How to Publicize the Not-so-Savory Private Personas of Public Figures
The general public can be easily misled by greatness shown in public. People tend to assume that when a person acquires great fame and fortune through their own efforts, they are full of positive qualities that help them achieves the success. The abilities to lead others with compassion, to get public opinion on their side to sell themselves and their products, and to improve the world with slices of their own undoubtedly admirable personalities are almost assumed. Simply said, people think a person can achieve great things because s/he is a great person with great qualities not many others possess.
In the era of social media in which the public generates content, the myth of greatness surrounding successful individuals is finally wearing off. Elon Musk's inappropriate tweets provide plenty of dissonance with his public image as a visionary leader developing electric vehicles and sending people to Mars. Revelations about Steve Jobs' toxic private life and aggressive management style have taken a certain degree of the shine off the overall coolness of Apple products and Apple as a company. Such would have been much more difficult decades ago when providers of information tend to be much more limited and thus can be much more selective on what the public can know.
Yet, precisely because there is so much publicly available information present about any particular topic, several sometimes contradictory narrative about any subject can emerge, confusing the audience about exactly what is the truth and what is not. The threat of "post-truth world" is not limited simply to "fake news." Even when people try to learn about who a person really is beneath what s/he says and does for the public audience, the question of whose words and images are to be trusted more than others is a persistent problem that cannot be easily overcome.
In such an environment, to glorify or to vilify an individual more than the person deserves is just too easy and too susceptible for a large swath of the general public to play along with. How the general public evaluates and reacts to the over-glorification or vilification will very much depend on how they use the sometimes endless information that they have in their disposal about the individual. By scouring the public domain for what they think are the missing pieces of information not presented, they can quickly find what is wrong with the over-glorification or vilification.
The bigger problem, however, is how information should be passed to the posterity regarding the same person. While a well-known celebrity today may come with large doses of publicly available information due to inescapable public attention, the same cannot be said later on when the celebrity status wears off and the information is relegated to the dark corners of little-achieved archives. Then, it might be most widely watched media pieces, characterized by excessive glorifying or vilifying, that remains with the public. The posterity"s understanding of the past celebrities may just be so one-sided.
The movie Bohemian Rhapsody, a biopic about Queen's lead singer Freddie Mercury, may very much a case where future generations understand a complex personality through a skewed and selective presentation of information. For today's audience, familiar with Queen from their own childhood, the deficiencies of the movie might be easily recognized and accepted as cinematic necessities. But for future generations that no longer experience Queen firsthand, skewed information may be taken at face value, as an easily accessible source of historical fact regarding a largely unknown artist of the past.
Whether it is appropriate for such skewed information to be presented, advertently or inadvertently, as authoritative for a future audience unfamiliar with the subject, ought to be thought about more carefully. Yes, there is no denying that artistic flourish is needed for movies to attract a large paying audience. Clearly defining the heroes and villains in a storyline with a clear climax helps a movie sell enough tickets to justify the huge investments up front. But a movie is more than just a gimmick to make money. It records and preserves information that is quickly accessible and digestible by a large number of willing audience, qualities that books and other dense written documents cannot have.
Hence, if movies are to simply whitewash famous individuals, by glossing over or covering up their vices and otherwise detrimental qualities, they are doing a disservice to people today and in the future. How to present the sometimes unsavory reality, making a famous person "normal" in a sense of having both a positive and a negative side, require much more concerted efforts that go beyond thinking about how to maximize profit. There is no easy answer that can balance hard-to-accept truth and profiteering from the box office. But the issue will certainly become a more and more important one as truth become ever-illusive in an information-inundated environment.
In the era of social media in which the public generates content, the myth of greatness surrounding successful individuals is finally wearing off. Elon Musk's inappropriate tweets provide plenty of dissonance with his public image as a visionary leader developing electric vehicles and sending people to Mars. Revelations about Steve Jobs' toxic private life and aggressive management style have taken a certain degree of the shine off the overall coolness of Apple products and Apple as a company. Such would have been much more difficult decades ago when providers of information tend to be much more limited and thus can be much more selective on what the public can know.
Yet, precisely because there is so much publicly available information present about any particular topic, several sometimes contradictory narrative about any subject can emerge, confusing the audience about exactly what is the truth and what is not. The threat of "post-truth world" is not limited simply to "fake news." Even when people try to learn about who a person really is beneath what s/he says and does for the public audience, the question of whose words and images are to be trusted more than others is a persistent problem that cannot be easily overcome.
In such an environment, to glorify or to vilify an individual more than the person deserves is just too easy and too susceptible for a large swath of the general public to play along with. How the general public evaluates and reacts to the over-glorification or vilification will very much depend on how they use the sometimes endless information that they have in their disposal about the individual. By scouring the public domain for what they think are the missing pieces of information not presented, they can quickly find what is wrong with the over-glorification or vilification.
The bigger problem, however, is how information should be passed to the posterity regarding the same person. While a well-known celebrity today may come with large doses of publicly available information due to inescapable public attention, the same cannot be said later on when the celebrity status wears off and the information is relegated to the dark corners of little-achieved archives. Then, it might be most widely watched media pieces, characterized by excessive glorifying or vilifying, that remains with the public. The posterity"s understanding of the past celebrities may just be so one-sided.
The movie Bohemian Rhapsody, a biopic about Queen's lead singer Freddie Mercury, may very much a case where future generations understand a complex personality through a skewed and selective presentation of information. For today's audience, familiar with Queen from their own childhood, the deficiencies of the movie might be easily recognized and accepted as cinematic necessities. But for future generations that no longer experience Queen firsthand, skewed information may be taken at face value, as an easily accessible source of historical fact regarding a largely unknown artist of the past.
Whether it is appropriate for such skewed information to be presented, advertently or inadvertently, as authoritative for a future audience unfamiliar with the subject, ought to be thought about more carefully. Yes, there is no denying that artistic flourish is needed for movies to attract a large paying audience. Clearly defining the heroes and villains in a storyline with a clear climax helps a movie sell enough tickets to justify the huge investments up front. But a movie is more than just a gimmick to make money. It records and preserves information that is quickly accessible and digestible by a large number of willing audience, qualities that books and other dense written documents cannot have.
Hence, if movies are to simply whitewash famous individuals, by glossing over or covering up their vices and otherwise detrimental qualities, they are doing a disservice to people today and in the future. How to present the sometimes unsavory reality, making a famous person "normal" in a sense of having both a positive and a negative side, require much more concerted efforts that go beyond thinking about how to maximize profit. There is no easy answer that can balance hard-to-accept truth and profiteering from the box office. But the issue will certainly become a more and more important one as truth become ever-illusive in an information-inundated environment.
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