Consider this: Kevin Federline is judged harshly because he’s gotten famous not for anything he’s accomplished but because of different reasons all together. His soon-to-be wife, too, is judged harshly because her fame, though not wholly unearned, seems manufactured (her mediocre voice is made-over in the studio, her songs are written for her, and she doesn’t even seem to be quite savvy enough to have negotiated so successfully that whole virgin/whore voodoo that she (used to) do so well.)
Yet is it true that Kevin doesn’t deserve his celebrity? What does it mean to deserve celebrity anyway? One can deserve praise for doing praise-worthy things. One can deserve money (maybe) for working hard. But celebrity is praise and money only incidentally. At its essence celebrity is a role that certain people fill in our culture, willingly or no, as a screen onto which the public projects its fears, fantasies, desires, anxieties, hostilities and hopes. To be a celebrity is to be a kind of god, but not a Jesusy-kind of God, a pro-active fellow who earns His divinity through sacrifice, but more of a Greek kind of god, whose divinity is arbitrary, unearned, undeserved, and whose sacrifice isn’t chosen. It’s to be born divine because your mother was raped by Zeus in the form of a lemur; it’s to be a receptacle for humanity’s imagination because some old biddies with too much time on their hands and a pile of celestial yarn have made it so.
Kevin Federline, then, isn’t an accidental celebrity, he’s the quintessential celebrity. He’s beautiful like a Greek god (he is, really; look past the cornrows, wifebeaters, and adolescent swagger); he’s ridiculous like a god; he sleeps with lots of women; and he’s totally empty of introspection.
As a man, Kevin seems to be a failure (I’m thinking here of the babymomma and two kids he left for Britney, and then of the fact that he even had kids with Britney, who’s clearly not mature enough to be a good-enough mother). I like him as a celebrity though.
