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Starsuckers
R2 - United Kingdom - Network Review written by and copyright: Paul Lewis (15th April 2010). |
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The Film
 Starsuckers (Chris Atkins, 2009) 
In the ‘making of’ documentary that is included on this DVD release, writer-director Chris Atkins asserts that Starsuckers (2009) was conceived after Revolver Entertainment – the financial backers of Atkins’ previous documentary, the BAFTA-nominated Taking Liberties (2007) – suggested that Atkins should find celebrity ‘talking heads’ to intersperse throughout the documentary, regardless of said celebrities’ comprehension of the issues raised in Taking Liberties. This inspired Atkins, and producers Christina Slater and Felicity Leabetter, to devise Starsuckers, a documentary that examines our relationship with the concept of celebrity and the ways in which celebrity culture is used to maintain the status quo. However, Atkins wanted to avoid the superficial celebration of celebrity culture that is found in the majority of documentaries about the role of celebrity in modern society: for example, the sycophantic Piers Morgan-hosted Channel 4 series The Importance of Being Famous (2003), in which various celebrities were interviewed about their relationships with fame. As Atkins notes in the ‘making of’ documentary, 'To me, that's like making a film about alcoholism and all you do is talk to alcoholics. Alcoholics don't know why they drink. If you want to know why an alcoholic drinks, you talk to an addiction specialist'. The result is a brave and insightful documentary that questions the hegemonic status that celebrity culture holds, especially in today’s age of gossip magazines and reality television - and the way in which that specific genre of television programming sells the culture of aspiration to its audience. Celebrity culture, and its dominance in today’s society, is something that is rarely interrogated outside of the work of a few iconoclasts: for example, Chris Morris’ satirical skewering of celebrity in Brass Eye (Channel 4, 1997) and Nathan Barley (Channel 4, 2005). Within the media landscape, attempts to challenge celebrity culture tend to be seen as a case of biting the hand that feeds. Because of this, Atkins and his production team were, from the beginning, aware that 'We were going to be attacking our own industry, in a brutal, no-holds-barred, we-may-never-work-again kind of way' (as Atkins notes in the ‘making of’ documentary). 
To add weight and objectivity to their analysis of celebrity culture and to ensure that Starsuckers avoided the trap of most documentaries about the issue of celebrity (ie, in talking exclusively to celebrities about their relationship with fame), Atkins and his producers interviewed a number of academics and experts. They also acquired some hidden camera footage of journalists breaking ethical codes (for example, by offering to purchase medical information about celebrities), and some honest reflections from public relations guru Max Clifford (obtained by Atkins whilst secretly filming Clifford during ‘downtime’ in a formal interview). The producers of Starsuckers also staged events in shopping centres, to illustrate how desperate parents are for their children to achieve fame, and showed how easy it is to ‘plant’ fake stories about celebrities in the tabloids. The resultant documentary, Starsuckers, is to be strongly commended for Atkin’s willingness to take on one of the rarely-questioned ‘sacred cows’ of modern society. However, Starsuckers is not without its flaws. The documentary is held together by a narrator (Rupert Degas), whose comments are intended to give ironic voice to the beliefs and motivations of the media corporations that dominate the modern cultural landscape. ‘Most of you have been unwitting participants in our greatest illusions’, the narrator declares at the outset of the film, before outlining what the documentary suggests are the central aims of today’s large media corporations: to ‘misdirect, distract and control’. 
It is no coincidence that the portions of the documentary that rely most heavily on this off-camera narration are the weakest; the documentary is much stronger in the sequences in which various experts are interviewed on-camera. The narration is a little too insistent, and the logic in its scripting is arguably a smidgen too gnomic and reductive. The portion of the documentary that relies most heavily on the narrator’s comments is its claim that we have a ‘hardwired’ need for celebrities or famous and ‘successful’ role models. Some persuasive evidence is presented to support this assertion, but the suggestion that our interest in celebrity culture is ‘hardwired’ into our neurobiology, and a hangover from our cave(wo)men ancestors’ need to survive by following successful role models, is extremely reductive and biologically deterministic, an example of ‘pop ethology’ to rival Robert Ardrey’s controversial 1967 book The Territorial Imperative. It reduces a series of complex social phenomenon to a set of hardwired biological ‘needs’. (The narrator tells us that 'When we surround you with famous faces, your survival instincts kick in and you feel the urge to get up close and copy them. This has created a new social hierarchy based on your proximity to anyone well-known'.) It provides one possible explanation for society’s interest in celebrity, but there are many others – and the producers could have acknowledged the plurality of different perspective about this particular issue. 
However, this does not weaken the central premise of the documentary: that celebrity culture is used as a form of phatic communication, to distract, control and pacify us. This central thesis aligns Starsuckers with the work of such important thinkers as Noam Chomsky, who in Manufacturing Consent (1988) asserted that sports culture in America was used by the media as a way of directing the populace away from political debate. Starsuckers explores the media’s promotion and celebration of celebrity culture, suggesting that something very sad is taking place: the documentary convincingly suggests that the media strives to hook people on celebrity culture from a very early age, ‘Because kids that follow the dream will always be our best customers’ (as the narrator asserts). This has, Starsuckers suggests, been compounded by the growth of reality television (ie, shows like Big Brother and The X Factor) and the concomitant culture of aspiration, and Starsuckers declares that, in the words of Jake Halpern (the author of the 2007 book Fame Junkies), modern society misguidedly presents ‘Fame [as] the cure-all, it’s the ultimate panacea’. 
The celebration of celebrity and fame, we are told, promotes a culture of narcissism that is fed most strongly by reality television’s promotion of the idea that anyone can achieve celebrity status (according to Dr Carol Craig, a psychologist and the founder of the Glasgow-based Centre for Confidence and Well-Being). For young people today, success is defined by wealth, appearance and celebrity – a cultural shift that Dr Craig claims has happened over the last ten years. Young people's growing interest in celebrity has been exploited through celebrity endorsement of products; the aim of this, in the words of the narrator, is to 'make you spend what you don't have on things that you don't need'. Another contributor, child psychiatrist Dr Phillip Graham, asserts that '[t]here is a link' between this 'increase in materialism and the mental health problems that an increasing number of our children show'. The documentary's examination of the role that celebrity gossip plays in the modern media landscape is arguably its strongest section. The narrator tells us that 'Gossip has become the underpinning [element] of the news business. The more we tell you about somebody, the more you want to know about them'. This section of Starsuckers contains some very insightful comments from Nick Davies, the author of Flat Earth News. Davies discusses the rise of celebrity gossip in the news media and suggests that sources of such gossip are rarely identifiable. He claims that 'most reporters, most of the time, no longer go out and find stories or make contacts or even check facts': instead, they simply rely on members of the public (or public relations professionals) to contribute stories and be offered a reward for doing so. To illustrate how easy it is for a false story to be planted and how rarely the facts are checked before the story is published, the makers of the documentary telephoned a number of 'red top' tabloids and planted several fake stories about celebrities; the headlines from the various newspapers, detailing the fake stories planted by Starsuckers producers, are shown on screen. Davies asserts that modern media culture's reliance on celebrity gossip has had a detrimental effect on the quality of our news media and having a negative impact on journalistic standards: Davies asserts that 'We are going into an age of information chaos; the profession that was there, that was supposed to be doing the job of filtering out truth from falsehood, is slowly declining. The idea that it's being replaced by bloggers and citizen journalists and the Internet is, to me, far more optimism than reality. The Internet is full of babble, imbecile babble [….] It ceases to matter to these big media organisations whether it's true, whether it's legal, whether it's right, whether it's important. It's just telling a story. They're not in the business of telling the truth; media organisations are in the business of being in a business – making money'. For the newspapers, celebrity stories are according to Davies 'cheap, it's easy, it's not legally dangerous and it sells papers. So you can see a whole shift in the priorities of the media'. Davies claims that the streamlining of news organisations has had a negative impact on fact checking and data gathering: journalists are under increasing pressure to provide a greater quantity of output. The public relations industry has filled this gap by planting stories, feeding them to a news media hungry for celebrity gossip and copy with which to fill its pages. Press releases and information fed to the news media via public relations people are, in newspapers and online, reproduced verbatim. This has eroded the distinction between news and advertising; news stories are used by PR organisations to promote a product or a celebrity. Professor Ellis Cashmore of Staffordshire University suggests that 'I honestly don't think most people know the difference [between news and advertising], even if there is a difference. Perhaps it's just gone'. Reacting to claims that newspapers are only giving their readers 'what they want', Davies asserts that 'Well, that might be. You could justify throwing Christians to lions in Rome that way, couldn't you, because that's what people wanted; but it doesn't mean it's good, and it certainly doesn't make it legal'. 
The news industry's hunger for celebrity stories is explored through interviews with journalists, including Emma Bussey, a former journalist for The People; Bussey claims that there is strong pressure on journalists to get 'kiss and tell' stories, which leads them to manipulate potential sources of information and participate in all sorts of ethically dubious practices. Using undercover footage and secret filming, the documentary shows the lengths that the tabloids will go to in order to get stories about celebrities – including buying medical information, something which under British law is illegal. Secret filming of journalists from some of the 'red top' tabloids shows that they are willing to circumvent the Press Complaints Commission's code of practice in order to get their hands on a juicy story about a celebrity; the documentary makes a strong case for the claim that the Press Complaints Commission's penalties for unethical practice are not stringent enough and are not taken seriously by the people in control of the tabloid newspapers. After exploring the role of the public relations professionals in shielding celebrities from negative media coverage, via some shocking undercover footage of Max Clifford talking about some of the stories he has prevented from being published and the methods by which he has done so, Starsuckers examines the power of modern celebrities by providing a discussion of a bizarre situation in Lithuania. In 2007, a group of Lithuanian music and television celebrities formed their own political party and became the second largest party in the country; the narration tells us this series of events 'should give you a glimpse of what you have to look forward to'. 
Starsuckers also provides a particularly insightful and detailed discussion of the role of charity in maintaining the status of celebrities and politicians, and the ways in which media 'spin' maintains the perception of celebrity charity events as being wholly altruistic. David Rieff of the World Policy Institute outlines that 'Live Aid arguably did some harm as well as some good': a portion of the money raised by Live Aid was used to facilitate a 'forced relocation' in Ethiopia at a time when the country was experiencing ethnic cleansing. The outcome of this was that the genocide in Ethiopia was in part 'enabled by the relief effort'; according to data presented in the documentary, Medicin Sans Frontiers estimates that between 150,000 and 200,000 Ethiopians were killed due to the forced relocation that was enabled by the input of money from Live Aid. Starsuckers also features interviews with some of the key figures behind the Make Poverty History movement, who suggest that that Richard Curtis and Bob Geldof scheduled the Live 8 event in 2005 to direct media attention away from the Make Poverty History march that had already been scheduled at the same time, effectively squeezing the Make Poverty History march from the newspaper headlines and television coverage. 'Every time we want to get a strong political message in the media, there happens to be a pop concert to take away some of that thunder', one of the faces behind the Make Poverty History marches declares. The outcome of this was that the potentially radical political message behind the Make Poverty History movement was effectively buried by Live 8's 'feel good' focus on celebrities. As one of the people behind Make Poverty History tells us, Live 8 'didn't actually strengthen the message of Make Poverty History. In fact, they diluted that message, and made it much more of an unclear, touchy-feely experience where everybody is made to feel good about themselves but in fact the political demands have been watered down to nothingness'. A largely excellent and timely documentary, Starsuckers falters during its exploration of the psychology behind our interest in celebrity culture – focusing exclusively on reductive biological determinism (and suggesting that interest in celebrities is innate, down to nature rather than nurture) and neglecting to explore some of the other sociological factors that push us towards celebrity. (The narrator's early assertion that 'Everyone is naturally and powerfully attracted to fame, even though most people will deny it' is characteristic of this emphasis on our supposedly innate attraction towards fame and celebrity.) Nevertheless, the film's examination of the role that celebrity gossip plays in the contemporary media landscape is excellent, and supported with some very cogent comments from Nick Davies in particular, who makes some of the most pointed comments in the documentary; and Starsuckers' critique of celebrities' desire to appear altruistic and the relationships between celebrities and charity work is also fairly incendiary. Some of the footage obtained through secret filming (especially Max Clifford's claims) is truly astounding, and the documentary features enough authoritative voices to add credence to its central thesis without ever becoming too 'dry'. 
Starsuckers runs for 100:33 mins (PAL) and appears not to suffer from any edits.
Video
Starsuckers is presented in its original aspect ratio of 1.85:1; the disc contains an anamorphic transfer. The bulk of the documentary is shot on digital video, and as noted above there is a mixture of interviews and secret filming obtained using various lesser quality video recording devices. There are no problems with the transfer. 
Audio
The disc offers a choice of Dolby Digital 5.1 and 2.0 stereo. Honestly, there appears to be very little difference between these two tracks: as a documentary, Starsuckers does not rely on a 'showy' audio track. There are no subtitles.
Extras
Audio commentary with writer-director Chris Atkins and producer Christina Slater. The commentary track is lively and informative, with Atkins and Slater being intelligent and witty contributors. However, the commentary doesn't reveal much that isn't also covered – in a more concise and focused manner – in the 'making of' documentary that is also included on this disc. Extra Footage: The Media: − 'Kids Talking About the Media' (2:31). Raw interview footage of young people discussing their relationships with the media. − 'Entertainment Journalist' (4:03). Interview footage with an anonymous entertainment journalist who exposes some of the tricks of the trade and suggests that celebrity gossip dominates journalism, including 'arts journalism', which in the words of the interviewee is 'just bullshit. That's just interviewing posher celebrities'. − Paparazzi: –- 'Kids Talking About the Paparazzi' (0:52): Young people discuss the paparazzi. –- 'More Kev the Pap' (5:43): Footage of Kevin, the paparazzo interviewed in the film. –- 'Owen the Pap' (4:23): An interview with another paparazzo, Owen. –- 'Paps Chase Britney' (2:49): Footage of paparazzi photographers pursuing Britney Spears. − 'Media's Influence on Mass Shootings' (7:31). Discussion of the role of celebrity in motivating the killers at Columbine in 1999. The interviewees suggest that media coverage of events such as the school shootings in Columbine causes them to 'snowball', influencing similar events – directly implicating the sensationalistic news media in these crimes. Celebrities: − 'Kids Talk About Fame' (3:01). Young people discuss the concept of fame and their relationship with it. − 'Famous People!!! - Celebrities on Celebrities' (8:24). Interviews with famous people focusing on their perceptions of the concept of celebrity. Interviewees include Keira Knightley, Clint Eastwood, the young actress Georgie Henley, Samuel L. Jackson, Curtis '50 Cent' Jackson, Emma Watson, Jennifer Tilly, Chris Noth, Al Pacino, Robert De Niro, William Moseley, Eddie Izzard and Ralph Fiennes. − 'Oliver Auditions – Celebrity Kids' (2:17). Footage of the applicants for the BBC's I'd Do Anything Saturday night reality television show. − 'Liliana Dalla Piana – Celebrity PA' (2:34). Interview with a celebrity Personal Assistant. − 'Luke Yankee – Celebrity Son' (3:17). Interview with the son of Eileen Eckhart. − 'Ian Drury – Celebrity Publisher' (2:51). Interview with the publisher of celebrity biographies and autobiographies, who suggests that we should 'redefine what a celebrity is' and claims that Jordan's 'memoir' was the 'big hit that kicked off' the current fad for celebrity autobiographies. − 'Gifting Suite – Celebrity Ligging' (4:33). Discussion of the role of 'gifting' (ie, donating freebies to celebrities) in promoting certain products. Fans: − 'Kids Talk About Their Idols' (3:04). Young people discuss their favourite celebrities. − 'Morrissey Fans' (3:32). Interview with fans of former The Smiths frontman Morrissey. Celebrity Charity: − 'Kids Talk About Celebrities and Charities' (2:34). Young people discuss their perceptions of the relationships between celebrities and charity work. − 'Brendan O'Neil' (3:33). Interview with the editor of Spiked magazine, who discusses celebrities' largely ignorant patronisation of the cultures of the developing countries they claim to help. − 'Toyota Charity Event' (2:43). Footage of Toyota's annual charity event. − 'Alexander Nicholas' (2:06). Interview with Alexander Nicholas, of Hollywood Hills Magazine, who discusses the motivations for celebrities' endorsement of charities. Making Of Documentary (in two parts, 15:40 + 19:45). The director, Chris Atkins, discusses Star Suckers' development and how the project grew out of his previous documentary, the BAFTA nominated Taking Liberties. There is also input from producers Christina Slater and Felicity Leadbetter, and co-producer Victoria Hollingsworth. Atkins discusses his desire to avoid the template for celebrity documentaries set by Channel 4's superficial The Importance of Being Famous, which featured Piers Morgan simply interviewing a host of celebrities about what it is like to be famous. Atkins says that 'To me, that's like making a film about alcoholism and all you do is talk to alcoholics. Alcoholics don't know why they drink. If you want to know why an alcoholic drinks, you talk to an addiction specialist'. Atkins and his producers discuss the research conducted for the documentary, which took six months. Atkins also claims that he and the producers were aware that 'We were going to be attacking our own industry, in a brutal, no-holds-barred, we-may-never-work-again kind of way'. The struggle to find investment is discussed in some detail, including the filmmakers' rather bizarre approach to Miramax for funding. The contributors also discuss the difficulties they faced during their shoots in America and at Cannes, and their recruitment of 'Kev the Pap', the London-based paparazzo photographer that the filmmakers followed during the filming of the documentary. Atkins and his crew also discuss the 'secret filming' techniques used to capture the representatives of the 'red top' tabloids breaking the Press Complaints Commission's code of practice. This leads into a discussion of the legal issues surrounding the film's production, with input from the lawyer who advised the producers, Simon Goldberg. Atkins claims that the tabloids 'think they're untouchable. They act with impunity, because no-one on television has ever dared exposed them'. The newspapers' reaction is discussed in depth, including News Corporation's attempts to sue the producers of Star Suckers for libel and defamation, and their attempts to lay claim to the tapes acquired through secret filming. Max Clifford's reaction to the film, which led to Clifford's threat of legal action against the film's producers which would have prevented the film's distribution, is also examined. Promotional Material: - Trailer (2:42). The documentary's theatrical trailer. - Promo Animation (2:12). A short, animation-heavy promotional piece, effectively functioning as a trailer.
Overall
Starsuckers is a documentary that is timely and culturally relevant in its examination of the ways in which modern society is exploited by celebrity culture, and has allowed celebrity gossip and fame to take a central position within modern news media – directing attention away from political and social debates. The documentary is weakest when it allows itself to be dominated by its off-screen narration, the reasoning in which tends to be gnomic and reductive; however, there are more than enough comments from academics and experts to give credence to the bulk of the ideas presented in Starsuckers. The claim that we have an innate attraction towards fame and celebrity is reductive, and the documentary's exploration of the psychology of our attraction to celebrity presents a sociobiological perspective (which is guilty of 'pop ethology') at the exclusion of other possible reasons why this might be the case; it is difficult to avoid the feeling that the filmmakers were far less comfortable exploring the psychology of our interest in fame than they were with focusing on the ways in which the various news media exploit celebrity. (It is perhaps no coincidence that this is the portion of the documentary that relies most heavily on the voice of the narrator to guide the viewer through the logic behind this argument.) However, the documentary's examination of the role of celebrity culture, and the phatic discourse that surrounds fame, is much more focused and far more well-rounded. In sum, Starsuckers is slightly uneven but is an important documentary, if for no other reason than the fact that it provides a critical perspective on the role of celebrity in modern society. Because of this, at times Starsuckers has the feeling of a revolutionary Situationist expose of the society of the spectacle, turning the techniques of the spectacle against itself (in the manner of the famous Situationist example of detournement, Can Dialectics Break Bricks?). For its radical perspective on celebrity, Starsuckers comes with a strong recommendation. This particular DVD release contains an excellent array of contextual material. For more information, please visit the homepage of Network DVD.
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