I. KYLIZZLEMYNIZZL
Paparazzi cameras flash madly from the screen of my phone. I am watching Kylie Jenner’s Snapchat story on the toilet. While I take a mid-morning leak, I get one of my tri-daily doses of kylizzlemynizzl. Right now she is on a red carpet in a Givenchy gown, walking forward in neat, expensive steps, looking at the screen of her phone, which is pointed towards the carpet, which is how she knows where she is going.
Kylie Jenner is the only Kardashian I Keep Up With, and I do so exclusively through Snapchat. So do millions of other people. Kylizzlemynizzl is the most-viewed account on the app. The King Kylie reign is so powerful that Snapchat added a personalized crown emoticon to her handle, the exclusive privilege of verified celebrity accounts. I started following kylizzlemynizzl last year when I found out you could follow celebrities on Snapchat. Snapchat accounts are not close to ubiquitous among celebrities, so the pickings were slim. These days I tend to skip through Jared Leto’s story, as he reminds me of an ex-boyfriend. I often skip through Victoria Justice, who is the most basic person I have ever met1—though I suppose I have not really met her at all. Rihanna doesn’t update her story much, and when she does you can tell an assistant or friend is holding the phone. Sometimes the assistant forgets to turn the sound on. Kevin Jonas barely posts either, except for once when he got a hot dog on National Hot Dog Day, which he knew it was because there was a National Hot Dog Day Snapchat filter.
If you’ve heard about celebrity Snapchats, you’ve probably heard about DJ Khaled, who started scoring millions of story views in late 2015—particularly after he live snapped a jet ski accident. DJ Khaled’s Snapchat did not blow up until after I had followed the first eight celebrity accounts Google revealed to me in the early summer of 2015. His explosion onto my social media feeds was too overwhelming to get involved in. I didn’t bother to follow his account. Besides, I skimmed enough social media to get snippets of DJ Khaled’s bizarre and funny quotes—and to see him recycle these quotes in interviews and advertisements. His Snapchat account felt tainted by its monetization. DJ Khaled quickly became a profitable meme generator—an advertisement, not a human.
Kylie Jenner does not post snaps to entertain other people. This is pretty evident, as her Snapchat story is, technically speaking, quite boring. She uploads about 15 to 20 minutes of content every day, and most of these shots are video selfies of her singing along to music whose lyrics she does not know very well. One gets the sense that she is on Snapchat purely to entertain herself, to pass time in the makeup chair by looking at her own face. Kylie Jenner’s stories are transfixing, in part, because Kylie seems to live in a perpetual state of boredom, holed up in her private mansion in her gated community, which she says she never wants to leave. Kylie owns a lot of nice things: a fridge stocked with all of her favorite foods, a shelf stocked with all of her favorite wigs, a quartz crystal the size of her palm, a velvet car. Watching Kylie Jenner’s Snapchat is like watching a Barbie sit in her Barbie mansion, enjoying the quiet boredom of owning everything one could possibly want.
That Kylie Jenner is a 19-year-old American starlet who mostly sits at home is shocking precisely because it is not shocking. When celebrities crept into my consciousness in the 2000s, their lives seemed irreparably damaged. Disaster, in the form of addiction or prison or sex tape, felt intrinsic to the very idea of a young starlet. I grew up knowing that the price of fame was a life watched by paparazzi, and a life watched by paparazzi was not much of a life at all. Everyone seemed to pity these broken women—Britney Spears, Lindsay Lohan, Paris Hilton—who kept spiraling downward. In the checkout line of the Stop & Shop, I found myself looking away from copies of Us Weekly, whose covers just made me sad.
But Kylie is not a teen of the 2000s, she is a teen of the 2010s. No American teenager in 2016 needs a photographer to take pictures of her all day—she’ll gladly do the job herself. As a result, the paparazzi are no longer what they used to be. And neither is privacy.
II. A HISTORY OF THE PAPARAZZI
Elio Sorci, the first paparazzo, described a paparazzo as “a young, carefree, happy man who earns his daily bread by putting other people into difficulty and doesn’t mind the risks.” While this description may sound familiar given the aggressive style of today’s TMZ, the first wave of paparazzi had a much less combative relationship with the celebrities they photographed. Sorci was one of many young Italian photographers practicing a new style of photojournalism—candid shots of celebrities. Rome became a cinema powerhouse in the 1950s, a fertile petri dish of celebrity culture. Since the 1930s the press had revered this celebrity culture. Celebrities were glamorous, and were to be publicized as such. The press fed the celebrities, the celebrities fed the press, et cetera, et cetera.
Early photographs of celebrities were largely glamorous, but the accompanying rumors were not. Though photographic celebrity “gossip” wasn’t popularized until the 1960s, written celebrity gossip has been around since pretty much the beginning of time. Mesopotamians gossiped in cuneiform about a mayoral impeachment 3,500 years ago. In 1709 the first modern gossip magazine, The Tatler, was printed in London. At the time, salacious content involved duels, gambling, and thoughts on inappropriate manners. American public gossip started in the late nineteenth century with a weekly newspaper named Town Topics, which published a column called “Saunterings.” The publisher of Town Topics, William d’Alton Mann, was infamous for how carefully he played his cards, often leveraging power by keeping the best gossip to himself. When Hollywood burst into the national consciousness, gossip magazines pursued actors more ruthlessly.
In some ways, the camera-wielding paparazzi were born because they had to be. By the 1950s, Hollywood was more glamorous than ever, there was more media evidence of this glamour than ever, and there was also a growing curiosity about the stars, evidenced by the burgeoning gossip business. These factors, combined with the increasing accessibility of cameras, created the perfect opportunity—if only someone was willing to take it.
That someone was Elio Sorci, soon followed by other young Italian men seeking to cash in on Rome’s celebrity culture. More of these opportunistic photographers cropped up throughout the decade, inspiring the character Paparazzo, a reporter in Fellini’s 1960 La Dolce Vita. The nickname “paparazzi” was born from the name “Paparazzo”: both an Italian family surname and a bastardization of the Italian word for “mosquito.”
One of the definitive aspects of paparazzi photojournalism was its mercenary nature: no one worked on contract. The photo was always sold to the highest bidder. Paparazzi worked in direct competition with one another. The paparazzi business, by its very nature, rewarded opportunism—doing whatever one could do to be in the right place at the right time. In his introduction to Sorci’s posthumous photography collection Paparazzo, Philippe Garner, a director at Christie’s Auction House, writes that the early paparazzi’s “lack of formal training, their lack of self-consciousness towards the medium, the absence of all those aesthetic and ethical anxieties that can inhibit spontaneity […] cast them […] perfectly in the role of ruthless image-hunters.” These men were able to get candid shots precisely because they were not “legitimate” members of the press. They had no union or workplace that benefitted from maintaining the glamour of Hollywood, and their work effectively ended the positive feedback loop of celebrity and celebrity press.
Still, the focus of paparazzi photojournalism was not (yet) on mining celebrity secrets. Rather, Sorci’s photographs drew their power from the simple act of making a private thing public—capturing people who were always on display in moments when they were not intended to be on display. Most of Sorci’s photographs are fascinating because they’re simply pictures of famous people looking sort of normal: Sophia Loren grimacing as she clambers into a limo, Mick and Bianca Jagger mid-conversation, Goldie Hawn about to tuck her hair behind her ear, giving Sorci a disgruntled glance. Yet the point was not to catch unflattering celebrity moments so much as unedited ones. Some of the photographs are quite beautiful: Brigitte Bardot still looks gorgeous while chewing on a blade of grass. Even a little off-balance, Clint Eastwood looks handsome on a skateboard.
And although the early paparazzi’s relationship with celebrities was opportunistic, it was not necessarily combative. Sorci became friends with many of the celebrities he photographed, even ones he caught in decidedly un-glamorous moments. Fellini even invited Sorci to shoot on the set of La Dolce Vita. According to Sorci’s wife, Sorci did not approve of the modern paparazzi in his old age, as he did not believe they truly practiced the craft. This statement, of course, must be qualified by the many statements Sorci had previously made about money being his prime motivator. Still, there is something that sets his photographs apart from the ones splayed on the cover of today’s National Enquirer.
Philippe Garner shares this feeling: “Perhaps it is just nostalgia for a lost era, but somehow the stars and celebrity figures we see in Sorci’s images seem more seductive, more captivating than their modern equivalents.” Why is this the case? Is it because the paparazzi are so ubiquitous now that celebrities are always expecting to be on display, making it harder to capture a celebrity in a truly unstaged, private moment? Is it because Hollywood has been knocked off its glamorous pedestal for so long that it’s no longer fun to look at celebrities being unglamorous? Or has technology changed so radically that our perceptions of privacy have also shifted, making the original project of paparazzi photojournalism altogether impossible?
III. A HISTORY OF PRIVACY (a.k.a. WHY PEOPLE PAY FOR A PICTURE OF KELLY CLARKSON PICKING HER NOSE)
The history of the paparazzi is, in essence, a history of the intersection between privacy and technology. As technologies have developed ways of producing and disseminating facsimiles of private moments, we have been forced to rethink the very concept of privacy. With the exponential growth of personalized technology in the last 20 years, this process has sped up rapidly—much more rapidly than material history can keep up with. This is to say, I have no facts to support these ideas, so rather than proving them with hard evidence, I am going to think through them with a sort of theoretical history—based in material history but intended more as a thought experiment than a textbook entry. (Think Thomas Hobbes’s account of the “State of Nature,” the beginning of time when all men lived by themselves in constant fear of other men. Was that the case in pre-civilization? No—we weren’t even humans yet, so thinking about the origins of humanity in terms of the Homo sapiens we know and love today is always sort of a moot point. But moot is sometimes a useful place to start.)
Let’s pretend we are at the beginning of human history. Humans are around, but they have not yet invented any technology. I’m talking no writing, no fire, no nothing. Blordak the Caveman sits in a tree all day growing out his opposable thumbs. Sometimes his friends come to his cave and they wrestle in exchange for coconuts. Sometimes they all hit up the watering hole for some gossip, or antelope, or, I don’t know, rocks.
At this point, there are three shades of the public/private divide: the embodied public (what most people mean when they say “public” colloquially today, the watering hole where all the cavemen gather), the embodied private (what most people mean when they say “private” colloquially today, Blordak’s cave where he can wrestle with his friends and be himself), and the mental private (inside one’s own head, Blordak’s stream of consciousness as he sits in his tree, twiddling his new thumbs). The relationship between these three dimensions is relatively simple: around many people (whom one might not know very well), one is in the embodied public; around fewer people (whom one feels comfortable around) or no one at all, one is in the embodied private; and alone, one is always in the mental private.
(Pardon the academese, because it’s about to multiply. Really, if this isn’t your thing you’re welcome to read something else. I support you.2)
The first technology to translate (or, make public) the mental private is speech. Using language, people can attempt to share the experience of being in their heads. However, speech (for the purpose of communication) requires a live audience within earshot, so as soon as the mental private is translated, it gets lost in the embodied conversation. Speech is great for sharing thoughts, but pretty shabby at recreating the mental private—the actual experience of being alone in one’s head.
Next comes written language, which is exponentially better at reproducing the mental private. With writing, the mental private does not get embodied in a human body (as speech does through the mouth), it gets embodied on paper—a confined thought-space much more like the mind’s blank slate. As writings begin to circulate, they create the first ever disembodied public, or mental public: the mental privates of many individuals co-mingling with one another in a disembodied space—the realm of thought. This is the literary commons. For the first time, technology allows people to make public their mental private. However, because access to printed works, let alone the literacy necessary to understand them, remained limited for a long time, the mental public of the literary commons was not truly a public space.
Let’s fast forward a few thousand years while humans work out the kinks of language and God and the Bubonic Plague, so we can get to the invention of photography. Photography gives us the technology to translate the embodied private—to make public the physical space of privacy. (While I suppose visual art did this before photography, it was about as crude at translating the embodied private as speech was at translating the mental private.) This translation of the embodied private gets even better with the invention and popularization of film. By the mid-twentieth century, Americans (seemingly) have access to dozens of embodied private spaces: Lucy and Ricky Ricardo’s apartment, the Cartwright’s Ponderosa Ranch on Lake Tahoe, the Cleaver’s house on Leave it to Beaver (where the toilet was first shown on television!3).
But of course, these are merely facsimiles of the embodied private. In the actual embodied private, there are often toilets, and their presence does not upset the mores of the American Public, nor does it require weeks of wrangling with network censorship rules. Yet as technology gets better and better at approximating the embodied private, people start to forget that the whole thing is an illusion. This change produces the public/private oddity that is the Hollywood actor: a person on display (“in public”) so often in these facsimiles of privacy, that the line between public and private shifts. For actors, the embodied private is rarely actually private (at least this is true of our perception of actors, whom we mostly encounter in these reproductions of private space). They are “in public” even when they are “in private,” because their private presence is being broadcast to the outside world.
The question of privacy for an actor, then, is actually a question of audience more than a matter of being alone or away from a crowd. Actors in the modern, densely populated world bring forth a new dimension of privacy: the unwatched private, when one is in an embodied public but does not perceive an audience. For example, Brad Pitt as he walks little Maddox through the airport, Scarlett Johansson as she picks out a Hallmark card for her aunt, Ryan Reynolds as he readjusts his ballsack on a park bench. In an increasingly crowded world, all of us can access the unwatched private—the anonymity of a crowd, the sensation of having privacy within an embodied public because no one is paying us attention. When paparazzi photograph Jessica Alba shopping for yarn, they are capturing the unwatched private (a sort of private space within a public space, due to a lack of audience). When paparazzi break into Jessica Alba’s bathroom and hide in the shower to catch a nip slip, they are capturing the embodied private. The original paparazzi were the first to commodify the unwatched private.
This was previously impossible—in the past, there was not much demand for another person’s unwatched private. That’s because most people do not behave for an audience in the embodied public, and if they do, the audience is their mother or friend, rather than millions of Americans. Photographs of people who do not usually perform for an audience not performing for an audience in public are, alas, a hard sell. Yet because we encounter celebrities first in these facsimiles of the embodied private (the public private), encountering them in the unwatched private feels like encountering something truly private—the celebrity existing for herself, rather than for an audience.
I use the word “celebrity” now instead of actor because at this point most celebrities seem engaged in some form of translating the private. Singers cry in the bedrooms of their music videos, politicians sit down for family dinner in their advertisements, athletes wash up and go on Dancing with the Stars. While reproducing privacy for an audience is not the bread and butter of all celebrity professions, it’s definitely implicated in most.
This I find interesting. In essence, isn’t this the same project as paparazzi photojournalism? Making the private public? In some ways, aren’t the paparazzi a bit better at doing this than film actors? Even when we’re spellbound by Meryl Streep, in the back of our mind we know she is just Meryl Streep, doing a very good job at pretending she is Margaret Thatcher. Film actors are rewarded for how accurately they can reproduce the embodied private for a public audience, for how well they can shut off the tiny IMDb humming in our head, scanning each character for the actor beneath. Yet when a paparazzo takes a shot of Meryl Streep on the sidewalk, Meryl Streep is not complicit in his translation of her “privacy” (by which I mean her existence in the unwatched private, this public sort of privacy). As hard as cinema tries, you can’t truly capture someone’s privacy unless they are unaware of your presence. In this sense, aren’t paparazzi photographs, even ones of celebrities in public, more successful at translating the embodied and unwatched private than the facsimiles the celebrity has produced?
A true paparazzi photograph, then, by which I mean a photograph of a celebrity who does not know he is on display, must come at the expense of the celebrity’s knowledge of the paparazzo. There’s a cost to capturing privacy. This is where the ethical questions come in.
I’m going to go ahead and assume that most people agree (at least hypothetically) on the right to the embodied private. When a paparazzo breaks into Jessica Alba’s shower for a nip slip, most people are going to defend Jessica Alba when she sues him for publishing the photographs. The ethics get thornier when it comes to the unwatched private. While some people might object to paparazzi hounding celebrities as they go about their day, some people say it serves them right—they’re public figures, after all. The cost of participating in commercially successful translations of the embodied private is one’s right to the unwatched private, the right for someone to exist as themselves (and not their work) in the embodied public and go unnoticed.
The paparazzi turned the unwatched private into a commodity at the expense of Hollywood stars…for a while. Then the stars figured out how to regain control—bargain with the paparazzi for planned “candid” photos of themselves. If the paparazzi were going to commodify their privacy, at least they would have a hand in selling it. Celebrities began to simulate both embodied and unwatched privacy for the cameras in exchange for money, in turn relinquishing the embodied and unwatched private as spaces of true privacy (i.e., audience-less spaces). The paparazzi got a good shot, the celebrity got a modicum of control over her “candid” appearance, and the positive feedback loop of celebrity and celebrity press continued. This is how (I believe) being a modern celebrity became the business of selling one’s privacy. By the 2000s, no one knew more about selling privacy than Harvey Levin.
IV. SEX TAPES AND BUZZ CUTS: THE RISE OF TMZ
Alec Baldwin called Harvey Levin, creator of TMZ, “a festering boil on the anus of American media.”4 The Guardian has called him “the high prince of sleaze.” Rory Waltzer, a former cameraman for Levin, has said he would make for a great dictator—though perhaps he already has.
Levin works from a riser at the center of TMZ’s office. He is 66. He wakes up every morning at 3:00 a.m. to exercise before he starts his workday, which is often as long as 12 hours. He sounds like a radio show host. His biceps bulk out from the short sleeves of the t-shirts he wears on television, like someone has injected lemons into his arms. According to Levin, TMZ is worth 400 million dollars. A pretty hefty sum, considering the website was only started in 2005. Named “Thirty Mile Zone”5 after an industry term for the Hollywood sprawl, Harvey Levin aimed to bring hard journalism techniques to celebrity press. In his view, the paparazzi had gone soft, mostly reporting stories that had been planted by publicists. His aim was “not to make celebrities look bad but to make them real.”
Levin was not interested in the slightly unflattering photo of the newest pop singer, he was interested in the massively unflattering photo of her police record. Levin taught his guys to go for the hard stuff: the deleted section of the security tape, the drunken voicemail, the original transcript of the 911 call. “They were at police precincts, doing real beat reporting, and getting things like surveillance video,” said Brittain Stone, a competing photography director at Us Weekly. By the turn of the century, the paparazzi had practically closed the positive feedback loop of celebrity press. Stone said at the beginning of the 2000s, “Our mission was to be aspirational—something that was pretty, shot in a certain kind of light, people looking good. TMZ never really did that.”
TMZ reopened the celebrity feedback loop by assuming a combative relationship with the celebrities they covered. On a radio show in 2013 Levin said: “You could take me, put me in Afghanistan, and I’ll use the same principles I’d use with Britney Spears.” (Though Levin fails to articulate why Britney Spears should warrant the same journalistic principles as a war.) While Levin espouses the principles of hard journalism, he diverges from old school journalism on one issue in particular: paying for information. TMZ shells out thousands of dollars for its visual stories, rewarding its army of moles like no other news source. Levin has sources in limousine services, airports, taxis, hotels, law offices, and state courts. And he pays them top dollar for the dirt.
In some ways, this is directly in line with Elio Sorci’s original conception of the mercenary photographer as paparazzi, loyal only to the highest bidder. Only TMZ is unique in that they are both paparazzi and bidder, spreading the cash throughout Los Angeles as they commission every low-level employee in town. No need to employ a handful of opportunistic young men when you have a city of opportunistic young people at your disposal, some of whom are bound to be in the right place at the right time. TMZ’s anonymous tip line receives over 100 tips a day. With high quality camera phones, anyone can be a paparazzo.
TMZ sought to make public a deeper, “realer” form of privacy than the embodied private or unwatched private. They sought to translate the narrative private5—the privacy of one’s life story. (The narrative private is any information that can produce a larger life story—not the stream of consciousness of the mental private but the information bank stored in our memory. This is the version of privacy meant by Facebook in their “Privacy Settings.” This is what your mom means when she asks you to keep your sex life private. The narrative private is the stuff we choose to excise from our public life story, what we mean in a literal sense by “private information.”) For Levin, photos that captured the embodied private or unwatched private did not make the cut unless they revealed (or seemed to reveal) some aspect of the narrative private—the fuller story of a celebrity. The photo had to be a story, and the story had to come at the celebrity’s expense. The dirt wasn’t attractive unless it had been swept under the rug.
The ethics here are complicated. (Or not complicated at all, if you are Immanuel Kant.5) While, ethically speaking, one could get behind publishing all evidence of the narrative private sent TMZ’s way—subjecting everyone to equal standards of narrative privacy invasion—the second TMZ passes on a tip, they confer on someone their right to narrative privacy, making every case morally relative. Maybe this would be fine if TMZ employed a think tank that considered the ethics of publishing a photograph of Rihanna entering a plastic surgery office, but they do not keep philosophers on payroll. In a business whose heart is unabashedly cold cash, morality tends to fluctuate—something Levin himself admits to. “I can’t give you a rigid principle on where the line of privacy is,” he said during a lecture at the University of Chicago in 2010.
Levin has passed on several large stories, including a video of 16-year-old Justin Bieber singing his song “One Less Lonely Girl,” substituting the word “girl” for the n-word. When Levin chose not to publish the video, Justin Bieber’s publicist literally wept with relief. Instead, Levin used the video as leverage to gain greater access to Bieber. In exchange for withholding the juiciest narrative private, TMZ got access to more, less interesting narrative private—the exact sort of behavior for which Levin criticizes his predecessors.
So maybe he’s a bit of a hypocrite, but the man is also responsible for some important headlines. TMZ first broke national news with Mel Gibson’s drunk driving arrest, and a transcript of the police report detailing Gibson’s anti-Semitic rant (four pages that were removed from the report officially filed by the police station). TMZ got the footage of Ray Rice abusing his wife in an elevator (evidence that the NFL lawyers failed to obtain). TMZ broke the news of Michael Jackson’s death, Michael Richard’s racist words at a standup show, Donald Sterling’s request to his mistress that she not bring her black friends to L.A. Clippers games. Levin says: “If you look at the stories we’ve broken they are stories that literally every newscast in America has put on the air.” He’s not wrong.
It’s easy to valorize TMZ when they’re exposing a celebrity’s racism—or worse, how the celebrity has exploited his status as a public figure to hide this racism. It becomes more difficult to valorize TMZ when they’re exposing a celebrity’s mental breakdown. Especially when the paparazzi are spurring it on, baiting the celebrity, camera in hand.
The rise of TMZ brought the frequency of celebrity meltdowns to a new pitch. Some people, like Amy Winehouse, were already troubled. The constant onslaught of paparazzi documenting this trouble only made things worse. Winehouse could not enter any embodied public without getting mobbed by cameras, paparazzi hoping for her to give a drunken monologue or a coked-up rant. TMZ trapped Winehouse under her public image, something she attempted to escape through alcohol. In July of 2011, Winehouse drank so much vodka she stopped breathing. She died alone in her bedroom, watching YouTube videos of herself singing.
Some people, however, were more complicit in the paparazzi’s presence. Just as celebrities regained control of celebrity press by commodifying the embodied private and unwatched private, celebrities attempted to regain control of this new, vicious brand of paparazzi photojournalism by commodifying the narrative private. The narrative private proved significantly more difficult to commodify than the embodied private or the unwatched private. Celebrities did not just have to appear “candid,” they had to appear “candid” in compromising situations. They had to control the illusion that they were not in control of their life story.
Publicists quickly switched tack to achieve this authority, tipping off TMZ’s cameramen with “candid” “scandals.” (Of course, publicists did not want to release real scandals, so they settled for controlling smaller scale gossip.) Paris Hilton’s publicist would alert TMZ when Paris was going to a movie with her boyfriend. Britney Spears would ring up TMZ before she went to get a spray tan.
But TMZ would not settle for a spray tan from Britney Spears. They wanted the custody battle with K-Fed, the series of driving misdemeanors, the back of the Las Vegas club where she’d passed out that night. And they got it. When Britney Spears shaved her head, the paparazzi covered the story like weathermen covering a natural disaster. Spears exploited the paparazzi to stay on the front of the tabloids, welcoming paparazzi into her embodied private and unwatched private in an attempt to gain control of her narrative private. In turn, the paparazzi exploited Spears’s offer, using their access to her embodied private and unwatched private to manufacture Spears’s narrative private—provoking her to pull tabloid-worthy stunts.
This voracious appetite for the narrative private led to another fad: the celebrity sex tape. Though celebrity sex tapes had been leaked decades before the 2000s, the Internet democratized access to these tapes, bringing the embodied private more fully into the mental public. If you weigh the options for celebrities at that time, making a sex tape actually made some sense. A sex tape would guarantee a star weeks of tabloid time, and was, in many ways, better than other forms of “candid” “scandal.” At least with a sex tape, a celebrity could commodify her embodied, narrative private. If paparazzi were going to invent a scandalous narrative privacy for her anyway, she might as well have a scandalous narrative privacy in which she’s moaning sexily on a nice bed, rather than passed out in her own vomit.
I should admit that this is pure speculation. I have no idea what Paris Hilton was thinking when she turned on the night vision setting of her video camera and left it to record from a nearby bookshelf. Hilton denies that she ever intended to profit commercially off the sex tape. It was sold and distributed by her ex-boyfriend, whom she had been dating during the filming of “One Night in Paris.” Hilton sued her ex-boyfriend, settling out of court for a reported $400,000. I will say that the video was released at a convenient time—three weeks before the premiere of Hilton’s new reality show, The Simple Life. Needless to say, the first season of the show was an enormous success.
But the cost of commodifying one’s embodied, narrative private is the cost of destroying the existence of the embodied, narrative private as a truly private, audience-free space. If one cannot actually be unwatched, and thus in control of one’s embodied or narrative private, the only privacy left is the mental: the untranslatable experience of existing in one’s head.
This seems like an incredibly difficult way to live. Can you imagine if your only true form of privacy, the only place where there was never an audience, was in your own mind? Of course Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan and Britney Spears ended up in rehab and prison. The paparazzi drove them into the furthest corner of their minds and left them clinging to their last shred of privacy as they were dwarfed by their own public figure. The late 2000s was a miserable time to be famous…unless you were Kim Kardashian. Say what you will about her, but she was the heavyweight champ of 2000s celebrity culture. Not only did she make a cool five million suing Ray-J for the release of her sex tape, she also made tabloid covers and didn’t fall to pieces. Kim Kardashian is many things, but she is not a felon or an addict, the two seemingly inevitable paths for 2000s starlets. This is because Kim Kardashian has a unique skill set: she is able to live with virtually no privacy.
V. KING KIM
Kim Kardashian was the first to thrive on commodifying the embodied, unwatched, and narrative private with a business move that combined all three: a sex tape. While making a sex tape is not particularly difficult to do, it is quite difficult to live with its consequences—to relinquish all privacy but the mental. By selling such a radically intimate moment of her life,8 Kim became her own paparazzo. Her press fed her own celebrity, her celebrity fed her own press, et cetera, et cetera. In this way, she became the uberpaparazzo, closing the celebrity feedback loop around herself, taking full control of her public figure by sacrificing almost the entirety of her private space.
Kim has a knack for the craft of paparazzi. She recognizes the opportunities for exploiting her own privacy as they develop through new forms of technology—and she does it at breakneck speed. Kim was one of the first to capitalize on the reality show wave, inviting cameras to live semi-permanently in her home. By sacrificing the embodied private of her household, she became a household name. Kim is one of the most followed celebrities on Twitter and Instagram. In 2014 she released Kim Kardashian: Hollywood, a free role-play game where one quite literally pretends to be Kim Kardashian. The goal of the game is to social climb through Hollywood, finally making it to the A-list. In 2015 she released Selfish, a 352-page book of her own selfies, in which she speaks candidly about how she achieved these supposedly candid looks.
Phillipe Garner says that Elio Sorci and the original wave of paparazzi photojournalists were brilliant not only in creating the medium but continuing to push the medium to its brink, “squeezing maximum mobility, flexibility, and possibility from the equipment then available.” This is precisely the genius of Kim Kardashian: moving with technology as it develops, pushing further into the layers of her privacy. When Paper Magazine released the infamous photo of Kim resting a champagne flute on her oiled ass cheeks, she “broke the internet.”
She might not have (actually) broken the internet, but she does seem to have broken the paparazzi. Celebrity pictures that scored $20,000 in the 2000s are selling for a measly 15 cents these days. Many of the smaller photo agencies that cropped up in the 2000s paparazzi boom have since folded. To be fair, this was not singlehandedly Kim’s fault. Just as the perfect storm of factors brought the paparazzi into being, the perfect storm of factors is now picking the paparazzi off. When the recession hit in 2008, people cut tabloids from their spending budgets. This was particularly easy to do considering the rise of celebrity social media accounts. Why pay five dollars for grainy pictures of Blake Lively when you could pay nothing for shots she’d taken herself? The industry’s recklessness had also finally caught up to itself, after celebrity car chases had caused so many crashes—even the death of one paparazzo. In 2010 California passed a law intensifying consequences for reckless driving in pursuit of a photo: now a paparazzo might get fined $2,500, or even receive six months in the slammer. Plus, with the increased quality and ubiquity of camera phones, there was not as much need for a squad of mercenary photographers to track celebrities through L.A. Rather, celebrity presses could outsource their work to the public.
More recently, Kim Kardashian has discovered how to outsource her work (of self-publicizing) to the paparazzi, regularly uploading paparazzi photos to her Instagram, even ones that depict her shielding her face from the cameras in an attempt to maintain the privacy of the unwatched private. The paparazzi are happy to give her their photos. “We make money off them,” says Kelly Davis, managing editor of X-17, a paparazzi agency that Kim has stolen shots from in the past. “I’m not going to bite the hands that feed us. We try to be friendly with the stars we photograph and most of them actually get along quite well with the shooters—both sides realize it’s a symbiotic relationship.” There it is again, that symbiosis of celebrity and press, cycling forever around the Kardashian clan. After commodifying her unwatched private and embodied, narrative private, Kim has planted an audience everywhere but her own head. Let the paparazzi take pictures—Kim Kardashian is always on display.
V. KING KYLIE
Kylie Jenner got Kim’s genes for both the surgically perfect curves and the primal instinct for self-commodification. Don’t get me wrong, the rest of the Kardashian family is pretty damn good at this. But only Kylie seems to possess that Kim-like knack for leaning in to technology. Just look at her Snapchat.
By instantaneously capturing and distributing her perspective of her world (which is, paradoxically, often just Kylie looking at herself), Kylie uses Snapchat to commodify the perspectival private9—the visual and auditory elements of the mental private: what Kylie sees and hears of the outside world from the privacy of her mind. Kylie has found a way to commodify an even deeper form of privacy than Kim—a slice of the mental private, the physical experience of existing in her head.
How though, is Kylie able to commodify this, considering Snapchat does not pay her directly for kylizzlemynizzl’s content?
At this point, Kylie does not need to explicitly commodify her privacy (by which I mean she does not need to receive money directly in exchange for translations of her privacy). Kylie Jenner’s life is an advertisement for Kylie Jenner. What Kylie gets out of publicizing herself is press. The Kardashians have so radically collapsed the distance between public and private that the second an object appears on or near a Kardashian’s body, it is, effectively, being advertised for. If Kylie so much as mentions she likes POM pomegranate seeds, POM will send her a gift basket with a lifetime supply. Kylie Jenner can have any material thing she desires simply by saying it out loud—thus incorporating it into the brand of Kylie Jenner, in turn advertising for the material thing. Her advertisement is its own advertisement for herself, Kylie Jenner.10
In this way, the Kardashians possess a sort of genius: both the ability to rapidly commodify their privacy, and the ability to live in only the mental private. Genius, of course, is a tricky word to use here, as to me it implies a level of intellect, which then seems to imply a level of intentionality. Underneath it all, does Kim Kardashian know what she’s doing? How is it possible that she has given up all but the mental private? Is she a sociopath? Is she so devoid of individual thought that there is simply nothing in her head? Or is that part of her master plan—to make us think she is an airhead, fully exposed, when in fact she is manufacturing this exposure? A part of me feels like Kim must know—if not on an intellectual level than at least on a gut level—exactly what game she is playing.11 A part of me imagines her peering at us from that last shred of privacy, watching us watch her watch herself in the camera in the mirror as she robs us all blind. She is Lady Godiva, riding stark naked on horseback through the streets of Los Angeles, charging us for every second we peek out the blinds.
Though in a way, everyone is sort of doing this. With the ubiquity of social media, everyone is now both public figure and paparazzi, constructing the public from shards of the private. Maybe we do not spend as much time looking at ourselves as Kylie Jenner, but perhaps that too is a thing of the past. Young people increasingly use Snapchat to communicate, sending pictures of their surroundings instead of text. Rather than spending time together in an embodied private, we spend time together virtually, by exchanging translations of our mental private—creating a new sort of mental public. While we are in the embodied private, we are now often also in the mental public: the virtual commons, where we can be alone, together.
I am not going to assign any value judgment to this statement, as I am afraid of vastly oversimplifying things. Who knows if personal technology is ruining human communication or improving it exponentially? I certainly don’t. I just mean to say, the concept of celebrity today is not the concept of celebrity from ten years ago, in part because the concept of privacy grows exponentially more layered as new forms of technology get closer to approximating the final frontier of privacy: the mental private.
I just mean to say, when I am sitting on the toilet, watching Kylie Kardashian get mobbed by her fans, which one of us is truly in private?
1. Once, while Justice was riding in a limo with her sister, Drake’s “Hotline Bling” came on the radio. “This is our SONG!” she said, squealing in utter delight, surprised that they were playing the number one hit song on a Top 40 radio station.
2. I mean, I want you to read it. So keep that in mind when you decide.
3. This is (partially) a lie. They just showed the toilet tank. The writers spent an entire week trying to write out the toilet shot after the network said no, and simply could not do it. In their defense, it was a slippery plot line: Wally and Beaver bought a tiny alligator and needed to hide it from their parents. They couldn’t keep the tiny alligator in their bedroom, since their mom would find it when she cleaned the room. They couldn’t keep the tiny alligator in the sink or the bathtub, since their parents would find it when they cleaned themselves. That’s right, the toilet was first (partially) shown on television because the writers of Leave it to Beaver were not creative enough to invent a place where two boys in the 1950s could keep a tiny alligator. (idk, the yard? perhaps a nearby brook?)
4. This quote is from a 2016 New Yorker profile of Harvey Levin, as is much of the information in Section IV.
5. The website was almost named “Buzz Feed.”
6. This will be on the test, so study up.
7. If this is the case, congratulations on conquering death and traveling through space-time to read this essay. Also congratulations on being Kant.
8. “Selling” is perhaps the wrong word here, as it ascribes intent to the distribution of Kim Kardashian’s sex tape. To be clear, Kim denies intentionally releasing the tape. She speaks about the event with regret and embarrassment. But she did make a great sum of money off a sex tape in a time when many starlets’ sex tapes were being “leaked.” It’s hard to say how intentional this was on Kim’s behalf—but what’s important is that, at the end of the day, Kim made bank off the tape, which is still on the internet, despite the fact that she could probably, by this point, have gotten it removed. Whether or not she intended to “sell” the sex tape when she made it, the point is that she “sold” it retroactively—effectively exchanging the tape’s existence for a great deal of fame and wealth.
9. Okay that was the last one, promise.
10. In the time since I first followed kylizzlemynizzl, Kylie Jenner has built a cosmetics empire by advertising through her various social media. Her Snapchat is now littered with videos of Kylie smearing eye shadow kits onto her forearm, asking customers for advice on new product names, and freaking out over Kylie Cosmetics web traffic. Kylie’s Snapchat has become an intimate new form of advertising—Kylie is able to spread the word about her business in a fully personal way. She is a friend documenting her life—which just so happens to include her cosmetics—rather than a public figure pushing her wares. Her cosmetics’ participation in her perspectival private (made public through Snapchat), adds to their value.
11. She does—the game is Kim Kardashian: Hollywood.