death of the movie star

Music: Let's Active: Big Plans for Everybody (1986)

This week a network morning show aired a segment titled "death of the movie star," in which the narrating journalist bemoaned the end of the traditional (or "classical") Hollywood system. Perhaps as little as two decades ago, a big-name "star" could anchor a film and almost guarantee a positive return. Not so today, said the journalist, as she listed off a series of big names attached to recent Hollywood flops . . . but with one exception, of course: Angelina Jolie's role in Wanted is proving the star is not dead yet! Of course, the story was on NBC's Today and Wanted is produced by Universal, and Universal owns NBC. So what explains this strange contradiction? Why would a media company sound the death knell for the star system at the very same time as it attempts to fetishize a star? Thinkers associated with the Frankfurt School have an answer.

The classical Hollywood system---which took east coast theatre norms and subjected them to industrial standardization---eventually learned that they could not rely (at least initially) on the charisma of the stage star. "In the case of film," explains Walter Benjamin, "the fact that the actor represents someone else before the audience matters much less than the fact that he represents himself before the apparatus." By "apparatus" Benjamin means the set, the camera, and the director—an industrial set-up, as it were. This evaporates the mystique of the actor, argues Benjamin, because the actor is not making a direct connection with audiences and adapting his or her performance to them. Instead, the actor must imagine she is performing for "the masses" and must accept a kind of "self-alienation." The actor, in other words, relinquishes his or her connection to the performance to the camera, as well as his or her immediate connection to an audience. "While he stands before the apparatus," continues Benjamin, "he knows that in the end he is confronting the masses. It is they who will control him. Those who are not visible, not present while he executes his performance, are precisely those who control it. This invisibility heightens the authority of their control." If this is hard to imagine, one can remember Buggle's "Video Killed the Radio Star," which is premised in a similar logic: inscription in the field of vision and in the age of technical reproducibility forces a deeper self-alienation for the musician. Now he or she must "look good" for the "masses." New Wave artists understood this, which gave rise to their phenomenal success.

The problem with Benjamin's account, of course, is that "the masses," like "the filmic audience," doesn't really exist. These are projections of . . . the Hollywood system. Certainly box-office draw is a measure of something---something like "the mass interest"---but this ignores the fairly limited band of choice the "masses" have with Hollywood film: Dark Knight or Hellboy II? Nevertheless, Benjamin suggests that the loss of "aura" once possessed by the theatre star is supplanted by something else, "cult value"—the value of circulation and transaction, the ability of using the shot of a film actor as a "mirror image" that can be transported---just as much as the supposed power of "the masses" (which Benjamin suggests is the camera obscura of Hitler's rhetoric). The "cult of the movie star" helps to preserve "that magic of the personality that has long been no more than the putrid magic of its [film's] own commodity character . . . ." What is this "cult value?" We know it today as celebrity.

Benjamin made these observations in 1936, a decade after Rudy Valentino's untimely death caused something of hysteric outbreak in the states, and just three years before Gone With the Wind and The Wizard of Oz would wow audiences with the magic of Technicolor, Gable, and Garland. Yet his observations were prescient, as the inevitable result---the abandonment of the cult of the star by Hollywood---would take nearly sixty years to happen. Far more insidious than the gradual disclosure of the star as just another piece of the Hollywood machine is the displacement of the actor's control to "the audience," which means the system itself. Benjamin argued this shift thins-out or evaporates altogether the spirit of political change ("revolutionary spirit") and replaces it with the ideology of capitalism. Adorno is even more lucid:

Whereas today in material production the mechanism of supply and demand is disintegrating, in the superstructure it still operates as a check in the rulers’ favour. The consumers are the workers and employees, the farmers and lower middle class. Capitalist production so confines them, body and soul, that they fall helpless victims to what is offered them. As naturally as the ruled always took the morality imposed upon them more seriously than did the rulers themselves, the deceived masses are today captivated by the myth of success even more than the successful are. Immovably, they insist on the very ideology which enslaves them. The misplaced love of the common people for the wrong which is done them is a greater force than the cunning of the authorities. It is stronger even than the rigorism of the Hays Office [a censorship bureau], just as in certain great times in history it has inflamed greater forces that were turned against it, namely, the terror of the tribunals. It calls for Mickey Rooney in preference to the tragic Garbo, for Donald Duck instead of Betty Boop. The industry submits to the vote which it has itself inspired. What is a loss for the firm which cannot fully exploit a contract with a declining star is a legitimate expense for the system as a whole. By craftily sanctioning the demand for rubbish it inaugurates total harmony. The connoisseur and the expert are despised for their pretentious claim to know better than the others, even though culture is democratic and distributes its privileges to all. In view of the ideological truce, the conformism of the buyers and the effrontery of the producers who supply them prevail. The result is a constant reproduction of the same thing.

In other words, like all organisms, the Hollywood system is self-correcting in respect to its "product." A century of self-correction has led to the "constant reproduction of the same thing," not simply the same tired plot after the next---but the same star.

The standardization (and thus liquidation) of stardom is perhaps no more conspicuous than with VH-1's Behind the Music show, in which the following career path is usually narrated: (a) star starts small and gets his/her big break; (b) everything's coming up roses; (c) just at the apex of making-it big tragedy ensues; (d) star almost loses it all, or does in fact lose it all (Tawny, no?). If there was a Hollywood version for the movie star (whatever happened to Deborah Winger? Sean Young?) we'd likely see a similar script. At least, however, Winger and Young are strong, independent individuals in "real life" no matter how their careers are scripted. What's frightening today is that, insofar as "real life is becoming indistinguishable from the movies," as Adorno argued in 1944, spectators and stars alike can no longer distinguish between media-induced fantasy and "reality"---as they are, to a very real extent, one and the same (cf. Britney Spears; Baudrillard).

So what's the story, here? I've been suggesting that stardom has been under dynamic transformation since the 1920s: as its cult value strengthened, its "content"---the control, individuality, uniqueness, and politics of the actor---has weakened gradually until only cult value was left. In postmodernity, pure cult value is perhaps best exemplified by Paris Hilton, a celebrity known for her circulation (in the economy of women, then on the Internet circuit, and finally, in the celebrity circuit buoyed by tabloid photographers). Movie stars are just as interchangeable. Thus the utter ridiculousness of Universal's proclamation that somehow Angelina Jolie has escaped the evaporation of the "movie star" in their film Wanted. In a qualified sense, she's not a movie star; she's a baby-crazed, child-adopting celebrity who is married to another celebrity and who happens to make "movies." Let's not call Wanted a "film," either.