But even sharing the stage with a throng of dancers and a gospel choir, Styles looked isolated. Dancing in sync, but never touching. The video feels lonelier still: in it, Styles is chased through a barren hotel by a hulking, long-haired man before he ends up back in his room, by himself again. Meanwhile, the lyrics suggest love (“We belong together”) but also, and maybe more importantly, painful self-knowledge: “It’s best you know what you don’t/ The aperture lets the light in.”

It makes sense that Styles would use a camera as a metaphor for introspection. Since he auditioned for The X Factor at the age of 16, Styles has been one of the most filmed, photographed and looked at men on the planet. Though he didn’t progress in the competition as a solo artist, judge Simon Cowell spotted his potential and put him together with four other contestants to form One Direction. They came third overall, but once the show was over, they were unstoppable. 1D became the biggest boyband on the planet. The only adult life Styles has ever known has been a public one. 

And boyband fame is possibly the most brutal kind. There’s a scene in the 2013 documentary One Direction: This is Us that has stuck with me since I first watched it. The band attempts a shopping trip in Amsterdam, and gets mobbed. The boys are grabbed and clawed at by desperate, shrieking girls. After taking refuge in a Nike store, band member Liam Payne talks to the camera. “One of them had my ear and wouldn’t let go,” he says. “I think she wanted to keep it. I said, you can’t have that, it’s mine.” Payne laughs, but his expression suggests someone who has looked into the abyss. 

One Direction broke up in 2016. Payne died in 2024 after falling from his hotel balcony. It was the kind of messy, horrible, drug-fueled death where misadventure is hard to tell from suicide. Shortly before he died, he reportedly told an onlooker: “I used to be in a boy band — that’s why I’m so fucked up.” Not long after Payne’s death, I interviewed a number of ex-boyband members for a feature, and almost all of them described their experience of celebrity as a kind of trauma. “You are a commodity, and not a human,” Ritchie Neville, formerly of Five, told me. “People crack, but I’m surprised more people don’t crack.”

Fame can be intrusive and sadistic for women (I wrote a book, Toxic, about exactly that). Men rarely attain the kind of “car crash” status that is often thrust on a female celebrity, in which watching her decline becomes a kind of spectator sport: think of Amy Winehouse or Britney Spears. But talking to Neville made me wonder whether there was something even more destructive in male fame. Female popstars are sexualized, but they don’t become the focus for mass performances of hysterical lust in the way that boyband members do. To be desired so violently — desired to the point that your fans would rip you apart just to have something of you — must do something terrible to a person. Of course it would fuck you up. 

One of the striking things about Styles, in fact, is how not fucked up he’s always seemed to be. He seems to have a protective reluctance to give too much away: characteristically, he has said very little about his feelings on Payne’s death beyond a short statement in the immediate aftermath, though he did address it in an interview with the DJ Zane Lowe for the new album. “Full transparency, it’s something that even the idea of talking about it I struggle with,” he said. “I really struggled with how strange it is to have people own part of your grief in a way.” Fame means that even the most devastating personal experiences can be turned into public property.

It’s something that Styles went through, albeit in a smaller way, back in 2014 when his breakup from Taylor Swift was widely understood to be the inspiration for her album 1989, though some of the references were relatively subtle. Styles gave his own musical account of the Swift break-up on his self-titled debut album, in the song “Two Ghosts”. But that’s an exception in his discography. Styles’s songs are, in general, intimate but impersonal: they very rarely map onto the tabloid version of his life in the way Swift’s songs do. What they often share, though, is a powerful sense of loneliness — a kind of loneliness that chimes, sometimes deliberately and sometimes fortuitously, with his listeners’ lives.

His second album, Fine Line, was released in 2019, but the wistful longing for contact that underpins it felt authored for the lockdown years. “I don’t want to be alone,” he sighs on the opener, “Golden”. When “Watermelon Sugar” was released as a single in 2020, it made perfect sense that the video opened with the message: “This video is dedicated to touching.” It was already a song about skin hunger, which many of us were experiencing that year. The 2022 follow-up, Harry’s House, was directly shaped by those weird years: Styles has said in interviews that “As It Was” in particular was written about the seeming impossibility of returning to normal after the pandemic. 

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Even in his acting roles, Styles seems drawn towards characters with a deeply melancholy failure to connect. His two leading movie roles (in My Policeman and Don’t Worry Darling) attracted little praise for his dramatic skills, and it’s true that Styles has never yet managed to be truly convincing when delivering dialog, but both films should be recognized as brave, interesting choices which cut against the heartthrob expectations he carried with him: in the former he played a closeted policeman in Fifties Britain, and in the latter he played a red-pilled nightmare who turns out to have kidnapped his wife and forced her consciousness into a simulation of midcentury American white-picket bliss. 

But what makes Styles such a great artist of loneliness isn’t just that he understands its pangs. It’s also that he finds something seductive in that idea of being alone. The pain is a good pain — the sharpening, purifying kind. It’s notable that the hobby he has to unwind from being a popstar is long-distance running, which is one of the most solitary things you can do. In a conversation with the author Haruki Murakami (also a runner) for the magazine Runner’s World, Styles describes the joy of running like this: “you can go about your day in the most naked form. It’s just you, alone, moving through the world.”

There’s something else quite telling in that dialogue. Styles tells Murakami: “I think my favorite thing about you is that I know nothing really about you, other than the work you’ve given to people. So I’m as deeply grateful for the amount that you’ve chosen to keep to yourself as for what you’ve chosen to share with us.” It’s a comment that echoes Styles’s own apparent strategy for surviving fame: extreme, meticulous reserve. It’s a method that echoes the careful distance David Bowie kept between himself and his audience, often using characters (Ziggy Stardust, Aladdin Sane) as a screen. Styles’s fashion icon status and arty performances are clearly indebted to Bowie, but this unapologetic self-protection might be the most significant influence that Styles has taken.

One way to describe fame is that it’s the condition of being loved too much — loved more than any one person can bear. For someone like Styles, who has had to survive an entire adulthood of that love, solitude must be the most fascinating thing. For most people, isolation is one of the painful conditions of our age: too much time hunkered down in solitary laptop labor, too many friendships that exist only on screens, too little touch. Styles’s extreme celebrity enforces isolation (when a trip to the shops provokes a riot, all you can do is stay at home), but it also turns being left alone into a luxury. That means that he can find beauty in a condition that, for so many people, is an ugly inevitability. Styles is our perfect pop star because he has found the romance in loneliness.

It’s easy now to condemn the media of the 2000s as a theater of humiliation. At the time, though, the prevailing concern was that everyone had become too soft. A generation that had been coddled by an “all-must-have-prizes” mentality had grown up entitled, lazy and egotistical. “In today’s celebrity-obsessed world, every youngster wants to be famous,” as Cowell sneered in his 2003 autobiography — called, in an impeccable piece of branding — I Don’t Mean to Be Rude, But… Cowell’s job, as he saw it, was to “prick the bubble of what I regard as this self-absorbed egotism” on behalf of an audience that was sick of the tyranny of talentless wannabes. 

But times change and so, apparently, does Cowell. Simon Cowell: The Next Act, which launches on Netflix this week, is yet another talent show format. We watch Cowell, now 66, as he attempts to create a new boyband to follow in the footsteps of One Direction, the X Factor-forged five piece whose global success marked the pinnacle of his starmaking powers. Since the death of ex-member Liam Payne in a drugs-related balcony fall last year, the band has also become a cautionary tale of fame’s savagery. Shortly before he died, Payne reportedly told an onlooker: “I used to be in a boy band — that’s why I’m so fucked up.” 

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Which helps to explain why Cowell is so keen to be seen to be reinventing himself. The Cowell of 2025 is still tough (“You’ve got to be sort of ruthless,” he says in the trailer), but this is a kinder, gentler kind of entertainment. As he told The New York Times in an interview to promote the new series: “I changed over time. I did realize I’ve probably gone too far… I got that. What can I say? I’m sorry.” To further underline his newfound vulnerability, the series even features his partner Lauren Silverman, with whom he has an 11-year-old son.

The show’s drama rests on the idea that Cowell is putting everything on the line for one more shot at svengali success, but the stakes really are high. The pop culture world that made Cowell has imploded in the past 10 years. He became famous the old-fashioned way: on prime-time TV, with the backing of the tabloids, and the help of disgraced publicist Max Clifford, who had a talent for keeping his clients in the spotlight while squashing stories that might harm their image. In his autobiography, Cowell — playing up the part of the cynical impresario — wrote that “hiring Max was one of the best decisions I ever made”. 

At its peak in 2010, The X Factor was watched by over 14 million. That year, The Sun and The Mirror had a combined readership of over 4 million. Today, the red tops probably have a circulation of less than a million — and more people watch YouTube than ITV. In an effort to grasp the elusive younger audience, the next series is introducing the YouTuber KSI as a judge – a sign of where the real power lies in entertainment. The most recent series of Britain’s Got Talent averaged just over 5.5 million viewers and the last big act to come from a Cowell show was Little Mix, who won The X Factor in 2011.

Meanwhile, the less said about Clifford the better. In 2014, he became the first man to be convicted of historic sexual offenses under Operation Yewtree, and died in 2017 while serving an eight year sentence for indecent assault. The schtick of Cowell’s shows was that they were laying bare the mechanics of the entertainment business, and turning the public into entertainment insiders. While there is no suggestion whatsoever that Cowell has ever been involved in sexual impropriety, cases like Clifford’s revealed a depravity that had been concealed beneath the glitz all along. 

The market has changed, too. South Korea took the manufactured pop model embraced by Cowell and turned it into something even more ferociously disciplined and even more successful. Now, K-pop rules the world when it comes to manufactured bands. In Britain and America, the charts belong to solo girl auteurs such as Chappelle Roan and Charli XCX — artists whose fans love them precisely because they write, record, perform and create their own image with no need for a puppet master like Cowell. 

Even his own creations have turned against him. Jade, formerly of Little Mix, launched her solo career last year with the song “Angel of My Dreams”, a delirious satire of the pop industry, including the line: “sellin’ my soul to a psycho.” Cowell had signed Little Mix to his own label, Syco, so it was pretty obvious who she was referring to. How sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is to have a thankless child, Cowell might have thought, if he were given to quoting King Lear, which he probably isn’t. But how apt it is for an aging ruler of a fallen kingdom.

Meanwhile, the tongue-lashing style Cowell perfected is now sorely out of step with contemporary concerns about mental health. In 2019, the TV presenter Caroline Flack — who, among other gigs, had once hosted The X Factor — killed herself in the midst of being prosecuted for assaulting her boyfriend, a case that had captured ferocious and, according to her family, unfair press attention. Her final Instagram post read: “In a world where you can be anything, be kind.” #Bekind has since been adopted as a social media watchword. It’s an injunction that would preclude making teenagers cry for entertainment. 

And then there was Payne’s death, which happened during the filming of Simon Cowell: The Next Act. In his New York Times interview, Cowell talks about his shock and sadness — “It was just awful, awful.” But when the interviewer presses him on whether what happened to Payne is a sign of the inherent toxicity of fame, Cowell does something curious. He starts discussing his own relationship with celebrity. “I honestly don’t know what is harder: trying to be famous or managing your fame,” he says. 

“Not every day has been amazing, but I’m glad I did what I did,” he continues. “I signed up for it because obviously there was something inside of me saying, I want to be well known. And I would do it all over again.” Is this the self-exculpation of a deeply cynical man? Cowell got to make his choices as an adult with a successful career in the music business behind him. One Direction were still children when they first came into contact with Cowell’s empire. Payne was just 14 when he first auditioned, and 16 when he returned to the show and was cast in 1D. 

No one so young could have known what he was letting himself in for. But even so, Cowell is telling an awkward truth about fame. We tend to talk about it now as a kind of violence done to its subjects, which it is, but it’s a kind of violence that almost never happens to people by accident. To become famous you have to want it, and want it painfully. Want it enough to sacrifice anything — including, most of all, the possibility of ever having a normal life. Want it as much as Cowell wanted it.

Cowell knew precisely how to pierce the souls of his auditioners because he was, like them, hungry for fame. He could be sublimely cruel, because he could sympathize completely with the hopefuls before him. Maybe time has softened him. Maybe fatherhood has blunted his edges. Maybe the death of Payne has given him a reckoning. But he’s still on TV because he still wants fame, and for the aspirants on Simon Cowell: The Next Act, that means he can still be a dangerous man.

Jamie is closer to Rickman than any of his other parts: not only was Rickman also a Labour activist who played the cello, but he was similarly needling and obsessive. And I wonder if Madly, Deeply is supposed to perform the same spell for a different woman: the resurrection of a loved one. This book is not a finished piece of art. Its publication feels personal: it is a fragment of a man, a fragment of the cult of the actor, and vanity by proxy. Obliviously, this book investigates that cult of the actor.

People will say that they like the diaries because they like Rickman the actor, and they want more of him: but you don’t get that from the diaries. He was clearly likeable, and generous: he mocked himself in Galaxy Quest, playing a Shakespearian actor slumming it in a Star Trek rip-off for money, and he felt that tension between artistic and commercial imperatives. (An entry written during a Harry Potter film says bleakly: “More Great Hall. More turkey. More Hogwarts song”.) But the diaries aren’t good. Rickman is a subtle actor, but he is not a writer, and I think he knows it. He agonises over the entries. He hints that he lied to them, fretting that he cannot remember the “coded details and the sharp thoughts hidden between the safer lines”. A good diarist will betray his friends and, above all, himself, as consciously and willingly as an actor will put “the chicken” on his head for the part. But Rickman is more oblique: his confessions are accidental.

You yearn for him to tell more — to inhabit himself consciously. But the most he manages is to call women he dislikes “Ms”, beadily; suggest that famous actresses are controlling, and write “[He] has a wonderfully pitched reading. I wish he would find different mouth-shapes,” about Simon Russell Beale. He is fragile. He struggles. He watches Yes To The Dress.

Rickman knows that fame is self-hating: the phenomenon of wanting to engage with fantasy people not real ones, that is, not engaging at all. I suspect his battles with the media are a proxy for his battles with himself: art versus commerce. He notes the terrible questions journalists ask on press junkets: “Alan, what are the smells of Barcelona?”

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He notes the offensive diary items. He suspects a female masseur is taking sexual pleasure from touching him in a professional capacity. Did she confuse him with Hans Gruber, or the Vicomte de Valmont? Many actors excel at playing who they are not — it’s the ecstasy of transgression. He is nothing like a villain, or a satyrmaniac: he was in a relationship with the same woman for almost 50 years.

I think a large part of Rickman was repelled by his fame — he mocks actors who care who is playing what and for how much — but it addled him anyway. Fame corrupted and exposed him, and we know that because in the diaries he accidentally exposes himself. He and his partner are distraught to discover that there are no Leftists at the luxury hotel in the West Indies they visit over Christmas: why would there be? He frets that the (presumably First Class) airport lounge he finds himself in has no space for “Eccentrics and Weirdos” like himself. So why not step outside?

His serious politics — and I am willing to believe they are serious in intent — are made absurd by the publication of these diaries. If you place serious things next to trivial ones — and the lifestyle of a famous actor can only be trivial — they become trivial too.

This is Rickman at an anti-austerity march in 2011. It reads like parody. “Straight to EAT for coffee and a sandwich before wandering down to Trafalgar Square and long wait for the Equity banner. At Park Lane the sight of the Dorchester proved too much.” “Ms [Mia] Farrow talked long and expertly about Darfur,” he writes in another entry. “Salma Hayek talks of her time in India as a volunteer for Mother Teresa — this utterly beautiful woman talking of wiping up shit and worms and keeping the flies off a dying woman’s face.”

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It often reads like parody, Adrian Mole grown up: “On the way home, a visit — forced — to Dean Street Tesco. What a dump this chain is. A sort of shopping equivalent of our shoddy government.” Or: “St James’s Christmas Mass. The sermon evoked Stalin as a reason for the need for God. Mostly I was looking at the congregation and wondering why we don’t have a local Waitrose.” Or: “Tonight the tree frogs were silent. What do they know?”

He should have written a book about acting. He is, of course, a superb critic: “Emma [Thompson] needs to work with someone who will ask her to dig rather than skim”; “Ms [Georgina] Cates [in An Awfully Big Adventure] suffers from only functioning from her sense of the story. She listens to nothing, responds to nothing. She’s a butterfly inside her own glass case, watching herself bat around.” “Every line,” in a Henry Goodman performance of Shylock, “is a thought contained in a body which has a life.”

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But mostly it is Rickman in an unfinished play: what would he think? It is a fair metaphor for our treatment of the acting class: deification is objectification, and destruction; the end of Perfume, in which the desired man is torn apart. It is fragments from a nervous man who hated gossip, and now will be read for it: “Bumped into P. Mandelson & Reinaldo [his partner] in Westbourne Grove. He was eating a choc-ice and trying to rent a video. Tea with Mussolini.”

So it is a tragedy, then: with the publication of this book, perhaps commerce won. A question from the Sweeney Todd press junket is cruel, but it displays his predicament neatly: Alan, if you were a pie which flavour would you be?

The series arrives as Kanye is in the thick of one of the more excruciatingly public divorces of recent times, his Instagram feed a bilious froth of resentment towards Kim Kardashian and her new boyfriend Pete Davidson. He also recently took against Billie Eilish for showing concern for crowd safety, which he somehow interpreted as a dig at his friend Travis Scott.

There’s more where that came from. West’s public life has become an endlessly dispiriting spectacle at the same time as his records have become increasingly hard to love. While he continues to throw giant listening parties for them, and will be headlining this year’s Coachella festival under his new legal name, Ye, his music now “sounds like an afterthought, some extra sounds to have as a treat”, as Pitchfork put it. All in all, it’s not the ideal time for four-and-half-hours of television dedicated to his genius, but that is precisely what makes jeen-yuhs so compelling.

The origins of the documentary are suitably complicated. In 2002, Clarence “Coodie” Simmons jacked in his career as a stand-up comedian and television host in Chicago to move to New York and chronicle the rise of a fascinating new 24-year-old rapper-producer that he had first met four years earlier. Coodie was there for two years, sometimes with co-director Chike Ozah, up to the release of West’s sensational debut album The College Dropout in February 2004.

Had it come out in 2005, the documentary would have charted the birth of a superstar, but West blocked it. “Kanye said he wasn’t ready for world to see the real him,” Coodie explains in his genial voiceover. “He told me he was acting now — playing a role.” Gradually, Coodie was frozen out. The two men didn’t see each other at all between 2007 and 2014 and filming resumed in earnest only in 2019, making the third episode of jeen-yuhs a bizarre and messy coda. To cap it off, Kanye demanded (but did not receive) final approval, so the series has been released without his blessing.

It would be difficult to make a conventional biopic about Kanye because the narrative arc doesn’t land. The classic pop star story goes something like this: ambition, achievement, crisis, recovery, redemption. That redemption might have happened for West with 2010’s My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy. Interrupting Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech at the 2009 VMAs was such an aggressive breach of celebrity etiquette that even President Obama called him a “jackass”. (It’s remarkable to think that Joe Biden is the first 21^st-century US president not to have expressed a strong opinion about Kanye West.)

The rapper weathered the almighty backlash by hunkering down in Hawaii with three studios full of collaborators working 24/7 on an operatic magnum opus. “It’s never explicitly discussed, but everyone here knows that good music is the key to Kanye’s redemption,” wrote one journalist who covered the sessions. “With the right songs and the right album, he can overcome any and all controversy, and we are here to contribute, challenge and inspire.” There is, however, a big difference between vindication and redemption. West learned that if his music was good enough he could get away with anything — so what happens now that it’s not?

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West is both the most significant and the most polarising artist of his era. Significant because he made hip hop so huge and omnivorous that the beats-and-rhymes model depicted in the 2002 footage now appears parochial. In 2012, the Atlantic described him as “the first true genius of the iPhone era, the Mozart of contemporary American music”. Polarising because he touted his wares with a manic grandiloquence that raised the bar for rap braggadocio. “For some kids right now, I am what Michael Jackson was for me,” he once said, as if Jackson weren’t the crowning example of a sweet, supernaturally talented kid who became destroyed and dehumanised by fame.

I’ve met West on two occasions. The first time was in Los Angeles in 2005, when he was launching his second album, Late Registration. Playfully bombastic, he framed his legendary arrogance as a form of entertainment in its own right: “It’s like I’m walking on this tightrope. It’s like the reason why you go to a circus — it’s more entertaining. It’s like, damn, what if he falls? And if I do make it, it’s like, damn, he made it! But either way you’re saying damn. Everybody else is just walking on the ground.”

The second time was in London, a decade later, between the cyborg roar of Yeezus and the colourful melee of The Life of Pablo. I remember thinking that I’d never met a less relaxed person in my life. He told me he was “extremely fucking happy”, but the only time he smiled was when his mother-in-law Kris Jenner walked into the room with his daughter North. Otherwise, it was like talking to a balled fist.

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You didn’t need to see him up close to witness this hardening and shuttering. Many of the College Dropout songs we see him recording in jeen-yuhs (‘We Don’t Care’, ‘All Falls Down’) are interested in other people, situating West in the broader community of we. He became much less, well, collegiate over the next few years. Even when his albums were as vast and populous as imperial palaces, they had an air of claustrophobia and loneliness, with more mirrors than windows. Paranoia is a species of narcissism after all. On stage, too, he conveyed a terrible solitude. No Glastonbury headliner has ever shown less interest in bonding with the crowd than he did in 2015. We were there to witness a moment, not to share it.

A year later, West experienced a breakdown which led to hospitalisation and a diagnosis of bipolar disorder. This partially (but only partially) explains the most chaotic episode in the history of pop stars venturing into politics. It began when he celebrated Donald Trump’s victory during a concert, triggering a chorus of shocked boos. Later, he took to wearing a MAGA hat, posing for photo opportunities with Trump and saying that slavery was a choice: they just didn’t have enough gumption to be free. In 2020, he ran for president himself on a platform that sounded rather like theocracy. He won 60,000 votes.

Even before all this, West mocked his disappointed fans in the 2016 track ‘I Love Kanye’: “I miss the sweet Kanye, chop-up-the-beats Kanye.” Well, the good news is that there are three hours of that guy in jeen-yuhs: performing a daffy Stevie Wonder impression on the porch of his childhood home; gawping like a tourist at the lights of Times Square; giddy with delight when Jay-Z lets him rap a guest verse on ‘The Bounce’.

You can’t help rooting for him because everything was a struggle. He was a hot producer who wanted to be known as a great rapper and his neediness is heartbreakingly apparent. In one mortifying scene, he tries to impress a small boy by reeling off the names of hits he has produced. “Cool,” the kid says politely. A receptionist announces him as “Cayenne West”. Beside the suave virtuosity of Jay-Z or Mos Def, his rapping is tense and effortful, like he’s pushing a boulder up a hill.

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During this difficult period, he had no greater cheerleader than his mother, Dr Donda C. West. He’s talked about Donda often (and named two albums after her) but it’s something else to see her in the documentary, the quintessence of maternal pride, and to observe how boyishly humble he is in her company. “This is so exciting isn’t it? I love it!” she says with a brilliant grin. “Anybody that does something that much and that long and is that good, it’s gotta pay off”. Her death during cosmetic surgery in November 2007 is the decisive rupture in West’s life: the start of the chaos years. In 2015, I asked him what he had sacrificed for success and he didn’t hesitate: “My mom. If I had never moved to LA, she’d be alive”. He refused to elaborate, lest he start crying.

In the documentary, Donda offers caution along with her encouragement: “It’s important to remember that the giant looks in the mirror and sees nothing”. Coodie runs with this metaphor, implying that West took it to heart, but he’s hardly an objective observer. His attempt to wrap up the story with gooey platitudes about God’s plan and friends reunited doesn’t square with what his camera captures, whether it’s a distressing bipolar episode or West delightedly viewing a clip of Tucker Carlson praising his anti-abortion position. The bridge that Coodie tries to jerry-rig back to 2002 collapses because he wasn’t there to document the transition from that Kanye to this one and unpick the rat king of grief, fame and mental illness that brought it about. The narrative doesn’t conclude; it just stops.

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Perhaps the problem is that West really does see nothing when he looks in the mirror, and what reads as preposterous self-confidence is really fathomless insecurity. In 2002, West had every reason to feel thwarted and undervalued, and to turn that frustration into rocket fuel, but that feeling never went away. Having conquered popular music, he had to find new areas in which to be misunderstood (fashion, politics) and new role models to emulate (Walt Disney, Picasso), the result being that he can never, ever be satisfied.

For a long time, that insatiability propelled his music to greater heights; now it distracts from it. Seeing the look on his face as he receives some kind words from Pharrell Williams or plays some tracks for Donda, you have to wonder if this period was as good as it got, before he realised that recognition wouldn’t bring happiness after all. Thus jeen-yuhs becomes a cautionary tale of ambition without end. The unique tragedy of Kanye West is not that he failed but that he could never allow himself to acknowledge that he’d won.

Meanwhile, column inches continue to be generated by whether or not the next 007 should be a woman, and Superman is now bisexual. Just as reliable as the output of these franchises is the grumbling about our apparent inability to come up with fresh new stories.

The usual explanation given for the domination of franchises over new material is that media industries like a known quantity. But what if the real problem lies deeper? What if, in truth, we’re no longer able to come up with new stories because we’ve turned storytelling itself into a branch of influencer culture?

This was the unsettling implication of last week’s water-cooler debate: “Kidneygate”. A long New York Times essay told the strange story of Dawn Dorland and Sonya Larson, two aspiring writers now embroiled in a bitter dispute.

Dorland donated a kidney to a stranger, then created a Facebook group to talk about her “journey”, and shared it with her writing group. Larson, a member of the same writing group, then wrote a short story depicting an egotistical and implicitly borderline racist woman donating a kidney. When Dorland learned this, she began an increasingly monomaniacal campaign of lawfare against Larson.

Like the dress that was either black and blue or white and gold, the story prompted a lot of debate. When does taking material from the world around you stop being legitimate and become invasive? Do we “own” our own stories? Or as the NYT put it: “Who is the Bad Art Friend?”

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But perhaps the question should be: would you trade a kidney for a shot at immortality? For while on the face of it Kidneygate seems to be two women arguing about art, in truth it’s about the only form of immortality on offer since the internet killed literature: clout.

Once upon a time, the way to get famous as a writer was to publish a book. But the internet inverted that. The print publishing industry today is both bigger than ever and more beleaguered than ever by competition from other media, not to mention the ocean of free digital content. The result is diminishing returns: more than 188,000 books are published every year in the UK alone, but only 5% of authors sell enough to earn more than £30,000 a year.

Against that backdrop, not unreasonably, publishers are more likely to be interested in people with the sort of profile that will help market their work. There are countless talented writers out there; the decisive factor in who gets the book deal is often being an existing player in public conversation. In other words, the swiftest route to becoming a famous author today is already being famous for something else.

That means aspiring writers need that indispensable resource for an attention economy: “clout”, which translates roughly as “the number of eyeballs you can persuade to notice you online”. And chasing clout is indisputably a skill, albeit not a literary one.

Building up clout can be done several ways, but perhaps the two most common are emotional exhibitionism and identity-politics controversy. Expert wielders of clout attract fans and haters in equal measure, set people arguing among themselves and then leverage the resulting public profile for real-world power or earnings.

One such expert clout-engineer is Nikocado Avocado, real name Nick Perry, a YouTube celebrity famous for his “extreme eating” or “muckbang” videos. Nikocado Avocado’s content is voyeuristic in the extreme. Categories on his channel include “Fights”, “Emotional” and “Upset Feelings” among others. More importantly, he has 2.6 million subscribers — a store of clout that translates into serious earnings. In 2019, his net worth was estimated at $3m.

It’s almost impossible to go too far with this kind of content. The only unforgivable crime, as far as consumers are concerned, is being caught faking the emotion. “Mommy vlogger” Jordan Cheyenne was recently pilloried after she accidentally uploaded an unedited video of herself and her child, in which she could be heard encouraging her child to act like he was crying. She has since deleted her channel.

In the more traditional cultural spheres of academia, politics and literature, competition for eyeballs drives clout-chasing identity politics controversies. These can be guaranteed to spice up any otherwise dull policy debate with angry culture war clicks, while handily boosting the profile of the would-be activist. Perhaps the consummate operator in this mode is the US Representative Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez, who attained meme status recently by appearing at the $30,000-a-ticket US Met Gala in a white dress with “TAX THE RICH” scrawled across the back, then blamed the criticism she received on racism and sexism.

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In every case, though, the core feature of clout-chasing is that it centres not on what you say, but on others’ perception of who (or what) you are. And here we see the heart of Kidneygate: a dispute over who gets to use the organ-donation story as a means of cultivating their public self.

If Nikocado Avocado figuratively spills his guts for those who follow his channel, Kidneygate saw someone spill them literally — and then post about it on social media. Dorland created a Facebook group to collect the applause she expected to receive. She walked in a local parade as ambassador for organ donation. She even created a hashtag: #domoreforeachother.

Larson, in contrast, wanted to use the kidney-donation story alongside her own Asian-American ethnic identity to boost her profile with a short story about “white saviour” politics. That is, she wanted to apply the clout-rich filter of American racial politics to this highly emotive content, in order to increase her own standing in the world of fiction-writing. And it should have worked: before Dorland’s legal action scuppered the offer, Larson’s work had been selected for “One City One Story”, a Boston literary award that would have seen her short story distributed free all over the city.

I’m just about old enough to remember the Before Times prior to mass social media. Back then, we still clung to the idea that writing was about immortality — an idea captured by Shakespeare: “So long as men can breathe and eyes can see/So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.”

Now, though, writing a book is just part of the “media mix”. Where fame used to be a means of getting your message out, now messages are a means of getting your fame out. In September, CBS launched The Activist, a show that turns political activism into reality TV — and where successful activism is measured “via online engagement, social metrics, and hosts’ input”. Never mind making a tangible real-world impact: like successful writing, successful activism is measured in clout.

And once you’ve attained enough of it, you can pivot effortlessly from reality TV to book-writing, perfume launches, politics or whatever. The only condition is that, like Harry and Meghan, you continue to feed gobbets of personal tragedy, emotional intensity, marginalised identity or some other kind of emotive content to the clout machine.

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Do this, and the whole media mix is yours. It’s not just the raft of celebrities flocking to write children’s books. The 22-year-old poet Amanda Gorman made history earlier this year as Biden’s inauguration poet, as much for her look and ethnicity as her aggressively bland poetry. Shortly after the inauguration, she signed a modelling contract.

And this pipeline works just as well in reverse. Transgender model Munroe Bergdorf has a threadbare literary track record, having attained clout mostly for being photographed wearing clothes, or for public rows with corporations and gender-critical feminists over identity politics. And yet Bergdorf received a six-figure advance from Bloomsbury for the “memoir and manifesto” Transitional.

The true message of Kidneygate, then, is not about art but what art now serves. It signals that if we allow it, the world of letters will irrecoverably join cinema, music, politics and activism as mulch for an online economy of attention.

And the Faustian nature of the bargain is increasingly clear. A culture powered solely by the hunger for intensity will devour any form of culture that isn’t already literal pornography. For in a raw economy of attention, the aesthetic or moral value of your work is irrelevant: what matters is emotional intensity and the power to generate discussion. Whether it’s politics, art, literature, music or simply people’s personal lives, the clout economy will transmute it, by a kind of reverse alchemy, into pornography of the self.

Before pivoting to YouTube emotional exhibitionism. Nikocado Avocado dreamed of being a concert violinist. Before pivoting to organ donation for clicks, Dawn Dorland dreamed of being a celebrated author. But there’s little clout to be gained through working hard at creating beauty for a common cultural domain. No wonder one in five British children want to be social media influencers when they grow up. And when everyone’s so busy crafting their online selves, no wonder there’s no creative energy left to dream new shared stories, leaving us nothing but zombie franchises crudely gingered-up by the culture wars.

Will we rediscover an ability to resist donating everything — even our organs — to the clout machine? I hope so. If we don’t soon regain a measure of digital self-restraint, the endpoint of every aspiration will be emotional porn. Or perhaps we could call it Kidneygate culture: a never-ending livestream of lost and miserable souls self-defining, fighting, crying, binge-eating or quite literally eviscerating themselves, all for our voyeuristic pleasure.

Men are barely part of the picture. Ask Google what a “dadager” is, and the first result is the definition of “momager”. Ask it about “tiger dads”, and it wonders whether you might mean golfer Tiger Woods’s actual dad. “Don’t put your daughter on the stage, Mrs. Worthington,” Noel Coward advised: Mr Worthington apparently did not need to be told. Maybe the assumption is that a father would never inflict such pressure on a child. After all, raising children is the woman’s job, and she’s supposed to crack on with it quietly. We make so much more fuss about Mother’s Day than Father’s Day — which is this coming Sunday, not that anyone will notice — perhaps because dads are still seen as supporting acts to mothers, the primary carers (who are always to blame when things go wrong).

But men do, obviously, get involved in their children’s careers. Tiger Woods’s actual dad is one example: he was coaching his son from practically the moment he could toddle. A high-level golfer himself, he knew what making it as a pro would mean for his son, whereas other fathers only get deeply involved when the glory begins. That’s the version of Mitch Winehouse that’s presented in the 2015 documentary Amy: a father who left the family home when the star was a child, reappearing as her career took off to become her effective second manager — and take control of her finances.

It’s a version that Mitch himself has rejected, complaining to an interviewer that the film was “trying to portray me in the worst possible light”. The fact that Amy died in 2011 as a result of alcohol poisoning raises the stakes for his reputation. Was he a caring father doing his best in an impossible situation, or one of the many who profited from Amy while neglecting her wellbeing?

His own book about her is really a long-form testimony for his own defence. All the same, Mitch did OK from his status as “Amy’s dad”. He got to travel the world in her entourage and manage her bank accounts — and writes in his book that “she and I knew that I needed to stop her frittering her money away”. He also got his own portion of fame with a TV series and a record deal. But all this success derived from his daughter.

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Tyler James, Amy’s best friend, is at pains in his new memoir My Amy to give Mitch all possible credit and stress how much Amy loved him (remember, she had “Daddy’s girl” tattooed on her bicep). But he also describes Mitch hoping to film Amy for his own documentary, regardless of her reluctance to be involved. Mitch pressing Amy to sign autographs for fans and be in photos, even though she doesn’t want to. Mitch lavishly announcing “we’ll get that” when James is booking his flights. (“I’d think, No, you won’t be getting it Mitch — Amy’s getting it,” writes James. “It wasn’t his money and it did my head in for years.”) Mitch, enjoying every moment of the celebrity that was manifestly tearing his daughter apart.

The most generous thing James can say about Mitch at these moments is this: “He was so caught up in her success I felt like he didn’t see his daughter for who she was anymore, and maybe not even himself.” Within the Winehouse machine, it seems like Mitch lost sight of Amy as an individual. She was just the raw material that supplied the mini-industry around her. Still, no record industry pro came any closer to saving Amy than cab-driver Mitch did. None of the seasoned experts in dealing with substance abuse were any more effective in their interventions.

It is unfortunate that Mitch is fixed forever in that line from “Rehab” where Amy explains she won’t be going because “My daddy says I’m fine.” Mitch accepts that he said this, but “as we carried on talking, though, I saw the other side” — that is, the side he ended up contracted to make a documentary about. His TV series was on families affected by addiction, and he writes that he “wanted the public to know about the heartaches and dilemmas that such people live with.”

Which presumably seemed a good reason to try to get footage of his alcoholic daughter relapsing. God knows life with an addict is impossible, but it’s hard to reconcile Mitch’s apparently simultaneous beliefs that Amy was well enough to tour while also being sick enough to anchor a whole series on the topic of substance abuse. The one thing that unites both positions, though, is the fact that they made money, which has a marvellous power to dissolve scruples.

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If Mitch seems at best naive in retrospect, the most extreme charge against Jamie Spears is the opposite: that he has wilfully run his daughter’s life to his own benefit. Britney is still fighting a legal battle to have her father permanently removed from the conservatorship that has controlled her personal, professional and financial life since her 2008 breakdown. How Jamie came to hold this central role in his daughter’s life is an interesting question in itself, given that (according to the documentary Framing Britney Spears) he was largely absent from her childhood, with her mother doing most of the career running.

But after 2008, it was Jamie who scooped Britney up off the floor and got her back in money-making shape. He set her up with a Vegas residency that made her (and by extension, him) wildly well-off — and which continued until she abruptly announced her “indefinite hiatus” in 2019. Among the #freebritney contingent of her fans, who believe she is being controlled by her father, her withdrawal from work is read as an act of resistance after a lifetime of being treated as a puppet. Her attorney has told the court that she’s “afraid” of her father, and won’t return to work until he’s no longer in control of her career.

Jamie’s not the only dadager who’s ended up putting an axe through his golden goose. If Thora Birch’s career trajectory had continued from where it was 20 years ago, she’d be one of the most famous actresses in the world: American Beauty, Ghost World. But in 2010, her ex-porn-star father got her fired from an off-Broadway play by allegedly interfering in the production, threatening other actors for touching her per direction, and poking his head through windows on the set. She didn’t have another significant role till The Walking Dead in 2020.

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And no one can outdo Thomas Markle when it comes to grifting from your own child: here’s a man who has faked paparazzi photos and sold private correspondence to get a slice from his daughter Meghan’s success in marrying into the royal family. It didn’t matter that she firmly held him at arm’s length. His logic seemed to be that she was his, and he felt entitled to his portion from her. Any boundary she set, he saw as a betrayal. Any infraction he committed was only what a loving father would do. No wonder she didn’t want him walking her down the aisle. He gave her away a long time ago.

It’s a question of possession. Some fathers still treat their children as an extension of themselves, regardless of how post-feudal the rest of the world becomes. When a woman takes the tiger role, she’s being ambitious through her children, and ambition in a woman is always suspect. When it’s a man involving himself in his child’s career, though, he’s merely exercising his patriarchal rights — something he’s apparently entitled to do even if, as in most of the examples, he wasn’t around for much of the actual childhood bit.