Greening and celebrification: the new dimension of celebrities through green production advocacy

Abstract

Screen culture and conglomerates are starting to echo the green shooting phenomena; roles such as sustainability director, eco-manager, eco-consultant, and eco-assistant are taking a more prominent space in the entertainment and cultural industry to achieve the goal of creating sustainable productions. In this current context, there seems to be a need for an agent to catch the attention of the audience to make a claim about green policies and contribute to a green literacy fabric. This opinion article recognizes that there are two types of voices, internal (scholars and practitioners) and external (celebrities and audiences), that have arisen in the audiovisual industry from different perspectives. Hence, through a theoretical approach, it tackles the particularities, typologies, and the role celebrities play as hot spots to push both viewers and creators into better decision-making models. The results show two main typologies: celebrification, in which a person becomes famous due to their sustainable actions, provoking a metonymic effect, and recelebrification, when famous people or well-known figures redefine their status by acting sustainable, producing a synecdoche effect. In conclusion, it is difficult to define what goes before and what goes after: whether it is the celebrity who passes the attributes onto production or whether it is the production that, by its characteristics, passes its attributes onto the celebrity.