I’m sure the millions of dollars help ease the tension a little, but being a popstar really does sound miserable.  Between recent reports of Ice Spice twerking with joyless dead-eyed monotony, Taylor Swift cancelling tours dates under credible terrorist threats, and Chappell Roan tearfully begging her own fans to back the fuck off and let her breathe a little, it appears that the all the Pop Girlies aren’t enjoying fame so much as they’re Going Through It.  This isn’t some recent phenomenon of the social media era either, which has encouraged obsessed fans to stand out in a global crowd by either viciously “defending” their Fav online or by hurling water bottles at that Fav in person, depending on which attracts the most momentary attention.  Being miserable has been a core fixture of modern pop stardom from the very beginning, which you can mostly clearly track over the course of The Beatles’ transformation in the 1960s from four goofball lads looking for a laugh to four miserable hippie chain-smokers who could no longer stand to be in a room with one another.  Culture scholars will point to earlier celebrities like Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby or Louis Armstrong as the first true popstars, but there’s something hyper-specific and extensively documented about the Beatles saga in particular that makes them feel like the Big Bang event of the modern pop landscape.  The scale & ferocity of Beatlemania will likely never be matched again in our post-monoculture era, but whenever I see how drained & defeated modern stars are by their own rabid fanbases, I always think about the Beatles cancelling all future live performances mid-career because the crowds simply did not know how to behave.

That symbolic, definitive role of The Beatles as the poster boys for popstar misery was already apparent when the band was still active.  At least, Peter Watkins saw great importance in the band’s dehumanizing level of international fame.  His 1967 film Privilege is a grim satire of Beatlemania, extrapolating a dystopian trajectory for “the youth of the future” based on how they treated the popstars of their day.  The film is set in the “near future” but only could have been made in the Swinging 60s UK, indulging in the far-out, psychedelic fashions & designs of its era while simultaneously diagnosing Beatlemania as a symptom of widespread cultural rot.  Real-life Manfred Mann singer Paul Jones stars as the fictional rock singer Steven Shorter (a lateral move in terms of flashy stage name recognition).  As the most beloved and most hassled pop singer of all time, Steven’s unremarkability as a name and as a presence is slyly mocked in the opening scenes where an endless sea of screaming teens hold up signs that simply read “STEVE!” in perfect banality.  Steve’s parade procession leads to a music video-style performance in a church, where he is handcuffed inside an onstage cage and physically rattled by his audience of orgasmic fans.  A narrator helpfully explains that the popstar’s violent stage act is designed by his handlers (more of a government propaganda agency than a mere record label) as a public service, a necessary release of tension for the attendees.  Basically, Steve is thrown to the wolves, who ravenously pick at his bones in staged concert footage that could easily double for a document of an early Beatles show if it weren’t for the jail-cell prop.  Despite being the most famous and most loved man in the world, he does not look happy to be there.

Not everything about Privilege‘s skepticism of pop music stardom still rings true.  The more we get to know Steve through the semi-romantic, semi-journalistic prying of an artist paid to paint his portrait (Swinging 60s supermodel Jean Shrimpton), the more we get to know the apparatus that puppets his cardboard-cutout personality.  The governmental project of Steven Shorter is revealed to be a long-term scheme to harness counterculture sensibilities and shepherd the youth into ultimately embracing a doctrine of Conformity.  He’s the propaganda mouthpiece for Church & State, a bread-and-circuses distraction for the masses who don’t realize they’re being manipulated by unseen councils & boardrooms.  It’s a pretty basic take on the music industry, all things considered, recalling more over-the-top productions of its era like The Apple or Lisztomania in its Free Love counterculture vs. fascistic conformity politics.  That cynicism feels increasingly reductive & dismissive in a post-Poptimism world, where disregard for mass-marketed art that appeals to teenage girls has been deemed largely misogynistic.  It’s Paul Jones’s dead-eyed, dutiful performance as Steve that adds a layer of nuance to that rote social commentary.  His abject joylessness as a non-person who’s been designated as the in-the-flesh embodiment of every living consumer’s desires & fantasies still rings true to how Top 40s pop stars interact with their public today.  The critical class may have found a way to appreciate & legitimize pop music as an artform, but pop fandoms & factions have yet to find a way to engage with their chosen Favs without draining all of the life & joy out of those popstars’ bodies.

While its intensely 60s fashions and intensely cynical thoughts on the music industry may feel extremely dated (in good ways and bad), Privilege was ahead of its time in terms of filmmaking aesthetics.  Watkins tells the tragic story of Steve the millionaire pop singer as if it were a documentary of a future event that had not yet arrived.  It’s narrated like a nature film, as if Steve’s alien characteristics are worthy of zoological study rather than human psychoanalysis.  Much of the camera work is handheld, following the fictional popstar through crowded parties and bumping into the drunken attendees, who in turn stare directly into the lens in awkward awareness of the audience on the other side.  It’s a psychedelic pop-music mockumentary version of The Truman Show, profiling a character who already knows he’s living in an artificial environment beyond his control and has grimly resigned himself to that fate without protest.  Bringing a documentarian feel into that intensely fake, plastic, semi-futuristic world makes for some great tension the movie might feel thin without, and it’s a choice that has only gotten more effective as it’s aged into a Swinging 60s time capsule in the half-century since initial release.  Steve’s visible misery as the Near-Future King of Pop has also helped preserve Privilege as something continually current & relevant, much more so than it would be if Steve actually enjoyed his job and his money as the world’s #1 idol.

Brandon Ledet