INTRODUCTION
This anthology offers a guide to studying the stars and the phenomenon of
stardom. Its concern is not individual stars but the cultural and theoretical
issues stars raise, although particular stars feature as examples. These are
largely American because Hollywood has established the dominant paradigm
of both mainstream cinema and stardom. However, Behroze Gandhy and
Rosie Thomas’ work on Indian stars highlights both the separate identity of
other world cinemas and the national specificity of Hollywood.
The hegemony of Hollywood is also a reason for the almost exclusive
focus on film stars. Yet stardom arose in the theatre before burgeoning in the
cinema, a relation discussed in a number of these essays. Latterly, with the
break up of the studio system and the emergence of the star as independent
producer, freer to choose roles and focus on acting rather than image, the
production of the bezazz and gossip of stardom appears to have passed from
the cinema to the music industry or sports world. However, as Kobena
Mercer’s closing analysis of Michael Jackson’s pop video, Thriller, suggests,
while other entertainment industries may manufacture stars, cinema still
provides the ultimate confirmation of stardom. So it is argued, the very
different forms of television produce personalities not stars; to achieve
stardom means breaking out of the medium. Nevertheless, as David Lusted
shows, television circulates and elaborates star personae who originate in
other entertainment fields.1
The star challenges analysis in the way it crosses disciplinary boundaries:
a product of mass culture, but retaining theatrical concerns with acting,
performance and art; an industrial marketing device, but a signifying element
in films; a social sign, carrying cultural meanings and ideological values,
which expresses the intimacies of individual personality, inviting desire and
identification; an emblem of national celebrity, founded on the body, fashion
and personal style; a product of capitalism and the ideology of individualism,
yet a site of contest by marginalised groups; a figure consumed for his or her
personal life, who competes for allegiance with statesmen and politicians.
Not all these facets can be equally represented in an anthology of necessity
limited as to length and cost. The major emphasis of this selection is the role
of stars in the production, circulation and negotiation of meanings, identities,
desires, and ideologies. Other areas of interest such as theatrical stardom,
fashion, national stars, performance and kinesics, television personality—
which receive limited attention here—may be followed up through the
bibliography.
A decade has passed since the publication of Richard Dyer’s Stars which
laid the groundwork for star analysis within film studies.2 Till then, work on
stars had been largely the province of fandom on the one hand or of
sociology on the other. While the one focused on personal biographies, the
other took stars as industrial marketing devices or social role models—a
means of creating and organising audiences and disseminating stereotypes.
Film criticism acknowledged the role of the star in films only rarely,
generally in connection with genre (the western and John Wayne) or with a
director (John Ford and John Wayne). Richard Dyer’s approach, combining
semiotics and sociology, introduced the notion of the star text. He analyses
the star image as an intertextual construct produced across a range of media
and cultural practices, capable of intervening in the working of particular
films, but also demanding analysis as a text in its own right. While semiotics
provides methods for analysing such ‘texts’, sociology asks how they
function in society. Thus study of stars becomes an issue in the social
production and circulation of meaning, linking industry and text, films and
society.
Such issues were consolidated in the seventies under the rubric of cultural
studies which responded to and fed an increasing awareness within
subordinated cultures of the political significance of representation. In this
perspective, stars personalise social meanings and ideologies. Actors become
stars when their off-screen life-styles and personalities equal or surpass
acting ability in importance. Stardom enacts the power and material success
of individual lives. Thus stars are implicated in the critique of individualism,
consumerism, and social stereotyping; they become an object of cultural
politics.
Such a politics, however, cannot neglect the meanings and pleasures that
stars hold out to their audiences. Richard Dyer’s work offered two routes into
the cultural complexity of stars. If star images relate to social meanings and
values, this relation is not one of simple reflection or reproduction. Textual
analysis shows how star images reconcile, mask, or expose ideological
contradictions. However, the premiss that such images are intertextual and
contradictory opens up the possibility for divergent or oppositional readings
by different audiences.
Dyer’s work on stars coincided with a period of growing interest in
psychoanalytic approaches to the cinema, which produced quite a different
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conception of stars and of their textual and ideological effects.
Cinepsychoanalysis is concerned with the source of cinema’s fascination
for audiences, and in particular with the interrelation of psychic and
cinematic mechanisms of identification. In this respect, it introduced into star
analysis the fundamental issue of desire and pleasure, attempting to answer
the question ignored by traditional economic analyses as to why stars have
the power to sell goods and films. Drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis, it
propounded a homology between the construction of the gendered human
subject in language and the ‘ideal’ spectator of narrative film. Both processes
involve identification with human figures—parents and stars. Both, through
mechanisms of fetishism and voyeurism, produce apparently coherent,
complete and fixed identities through the denial of difference—that
‘otherness’ which femininity, ethnicity or divergent sexualities enact for
white, patriarchal society. Such identificatory figures also deny the fact of
process, whereby meanings and identities are never fixed but in constant flux.
In this analogy a film’s ‘ideal spectator’ is a masculine construct, offering
identification with the male star as a narrative position of illusory mastery; the
female star, as object of the cinematic gaze, is reduced to a male fetish.3
For cinepsychoanalysis the culturalist argument that stars become stars
because they mean something to their audiences sidesteps their ideological
nature as mechanisms of identification and neglects the complex subjective
processes involved in the production of meaning. From this perspective, the
fragmentary, extra-cinematic circulation of the star image acts as an
inducement to the consumption of films for their promise to the viewer of
completion both of star image and self image through the structure of
identification offered by classic narrative. Thus the differences between stars
which interest the cultural analyst of social meanings are, as in earlier
critiques of mass culture, conceived as marketing devices, enticing audiences
to return to the same old scenario of patriarchal subjecthood and bourgeois
consumption.4
The cultural politics which arose with the various liberation movements of
the sixties and onward has been ambivalent about the political effectivity of
stars. Some feminists, for example, have found that by virtue of their public
prominence and economic power women stars, particularly in the thirties and
forties, appeared to offer positive figures of identification. Feminist critics
like Molly Haskell argued that such strong, independent female images
overrode repressive narrative resolutions and debates arose over the degree to
which star figures could be reappropriated to serve politicised imaginations.5
On the other hand, the female star who inevitably becomes a focus of visual
pleasure for an apparently masculine spectator appears the epitomy of the male
fetish.
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However, against the rejection of the star as a patriarchal construct, groups
hardly yet represented—gays and blacks, for example—demand images that
recognise marginalised social existences and that offer affirmative identities
and fantasies. Moreover, as Jackie Stacey points out, feminists confront a
dilemma when considering the popular female audience whose pleasurable
identifications with a female star theorised as fetish or voyeuristic object
must be counted either narcissistic or masochistic.
By the end of the seventies an impasse appeared to have arisen between a
culturalist approach concerned with the social circulation of meanings and
identities as ‘social facts’, analysable for their contradictory ideological
effects, and a psychoanalytic concern with the unconscious yet formative
processes which underlie such meanings and identities, determining their
subjective effects.6
This collection, while anthologising a few exemplary pieces from earlier
debates, largely represents later developments. These suggest that the
impasse of the early 1980s is in the process of breaking up as sociological,
semiotic and psychoanalytic approaches begin to inform each other, recasting
the object of study and the terms of analysis. Major developments in film
history, audience research, and the theorisation of feminine subjectivity have
contributed to this rapprochement.
The anthology is organised in four parts: The system; Stars and society;
Performers and signs; and Desire, meaning and politics. These headings
represent emphases in approach and focus, not rigid demarcations. The
increasing impossibility of separating industry and text, economics and
aesthetics, sociology and semiotics, cultural politics and psychoanalysis and
all these from history is demonstrated in the overlaps between issues raised
across sections. Articles within sections are organised so as to point towards
succeeding issues.
The focus of Part I: The system is the economic and institutional base of
Hollywood stardom. However, the opening essays on the origins of the star
system by Janet Staiger and Richard de Cordova raise questions of
historiography and cultural context. Whereas traditional film histories stress
cinematic specificity and innovation, Staiger and de Cordova consider the
complex interaction of economic motives and existing cultural practices in the
formation of the star system, in particular its relation to theatrical stardom,
the acting profession and the middle-class audiences cinema sought to win.
Exploitation and fabrication are the key themes in Charles Eckert’s and
Thomas Harris’s accounts of respectively the use of stars in tie-ups between
film studios and consumer industries and the publicity machines used by the
studios to manufacture star images. Karen Alexander situates such industrial
processes within the wider context of representation and ideology. Recording
the exclusion of black actors from stardom and the severe restriction of their
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roles in conformity to racist assumptions and arguments, she suggests how
‘the system’ has material effects in the sphere of subjectivity and identity.
Part II: Stars and society develops this issue, focusing on the cultural role
of the star system. Richard Dyer adapts Weber’s concept of charisma to
suggest that certain performers become stars rather than others because their
images embody central but threatened values within a given social
conjuncture. Charles Eckert and Charles Wolfe, using respectively neoMarxist/Freudian
structuralism and semiotics, develop sophisticated
intertextual readings of star images as they circulate in society through filmic,
political and journalistic discourses. All three writers use textual analysis to
interpret the ideological work star images perform in a given society.
Charles Eckert concludes his dissection of the political content of the
‘Shirley Temple’ text with an ironic acknowledgement of the power of the
fantasy she embodies. Charlotte Herzog and Jane Gaines challenge textual
interpretation with questions of audience. Drawing on ethnographic
approaches, they treat fantasy as practice rather than image, examining the
extra-cinematic circulation of Joan Crawford within the discourses of fashion
and related social practices of women who remake dresses worn by the stars.
Read in relation to Eckert’s work, this research suggests a struggle in the
arena of fantasy between the exploitative aims of the producer and the
appropriations practised by specific groups of consumers.
Behroze Gandhy and Rosie Thomas, writing on three stars who span the
history of Indian cinema, raise issues of national cultural context. While
under British imperialism, Indian cinema adapts the Hollywood model,
producing in different historical moments three distinctive and exemplary
female stars. Negotiation is a key term in their analysis of the cultural
productivity of these stars, recalling Richard Dyer’s work on the relations
between star images and ideological contradiction.7 In the case of Fearless
Nadia, Nargis Dutt and Smita Patil, a major contradiction emerges between
modernity and tradition. In their images, changing values of motherhood,
sexuality, and gender meet with the deeply mythological embedding of the
female image in Indian culture. Gandhy and Thomas suggest the powerful
resonances produced in the negotiations between such contradictory forces,
endowing these stars with a political potency and national status that appear
to exceed anything attained by comparable women stars in the West.
Stars and Society concludes by shifting from the functioning of stars
within larger social structures and practices to the operation of the social
within personal reception. Richard Dyer addresses the ideological construct at
the heart of Western stardom—the individual person. The star promises what
mass society and the human sciences—sociology, Marxism, psychoanalysis—
throw into question: intimate access to the authentic self. In this respect, stars
offer their audiences not only consumable images or ideological values but
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personal relationships. This raises the issue of identification with which
Jackie Stacey closes this section. In the written responses of self-confessed
fans she finds a range of identificatory modes and practices in which,
contrary to early cinepsychoanalytic formulations, difference from the star is
equally important as recognised similarity.
In these sections stars are discussed mainly as industrial, ideological and
cultural products. Part III: Performers and signs focuses on stars as the
products of film aesthetics, considering issues of performance, text, genre
and mode. Barry King’s conception of stardom as the actor’s professional
adaptation to institutional and filmic conditions of production brings the
interdependence of economics and aesthetic forms to bear on star
performance. John O.Thompson, drawing on semiotic approaches to textual
meaning, suggests how the contribution of particular star images to film texts
can be analysed, while Andrew Britton teases out the interrelation between
star images and generic conventions. Finally, my own piece considers stars
as symbolic figures within the broader aesthetic tradition of melodrama,
suggesting that stardom with its intense focus on the moral drama of personal
identity offers evidence of the continuing activity of the melodramatic
imagination in popular culture.
Each section closes on questions of identity and desire which are central to
the effectivity of stars. Part IV: Desire, meaning and politics applies
institutional, semiotic, cultural, and psychoanalytic approaches to questions
of desire, audiences, readings, pleasures, meanings and politics. What
emerges from these essays written from their different perspectives is a new
conception of identity as multiple, ambivalent, contradictory, always in
process of construction, but rarely dispensible. Work on feminine
subjectivity suggests that the construction of the patriarchal, bourgeois
subject is a hegemonic project rather than an achieved dominance, needing
constant reassertion, contested by groups who cannot develop within it, and
open to transformation.8 Stars as objects of desire, ‘social hieroglyphs’, and
role models provide a vital link between personal identity and politics.
Michel Mourlet’s opening pean to Charlton Heston defends the violence
entailed in the spectacle of masculinity, identifying the energy of desire with
male machismo, in an eloquent exemplification of masculine spectatorship,
at once engaging and disturbing. Miriam Hansen looks at another male star,
Rudolph Valentino, renowned as an erotic cult figure for a huge female
audience. Reworking cinepsychoanalytic models, she explores the vexing
question of female spectatorship, examining those constructions of narrative,
camera and the look which anticipate a female audience. Feminine
spectatorship is characterised by sexual ambivalence, oscillation, multivalent
looking; the construction of the male image for this ‘undomesticated female
gaze’ unsettles the fixity and mastery of masculinity, animating the feminine
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and ethnic ‘otherness’ of the Valentino persona in an oscillation between
passivity and activity, sadism and masochism, which offers the female
audience a fantasy of ‘erotic reciprocity’.
Andrea Weiss focuses on the relation of female audiences to female stars.
Given the dearth of representation for lesbian viewers, she asks how
oppressed, oppositional identities emerge, looking at the way dominant
discourses and cultural practices can be re-read within subcultural
lesbian discourses. In the thirties and forties, the Hollywood star system
supported strong female stars, often in women’s genres, who under pressure
of censorship were denied explicit heterosexual expression. The resulting
sexually ambiguous, androgynous figures filled a gap in the public imagery
available for lesbian audiences, while the circulation of subsidiary texts
detailing the off-screen lives of stars was paralleled by a lesbian network of
‘gossip’ and rumour; consequently lesbian audiences drew on different
knowledges from heterosexual audiences. Looking at the films of Dietrich,
Garbo and Hepburn, Andrea Weiss suggests the textual strategies which
enable alternative sexual identities to be ‘read-in’ against those preferred in
heterosexual discourse.
In that she has been popularly taken to represent the new, ‘politicised’
woman of the sixties and seventies—feminism’s answer to ‘what do women
want?’—desire and politics meet overtly in Jane Fonda. The issue is whether
and how the star as a product of a mass entertainment industry and a singular
individual can be used for oppositional politics. Tessa Perkins takes up the
question, what and who does ‘Jane Fonda’ represent? In examining the
attempts of the press to contain by belittling the radical claims of her image,
the ambivalent responses of many feminists, and the frequent contradiction
between image and film roles, Tessa Perkins effectively recasts this question,
shifting from the quest for conclusive meaning or political judgement to the
proposition that ambivalence itself is part of Jane Fonda’s significance. The
intense negotiations which her image provokes clarify issues at stake in the
public contest around women and politics. Thus stars offer not fixed
meanings nor role models but a focus in the continuous production and
struggle to define and redefine desires, meanings and identities.
David Lusted’s essay on Tommy Cooper, Diana Dors and Eric Morecombe,
stars of British variety and cinema who found an alternative
existence as television personalities, develops the issue of subcultural
contestation in relation to the institution of television, working-class
audiences and, implicitly, British culture. While these stars are not overtly
political, they represent their audiences through the subcultural readings they
make possible. The emphasis here is less on image than on the institutional
and generic practices of different television programme formats which they
exploit or subvert. Against the individualism of the star system, David Lusted
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stresses the social dimension of the meanings and pleasures offered to
working-class audiences by these stars. Their work in other entertainment
traditions calls up ‘a rich repertoire of reference in popular cultural memory’
and through their refusal of television’s protocols and their manipulation of
its codes, they both represent and collude with working-class experience.
Finally, the different strands of this anthology meet in Kobena Mercer’s
analysis of the convergence of different media industries, music,
perform ance, the horror film, stardom, sex, race, masculinity and cinema in
the transformations of Michael Jackson’s face alluded to or performed in the
pop-video, Thriller. The racial and sexual ambiguity of Jackson’s
androgynous, Peter Panish, Europeanised black looks, the eroticism of the
Afro-American soul singer’s voice, and Thriller’s play with the conventions
of the horror film all, in Kobena Mercer’s analysis, combine to question
prevailing stereotypes of black masculinity. Beyond this, Mercer implies,
Jackson’s success in popularising black music in white markets is linked to
his revitalisation of stardom itself. Thriller in its parodic play with show bizz
and film genre conventions celebrates both the desire and the horror involved
in the metamorphosis which produces the ‘star-as-image’. Kobena Mercer’s
account of Jackson’s resonant intertextual image demonstrates that despite
the retraction of the Hollywood studio system, stars continue to be produced
across the media. More importantly, his analysis shows how a particular star
contributes to the arena of cultural contestation when pleasure and politics
intersect.
NOTES
1 See D.Kehr, ‘A star is made’, Film Comment, 1986, vol. 15, no. 1, which contrasts
the careers of Henry Winkler and John Travolta; J.Langer, ‘Television’s
“personality system”’, Media, Culture and Society, 1981, vol. 3, no. 1, October,
and J.Ellis, ‘Stars as a cinematic phenomenon’, in Visible Fictions: Cinema,
Television, Video, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
2 R.Dyer, Stars, London, British Film Institute, 1979.
3 See C.Johnston, ‘Women’s cinema as counter-cinema’, in C.Johnson (ed.) Notes on
Women’s Cinema, London, Society for Education in Film and Television, 1973,
and L.Mulvey, ‘Visual pleasure and narrative cinema’, Screen, 1975, vol. 16, no. 3,
Autumn.
4 See A.Friedberg, ‘Identification and the star: A refusal of difference’, in C.
Gledhill (ed.) Star Signs: Papers from a Weekend Workshop, London, British Film
Institute Education Department, 1982; P.Cook, ‘Star Signs’, Screen, 1979/80, vol.
20, nos. 3/4, Winter; and John Ellis, ‘Stars as a cinematic phenomenon’, in Visible
Fictions, London, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982.
5 M.Haskell, From Reverence to Rape, New York, Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 1974
and Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1974.
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6 See C.Gledhill, ‘Introduction’ and P.Cook, ‘Stars and politics’ in C.Gledhill (ed.)
Star Signs: Papers from a Weekend Workshop, op. cit.
7 For discussion of the concept of negotiation see C.Gledhill, ‘Pleasurable
negotiations’ in D.Pribram (ed.) Female Spectators, London, Verso, 1988.
8 See L.Williams, ‘When the woman looks’ in M.A.Doane, P.Mellencamp and
L.Williams (eds) Revision: Essays in Feminist Film Criticism, Los Angeles,
American Film Institute, 1984 and ‘“Something else besides a mother”: Stella
Dallas and the Maternal Melodrama’ in C.Gledhill (ed.) Home is Where the Heart
Is, London, British Film Institute, 1987; J.Walker, ‘Psychoanalysis and feminist
film theory: The problem of sexual difference and identity’, Wide Angle, 1984, vol.
6, no. 3; D.Pribram, Female Spectators, op. cit.
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