Celebrity Worship Syndrome

Synonyms:
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Celebrity Worship Syndrome is a when a person becomes overly involved with the details of a celebrity's personal and professional life.

What constitutes "overly involved" is a matter of discussion.

This article has a focus of the elements of these behaviors, and an approach of how it affected socially fandom, fans, and fanworks, rather than one of medical, legal, and psychological aspects.

The page's focus is on fanworks created in response, fan discussion about their image in the bigger world, how examples affected their fan community, and the sometimes fine line between accepted and unexpected fan behavior.

Some Related Terms

Note: the mentions below does not mean these activities are a form of "celebrity worship syndrome," only that they can, like many things, have elements of it when taken too far. Too far is open to interpretation and is a form of fannish discourse.

• Actor Fans
• Anti-fan
• Fans on Sets
• Groupie
• RPF
• Stan
• Violating the Fourth Wall

Two Early High-Profile Cases

While "celebrity worship syndrome" has many earlier presidents, as well as many more examples, the two below were very-high profile, and were what put the activity on the in the public eye.

• John Lennon and Mark David Chapman (December 1980)
• Reagan and John Hinckley Jr. (March 1981)

A Form of "Good Fan," "Bad Fan"

See Good Fans and Bad Fans.

Giving Fans and Fandom a Bad Name

Fans are often aware of their public image and of being represented as odd, obsessive, childish, and worse.

A fan in 1981 wrote about attending an event in which William Shatner attended, The William Shatner Fan Fellowship Weekend, and she described in detail about Shatner's comments about the health of one of his dogs :

I believe that every single person in that room relived that time with Bill and I feel that it told us a great deal about him as a person. Part of this hour was being filmed by ABC TV who are doing a film on fandom, following the assassination of John Lennon and then the attempted assassination of President Reagan both by 'fans'. I hope that the footage they got from the Weekend showed that fans are reasonable, polite and quite sane people and that it is in fact only a fraction of a percent that are 'fanatics' to the point of lunacy.

We, in fandom, have for some time suffered from 'bad press'. Our sole consolation has been to shrug and say, "They don't really know us." Recently, however, someone well-nigh in the center of fandom, Sonni Cooper, president of the William Shatner Fan Fellowship, has shown that a low opinion of fans is not confined to the uninformed. In her column "Public Image" (The Center Seat, June '81) she wrote an article that seemed to me one sided, patronizing, and tinged with Hollywood paranoia. I quote, in part:

"Accepting the public image of fandom is difficult, but not entirely undeserved. An attempt was made on the president's life, and John Lennon was murdered by a fan. How can we make the public understand that these people are mad and incidentally fans? Must we always be in the shadow of the "fanatic" from which the word fan is derived?"

Related Fanworks

Some examples of fanworks that address this behavior.

Fiction

• Secret Admirer by Ciana Sepulveda ("Just as Kirk and Spock begin a love affair, Kirk begins receiving gifts from a secret admirer.) (1995)

Fan Discussion

1980

Shortly before the club, Mark Lenard International Fan Club, folded, Mark Lenard attended a con in his honor, NonCon. By several accounts, some fans had been too intense and inappropriate which made him, and others, uncomfortable. From a fan's letter in the last issue of Despatch:

I knew at NONCON that it was the beginning of the end. But you two are not to blame. You both have done a fantastic job, and I agree, it was taking too much of your lives. I can also see Mark's point of view and that of his family. Especially in light of what happened to John Lennon recently. At NONCON, I was shocked and a little frightened at the lengths some people go to for attention - and how ugly they can talk if they think they have been slighted. I was also embarrassed at the harassment Mark endured, and ashamed at the indignities of a few in our group - and very upset about some of the nasty remarks I heard.

1981

Accepting the public image of fandom is difficult, but not entirely undeserved. An attempt was made on the President's life, and John Lennon was murdered by a fan. How can we make the public understand that these people are mad and incidentally fans?

When the media gets on their 'all fans are demons and/or crazy cultists' they don't bother to say: "All Jody Foster fans are blankity, blankity, blankity." They say ALL fans.

Then our last hour with Mr. Shatner at [ The William Shatner Fan Fellowship Weekend ]. This session opened with him talking quite a while to a young lady who had dogged his tracks during his tour last summer, thereby making him feel very uneasy. After he had explained how unnerving it can be to see the same face popping up at you all the time; the young woman exclaimed that he should not make people fall in love with him. Mr. Shatner explained very carefully that it was not he who did anything. The persons themselves fell in love or thought they did with a creation of their own making. The young lady then proved his point for him by telling him that he didn't even look like William Shatner; he wasn't tall enough, his shoulders are not as broad as they should be and that he was thinner than Captain Kirk. The rest of us assured him that we were certain he IS William Shatner.

1993

From a fan complaining about RPF, specifically Blake's 7 RPF:

Fantasies are the private property of the individual. So, the constitutional right to privacy gives you the "right" to write about real people by denying the that same right to privacy to your subjects. Hmmm...

[...]

Obviously fantasies CAN NOT be censored. Just ask John Hinkley. Shooting the president was not a fantasy; it was a fantasy inspired crime. For that matter, just ask me, I'd be doing 20 years to life for some of the situations and people (yes, plural in the same fantasy) I've had on top... er... with Martin Shaw. But, I don't claim some kind of right to write the story.

1997

From a fan discussing an X-Files RPF story called The Murder of Tea Leoni, and brings up the idea of fiction as an escape valve:

If Agent Dare didn't have SOME place to express herself regarding these feelings, she might have actually freaked and started stalking Leoni. However, taking the time necessary to churn out that story and post it up here was like counting to ten. She got it out of her system and can go back to her job as a postal worker or whatever she does IRL, and nobody got killed.

I'm being facetious, but there might be someone ELSE out there who's less together than Dare, and they might NEED a release of some sort to keep from becoming the next John Hinckley. Remember he tried to kill Reagan to impress Jodie Foster. If there had been an active "alt.movies.Jodie-foster.creative" out there in the middle eighties, maybe Brady could still use his legs today. You never know. =)

2006

Sure, we can sit in the fannish community and say that the person who transitions from Fan to Insane!Fan is one in 10,000; and the person who transitions from Insane!Fan to Stalker!Fan is one in 10,000 of those. But it only takes one of those to affect an individual author.