‘Hollywood's hot dads’: tabloid, reality and scandal discourses of celebrity post-feminist fatherhood

This article offers post-feminism as a critical framework for understanding the phenomenon of celebrity fatherhood as it has been widely articulated through the channels of tabloid media, celebrity reality TV and the discourse of scandal. A heavily paternalised presence within the tabloid media has become increasingly central to the sustainability of a coherent public identity for innumerable male celebrities in contemporary media culture, including film and cable television celebrities, among them Tom Cruise, Brad Pitt, Patrick Dempsey, Jude Law, Snoop Dogg and Hulk Hogan. The post-feminist paternalisation of mediated masculinity in celebrity culture has increasingly permeated a growing arena of representational outlets, and while cinematic stardom remains one of the most visible popular cultural manifestations of this phenomenon, the popular cultural breadth and scope of these representations and personifications have expanded and converged exponentially alongside wider trends in the distribution and consumption of media texts, so that celebrity post-feminist fatherhood is widely discursively circulated in the realms of reality tv, celebrity gossip magazines and online celebrity forums and blogs. The examples of celebrity post-feminist fatherhood under the analytical purview of this paper are indicative of a major trend within the tabloid culture of the contemporary media, which increasingly function as a space for popular cultural ephemera to play out currently pertinent and discursively apposite gender concerns. For male celebrities, it has become increasingly necessary to showcase their heteronormativity through tabloid profiles that characterise their fatherhood as ‘sexy’, in order to meet the requirements of hegemonic masculinity in post-feminism, and for individuals whose celebrity is flagging to recuperate their status through revitalising and currently culturally apposite means of mediating their paternity.

Keywords:

• post-feminism
• fatherhood
• tabloid
• scandal
• reality TV

Acknowledgements

My thanks go to Sean Redmond, Su Holmes, Allison Maplesden and Diane Negra, as well as the two anonymous readers for their helpful advice and suggestions. I also acknowledge the assistance of the School of English and Media Studies at Massey University for funding my attendance at the Screen 50 conference in Glasgow in 2009, where I presented an early version of this work.

Notes

1. Where film and television actors are concerned it is, of course, necessary to highlight the distinction between screen persona and publicity image that was made in film studies theorisations of stars and star images, and hence the notion of ‘duality’ that was discussed in scholarly work on stardom thereafter (Dyer 1998/1979; Ellis 1992/1982; Geraghty 2000). Therefore, the shift in significance from one side of the public/private, on-screen/off-screen (specifically, the cinema screen), extraordinary/ordinary binary with regard to the primary avenues through which these figures register in popular consciousness, has lent the public identities of the Hollywood actors in question a mutability that speaks to the on-going definitional and terminological debate regarding stardom versus celebrity, the ‘blurred boundaries’ between them and the ‘hierarchy of cultural values which organises the meanings of these terms, with the concept of “star” positioned above the concept of the “celebrity”’. (Redmond and Holmes 2007, p. 8). Traditional star studies might consider this shift a diminishment of the ‘auratic’ (Benjamin 2007/1973; Mann 1988) status of their stardom, to the point where the (now blurred) line between star and celebrity status is crossed, as the principal textual realm in which their public identity is mediated moves to, or at least competes with, those which seem to allow greater access to a purportedly ‘authentic’ self (e.g. the tabloid and reality forms under consideration here), and which are thus lower on the auratic scale than the high-aura cinematic star vehicle, or operate in a second-tier capacity in the cultural hierarchy of star texts (Dyer 1998). Thus, without reiterating all the nuances of the stardom/celebrity debate (see Evans 2005; Geraghty 2000; Marshall 1997; Redmond and Holmes 2007) it makes greater sense, given the purview of this paper, to discuss these Hollywood actors in terms of their status as celebrities rather than film stars. This is not to negate the significance of the screen persona or the phenomenon of film stardom and I will, where appropriate, make reference to cinematic and televisual fictions, where there is a productive parallel or point to be made about the mediation of post-feminist fatherhood. However, it is beyond the scope of this piece to be able to explicate adequately all the nuances of the discursive interlocution between stardom and celebrity.

2. I am not claiming that the paternalisation of celebrity is a straightforwardly top–down linear process, or that it necessarily occurs as a direct upshot of the agency of the individuals in question. Nor am I making claims as to the conscious intentionality of particular individuals regarding their public paternalisation, other than in instances where the celebrity's agency is manifestly evident, as in the case of Calvin ‘Snoop Dogg’ Broadus, who executive produced his reality TV show Snoop Dogg's Father Hood purposefully in order to showcase ‘me as a father’ (Season 1, episode 8). Rather, I wish to position it as a more circulatory and discursive process with a number of factors and facets of the cultural industries interoperating to facilitate this discourse of masculine identity in contemporary celebrity culture, and to effect this representational trend. I hence acknowledge the role of the celebrity's own power and agency, the publicity machine and promotional culture, gossip culture, and the tabloid news agenda in contributing to this discourse. See scholarship by Gamson (1994), Marshall (1997), Turner et al. (2000), Turner (2004) and Hesmondhalgh (2005) for discussions of the relationship between celebrity agency and power and the cultural production of celebrity.

3. Thanks to Diane Negra for bringing this article to my attention.

4. The image in question appeared several months prior to the confirmation that Law fathered a child from a one-night-stand with model Samantha Burke. This, of course, has troubled his personification of the paternal ideal and the impact of this development upon the coherence of his public persona as a post-feminist father remains to be seen. A later section of this paper details examples of cases whereby scandal and/or backlash germane to a celebrity's fatherhood has ruptured the coherence of their personification of this ideal.

5. This is, in fact, quite typical of the way in which Barack Obama has been mediated within celebrity culture, and the fact that he became so quickly and widely entrenched within a celebrity orientated media culture did not go unnoticed by his political opponents, who in fact attempted to flag it up in order to discredit him. Shelley Cobb has elsewhere highlighted ‘John McCain's presidential campaign ad comparing Barack Obama's celebrity status to Paris [Hilton's] and Britney [Spears]’, thus associating Obama with the public image of the young female celebrities as vacuous and immature’ (Cobb 2008, para. 25).

6. In this way it acknowledges the aforementioned ‘duality’ of film stardom in terms of filmic persona and persona articulated elsewhere in media culture in the capacity of celebrity, but positions them in this case as complementary, as do the following examples relating to Patrick Dempsey.

7. Other examples of this include the aforementioned alignment of Matthew McConnaughey's fatherhood with his laid-back ‘dude’ persona (among his film roles, Failure to Launch (2006) and Surfer Dude (2008) most visibly foreground this aspect of his persona), and the online gallery of celebrity fathers that makes rhetorical use of the title of Eddie Murphy's family comedy star vehicle Daddy Day Care (2003) (Byrne).

8. Thanks again to Diane Negra for supplying this article.

9. At the time of writing, Run's House is now in its seventh season. The 2005 premiere of Hogan Knows Best attracted 10.2 million viewers, at the time VH1’s ‘highest rated premiere ever’ (‘VH1’s Sunday Night...’, 2005).

10. According to Adrienne McLean, ‘a media scandal occurs when the intentional or reckless personal actions of specific persons, who can be identified as perpetrators of those actions, disgrace or offend the idealized, dominant morality of a social community’ (McLean 2001, p. 6, author's emphasis) and for all the male celebrities concerned here, the offences perpetrated were incongruous with the morality or values associated with the dominant paternal ideal they had heretofore come to personify.

11. See Cobb (2008) for an in-depth case study of the demonisation of celebrity motherhood in post-feminism.

12. Recently the tabloid media have also seized upon and widely circulated a quotation by Price comparing her daughter to a ‘troll’ (‘Katie Price compares daughter…’, 2009).

13. Eddie Murphy was speaking on Dutch television show RTL Boulevard while promoting his current vehicle Dreamgirls (2006), in which he played a womanising philandering African American superstar, in a curious confluence of filmic persona and publicity image (‘Murphy ditches Scary Spice and demands DNA test’, 2006).

14. Thanks to Diane Negra for supplying this article.

15. There are innumerable references in the entertainment news media that refer to Russell Crowe in these terms both prior to and during the paternalisation of his public identity. At the time of the release of Crowe's then current vehicle Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World (2003), one broadsheet profile did so, citing his ‘unenviable tabloid reputation’ as a ‘foul-mouthed, drunken, bullying, womanising brawler’ (Goodwin 2003).

16. This had already taken place through his cinematic outputvia paternal roles in Gladiator (2000) and Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World.

17. A few months after its release, one journalist reported that although Cinderella Man (2005) had ‘received almost unanimously rave reviews’ its box-office takings were much ‘lower than expected’ (Palmer 2005), while the World Entertainment News Network claimed, in the week following Crowe's arrest, that ‘cinema-goers have stayed away since the actor attacked Nestor Estrada with a telephone last Monday, and the film struggled at the weekend’ (‘Crowe's attack threatens new film’, 2005). See also Waxman (2005) and Gray (2005).

18. Another example of a male celebrity who was vilified in the media following a scandalous revelation of their ‘bad’ fatherhood was Alec Baldwin, whose private answer phone message to his daughter Ireland in which he refers to her as a ‘little pig’ was leaked in the media and circulated extremely widely after it first appeared on celebrity gossip blog TMZ (‘Alec Attacks’, 2007).

19. This was particularly prevalent in 1996 during the promotional activities surrounding the release of Mission: Impossible, but perhaps more importantly, ahead of the release of Jerry Maguire later that year (Sarkin 2006a, p. 48).

20. Alongside Cruise's paternal autocracy, the mediation of his fatherhood at this time continued to be posited according to the post-feminist template with regard to its practicalities: ‘I change diapers all the time. I have to tell you I love it’ (Stewart 2006).

21. He is much less prolific, and has not had a major box-office success since scandal discourse began to be circulated in relation to his post-feminist fatherhood (http://www.boxofficemojo.com/people/chart/?id=tomcruise.htm).