Should Famous People Be Telling Us This Much About Their Illnesses?

This past summer, Celine Dion manufactured a breathtaking cultural moment. It was at the opening ceremony of the Paris Olympics, just after a long, daffy and highly maximalist buildup to the lighting of the Olympic cauldron. Suddenly, there she was, standing on a terrace of the twinkling Eiffel Tower in a scintillant Dior gown. As she sang, a swell of both applause and what sounded like a collective moan of pleasure rose from the audience. Celine Dion was alive and singing. And if you didn’t cry, it could only be because you didn’t know.

It was hard not to know. A few weeks before the Olympics came the release of “I Am: Celine Dion,” a well-publicized documentary that took viewers inside what had become of her life since she became largely housebound with stiff-person syndrome — an exceedingly rare disorder that, in Dion’s case, causes terrifying whole-body spasms so severe that they can break bones. Anyone who has watched “I Am” knows what these crises look like, because Dion allowed herself to be filmed during one of them, for 10 minutes, her body frozen in agonizing contortions. By that point, we were already familiar with Dion’s universe of deep illness; we’d seen her holed up in her Las Vegas compound, surrounded by doctors, unable to walk properly, unable to sing properly, often supine, her body distended, her skin raw. In terms of radical transparency, “I Am” is a milestone: a completely new standard for Bravely Baring All.

Dion is far from the only celebrity to have invited the public to witness life with a serious illness. Lady Gaga’s 2017 documentary, “Gaga: Five Foot Two,” revealed the star’s daily struggle with fibromyalgia, and in last year’s “Still,” Michael J. Fox — a groundbreaking figure in celebrity-illness transparency — further tugged down the curtain on how severe his Parkinson’s disease has become. Selma Blair, who spent a portion of her career hiding symptoms, eventually revealed a diagnosis of M.S. and then began posting intensely personal bedside updates on social media. Last year an issue of British Vogue had her on the cover, in a skinny beige column of a dress, patent pumps and a cane, with a headline announcing her as “Dynamic, Daring & Disabled.”

For fans, these narratives can create a kind of whiplashing feelings roller coaster. You see Lady Gaga diminished and sobbing because of unrelenting full-body pain — and then, soon enough, suspended from the top of a Houston stadium for a Super Bowl halftime performance. You witness Celine Dion in a heartbreaking, horrible fit and then belting out an Edith Piaf song from such great heights.

The intention here, surely, is to show that such stars are only human, that their lives and bodies have the same potential for suffering as ours. But the insane highs and pitiable lows these stories offer us feel almost inhumanly extreme. And in watching them, I began wondering if the stars in them didn’t end up feeling caged by the seemingly necessary Hollywood framing in which inspiration and drama need to take precedence over nuance and open-endedness. Dion and Gaga have to adapt to illnesses for which there is no known cure. So what do they do now? The answer is synonymous with their job: perform.

Middleton’s video just feels so weird.

It has long been the burden of the sick person to take on some social role. During the Industrial Revolution, the tubercular waif was endowed with beauty and mysticism. More recently, as brilliantly described in Barbara Ehrenreich’s 2009 best seller, “Bright-Sided,” baby boomers have patented the archetype of the cancer “warrior,” that brave and positive-thinking soul who proved that even illness can be a gift. And in the celebrity realm, the last couple of decades have proven that stars, and their ailments, hold immense power to destigmatize and raise awareness about illness.

At the turn of the millennium, for instance, after losing her husband to colon cancer, Katie Couric advocated for colonoscopies, even having one live on the “Today” show. So many Americans subsequently booked colon screenings that doctors began talking of “the Couric Effect.” (The actors Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney recently shot their own colonoscopies in the same spirit.) Lately we’ve had countless young celebs come into their careers freely discussing their mental-health issues. You can easily find online lists of, say, “34 Celebrities Who Have Opened Up About Depression” or “76 Famous People With A.D.H.D.”; the content may feel faintly exploitive, but the normalization it brings is almost certainly a good thing.

Yet awareness and normalization do not seem to be the goals of star-produced illness narratives like Gaga’s or Dion’s. These documentaries are not constructed to make the viewer feel as if poor health is a part of life everyone may reckon with; they feel more like stories about triumphant heroes who will never succumb. The person with a rare neurological disorder might be momentarily consoled to see that Dion has one, too, and the fibromyalgic patient could feel validated by Gaga’s openness. But ultimately few sick people will be helped by the idea that in order for illness to be acceptable, it must be conquered. The arc of such stories can only create more pressure and alienation for people living with chronic sickness or disability. She’s on the Eiffel Tower; why can’t I get out of bed?

And for public figures more naturally inclined toward reserve, the imperative to bare all is now nothing short of oppressive. Consider Kate Middleton, the Princess of Wales, a woman who quite clearly did not want to reveal much about her illness to the press or the public. This spring, in order to appease a British public nearly rabid with curiosity — and to stymie whirling conspiracy theories suggesting everything from a frayed marriage to a mental breakdown — she did begin to share. First came a slightly uncanny family photo, which was accused of having been clumsily digitally edited or tampered with by A.I. Then there was a composed video in which the princess confirmed that she’d had abdominal surgery, been diagnosed with cancer and needed chemotherapy. That, too, was suspected of A.I. intervention — of not being real enough.

Finally she appeared at Wimbledon in July, rail thin after treatment, to a standing ovation. A “symbol of resilience,” said the announcers on ESPN and probably everywhere else. The following month, Buckingham Palace released a new video, shot post-chemo. This one’s style was wildly different. We saw her, Prince William and their children frolicking in a sun-dappled forest in light casual clothing, energetically climbing on logs, laughing, playing cards. Kate wistfully walked through tall, undulating grasses, trailing one hand behind her. Then it was just Kate and the prince, nuzzling and kissing on a picnic rug, the type of public display this couple don’t normally engage in. Cancer, she said, had given her “a new perspective on everything.”

The video just feels so weird. (In much of it, Prince William looks as if he is going to die, of awkwardness.) You get the sense that, much like the “Black Panther” star Chadwick Boseman or the writer-director Nora Ephron or the comedian Norm MacDonald, Middleton isn’t naturally inclined to share her illness. You get the sense that, like most people recovering after chemo, she might prefer to be left alone, forgiven for not being at her most vivacious or presentable. But our new expectations for a bold style of transparency make this kind of desire impossible to honor. Formal announcements of illness and requests for privacy land in the public sphere almost like an affront. It’s not enough for Kate to tell the nation that she has cancer. She has to be the cancer, and be better for it.

Mireille Silcoff is a cultural critic who recently wrote about teen subcultures for the magazine.

Source photographs for illustration above: Apple TV+; IOC/Olympic Broadcasting Services via Getty Images; Mark Case/Getty Images.