Attack of the celebrity blogs

From Rosie's ramblings to Melanie Griffith's cringe-inducing memos to herself, the rich and famous are increasingly exposing themselves online. Why?

By Stephanie Zacharek

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March 19, 2005 | There's a theory that no one keeps a diary unless he or she wants it to be read, which is as good an explanation as any for the popularity of blogging. For the people who write them, blogs are a means of self-expression first and foremost, but they also reinforce an individual's sense of being part of a community. Even more important, they're a rudimentary form of validation: I'm being read, therefore I am.

All that goes for civilian bloggers, regular, average types who would be invisible and unknown to us if we didn't read their blogs. But it doesn't begin to explain why Melanie Griffith, minor celebrity and, let's not forget, at one time an incredibly charming actress, would feel compelled to share her tips on connecting with her inner self, complete with a form letter that goes

Dear Inner Self,

Melanie

Celebrities are different from you and me, and their blogs are different, too, if only because they open additional windows onto people we already assume we know. You many not have wanted to know that Griffith writes letters to her inner self. (I wonder if she uses the good stationery?) But of all the things Griffith might choose to reveal about herself -- from plastic-surgery denials to affirmations about the strength of her marriage to Antonio Banderas -- what kind of balls does it take to post something as ridiculous and as embarrassingly intimate as a form letter to one's psyche? For those who have become tired of celebrity overload (although the ever-increasing glut of big-pictures-no-text celebrity-poop magazines suggests that there might not be many who are), celebrity blogs are a welcome antidote -- they put us, the consumer, in the driver's seat. No one is flashing melaniegriffith.com in our face; if we find ourselves going there, it's our own damn fault.

There are as many different types of celebrity blogs as there are celebrities: We have blogs from celebrities who have fallen out of the spotlight and who want back in, at least in some marginal way (Rosie O'Donnell); blogs from celebrities who are too big to need blogs but who still maintain them, at least in some cursory faction, to maintain the illusion of intimacy with their fans (Gwen Stefani); blogs from celebrities who actually seem to enjoy recording their thoughts about mundane day-to-day activities and manage to do it in a conversational, entertaining way (Moby); blogs from celebrities who feel strangely compelled to lecture us on the meaning of the universe (Fred Durst); blogs from celebrities who feel strongly about politics (Barbra Streisand); and, most fascinating -- and most readable -- of all, a blog from an actor whom few of us have thought much about in recent years but who has become a kind of touchstone for many people in the readersphere who are simply attempting to do what they want to do with their lives and finding it more difficult than they ever imagined (Wil Wheaton, who appeared in "Stand by Me" as a child actor and in "Star Trek: The Next Generation" as a teenager, and then seemingly dropped off the Earth's surface).

In an era when celebrities already carry so much currency, and get so much ink and so many TV pixels, why should they want to bother to communicate with us directly? Sometimes celebrity blogs, updated lackadaisically if ever, feel like nothing so much as a publicity stunt. (Stefani's blog is filled with boring stuff along the lines of "Thanks for coming out to our tsunami benefit" -- falsely noble and eminently unreadable. A Stefani fashion blog would be much more fun, and more honest.) Some celebrities, like KISS's (Gene Simmons,) are at least forthright about their intentions: "Appeared on CNN ShowBiz today with FABIO to shill for my MR. ROMANCE television series," he writes with joyous crassness in his entry for March 15.

Next page: Moby channels the Beatles; Jeff Bridges, John Lennon