Celebrity Memory

& Troubled
Identifications

DR. WILL KURLINKUS

Theory Narration Expectations: Nov. 23
1. Is a video
2. Cognitive Treadmill: moves quickly from one slide and image to the next with constant narration
(narration should be well-scripted but sound natural when read). Generally switching images, slides,
video clips every 20 seconds or less.
3. Poses a question/mystery that it then answers
4. Deals with some “theory” of memory (a new term or idea) and quotes at least one memory theorist
5. Illustrates that theory using clear and interesting examples
6. Good video essays define new terms and concepts for their viewers. You must do this as well. Yours
must include critical education and analysis. You must break your audience’s guessing
machine=new, non-common, information. Makes me say, “Oh, I didn’t know that.”
7. Is image, infographic, and videoclip driven with only a few key quotes, titles, and words smattered in.
8. Written for a popular YouTube audience beyond me
Key Questions of Celebrity, Memory, and
Identification
• What do we do when the celebrities we loved growing up are found to be monsters?
• “How do I reconcile aesthetic pleasure with moral disgust? Which of my feelings will win? What do I do with art I
love that was created by a monster?”
• This is especially hard for those minority groups who don’t have as many other celebrities to look up to. Cliff
Huxtable on the Cosby show was one of the only black doctors on TV.
• What is the complex mixture of feelings that we feel?
• “I loved this movie. It made me feel all kinds of deep and profound teenage feelings, and those feelings were
real and I could not unfeel them. But now, whenever I thought about Johnny Depp, I felt a deep and profound
disgust, a moral outrage. That was a real feeling too, and I couldn’t unfeel it either.”
• Movies, music, comedy, and media are a key part of identity formation growing up.
• Can we still enjoy their work? Can we separate the artist from their art? (this is “new criticism” focusing
on the art and only the art or is the art a assemblage by multiple creators-–the postmodern view or
should we consider the artist’s autobiography, the new historicist point of view). Is it the art or our
reading of it that is transformative? Money—whose getting paid?
Who is your favorite celebrity
and why is s/he your favorite?
How has this person contributed
to your identity?

Have you experienced the

identity shift of a failed celebrity?