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 Image Source: Entertainment Weekly

I’m afraid I dare divert our attention away from the current Vice-Presidential debate this evening (as tempted as I am to address Paul Ryan’s recently released photos from a year-old Time shoot) and address the original celebrity VP with the limited rhetorical perspective that four years can give us.  With the release of the HBO television movie Game Change in March of this year, the premiere of her daughter’s and grandson’s reality show Life’s a Tripp on Lifetime in June, and Bristol Palin’s return to the All-Star season of Dancing with the Stars just weeks ago, Sarah Palin has managed to pop up quite frequently in celebrity media even four years after her failed bid for the vice-presidency.  Just this week in LA, a paparazzi photo of a much-thinner Palin made the internet rounds, prompting an investigation from People. (Surprise: in an exclusive interview, Palin translates her new, slimmer physique into an endorsement for a forthcoming fitness book that directly opposes Michelle Obama’s “Let’s Move” campaign, which Palin openly criticized in 2010.)  How can we explain this resurgence in public interest in Palin, especially in an election year? What can the public’s interest in Sarah Palin’s post-political life, as well as the eagerness of the media to portray it, tell us about political celebrity in 2012? 

First, it’s important to define what I mean by “celebrity” here, and so I’ll borrow Graeme Turner’s definition.  Fame can loosely be described as a person who garners public interest from their public deeds; celebrity, however, can only be ascribed to a figure when the public’s interest shifts from the figure’s public life to his or her private life, privileging the private as the site of authenticity.  (In so doing, the public/the mass media might lose track of the source of fame and the figure might enjoy a celebrity status propelled and sustained solely by the public’s interest in his or her private life—in other words, that celebrity reaches a point of stasis in which they are “famous for being famous.”) Thus, modern celebrity is impossible in an age that lacks mass media and is essentially a 20^th century phenomenon.  And, as many scholars have argued, the more hypermediated public figures become, the more frequently these public figures achieve celebrity status by such a criteria.

The move from public figure to celebrity in the political realm, however, has happened much more slowly than in popular culture for a variety of reasons—differences in cultural register, a multi-generational audience, the threat of exposure by rivaling political factions, etc.  In general, paradigmatic shifts in the mechanisms of fame in the political realm trail behind those in the celebrity realm, even as they sometimes closely resemble them.  Take, for instance, the famous example of Kennedy and Nixon—Kennedy was able to capitalize on Hollywood-esque charisma, but only after Hollywood celebrities themselves had maintained for several decades a high-culture status. 

What I find intensely interesting about Game Change is that it addresses the translation of popular culture celebrity into the political realm directly.  The movie frames Sarah Palin as the well-intentioned but ultimately doomed response to Barack Obama’s political celebrity (which is invoked specifically throughout).  Although the movie’s message on political celebrity is nuanced, I think the more interesting issue to address is how such a movie could be produced less than four years after the failed McCain/Palin campaign.  Rhetorically, it claims perspective and even capitalizes on some sense of nostalgia for the energy and fervor of the 2008 election on both sides of the fence as if this event were archived in our cultural past.  But how can this be when we have yet to even finish out the term that this election decided? 

While I think the movie was clearly released to encourage reflection about behind-the-scenes politics of the current election,  I think a deeper reading is available.  I’d like to suggest a logical turn from the mechanism of celebrity I’ve described above, and that is, that if hypermediation accelerates our processes of celebrity designation and, as many have argued, of celebrity consumption and disposal, that the process of returning to the lost celebrity object with sentiment and longing, that is, nostalgia, must essentially also be accelerated.  I have claimed above that I think that political celebrity lags behind popular culture celebrity in several significant ways; I think that this, too, is important to the puzzle of the public and the media’s interest in Sarah Palin.  It is the single most important factor in designating her as a past 15-minutes-of-famer worth remembering.  The combination of the conservative, and occasionally recalcitrant, nature of celebrity in the political realm and the adaptive, dynamic nature of celebrity in mass media allow for a nostalgic experience in a compressed amount of realtime of a figure we might not otherwise remember.  (No one’s making any movies about Dan Quayle these days, are they?) 

I want to close by expressing that I do not in this discussion mean to discount Palin and her family as their own agents; although I’m much more interested in the public’s response to that agency as channeled through the media, especially as I investigate objects produced by the media and consumed by the public.  I find that discussions that emphasize the agency of Palin herself run a high risk of getting, as Sam Baker would say, “judgy”—that is, that they often adopt a rhetoric of disdain for and suspicion of anyone who would purposely seek out and seek to maintain media attention, even as these rhetors themselves are complicit in that mechanism.