The Celebrity Pandemic: Why The Rich And Famous Can't Stop Falling On Their Faces During The Coronavirus

Editor's Note: This article first appeared in the May 2020 issue of Meme Insider, a magazine covering memes and other internet phenomena. You can subscribe here.

It started with Gal Gadot. As the first shockwaves of the coronavirus hit the western world, Gadot crooned, “Imagine there’s no heaven” into her cell phone. Other celebrities like Jimmy Fallon and Kristen Wiig followed her, each of them singing a line of John Lennon’s “Imagine” to soothe a confused and scared world entering the beginning of a lengthy quarantine -- or so they thought.

This is the point of celebrities, after all. They’re entertainers. They make movies or music or television shows. They giggle and tell anecdotes on late-night television. They date and help gossip mags sell tabloids. They don’t provide an essential service, but rather provide a distraction for their fans to momentarily escape the various hardships in their life. They’re also, usually, incredibly rich, with sums of wealth you or I will likely never achieve, a fact which becomes irritatingly clear when they video themselves in their luxurious mansions singing (in different keys, no less) one of the most irritatingly preachy songs ever penned.

The Gal Gadot “Imagine” video is atrocious, and was rightfully slammed. With thousands dying from COVID-19 globally, governments put forth “shelter-in-place” orders that essentially barred people from going outside. Businesses closed. Livelihoods were ruined. Unemployment in America hit over 10 million people. In this trying time, the last thing the public wanted to see was dozens of celebrities worth an estimated combined net worth of a gazillion dollars singing Kumbaya. People needed money and leadership, not a reminder of the vast social distance between themselves and the wealthy elite. The actors in the “Imagine” video had attempted to say “Don’t worry, we’ll get through this” to the public but only ended up saying “Don’t worry, we’ll get through this” to themselves.

Unfortunately, “Imagine” was only the first in a series of jaw-droppingly awful celebrity contributions to the coronavirus discourse. Vanessa Hudgens told viewers of her livestream that while people dying is bad, it is “also, like, inevitable?” Ellen DeGeneres made a quip comparing life in her palatial estate to prison. Priyanka Chopra shared a video of herself clapping for health care workers from her balcony overlooking a large, empty field (there were no health care workers present). Every few days it seemed a celebrity would emerge from their quarantine, prepared to provide the world their glorious, shining light, only to further underpin the gulf between the expensive, beautiful universe they live in and the panicked conditions of the rest of the world.

Usually, the intense class disparity between a celebrity and the vast majority of his/her fanbase goes largely unnoticed. The entertainment industry is a multi-billion dollar business, and most of the time, a fan is largely content to drool over the lavish and bizarre lifestyle of their idol. It’s what drives the fascination with shows like Real Housewives or Keeping Up With The Kardashians: while we ogle over the oodles of cash dripping from the expensive households and designer clothes, we also get a look inside how such privilege has turned the subjects of such shows into quasi-zoo animals, completely unequipped to deal with the realities a person making tens of thousands of dollars a year confronts every day.

This isn’t to say that all celebrities are stupid, but in the current global crisis, the regular parasocial relationship between celebrity and fan has been exposed as a deeply shallow one. Celebrities are best at entertaining, but what the public has resoundingly declared is that it is not entertainment it seeks, but relief. In her first attempt at doing her show while stuck in quarantine, Ellen DeGeneres said, “While we’re all stuck here, I wanted to help you take your mind off what’s going on in the world.” Minutes later, she said, “Quarantine is like jail in that you’re dressed the same every day and everyone here is gay.”

The backlash she received for her joke underscored the tension between fan and celebrity in the time of the coronavirus. Prisoners are at high risk for the coronavirus due to poor sanitary conditions and close living quarters. Life in a massive, beautifully decorated estate is nothing like prison, and people let her know it. There was a massive Ellen-backlash, as if the general populace said “We do not need your poorly-worded jokes, Ellen. What we could use is a sliver of your incredible amount of wealth.”

While celebrities have seemingly relished in tripping over themselves with their astounding number of coronavirus-related gaffes, it cannot be denied that their mistakes or misstatements have been amplified by an angry, confused public. Recently, pop singer Justin Timberlake received criticism for saying he and wife Jessica Biel, while blessed, were commiserating over constantly having to care for their 5-year old son. “24-hour parenting is not human,” he said in an interview with Sirius XM. Once the clip got out, the responses from social media were as expected. “You guys have one kid and millions of dollars. I’m going to lose it,” said one particularly viral response.

Nevertheless, as outraged tweets were sent and juicy rage-click headlines were written, a small but noticeable schism developed in the public response. Some commenters were on Timberlake’s side. “Any honest parent will tell you the same thing,” said one commenter. “Not having space from your kid is hard. Batteries need to be recharged.”

The schism marked the first break in the Corona-gaffe media economy that has come to define entertainment journalism in recent weeks. In the face of a global crisis that finds parents either struggling to simultaneously work from home and raise their children or panicked about their next paycheck, a complaint about parenting in an isolated Montana second home does seem petty. On the other hand, parenting, no matter how many millions of dollars one has, is a difficult job. And beyond all that, with the public desperate for someone to turn their frustration towards, any slightly miscalculated statement becomes another news story. “In any other time, we’d let this slide,” one commenter remarked.

As the coronavirus pandemic drags on, there are sure to be more celebrity gaffes as the famous among us attempt to help others by doing the only thing they know how to do: entertain. But before you fire off an angry tweet, consider that celebrities are also people attempting to do their best in an incredibly difficult situation. This isn’t to say that every well-intentioned gaffe isn’t worthy of criticism, and most celebrities could very well avoid any public pitfalls with media silence and healthy charitable donations to coronavirus relief efforts, but these are still people, simultaneously facing the same struggles you and I are while also living a vastly more scrutinized--and privileged--life. In short, we can afford to be a little nicer, and celebrities can afford a little more silence and a lot more financial aid.