Why it’s hard to see celebrities as real people

Despite their fame, celebrities are just people – but Rob Long has difficulty recognising them as such

When Rob Long heard Kim Kardashian had been robbed in Paris, he didn't react the way his friends expected (Larry Busacca/Getty Images/AFP)

Let me begin with a confession: I am not, it turns out, a very nice person.

When I first heard the news that Kim Kardashian, the international Twitter and Instagram sensation – among other notorieties – was robbed at gunpoint in her Paris apartment, I giggled. My lunch companions shook their heads.

“This isn’t funny, Rob,” they said. “They put a gun to her head. They tied her up.”

I laughed again. I couldn’t help it.Yes, I know: that’s a callous and cold-hearted response. But the entire story just seemed so hilariously unlikely, such an organic part of the entire Kardashian Attention-Seeking Complex, that my initial response wasn’t, as I was informed by my lunch companions, the morally correct one. It was an involuntary response based on my instinctive feeling that Kim Kardashian is not, in the traditional sense, a real person.

The facts are these: Kim Kardashian was in a Paris apartment – it’s unclear if it’s one she owns or just one of those swank residences that famous people are allowed to occupy occasionally. Armed robbers, dressed as police officers, forced their way inside and tied her up at gunpoint. They locked her in a bathroom and then made off with about US$10 million (Dh 37 million) worth of jewellery.

If you replace the name “Kim Kardashian” in the paragraph above with pretty much any other name, the entire episode takes on a more alarming tone. If you replace her name with something generic and bland – “housekeeper”, say, or “an elderly woman” – suddenly your sympathies are fully engaged.

Or mine would be, anyway. But as I confessed at the outset, I’m clearly a monster of a human being. My first reaction was to giggle, which evolved into a staccato kind of laugh until it was silenced by the looks of disappointment and condemnation on the faces of my friends.

I offered up an excuse. Here she is, I said, one of the most famous women on the planet, a high-fashion reality television personality with a world-famous rap star husband, a person who craves the spotlight and relentlessly seeks it out, someone who has turned the day-to-day events of her private life into fodder for a television series – and I’m supposed to discern through the haze of flashbulbs and tabloid stories and racy magazine covers and lurid family goings-on that she’s a real flesh and blood person, just like you and me?

Okay, obviously I know that in some intellectual way, but it’s hard to keep it top of mind. It was hard for me not to think that this was just a fictional episode in a fictional character’s life, like the time Spiderman’s uncle died or the moment when Luke Skywalker learned the true identity of his father. I should know better, of course. I’ve been working in Hollywood, alongside some of the most famous people on earth for 25 years.

I’ve walked alongside movie stars as they’ve attracted stares and points and autograph-seekers. I’ve seen, up close, the difference between the public image and private reality of a celebrity’s life. But since I’ve never met Kim Kardashian – and in this way I’m like most people – it was easy to forget that she appears on a television show, but isn’t a television show herself. Her life, on television, seems unscripted and spontaneous only because it’s a totally scripted and planned-out thing. When armed thieves broke into her Parisian digs, it’s almost as if they passed through the proscenium arch – they became actors in the continuing reality show that is Kim Kardashian’s life. The whole event, when I first learned of it, seemed like a plot twist, which is why my first reaction was to laugh gleefully. Finally, I thought, this show is getting interesting.

It took four or five of my friends to pull me back to reality and remind me that while many, many events of Kim Kardashian’s life are content-generation machines for her reality television show, being assaulted and threatened at gunpoint was clearly not one of them, and a good person of moral character would know that. I was suitably ashamed.

Less than an hour later, though, I was back to my old, bad self. A friend of mine looked up from his computer and announced, “Hey, did you hear that Lindsay Lohan’s finger got chopped off?”

The facts are these: Lindsay Lohan, the troubled starlet who has been a fixture of the tabloids since her early teenage years, had her finger nearly sheared off in a boating accident off the Turkish coast. Doctors, luckily, were able to re-attach the finger. Lohan is fully recovered and back to business, which we know because she’s posting updates on Instagram.

My reaction when I heard the news – and I am not proud of myself, okay? – was to emit a fast, loud, mirthful bark.

Lindsay Lohan is a real person, with a real finger. She’s as real, in her way, as Kim Kardashian is. Both of them suffered real hurt – in Lindsay’s case, bloody real – and only an unredeemable monster would react the way I did. But in my defence, faced with all of these tabloid-favorite celebrities Tweeting and Instagramming and broadcasting their every move, maybe becoming a callous spectator is the most rational reaction.

Rob Long is a writer and producer in Los Angeles

On Twitter: @rcbl