Review: Starsuckers

‘Starsuckers’ is the new documentary film by Chris Atkins, (Director of the Blair-baiting polemic ‘Taking Liberties’) which created a bit of a stir at the London Film Festival both by preleasing clips of tabloid journalists offering cash for trash stories about celeb boob-jobs, whilst being simultaneously sued by Max Clifford. The Guardian particularly loved the exposé of tabloid malpractice which chimed with the work of their reporter Nick Davies (who himself appears in the film).

The film is a jaunty, if uneven, investigation into the public’s, apparently insatiable, appetite for celeb gossip, alongside the media’s manipulation of this rather unsavoury diet. And it has a number hits: Clifford filmed secretly boasting about news stories he’s fabricated and covered up, examples of the seepage of ‘celebrity news values’ (or rather lack of them) into the reporting of politics, the corresponding movement of celebrities themselves into politics and a meticulously researched critique of the grossly smug Live8 concerts, which will doubtless have Bob Geldof’s apparatchiks vetting Youtube for years to come. Ultimately, however, the film’s guiding thesis, that celebrity is used by the media to control the masses, is both too obvious and too reductive to be especially interesting.

At a cinematic level it also suffers from a grating voiceover, intended to represent the media as a whole, but which seems more like a gimmick used to disguise an intrinsic lack of faith in the film’s own suppositions. Perhaps unsurprisingly this voiceover tends to vanish during the strongest sections in which ‘good old fashioned’ news reporting, truth as the voice of authority, takes over.

It’s a pity ‘Starsuckers’ is so hit and miss because as the media shifts into a digital age something fascinating is happening, not simply in the dispiriting thought that our main news sources are now PR companies and press officers rather than journalists, but in the distinction between media and the general public, and between the public figure and the private citizen.

As regards the media overall? Personally I’m with Baudrillard’s assessment (from a book first published in 1985 – no, there’s no new news)― ‘We should agree neither with those who praise the beneficial use of the media, nor with those who scream about manipulation, for the simple reason there is no relation between a system of meaning and a system of simulation’.

The net result for individuals, as he saw it, was ‘stupor; a radical uncertainty as to our own desires, our own choices, our own opinions, our own will. This is the clearest result of the whole media environment, of the information which makes demands on us from all sides and which is as good as blackmail.’

Stay tuned for The Third Estate’s exclusive interview with director Chris Atkins, coming to a computer screen near you tomorrow…