Comment | Celebrity documentaries are praised for their openness – In reality, it can be about calculations

Pamela Anderson reads his old diaries, David Beckham grilling in his outdoor kitchen and Robbie Williams lying in bed in his overalls. The past year has been full of celebrity documentaries.

In 2020 I wrote actor About Demi Moore's biography and I speculated that intimate and revealing biographies would become a way for public figures to manage their brand in the age of social media.

I was partly on the right track. It has proven that the release of a documentary film or series on a streaming service is a real effective means of becoming the topic of the month in the attention economy of popular culture. Pamela Anderson did both: both a biography and a documentary were released in January.

The Beckhams have also published biographies before, but only Netflix's praised documentary series has made them relevant again in a new way. It promises more lucrative deals for the couple depicted in a sympathetic light.

Behind the popularity of celebrity documentaries is the magical union of nostalgia and personal revelations. We remember them, we vaguely remember the skirmishes, but only the documentary forms a whole story and reveals what really happened behind the scenes.

Above all, documentaries remind us of the humanity of these fairy-tale rich and successful characters, when we see a millionaire soccer player doing the dishes or a singing star talking about his panic disorder.

Celebrities the relationship with the public is often at the heart of these memoirs. Destinations want to redefine their stories on their own terms. Especially the relationship of the stars of the late 1990s and early 2000s with the public was largely defined by the yellow press and the everywhere stalking paparazzi.

With the digitization of social media and the yellow press, the earning logic of this celebrity gossip machine, which relies on the work of the paparazzi, crumbled. At the same time, the reins of brand management passed more into the hands of celebrities and PR machines, for better or for worse.

Surely no one wants to return to the golden age of the paparazzi, when the crying Britney Spears harassed with a small child in the corner of the cafe.

But the fact that documentaries have become part of celebrities' PR machinery and brand management raises many questions. More and more often, the subjects of these documents are also involved in the production of the programs themselves.

Can the documentary maker then present his characters as complex and flawed, or will difficult subjects be skipped? Is it then a documentary or a PR stunt?

Development cost the result can be at least artistically lousy documentaries. About ex-royalty Harry and Meghan -documentary series production company was the couple's own Archewell Productions. The end result was a calculated commercial brand collaboration with Netflix.

Also Beckham– series is based on David Beckham's own production company Studio 99. Editor of the New Yorker Rebecca Mead guessesthat it might have an effect on the series moving past the criticism Beckham received as an ambassador for the human rights-repressing Qatari soccer World Cup.

However, according to Mead, this is not necessarily a shortcoming, but can reveal something essential about how the Beckhams want themselves to be seen. A person's ability or inability to reflect on their own actions is of course interesting in, for example, memoirs, but in biographical films the embellished view often leads to a boring end result.

Celebrities self-directed brand management is nothing new in the journalistic field either. The bigger the celebrity is, the more he wants to dictate the conditions for the journalists' work. Culture journalists are familiar with strict rules for interviews: questions may only be asked in relation to the work to be published.

The change is also visible on a smaller scale. The brand management of Finnish public figures has become professional in many ways.

At the same time, the perception of a journalist's work and its rules of the game seem to have become blurred. Sometimes you have to be reminded that an interview is not an advertisement that is approved in advance by a manager or an agent.