CRITICAL REMARKS ABOUT MOVIE STARS
The conventions by which a
viewer is guided through a movie presume an accumulated knowledge of what
Hollywood is, a knowledge that extends beyond the boundaries of any individual
movie fiction. (Maltby and
Craven, Hollywood Cinema, 101)
. . .a star's repetition
of performance elements over a number of movies would lead to the consolidation
of that performance as a set of gestures and behavior patterns recognizable to
the audience, who could then predict what the star was likely to do in any
movie he or she appeared in. (Maltby
and Craven, Hollywood Cinema, 89)
Hollywood’s commercial aesthetic encourages
performance styles that produce this dual presence, and allow the two halves of
a performance to play against, or play with, each other. In a manner similar to the way a viewer’s
perception shifts easily between represented and expressive space, our
impression of an actor’s presence and his or her “disappearance” into character
readily alternate with each other. (Maltby,
HC 2nd ed, 381)
…a star’s performance can resolve the tension of two identities in one
body in a more complete manner than any “actorly”
performance could reasonably hope to achieve. An established star is,
literally, a body of expectations, and these bodies function as very economical
narrative devices. A great deal of information is conveyed about characters
simply because they are played by Harrison Ford or Bette Davis. (Maltby, HC
2nd ed, 385)
Stars articulate what it is to be a human being in contemporary
society; that is, they express the particular notion we hold of the person, of
the “individual.” They do so complexly, variously—they are not straightforward
affirmations of individualism. On the contrary, they articulate both the
promise and the difficulty that the notion of individuality presents for all of
us who live by it. (Dyer, from Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society,
Introduction)
What is at stake…is the degree to which, and manner in which, what the
star really is can be located in some inner, private, essential core. This is how the star phenomenon reproduces
the overriding ideology of the person in contemporary society. But the star phenomenon cannot help being
also about the person in public. Stars, after all, are always inescapably
people in public…The private/public, individual/society dichotomy can be
embodied by stars in various ways; the emphasis can fall at either end of the
spectrum, although it usually falls at the private, authentic, sincere end.
Mostly too there is a sense of “really” in play—people/stars are really
themselves in private or perhaps in public but at any rate somewhere. However, it is one of the ironies of the
whole star phenomenon that all these assertions of the reality of the inner self
or of public life take place in one of the aspects of modern life that is most
associated with the invasion and destruction of the inner self and
corruptibility of public life, namely the mass media. (Dyer, from Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society, Introduction)
[The Gunfighter
{1950} was] a self-conscious reflection on the nature and meaning of "the
star" as an element in both cinematic form and public life. . . . [the writer] envisions the gunfighter as a killer-celebrity
who finds himself trapped in the role and reputation he has spent his life
seeking. The mood of entrapment was to shape the narrative and the landscape
through which the gunfighter would move, seeking refuge or escape from his
special history and failing to find it. (Slotkin, Gunfighter Nation, 385)