Right now, our good friend Josh has joined the throngs of media taking photos and videos of the stars making their way down the famous red carpet. Fans are screaming for them and fashion pundits are criticizing them, but what is it about these people that captivate our culture so deeply?

I think it's related to why we call them "stars" in the first place, associating them to the celestial bodies that can be seen from a distance but never touch. In both referents of the word "star," we feel their presence but we can never really experience them close up; they emanate light (through our screens or from the sky) and we easily forget that they physically exist at all.

Holding figures in heavenly regard is nothing new. Roman cultures named the planets after untouchable gods for a reason. These figures were idealized in much the same way as our culture idealizes our Hollywood stars: both the ancient gods and movie stars have the same added meaning to them, the same simulacrum of how a human being "should be." In fact, science has concluded that most of the elements that are around us and in our bodies came from early star explosions in the universe which settled in our solar system. In this way, it's easy to think of "stars" as a more pure version of our selves, and we often think of movie stars as just that.

And yet when you finally see them walking in front of you in real life, it almost feels like a let-down. They aren't the shining bodies that we somehow wish they were. They are just like us. And we desire more than what's just like us, perhaps because media and advertisement frames is that way, or maybe just because we enjoy creating fictions around our lives. Yet when you see an ET reporter's smiling face drop to a grumpy frown after he completes a take, you see the illusion that screens can project.

I definitely do not think this illusion is always bad thing, I just think we should keep it in mind.