The sibling pop group Jonas Brothers' first movie Jonas Brothers: The 3D Concert Experience has caused hysteria among millions of Jonas Brothers fans in multiplexes across the nation. Nearly a month since its release, it has sparked hundreds of copyright-infringing YouTubers to describe the aforementioned scene as “fantasy,” “beautiful,” and “the greatest seventeen seconds” of their lives.
Yet a close look at the boys’ demeanor in the film shows that they were not experiencing the same euphoria as their fans.
Joe, lead singer of the band, admitted to MTV News on February 25 that they had allowed the Disney cameramen to “film everything backstage,” but it “just happened to be our quick-change room and they caught us.”
"The thing is, we were in the midst of the show, so we were just continuing like a show," Kevin, backup vocalist and instrumentalist, explained. "So when we went backstage, we didn't realize they were there and we were changing ... we went, 'Oh my gosh! Wow! We might want to get them out of here.'”
This is not the first time the media have overstepped their boundaries, exposing aspects of celebrities’ lives that they would have rather kept private.
The pop icon Britney Spears has had to deal with the invasiveness of paparazzi for almost a decade now. Her January 2008 single, “Piece of Me” reflects her distress: “I’m Miss American Dream since I was 17/ Don’t matter if I step on the scene/ Or sneak away to the Philippines/ They still got pictures of my derrière in the magazine/… I’m Miss bad media karma/ Another day another drama.”
American law upholds the basic human right of privacy, yet somehow we as a society feel entitled to deprive celebrities of theirs.
In her book The Repeal of Reticence: A History of America's Cultural and Legal Struggles over Free Speech, Obscenity, Sexual Liberation, and Modern Art, scholar and cultural critic Rochelle Gurstein explains that “Intimate matter… because of their smallness and fragility, needed to be tenaciously guarded against curious eyes lest they be deformed.”
Charles Eliot Norton leading American author, social critic, and professor of art of the 20th Century would have agreed. In the preface to Letters of John Ruskin to Charles Eliot Norton, he mentioned that he held “with those who believe that there are sanctities in love and life to be kept in privacy inviolate.”
As Norton further explained in his book, “[v]ulgar curiosity is, indeed always alert to spy into these sanctities [of private life] and is too often gratified as in some memorable and mournful instances in recent years, by the infidelities of untrustworthy friends.” When the Jonas brothers agreed to be filmed backstage, they were no doubt aware of the transparency and vulnerability that it would entail. Yet, nowadays, apparently, dressing rooms are no longer considered to be sacred, at least for the camera. If any individual were to be standing in a famous performer’s dressing room, they would swiftly be arrested and labeled a stalker. Yet these trusted cameramen were given license to violate common courtesy for the sake of the entertainment of the masses.
Gurstein makes clear that “[te]nderness teaches us to forestall overly searching glances and to neglect harsh observations, ensuring that we never view our loved ones distanced, as in a photograph, but through a sympathetic lens that enables us to situate shortcomings within the unfolding narrative of our shared existence.” Celebrities are, in fact, viewed from a distance, and as such are treated as commodities. They are no longer mere entertainers, but entertainment themselves. Yet, as Gurstein warns, we should reconsider the “shared existence” we have with these celebrities.
Our society needs to redeem a sense of discretion, which Gurstein defines as, “the sensitivity that enables us not only to respect another person’s secrets, but also to sidestep knowing something that the person does not want us to know or does not expressly reveal to us…It is discretion that permits us to render truth about our lives sensitively, making a home for ourselves and other who are always only human and therefore not deserving of the brutality of full disclosure.” But our disregard of the humanness of celebrities helps us justify our desire to exploit them for our own selfish desires.
The Jonas Brothers and other modern celebrities have exhibited—as English lawyer, judge and writer James Fitzjames Stephen writes in Liberty, Equality, & Fraternity—this truth: “[t]hat any one human creature should ever really strip his soul stark naked for the inspection of any other, and be able to hold up his head afterwards, isn’t, I supposed impossible, because so many people profess to do it; but to lookers-on from the outside it is inconceivable.”
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