Beautiful penitent whore: the desecrated celebrity of Mary Magdalene

ABSTRACT

Mary Magdalene is a superstar: a character of perennial cultural fascination in the East and the West, embodying the classic dichotomy of virgin and whore. In this article, I examine her as a celebrity and a film star, using the way in which star studies examines the sources of meaning in a star image, and celebrity studies understands cultural impact and the circle of affect, in order to encompass and analyse Mary Magdalene’s complex and contradictory elements. This is an interdisciplinary encounter with Mary Magdalene, from the perspectives of theology, church and art history, feminist film and media studies, celebrity and popular culture. My aim is to provide a means for productive analysis of her unique complexity, when her meaning is obscured and distorted by ideological and cultural red herrings.

KEYWORDS:

• ‘Mary Magdalene’
• celebrity
• stardom
• theology
• feminism

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Elliman, in Jesus Christ Superstar (1973); Fltskog, Scandinavium, Gothenburg, 1972; Chisholm, O2, London, 2012, following television show called Superstar on ITV to select the actor to play Jesus.

2. Diane Apostolos-Cappadona sets out these different Marys in detail and in the context of the visual arts in her catalogue to accompany the exhibition In Search of Mary Magdalene: Images and Traditions (2002). This was on display from April 5–22 June 2002, at The Gallery at the American Bible Society, New York.

3. It is actually July 22.

4. Rojek (2001) examines the convergence of celebrity culture and religion, but not in a way that develops the idea of Mary Magdalene. He does consider similarities in the way Jesus, Elvis and John Lennon are part of rituals (61). He also considers the choice of Hollywood celebrities to play the role of the Devil onscreen (73).

5. Casey points out that Mary Magdalene is the only person agreed upon by the gospel writers to have gone to Jesus’ tomb (2010, p. 465).

6. See Casey (2010), pp. 25–6 for a summary of the scholarly discreditation of Dan Brown’s novel.

7. Joan Taylor presented a paper entitled ‘What Did Mary Magdalene Look Like?’ at The Body Politics of Mary Magdalene, a conference at the Warburg Institute in London in 2017, organised by Mary Magdalene scholar Joanne Anderson. I am hugely grateful to Professor Taylor for sharing her as yet unpublished paper with me and granting me permission to refer to it in this article.

8. In Jesus’s Female Disciples: the New Evidence (2018), Joan Taylor and Helen Bond claim that the number and significance of women involved in Jesus’s ministry has been underestimated for centuries.

9. Vertigo replaced Citizen Kane in Sight and Sound’s 2012 poll of The 50 Greatest Films of All Time (Vol 22, Issue 9, 2012).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Lucy Bolton

Lucy Bolton is Reader in Film Studies in the School of Languages, Linguistics and Film, at Queen Mary University of London. She is the author of Contemporary Cinema and the Philosophy of Iris Murdoch (Edinburgh University Press, 2019) and Film and Female Consciousness: Irigaray, Cinema and Thinking Women (Palgrave 2011), and the co-editor of Lasting Screen Stars: Images that Fade and Personas that Endure (Palgrave 2015). She co-edits the book series Visionaries (EUP) and is on the editorial boards of the journals Film-Philosophy, Open Screens and Celebrity Studies.