The Year of Charitainment

By James Poniewozik

At Manhattan's Supper Club, Angelina Jolie--humanitarian, Oscar winner, erstwhile wearer of a vial of Billy Bob Thornton's blood--is scheduled to speak about Sierra Leone. It's a benefit dinner for Witness, a group that has been chronicling abuses in the war-torn African country--slaughter, rape, the drafting of child soldiers. So, naturally, a swarm of cameras are there to get her take on the big issue of the day: Isn't she, like, totally excited that Brad Pitt has decided to adopt her two kids?

Jolie ducks questions from the reporters, who instead corner actor Tim Robbins and singer and Witness co-founder Peter Gabriel, among other high-profile guests. The event is covered by Entertainment Tonight, Extra and The Insider, TV shows that do not generally report on internecine bloodshed in sub-Saharan Africa when it is not connected to the woman who hooked up with her married co-star in Mr. & Mrs. Smith. Jolie's notoriety is now a charitable asset. If you could place a dollar value on a broken marriage, Jennifer Aniston could claim a monster tax deduction.

It's fitting that Jolie should be hounded by cameras at an event for Witness, a group that supplies human-rights workers with video equipment to record atrocities. Its slogan: See It, Film It, Change It. Cofounded by a celebrity, the organization harnesses what celebrities know best: that in this world, nothing matters that does not have a camera pointed at it. When I ask Gabriel why it's useful to have Jolie as a spokeswoman, he is blunt. "Number one, you're here talking to me," he says. "Also, when she went to Sierra Leone with us, straightaway we got into the President's office, which would have been very hard without her." Ignore Kofi Annan all you want, but blow off Lara Croft at your peril.

Jolie is just a woman of her time. 2005 will go down as the year of charitainment. The networks broadcast celebrity telethons for both tsunami and Hurricane Katrina aid. Bono and Bob Geldof organized the Live 8 concerts with the help of screenwriter Richard Curtis (Love Actually), who wrote HBO's The Girl in the Cafe, the world's first romantic comedy about African debt relief. (As propaganda goes, it was at least a better date flick than Triumph of the Will.) Even celebrity cartoons were pressed into service. UNICEF blew the Smurfs into little blue smithereens for a commercial intended to raise money for the rescue of child soldiers.

Meanwhile, charitainment became a bona fide TV genre. Joining the ABC do-gooder hit Extreme Makeover: Home Edition and Oprah's giveaways and crusades was Three Wishes, in which Christian-rock singer Amy Grant bestows largesse on needy people every week. Time was, the occasional celebrity like Audrey Hepburn would lend her profile to a cause. But Grant and Makeover's Ty Pennington are a distinct kind of charitainment star, celebrities whose good deeds are their chief claim to fame. Their shows aim not just to solve personal problems (help autistic kids, build a school library) but also to salve the nation's wounds (build houses for soldiers in Iraq, give a new start to a Katrina refugee family).

There are plenty of reasons for celebrities to do charity: guilt, faith, personal suffering, ratings, p.r. "If you want a long-term career and you want to be taken seriously by the public, to do nothing is a mistake," says publicist to the stars Ken Sunshine. "Charitable work rounds out and humanizes your image." And then there's politics. It's probably not a coincidence that some of the most charitably active celebrities are also some of the more outspoken liberals--Sean Penn, George Clooney. Many celebrities have found that working on international causes (say, civil liberties or poverty overseas) is a way to indulge a more palatable, little-l liberalism at a safe remove from controversial issues at home (say, civil liberties under the Patriot Act or poverty in Newark, N.J.).

But perhaps above all is the need to rationalize the weirdness of celebrity. Fame is like a superpower, conferred near instantly on once ordinary people, unless you're a royal or a Minnelli. Celebrities can make us pay good money to watch movies based on TV shows we wouldn't watch for free in reruns. They change our clothes and haircuts. They even get us to buy--God help us--puggles. You should be grateful that Sharon Stone and Tom Hanks merely ask you to join the fight against AIDS. They could just as easily command you to build a pair of wings out of newspaper and fly off the roof of your garage.

More interesting than why celebrities take up causes--and tougher to answer--is why the rest of us pay attention to them. Granted, there is the rare celeb, like Bono, who becomes a bona fide expert, but why should I turn to him for advice on solving poverty any more than I'd buy a ticket to watch global-poverty guru Jeffrey Sachs sing I Will Follow? Maybe stars can draw on a reservoir of trust, but that trust can be volatile. In 1985 Michael Jackson was a beloved humanitarian. Today, hearing him sing "We are the world/We are the children" is not so touching. Not in a good way anyway.

Americans, I suspect, like to see celebrities do charity because of our paradoxical expectations of them. We want them to be glamorous and live fantastic lives, and yet we also want them to be, in the words of Us magazine, "just like us!" But if they're just like us, why should they have so much more than we do? There may be a sense that celebrities need to atone, if not for their sins, then for those of their industry. At the Witness benefit, former child soldier Ishmael Beah talked about his experience as a conscript in Sierra Leone's civil war. To keep the troops, as young as 7 years old, hopped up for battle, their officers gave them intoxicants--marijuana, cocaine and, he says, "war movies, like Rambo: First Blood Part II."

And let's face it, while guilt may impel some celebrities to volunteer, guilt is a two-way street. We're the ones who buy the tickets and watch Entertainment Tonight. When I read in PEOPLE magazine about Jessica Simpson jetting to Africa to help kids with facial deformities ("They were in awe of the blond hair," she reported), sure, I laughed. She conveniently happened to turn from Daisy Duke into Florence Nightingale just as her impending split from husband Nick Lachey was dribbling into the tabloids. But then again, what was I doing to improve the lives of needy children in Africa? Reading PEOPLE magazine?

Verily, then, Jessica Simpson traveled to Kenya not for her sins but for mine. When a pop star inserts herself into weighty world matters, she may seem ridiculous, but only because we are too--because she has reminded us that we spend so much time on trivia that we ignore matters of life and death to other people. Even matters of our own life and death. We think about stem-cell research because Michael J. Fox or Nancy Reagan talks about it. We put off colon-cancer checkups or mammograms, and then get them because Katie Couric reminds us to. Think about that one: the specter of our own slow, painful deaths is not itself enough for us to get a simple test. But the nice lady from the Today show tells us to do it, and suddenly we're there.

Of course, after the cancer screening, there's always a heart attack to worry about. And Parkinson's. And Alzheimer's. And then all the ails of the rest of the world. Who needs my help more--the New Orleanians or the Kashmiris? Oppressed Christians in China or battered women in Minnesota? MS or MD? If I give to AIDS patients, am I leaving breast-cancer sufferers, starving children and land-mine victims to die?

It is easy to say that people don't help others because they're unaware of what's going on in the world. But maybe the problem is that they're too aware. In a world of endless woes, you can be overwhelmed into inaction. Or you can make, at some level, an arbitrary choice. That is where celebrities come in, because there is no phenomenon more arbitrary than celebrity. They are attention filters, the human equivalent of throwing a dart at a map. A pretty face and a famous name are a convenient excuse to focus on one problem in the midst of a thousand equally unignorable others. To give to Tibet and not Africa may seem callous. But to pick Richard Gere over Bono--that's just show biz.

It has been said that celebrities serve the same function that ancient gods did, but there is a difference. People created gods to explain things--lightning, death--that they could not understand. We worship celebrities because they're simple focal points in a world in which we have too much information. As Witness preaches--See It, Film It, Change It--the most valuable commodity in ending misery is not money or even will but attention. And attention is the celebrigod's lightning bolt. If the most fatuous celebrity plants himself near a problem, he may embarrass himself. But at least someone will see it. And someone will film it. And a few of us may, little by little, be moved to change it.

With reporting by Rebecca Winters Keegan / Los Angeles