Have the celebrities of today become our symbolic Mommies and Daddies? Their lives consumable to the mass populous, digested, and hopefully satisfying our need for unconscious pleasure?

One of Freud’s best known theories is the Oedipus complex (that boys desire their mother and wish to kill their father) (p.99). Storey links the Little Redscape folk tale with this complex and translates it as Freud would a dream and “reveals” the true meaning. The argument Storey and Freud make is that writing is a way to “access the more profound pleasures of unconscious fantasies” (p. 100). As I was flipping through the pages of Chapter 5 I started to link this idea to our interest in the tabloids. We fetishize celebrities lives and take great pleasure and time critiquing these individuals. Why? Is it perhaps that our consumption of their lives satisfies some sexual part of us that is hidden to our conscious mind?

People such as Nikki Minaj and Brad Pitt foster mostly sexual discussion yet have become some of the role models of society. We tell and read these stories about them as if they were characters in a novel. They have become a consumable product. What about these people make us so interested in them and worth our time and money?

According to Freud, we all are suffering from a special form of amnesia and carrying around hidden wishes that we cannot deal with, “the essence of repression” (p. 95). I’m suggesting that the reason we consume celebrities lives is because their stories allow us to “symbolically play out the desires and fantasies” (p. 100) that we are unaware of. We as readers of popular culture, are not “passively accept the meaning, we are actively producing it” (p. 103) and projecting our associations onto it. Through the lens of the Oedipus Complex, Nikki Minaj and Brad Pitt are our symbolic Mothers and Fathers and our fascination with them defers or masks our fascination with our own parents.

Just an unsettling idea.