By Dessa Bayrock (The Cascade) – Email
Print Edition: January 11, 2012
I’m the first to admit that celebrity culture is overrated, but whether we like it or not, musicians and actors help set the standard for what is socially acceptable. There are some stars we can only hope have less influence than others (I’m thinking especially of any Teen Mom episode), but all in all, celebrities can’t help but be considered role models. Think of any standard tween room, plastered with the Biebs’ signature swoosh or Taylor Swift’s shy grin. Every kid, at some point, wants to be a rock star. These are the people they look up to.
For the most part I am completely okay with this: secretly I harbour dreams of becoming Ryan Gosling’s best friend and playing in Taylor Swift’s backup band. I believe, however, that celebrity culture, as a whole, moves kind of like a flock of birds – no one celebrity has the power to influence in particular, but the motions they make as a group certainly do.
To stop beating around the bush, Katy Perry and Russell Brand filed for divorce this Christmas season, after just fourteen months of marriage. Divorce in the celebrity world is hardly anything new, but for some reason Brand and Perry’s split hit me particularly hard.
They’ve always been a bit of an unlikely couple, but always completely committed to making it work: as Brand told Ellen DeGeneres just this past December, “I am married to Katy perpetually. Until death do us part was the pledge. I am still alive.” Yet, citing “irreconcilable differences” (a vague excuse if I’ve ever heard one), the two parted ways by the end of that same month.
Hanging Brand and Perry out to dry might seem unfair, especially since I don’t hold Kim Kardashian (whose marriage lasted a mere 72 days) up to the same moral measuring stick – but I expected this from Kardashian. Katy, Russell – I’m frankly disappointed in you.
In short, marriage used to mean something. Considering soaring divorce rates, I guess it was naïve of me to think it still should, especially on a celebrity level. Maybe permanency is out-dated and old-fashioned, but putting less than or barely a year into a marriage just seems like a joke. I understand that relationships go south all the time, but the point of marrying someone is committing to work through the sour parts. It just seems downright lazy not to.
Like I said, it might be unfair to hold any celebrity up to that standard, and maybe I should thank them for contributing to the 30 per cent of marriages that don’t make it, so us everyday people can be part of the seventy per cent who do. On the other hand, might it be fair to blame our constantly divorcing and remarrying celebrity role models for the skyrocketing divorce rate in the first place?
All in all, maybe I’ve just been reading too many issues of US weekly and People Magazine in the break room at work, but Perry and Brand’s divorce was the downer of my holiday season. In the same way eggnog disappears from store shelves in the post-holiday season, nothing lasts forever any more, no matter how unwilling I am to let it go.
