412: Stars + Celebrity

 Here are some links I found interesting this week:  1. Social media influencer Amelia Dimoldenberg was appointed as social media ambassador and red carpet correspondent for the Oscars where she will hold interviews with stars at the event. In this interview with The Hollywood Reporter, she says "I'd probably be starstruck to interview Martin Scorsese. He seems so funny from watching his daughter's TikTok's of them together."  After reading this article, I felt that it was a really interesting example that builds on our conversation the past two weeks about the role technology has played in reshaping the relationship between stars and fans. Social media, in this example, has provided Dimoldenberg with an increased access and intimacy to Scorsese's personal life. Not only does she indicate that she uses social media to learn more about a star that she is a fan of, but she also points out aspects of his life that cause her to make a generalization about his pers...

Although I very much admire Miriam Hansen’s efforts to safeguard the female spectator from historic erasure by exploring Valentino as a star created for female viewers, I felt that her argument at times lacked necessary nuance and clarification. While Hansen is right to point to the economic/industrial factors arising from WWI that led to a greater recognition of the “female experience, needs, [and] fantasies…, albeit for the purposes of immediate commercial exploitation” (263), absent from this evaluation is an acknowledgement that because the majority of people seeking to target the female demographic during this time were male, what they captured was more of a male interpretation of the female experience than anything else. In essence, Hansen appears to reflect the male fantasy onto the female spectator instead of exploring how the female gaze might altogether be different. Subverting Freud’s androcentric understanding of visual pleasure as Mulvey does, Hansen engages in a reading o...

This week, I was particularly intrigued by Hansen’s chapter about female pleasure and spectatorship. It addressed an issue that I have been grappling with for the past 1.5 years but have been unsuccessful at answering: what do we make of a so-called “female gaze”? (Is there one?) Hansen referenced Mulvey’s (1975) “Visual Pleasure,” where she famously used psychoanalysis to theorize about cinema’s penchant for voyeurism and the ways in which it is constructed for male/masculinized pleasures. Mulvey’s work is fundamental to what many know as the “male gaze.” But Hansen brings up popular critiques of feminist film theory because it has somewhat fallen short of conceptualizing the female spectator “other than in terms of an absence” (p. 263). What does an “alternative conception of visual pleasure” look like when roles are reversed (p. 264)? I am unable to articulate a potential vision, partially because I found myself struggling with the gendered binary between voyeurism and exhibitionism...

    In this week’s readings, I found Richard deCordova’s chapter to be the most interesting. Specifically, deCordova discusses the interdependence of a star’s screen personality and their private life: “The star is characterised by a fairly thoroughgoing articulation of the paradigm professional life/private life. With the emergence of the star, the question of the player’s existence outside his/her work in films entered discourse” (26). When obtaining stardom, the traits of an actor’s characters or roles are attributed to their true identity, or who they are in their private life. The blending of these identities is heightened for actors who are heavily typecasted, unable to break free from certain stereotypes, such as the girl next door, the dumb jock, the seductress, the nerd, etc. Likewise, the more talented an actor is at playing a particular role onscreen, the more audiences believe that the way they appear onscreen is truly how they behave in their personal lives b...

Richard DeCordova’s essay really explored and articulated something that I thought was evident in the history of the star, but I couldn’t necessarily articulate myself.  To me, the emergence of the traditional star system of classical Hollywood cinema followed this predictable pattern that aligned with the rise of cinema and fan magazines that publicized stage star’s and film star’s characters, personas, and later, personal lives.  DeCordova explained this pattern and added an immense amount of nuance to the process through his multiple quotations and analysis and expansion on the history of moving from the stage to film and the technology that aided it.  Today, I think the star system has greatly shifted from stage acting leading to film acting leading to stardom.  With the rise of digital media and social media influencers, stars are being born with just a single post. These “stars” are getting bigger brand deals than the average B-list movie star and are even feat...

  Core Response 1: Valentino, The Sheik, and Masculinity My response to this week’s reading is based on the following quote from Miriam Hansen:  “If the Valentino films had no other critical function, they did present, by way of negation, a powerful challenge to myths of masculinity in American culture between the wars. The heroes of the American screen were men of action, like Douglas Fairbanks or William S.Hart, whose energy and determination was only enhanced by a certain lack of social graces, especially toward women.” I think this analysis of Valentino as contradicting his age’s ideal conceptions of masculinity truly depicts The Shein ’s historical nature. Watching the film, I couldn’t help but roll my eyes at the martyr-esque depiction of Diana paired with the entitled nature of Ahmed. I felt mentally exhausted watching the film expect the audience to swoon for Ahmed as he develops sympathy over a situation he quite literally created by kidnapping a woman; Not to mentio...

Links for Week 2: Stars in DC in the 1940s: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kzMGaY832r8 Star-driven Media: https://www.eonline.com/ Stars Drive Taste: https://www.hgtv.com/design/packages/high-design-guide Gossip Thrives on Star Lives: https://perezhilton.com/ Stars + Activism: https://janepac.com/?home#endorsements

While there are many potential areas of inquiry within Richard Dyer’s (1998) Stars , I find myself gravitating towards a fundamental question: what is the star’s relationship to celebrity? Are the two synonymous? I find that the terms are often interchangeable colloquially, so long as they both refer to the traditional Hollywood celebrity. But how does one define celebrity? Dyer proposes a number of ways to conceptualize the star, one of them being Alberoni’s (1963) argument that stars are “people ‘whose institutional power is very limited or non-existent, but whose doings and way of life arouse a considerable and sometimes even a maximum degree of interest’ (p. 75)” (p. 7). The notion of a lack of institutional power is highly debatable—especially in transnational contexts where celebrities and geopolitics are explicitly tied—but what I am most interested in is the focus on the star’s “way of life.” Certainly, the importance of a star’s personal life opens a pathway for influencers an...

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