The first one I saw was probably my best one. It was a grey winter’s day in London, and I was visiting the David Hockney exhibition at the National Portrait Gallery. Looking at a self-portrait, I felt a presence over my right shoulder – a short, older man with a shock of grey hair. I did a double take. Dustin Hoffman! Or someone who looks a lot like him? No, it’s definitely him. Of Tootsie fame. Of Marathon Man fame, the film I was made to watch in fifth form Media Studies class.

I think (quite unkindly) he’s much shorter than I thought. Also: god, he’s looking old. We were in the close quarters of an intimate exhibition room and made brief eye contact. As I took the tube home, I triumphantly texted everyone I know who might care that I saw Dustin Hoffman today. 

Since then, I have spotted Charli xcx twice in the same East London bookstore. On separate occasions since, I saw Olivia Rodrigo and Lily-Rose Depp both a stone’s throw away from that same bookstore. I walked past the guy who played Dean Thomas in the Harry Potter films (Alfred Enoch) in my local park, wearing an inexplicable 80s-style polyester jumpsuit. In Soho, I rudely pointed directly at Andy Serkis to alert my friends of his presence. I have also been in the same pub as English actor James Norton on two different occasions, and saw Phoebe Waller-Bridge pushing a pram through the uneven ground of Hackney Marshes. In Richmond, my friend and I walked past Greta Gerwig frowning in concentration at whatever was playing through her headphones.

But my pièce de resistance is that I have run past Paul Mescal twice along Regent’s Canal, and can confirm the rumours are true – he can indeed be spotted in little shorts, like all those paparazzi photos. All I need to complete the collection is to see someone from Love is Blind UK and Steve Coogan.

These instances of celebrity spotting have become the top-of-the-agenda subject of my catch-ups with friends. I update them on who I have seen since we last met, and they listen patiently. Sometimes with real excitement, but mostly with feigned interest.

Perhaps my giddiness is unbecoming. I should act more like the French, who, as Rachel Kushner recounts in her essay on fame, act casually when there is a celebrity in their midst. I should stare straight through the famous amongst us and wryly enquire, “who?” 

I want to tell you that I am not usually someone who would care; I have no interest in gossip mags and I never watched an episode of Keeping Up With the Kardashians. But now I am in the land where they more frequently are, the power of the celebrity has a mysterious grip over me. 

And I’m not alone. To understand their power and pull, cultural theorists like Richard Dyer and P David Marshall have examined celebrity as a social and political construct – arguing that they uphold certain political ideologies or cultural ideals, such as the symbol of female beauty (i.e. Margot Robbie) or of capitalist success (i.e. Oprah Winfrey).

Philosopher and gender theorist Judith Butler has described how their parents, Jewish refugees fleeing the Second World War, assimilated into their new home and evaded further persecution by conforming to the American ideals of the time – which involved directly imitating the likes of Hollywood icons Clark Gable and Ava Gardner in order to survive.  

These days, the lives of the rich and famous loom even larger in our psyche. As sociologist Chris Rojek notes, they fulfil a somewhat spiritual role in our increasingly secular and commerce-driven society. As traditional public figures – like political leaders, and more historically, religious and military leaders – fade in influence, our media-driven economy has turned our attention towards the celebrity figure, who now provides us with emotional and spiritual leadership.

As a consequence, celebrities can have outsized influence on public opinion and politics, for better or worse. Nicki Minaj, for example, received global backlash for publicly claiming the Covid-19 caused impotency in her cousin, whose testicles had become swollen after inoculation. More recently, a lot is being said about the influence Taylor Swift’s endorsement of Kamala Harris might have on the election.

As economist Tyler Cowen explores in their seminal book What Price Fame?, the celebrity of today is best understood as a sophisticated public commodity. They exist to be bought and sold, hawking their wares beyond their original talent that originally brought them to public prominence.

Just look at Selena Gomez’s Rare Beauty makeup brand (and the countless celebrity beauty brands alongside it), or Snoop Dogg’s numerous branding ventures (the most recent being his own brand of breakfast cereal). As they roll out skincare line after weight loss supplement after overpriced vagina jade egg, celebrities start to resemble a commodity more than a person. In doing so, their humanity becomes lost on us. 

Ever since I was young, I have consumed media that evinces the plight of the celebrity, posing it as an experience troubled by loneliness, isolation and inevitable exploitation. My childhood bedroom walls were adorned with posters ripped from Creme and Girlfriend magazines, featuring glamour shots of Jesse McCartney, Steps, and one Ms Spears (my most favourite popstar at the time).

Britney Spears’ Lucky, with the lyrics “she’s so lucky, she’s a star, but she cry, cry, cries in her lonely heart,” told the story of a “Hollywood girl” who had seemed to have everything but whose “tears [still] fall at night.” Fame: it’s not all what it’s cracked up to be, we are routinely told. 

What’s more, by passing the famous on the street, observing them going about their daily, private tasks, we burst the bubble of artifice that surrounds the celebrity, revealing someone a bit more normal. They, too, must navigate a pram through uneven, grassy ground, and run laps around the park each morning to keep fit. However, forming an argument about celebrity spotting that goes along the lines of “celebrities: they’re just like us!” is not useful. This framing only serves celebrities' relatability – and subsequently, their selling power – and does little to illuminate what is going on with us. The normies, the hoi polloi, the non-famous. 

Jean Baudrillard, observing the rapidly media-saturated and commercialised nature of the late-twentieth century, framed Hollywood as a “simulacrum.” In other words, a copy of something that does not actually exist in reality. Hollywood, much like Disneyland, represents more of an idea or a feeling, rather than the actual neighbourhood in central Los Angeles.

Baudrillard argues that these simulacra – representations that have become so distorted and exaggerated that they no longer represent anything real – create hyperreal environments in which the real and the artificial collapse, and we can no longer distinguish the two. Think, for example, of your Instagram feed: these frozen images of aesthetic perfection are actually simulations of reality, but we experience them as the authentic lives of people much better off than us. The celebrity is a resident of the hyperreal; they are people, yes, but in their most seductive and aspirational forms, our image of a celebrity has little to do with the original individual. 

Hyperreal spaces such as Hollywood, often constructed in films by movie stars, exist in our imagination as highly polished versions of the human experience, without the friction and discomfort of our real lives. Daily life can be a drag – we have dishwashers to unload, noisy neighbours to put up with, and are sometimes late for the bus. Celebrities purport a vision in which all those micro human nightmares are solved. 

So, when I spot a celebrity in my neighbourhood, my heart quickens a bit, and my world compresses into a tunnel through which I see them and only them, and the inertia of daily life fades away for a moment. But why do I care? I don’t really like Dustin Hoffman, and like many older men with too much money, power, and fame, he’s behaved abysmally.

It did not really matter who he was. The most important thing about him was that he was someone. And my proximity to him felt as though the glamour was rubbing off on me. I was in the place where the notable and important were, so did that mean I might be a little bit important too? Being in the presence of the famous makes you feel you are in the right place at the right time, and that your life choices have been discerning and precise to lead you here. Well done, you. 

I have begun to collect my celebrity sightings much like someone collects stamps or novelty cat magnets. In our climate of over-consumption, where one must buy certain things to feel relevant, I have begun to trade in the market of celebrities, who themselves have become commodities. My collection of celebrities is my own version of conspicuous consumption wherein I convey my new international and metropolitan lifestyle, to distinguish my new way of living from my old one – back home in Aotearoa New Zealand. 

In Aotearoa, I had never seen a celebrity. Actually, I lie: I had walked past Lorde a few times. But she doesn't really count if you grew up near her. A friend of mine once saw Benedict Cumberbatch in a bar on Ponsonby Road, and I claimed it as my brag.

In my new London locale, my accumulation of sightings – and my incessant boasting of these sightings – speaks to celebrities as stand-ins for not only our shared social anxieties, but also our inner insecurities. Perhaps I boast about my proximity to the famous because I am anxious about my life choices. Am I in the right place in life? Well, Greta Gerwig is here, so I must be! 

Other than revealing our social and economic insecurities, a corporeal encounter with the famous can provide some unexpected respite from our hyper-online world. For a moment, seeing some famous – in the flesh – loosens the exhaustion of exclusively absorbing simulacra (on our phones, on the big screen, on billboards, even on the sides of buses).

Baudrillard has named this tired feeling the “desert of the real”: instances where media saturation has sucked out any genuine experience of truth, leaving us to feel a profound sense of disaffection as a result. However, by spotting a celebrity going about their lives, separated from the fabricated glamour and drama of Hollywood, we pierce the digital artifice – even if just for a few seconds.

We are well aware of the alienation that being hyper-online causes. But when you’re inundated with human perfection through media representations of famous people, it’s easy to forget that these are just that – representations, not reality.

So, as I walked past Greta Gerwig in her cute denim jumpsuit, her frown of concentration forming lines on her forehead much like my own, I remember that everything I had seen of her up until that moment was a simulation, a copy of a copy of a copy of this original version before me. I sighed in relief, momentarily liberated from the spurious and artificial. This feeling is addictive, so I continue to amass my collection. Apparently you can spot Keira Knightley at a cafe called Towpath just down the canal from me, so I better swing by.