat, I'm not that famous anymore so I don't know — from what I see, most of it seems to manifest itself online. In my day, there was no internet. The only way you got in touch with fans was live, or by letter. While it's all online now, both support and hate messages.
I think one of the scariest parts of the book is where you search for your name online.
Yes that was a terrible time. I made a mistake, I wish I could go back and never do it again: I searched for my name and saw google autocomplete, the one that shows you what others have been looking for in relation to your name. Things like "Justine Bateman looks old" came out and I was ... I don't even remember how old I was.
I think [_that the book says_] 44.
Ok. And I've always looked younger than my age. At the risk of sounding arrogant, it's something I have in my genes, like having brown hair. And then, the company had determined that I was beautiful. Probably if I had existed 100 years ago it would not have been the same, trends and society set the standards of beauty, right?
Quite right.
And I had always been defined as an attractive girl. I had never been criticized for my appearance. This since I was 20 years old, in my head I couldn't wait to look like the big movie stars like Anna Magnani or Isabelle Huppert. So when I had the first wrinkles, I was delighted, too bad the company had already changed its mind about it. What cosmetic surgery once did, then makeup and now even Instagram filters, is to erase all signs of time, try to make you look as similar as possible to your photos as a child. That's why finding those insinuations online really shocked me. I shouldn't have clicked, deepened, read everything. It was much worse than I thought.
I see.
I looked at that photo but didn't understand what they were referring to. It was a bit like the blue or gold dress dilemma. There is an extraordinary study that analyzes the behavior of people in relation to the group: there is a person in a room who is shown lines, line A is much longer than the others, and when the person is asked which is the longest line, this one answers "A". Then other subjects enter the room and all respond that line C is the longest. At this point the certainty of the first subject falters, and when the interviewer asks him the same question, he answers "A" again but with less conviction. On the third try, however, his answer changes and says "C," because it doesn't explain how he can see something so different from the others. And the same thing happened to me. I convinced myself that those terrible things about me were true. That was what destroyed me.
How did you get over it? In the book you say it lasted for many years, right?
Yes, right. My main fear was that one of the essential components of my reality — success — was gone. I felt like when you lose a family member, or you suddenly have to move to a new city, or you lose your job. These things are also part of reality, and when they are gone, for many it is a trauma.
What was it like to go from absolute fame to the level of notoriety you have today? Was it a gradual or sudden process?
It was gradual. But at first you think "Ok, that's understandable." It starts like this, you're still famous but people don't talk about you that much anymore. You think it is because you are not participating in any flagship program. And therefore it is normal. You think other projects will come, more success and that you will return to the top. Like in the stock exchange, right? In reality you don't notice that you are only going down and never going back up.
One of the reporters I spoke to told me, "What if this book suddenly made you very famous again?" Although I was aware that the possibilities were extremely small, at that moment, I felt a shiver of fear. And I said "I don't want to." I don't think I would get any good out of it.
