Star studies in mid-life crisis

Introduction

Star studies in mid-life crisis

If the publication of Richard Dyer’s Stars in 1979 marks the beginnings of Star Studies, then what began as a particular branch of Film Studies is now 40 years old. For the glamorous female stars of studio-era Hollywood, this was once a dangerous age that saw many retire from the big screen (e.g., Norma Shearer) or be relegated to character parts (e.g., Miriam Hopkins). Occasionally, and memorably, star performances pathologised the ageing female stars who refused to accept such relegation, such as Gloria Swanson’s Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Bette Davis’ Jane Hudson in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962). For men (stars or otherwise), the onset of a fifth decade is commonly associated with a ‘mid-life crisis’ brought on in part by a thinning head of hair and an expanding waistline, compounded by a palpable sense of frustration resulting from unachieved ambitions, declining potency, and general loss of confidence. At 40, does any of this redundancy, invisibility or decline apply to Star Studies? Has the time come for it to retire – gracefully or not – from the academic scene or content itself with a marginal role? Has it lost direction, motivation and ambition to become bloated and complacent, lacking new ideas, out-stripped by other (newer) areas of Media and Cultural Studies – for example, Celebrity Studies – so that it is now an irrelevance?

Judging by a recent spate of publications, Star Studies appears to be in good health, even somewhat revitalised.¹

In 2017, for instance, Revisiting Star Studies signalled new and future directions in the field, suggesting anything but complacency. This collection of essays on stars in classical and contemporary cinema, edited by Sabrina Qiong Yu and Guy Austin, identified a number of key themes pertinent to the ongoing development of this dynamic area of scholarship, including social media, globalisation, and transnationalism. An intention on the part of the editors to test the boundaries, offer alternatives, and challenge the clichés of Star Studies resulted in chapters on non-Hollywood and even non-human stars, among other things.² This publication indicates that Star Studies remained cutting-edge in 2017, in part by cross-pollinating with other disciplines such as Crip Studies (radical and affirmative studies of disability) and Animal Studies. Yet the collection also stands as evidence that its proponents felt under threat from scholars associated with a new and rapidly growing branch of Media and Cultural Studies known as ‘Celebrity Studies’.³ Indeed, in her introduction to Revisiting Star Studies, Sabrina Qiong Yu expressed some degree of unease when acknowledging ‘a danger that star studies could be incorporated into Celebrity Studies (2017, p. 13).

Stardom versus celebrity – a generational debate?

The tension between stardom and celebrity is, arguably, as much a part of public/popular press debates as those fought between academic disciplines. These debates are founded on a perceived dichotomy between stardom and celebrity – an opposition born of historical and hierarchical assumptions about how fame is earned or deserved. There is a deep (and marketable) nostalgia attached to the lost glory and glamour of the classical Hollywood star, perhaps most memorably articulated by Norma Desmond herself, ‘I am big. It’s the pictures that got small.’ Here she describes the shift from silent to talking pictures, a moment that resonates with contemporary shifts in cinema distribution (e.g., the rise of streaming platforms) and the theatres of stardom and celebrity (e.g., the rise of social media).

However, we resist seeing the relationship between stardom and celebrity in adversarial and generational terms. We contend instead that Star Studies has benefitted from the exponential growth of Celebrity Studies since 2010. Their interconnectivity lends both renewed impetus (and only partly in the form of competition) while providing outlets and methods for new research into film stars and stardom. It may well be that some film scholars fear being relegated to the margins of academia in the twenty-first century, as antiquated and of limited contemporary social significance. This struggle is felt keenly at a time when the mass media is foregrounding celebrities whose visibility is built via reality television, social media, and online fandom. Indeed, this pressure prompts the framing question of this special issue of Celebrity Studies that asks the following question: in an age of (digital) celebrities where is the (film) star? However, there are scholars (such as Hannah Hamad, Sean Redmond, and those in this special issue) keen to situate their investigations into contemporary film stardom and stars within the arena of Celebrity Studies in order to benefit from the debates and methods that continue to make this such vibrant area of scholarship, as this issue of the Celebrity Studies journal proves.

There is certainly no shortage of questions to be asked about contemporary film stars and stardom, ones that draw simultaneously on established debates within Star Studies and those currently circulating within Celebrity Studies. For instance, how has the ‘post-40 syndrome’ shifted for ageing female stars? Are the biggest film stars on the planet heavily hyphenated, not just starring in movies but writing, directing, and producing them? Are the biggest stars transnational and trans-medial, operating across national boundaries and multiple media platforms? What role does scandal still play in the rise and fall of stars? How have star-fan relations changed over the last two decades, particularly with the advent of social media? Are film stars still at the top of the celebrity hierarchy or have they been displaced in the 21^st century by pop, sport, and reality TV stars or even politicians and authors? Do contemporary frameworks of celebrity distinguish between these types of stars or are they all made and received in similar ways? Do awards and other accolades still indicate the status of film stars and invest them with measurable star power? Do film stars still have power within global and national politics and can they really instigate social change? Who is now managing a star’s public image? Do film stars remain relevant for understanding how society is changing? Do established star theorists, such as Edgar Morin and Richard Dyer, remain relevant for understanding the nexus between stardom and celebrity?⁴

Our call to action

It was with these types of questions in mind that contributions were sought from scholars for this special issue of the Celebrity Studies journal. This issue’s mandate was deliberately sweeping and ambitious, aiming to take the temperature of scholarship on stardom in order to gauge and perhaps map the interests, obsessions, methods, and scope of those currently working on the subject. Our reconnaissance into the field was also led by a firm eye towards the intersections between stardom and celebrity. What quickly became apparent when reviewing the abstracts was an overriding interest in the complex relationships between stars and social media; not only that but a particular interest in the connection between older, traditional notions of film stardom (and ageing film stars such as Sylvester Stallone or Jane Fonda) and globalised and ephemeral social media practices. This was not surprising. After all, the construction of star images today takes place largely, although not exclusively, via social media. No longer controlled by studios, movie star images are networked; circulating far and wide over the Internet and only partially controlled (or controllable) by the stars themselves. Fans and ‘anti-fans’ play an important role in the circulation and constellation of star images via social networks with celebratory, but unofficial, accounts such as Twitter’s @keanuthings and sharper content such as the online gendered backlash against Brie Larson’s appearance as Captain Marvel in 2019.⁵

Any analysis of the cultural significance of stars and the related social practice of using star images must examine and take into account a movie star’s online and social media presence. Facebook, Twitter and Instagram are, perhaps, the most mainstream and accessible platforms currently providing people around the world with an outlet for interacting with stars and engaging in the construction and reconstruction of their public profiles. These popular sites have changed the way in which people relate to each other and also how they relate to celebrities, including film stars. Media industries and celebrity cultures have been forced to yield control. Few celebrities and stars can afford to ignore these platforms and many gain, retain, or regain cultural currency by using them. This is not to argue that all stars embrace and exploit them in the same way. As Moya Luckett argues, stars such as Dakota Fanning maintain a more reserved and aloof relationship to social media, thereby cultivating a star image that is not immediately available but rather carefully guarded in order to foster an image of professionalism. Unlike Fanning, Mark McKenna argues that Sylvester Stallone uses social media, in particular Instagram, in a manner that aims to be read as savvy, generous, and personal. This acts as an invitation into the immediacy of Stallone’s family and working life.

Consequently, star sites online provide rich material for understanding the contemporary cultural significance of film stars vis-à-vis other kinds of celebrity. Official and user-generated images of stars and celebrities circulate widely, vying for attention and authority. There are also many different types of star and celebrity sites, including shrines, exposés and official ‘behind-the-scenes’ postings. The choice of which kind of platform is best suited to a star and their fans is certainly worthy of consideration. This is one central question for articles in this issue by Peter Turner (on the Fast and Furious stars), Dan Ward (on Dwayne Johnson), McKenna (on Sylvester Stallone) and Luckett (on Dakota Fanning). Sarah Thomas takes this to even newer media, considering how stars, such as Nicole Kidman and Nicolas Cage, for example, are stitched into the digital fabric of virtual reality.

Given its centrality to discourse and scholarship around stardom, it seems logical to ask whether social media has significantly displaced traditional media such as magazines, newspapers and TV chat shows when it comes to promoting movie stars and their films? As with the redundancy of Star Studies, the death of more traditional broadcast and print media has been somewhat over-reported, as older media conventions have been built into the very foundations of the new media. The same might also be said of the way Film Studies has been remediated through, and enmeshed with, Celebrity Studies scholarship. As some of the authors included in this issue suggest, publications such as People remain important for the mass circulation of star images, while established festivals such as Cannes remain crucial sites for the manufacture and display of stars across media. What is unclear, however, is whether this will remain the case. With the rise of social media, star scholars may need to adopt new research methods for investigating stars, but not necessarily and not entirely. In fact, this collection of essays suggests that some of the most established theories (those of Edgar Morin and Richard Dyer, for instance) remain as relevant now as when they were first published. Our call to action is then to re-evaluate and take seriously the productive struggles, intersections and convergences between Star and Celebrity Studies as disciplines.

In this issue

Through a combination of shorter provocative pieces and longer in-depth studies, this issue looks to address and perhaps answer some of the questions above, both through their content and their methodologies. Our focus has proven to be more Hollywood-centric than we originally intended and yet there is clear evidence in several of the essays included here of the increasing dominance of the Chinese film market (most notably, in McKenna’s) and the need for all film stars to engage with and respond to their fans across a wide range of geopolitical territories and ethnicities (see Turner). Indeed, an investigation of the relationship between the star and their global audiences would have been a topical launchpad for this volume. Yet, instead, mindful of the centrality of the role of new technologies that are transforming the ways films are made and consumed, we begin the issue with Sarah Thomas’ consideration of the place of the star within the new world of virtual and augmented reality. Here, Thomas takes a bold and original step forward into a new, complex and exciting cinematic and ludic universe, one in which a range of older stars have been finding their feet as much as new and emerging stars.

Peter Turner, in his piece on the stars of the Fast and Furious franchise, argues that Instagram has been used recently as a form of ‘interstellar community’ in which stars communicate with (and in relation to) each other as well as with their fans. He also notes that Instagram has proven to be highly popular among male Latinos, a key demographic for the Fast and Furious films. As part of his study, he updates Dyer’s work on the social significance of film stars, retaining the notion of the private and public self, while observing how the various stars associated with this franchise employ markedly different degrees of self-disclosure on social media. His essay explores the extent to which stars remain relevant to the marketing and success of movies, considering whether social media has augmented or eroded their power in the mainstream commercial film industry. Just who exactly is behind the stars’ postings on social media, however, remains a vexed question. One of the biggest stars of the Fast and Furious films is Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson, a former WWE wrestler and avid Instagram-user with over a billion followers. Significantly, Daniel Ward’s essay reveals that, although social media has played a major role in Johnson’s recent success in Hollywood, both his star persona and his strategies for engaging with fans and other stars have been largely influenced by his earlier (pre-filmic) career as a wrestler, including the genre’s intensely performative fabricated feuds.

While Instagram has played a significant role in Johnson’s ascendency in Hollywood (and to his persona as Hollywood’s hardest working man), social media has proven instrumental in the revitalisation of Sylvester Stallone’s career as a geriaction star with a huge global following, particularly in China. As Mark McKenna observes in his essay, social media has enabled this major box-office star of the late 1970s and 1980s to revive his brand and counter the myth of redundancy that has always been a part of his star image. Other ageing stars have not only used social media to resurrect their film careers, with blogs and Twitter accounts, but also through more traditional means, such as memoirs, self-help guides, workout videos, sponsorship deals and advertisements, as Alberto Mira describes in his essay on Jane Fonda at 80. An advocate for healthy ageing and female empowerment, Fonda has successfully regained her social significance after a 20-year career break in 1991, generating a whole set of issues about age, gender and agency. In contrast, Moya Luckett’s study of Dakota Fanning highlights the ways in which this American star has consistently blurred the boundaries between girlhood and adulthood, mainstream and cult stardom, fashion and film, with a restrained use of social media that shifts interest in her private life (namely, her romantic and sexual life) towards her strong family ties with her sister and mother. Almost a non-celebrity, Fanning has maintained a low-key stardom from an early age that emphasises her professionalism, her interest in fashion and her feminism in such a way as to appeal strongly to women. Modelling and red carpet premieres play a key role in terms of maintaining Fanning’s visibility online and across the media more generally, including newspapers but, more importantly, upmarket magazines. Similarly, Felicity Chaplin’s study of Anglo-French star Charlotte Gainsbourg emphasises how fashion spreads in magazines (such as Vanity Fair) and red carpet appearances (notably at the Cannes film festival) have been consistent features of her film career, as well as her reputation more generally as, like Fanning, edgier than most glamorous female Hollywood stars, associated more firmly with art cinema. Controversy and scandal, along with associations with fashion designers and modelling (more specifically, photographic posing), have significantly helped to determine Gainsbourg’s distinctive chic image, enabling her to successfully maintain a film career for over 30 years since the age of 14.

The studies of Fonda, Fanning and Gainsbourg included here suggest that star images and film careers rely on much more than skilful navigation of social media, requiring a whole range of activities across various media and public spheres. These activities are equally as physical in their appearances as they are digital in their media construction. Joshua Gulam and Donna Peberdy highlight the extension of a star’s performance of their iconic and defining on-screen roles to their paratextual performances, as humanitarian fundraisers (in the former) and as self-aware producers of public meltdowns (in the latter). Gulam, for instance, recognises the continued and urgent importance of a star’s film roles to their off-screen activism by analysing the humanitarian campaigns headed by actors Ben Affleck and Matt Damon. He urges us to re-centre these film roles in considerations of the star’s off-screen activism, particularly when it relates to neoliberal discourses of individual responsibility and market-based logic, as it does in the case of Ben Affleck. Gulam ends his piece with a timely call to consider the gendered discourses of humanitarian activism enacted by Affleck and Damon in the wake of the Weinstein scandal and through the problematic ‘Buy a Lady a Drink’ campaign supported by Damon’s water.org. Meanwhile, Donna Peberdy considers the authorship of the very public meltdowns of Joaquin Phoenix, Shia LaBeouf, and Jim Carrey, arguing that they constitute rejections of established star images, representing efforts to re-draw the ways the stars are received by the public. What follows are often uncomfortable performative moments that oscillate between performance art and philosophical musing in attempts to re-imagine the public self.

Similarly, James Morrison’s study of James Franco indicates that much of Franco’s success is due to a prolific and diverse portfolio of work, one that has not only maintained his public visibility but also produced a carefully crafted image as a queer icon despite the actor’s own heterosexuality. This high-achiever with a tendency towards playing slackers and failures is, in the great tradition of stars (as noted by Morin and Dyer), nothing if not contradictory. The Franco that emerges from Morrison’s account is a versatile and ambiguous figure: attractive, puzzling and unconventional. His prolific and promiscuous workload has produced a varied movie career in recent years, including a high proportion of ‘trash’ and cult films as well as mainstream hits. Yet, Franco is far more than a versatile actor with a complex image. He is also, in Morrison’s own words, an ‘all-purpose artiste,’ including director, painter and poet.

Often performing in lead supporting roles rather than starring ones, Franco represents a new type of Hollywood star, one with an inclination towards controversial and inherently queer roles. Inhabiting a very different type of masculinity that is equally slippery, Dwayne Johnson’s roles have been likewise received as queer, arguably building on camp associations established in earlier sword and sandal films, which were built around muscled strongmen, such as Steve Reeves. Putting Franco and Johnson together in this way reveals similar dedication to self-aware performances, albeit coming from diverging histories and finding their places in different cinematic spaces. Where Franco may be more at home in unconventional films, Johnson is associated with some of the most successful genre-based franchises in Hollywood. On one hand, Dwayne and Franco might represent illustrative cases of new forms of film stardom that are emerging. On the other hand, they may both be exceptional cases. In fact, in some fundamental ways, Franco and Johnson provoke a consideration of what makes a star a star in the 21^st century and also whether the established critical frameworks for understanding stardom can fully accommodate both of these film stars. These two stars neatly embody the key concerns that the gathering of this special issue revealed. Specifically, the interest in mainstream stars who embrace social media (Johnson, Diesel, Stallone, Affleck and Damon) and, secondly, those ‘edgier’ stars that do not reject social media so much as make a performance out of keeping themselves at a distance (Gainsbourg, Fanning, and LaBeouf).

Does life begin at 40?

Forty years on from Richard Dyer’s Stars, Star Studies appears to be in robust health, even if the theories and methods being used to make sense of stars and stardom are being adjusted and augmented in order to remain relevant. Indeed, the old adage that ‘life begins at forty’ may well be applicable in this instance. The essays assembled here suggest that this might be so, as they open up a rich terrain for future research. They are a testament not only to the fertile ground that lies between Star Studies and Celebrity Studies but also to how a fusion of these two dynamic academic fields can bear fruit in terms of original, incisive and socially significant research. More worrying for us is the Western-centred nature of the study of film stardom (evidenced by this collection of essays), which remains largely fixated upon Hollywood and Western, notably American, stardom. Thus, we urge those scholars of the big and small screens, as they re-consider and re-value the study of stardom as an interdisciplinary project, to open their field of vision to the ways that global and local star systems are adapting and feeding into the Hollywood model of stardom and Western modes of celebrity.

At 40, Star Studies can look towards a more distant future to the ‘Third Act’ so usefully defined by Alberto Mira in his analysis of Jane Fonda. Although, perhaps Fonda’s recommendation to frame the Third Act as a staircase rather than a decline might be somewhat over-optimistic. As Mira reminds us, the Third Act ‘is both markedly different from her previous career but, at the same time, keeps bringing her past back’. Such a reminder about the importance and inescapable nature of the past is an important part of answering our eponymous rallying question in this issue. But, given landscapes of neoliberal capitalism, digital and social media and globalised patterns of reception, the past is certainly not the only feature marking stardom and Star Studies at 40. It is a mobile discipline more suited to adaptation than it has been given credit for and if we have framed this issue to answer the question ‘where is the star?’ we might answer that s/he is – just like the 41-year-old James Franco – here, there and everywhere.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Martin Shingler

Martin Shingler was Senior Lecturer in Radio & Film Studies at the University of Sunderland, UK, from August 2005 until August 2019. He has published numerous essays on Bette Davis and is the author of Star Studies: A Critical Guide (2012) and When Warners Brought Broadway to Hollywood, 1923-39 (2018). He is also the co-editor of the BFI Film Stars series.

Lindsay Steenberg

Lindsay Steenberg is Senior Lecturer in Film Studies and Co-ordinator of the MA in Popular Cinema. Her research focuses on violence in contemporary popular cinema and television and she has published widely on the subject of the crime and action genres and their stars. She is the author of Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture and is currently writing a monograph entitled Are You Not Entertained? Mapping the Gladiator Across Visual Culture for which she has received an Oxford Brookes Research Excellence Fellowship.

Notes

1. See Bandhauer and Royer (2015); Bolton and Wright (2016); Carman (2016); and Street (2018) for recent examples of star studies.

2. See, for example, the following chapters in Revisiting Star Studies: Michael Lawrence (2017), ‘Darsheel Safary; globalisation, liberalisation and the changing face of the Bollywood child star, 125–144; Niamh Thornton (2017), ‘YouTube as archive: fans, gender and Mexican film stars online,’ 205–222; and Stella Hockenhull (2017), ‘Celebrity creatures: the “starification” of the cinematic animal,’ 279–294.

3. Celebrity Studies has grown rapidly since the launch of the Celebrity Studies journal in 2010 and the inauguration of the biennial Celebrity Studies conference in 2012, and has helped to reignite interest and enthusiasm in stardom and stars. Celebrity Studies has much in common with Star Studies, drawing heavily on many of the same theorists, theories, concepts and methods (e.g., Richard Dyer). However, situated within the field of Media and Cultural Studies (rather than Film Studies), it incorporates a much wider range of subjects when it comes to exploring the operations and significance of fame and idolatry, including stars of pop music, sport, television, YouTube and social media, as well as writers, politicians and even academics.

4. Edgar Morin’s (2005), The Stars was originally published in French in 1957 and although its impact remained limited until it was translated into English, it can be seen as a leading precursor to Dyer’s Stars.

5. For a discussion of ‘anti-fans,’ see Redmond (2014) and Gray (2003).