What Gwyneth Can Teach Us About The Ballerina Farm Profile
Image is everything!
Celebrity profiles promise an insider’s peek into the lives of our parasocial besties, but celebrity profiles are not unvarnished records of objective truths; they are stories. And these stories are written by people making choices. About questions, about framing, about public interest. So when we talk about celebrity profiles, we’re talking about a smorgasbord of factors as much as we’re talking about the celebrity herself.
Despite the variable of human choice though, most profiles follow a few tried and true scripts.
There’s America’s sweetheart “gobbling,” “scarfing,” and “inhaling” cool girl foods like pasta, cheeseburgers, and donuts as she entrances all onlookers with her charisma and beauty.
She drifted into the dining room followed not so much by a cloud of glitter but by some subtler, more effable magic. A force. A presence. Someone who was born to turn heads. “So sorry I’m late!” she breathed with her trademark grin, as she sat down five minutes early and promptly slathered a waiting roll with butter before popping a bite into her mouth. The ghost of jasmine floated towards me. “Oooh we MUST split the lasagna. You’ll die - it’s my favorite.” I had no choice but to acquiesce.
There’s the celebrity profile that feels like a gentle version of trolling - or what
calls the “lancing” profile (see here).There’s the celebrity profile used pretty much exclusively as advertisement (see here).
There’s the celebrity profile intended to usher in a celebrity’s rebirth (or at least a reborn image) (see here).
And on increasingly rare occasions, there’s the celebrity profile that belies a stunning lack of publicist presence and/or guidance (see here)!
What’s rarest of all is a celebrity profile that breaks through the shellack of celebrity itself and offers the reader a glimpse into a new perspective: on the celebrity, her industry, her power, or (as in this case), the celebrity’s body (and all that it communicates).
My favorite profile of all time is probably Taffy Brodesser-Akner’s profile of Gwyneth Paltrow, which manages to provide brilliant social commentary, cultural criticism, and what feels like a true look into Paltrow’s world (or at least the corner of her world that Paltrow chose to show her). Brodesser-Akner considers the impact of Paltrow’s celebrity, the scope of her influence, the financial drivers of her success, and insightfully interrogates what fuels our fascination with Paltrow and her rarefied Goop-y kingdom. It’s a true tour de force.
I’ve written two profiles, the experience of which made me understand firsthand how many individual choices go into covering a celebrity. There is no such thing as truly objective journalism, and celebrity profiles are no exception. First, there’s the subjectivity of the writer herself. In the writing of one profile, my background as a chronicler of momfluencer culture significantly shaped not only my questions, but the arc of the piece itself. And in the writing of the other profile, my burgeoning awareness of diet culture and fat phobia made it nearly impossible for me to focus on anything BUT those themes within profile. But I was not the only one person making choices. There were also several editors with their own biases, motivations, and professional mandates; there were publicists mediating access; there were, of course, the celebrities themselves; there was audience interest; and lastly, there were the photographers.
The recent NYT profile of Hannah Neeleman might not have offered longtime Ballerina Farm followers any fresh perspective on white maternal ideals or the multibillion dollar momfluencer industry, and we have no way to know what sort of access the writer had (or what the parameters of her assignment entailed). But the photographs accompanying the piece offer a very clear perspective, which I want to talk about!