Keanu’s late style: the ubiquitous art of short-form celebrity

ABSTRACT

Over the course of his Hollywood career, Keanu Reeves’ stardom has elicited contradictory appraisals. A well-documented history of personal struggle has facilitated a collective engagement with the lived reality of the star, fostering the public construction of an emotional interiority. Yet, these efforts at authentication seem to be obstructed by the enigmatic star’s commitment to a form of privacy that eschews the conventions of celebrity access . Following a discussion of the longstanding contradictions around his celebrity subjectivity, this article focuses on transformations in Reeves’ persona over the past decade. Since 2010ʹs ‘Sad Keanu’ meme, the star’s popularity has exploded into ubiquity, creating new fantasies of communicative disclosure. I unpack this late career ubiquity by focusing on the figurations of his celebrity identity across the ‘short form ephemera’ of memes, selfies, and film cameos. This article shows how these ephemera create new mediations of celebrity proximity, including his cameo in the romantic comedy Always Be My Maybe, where the articulation of Keanu’s Asian heritage marked an important intervention into the public life of the star. Working across celebrity studies paradigms including reluctance and confession, this article traces an emerging short-form media ecology unfolding serially across new arrangements of celebrity interaction.

KEYWORDS:

• Keanu Reeves
• online media
• cameo appearances
• celebrity affect
• Asian identity

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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Nitin Govil

Nitin Govil is Associate Professor of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. He is the author of Orienting Hollywood: A Century of Film Culture between Los Angeles and Bombay (2015) and one of the co-authors of Global Hollywood (2001) and Global Hollywood 2 (2005). In 2018, he taught the first Keanu Reeves class at the University of Southern California.