STARDOM What makes a star? Why do we have stars? Do we want or need them? Newspapers, magazines, TV chat shows, record sleeves—all display a proliferation of film star images. In the past, we have tended to see stars as cogs in a mass entertainment industry selling desires and ideologies. But since the 1970s, new approaches have explored the active role of the star in producing meanings, pleasures and identities for a diversity of audiences. Stardom brings together some of the best recent writing which represents these new approaches. Drawn from film history, sociology, textual analysis, audience research, psychoanalysis and cultural politics, the essays raise important questions for the politics of representation, the impact of stars on society and the cultural limitations and possibilities of stars. STARDOM Industry of Desire Edited by Christine Gledhill LONDON AND NEW YORK First published 1991 by Routledge 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by Routledge a division of Routledge, Chapman and Hall, Inc. 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2005. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” © 1991 editorial matter, Christine Gledhill; individual articles © respective contributors All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Stardom: Industry of desire 1. Cinema films. Acting. Stars, history I. Gledhill, Christine 791.430280922 Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Stardom: Industry of desire p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Motion picture industry—United States—History. 2. Motion picture actors and actresses—United States. 3. Motion picture studios—United States. 4. Public relations—Motion picture industry. I. Gledhill, Christine. PN1995.62.G85 1991 791.43028092273–dc20 91–33813 CIP ISBN 0-203-40042-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-40085-2 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0 415 05217 3 (Print Edition) 0 415 05218 1 (pbk) CONTENTS Notes on contributors vii Acknowledgements x Introduction xi Christine Gledhill Part I: The system 1 Seeing stars 2 Janet Staiger 2 The emergence of the star system in America 17 Richard deCordova 3 The Carole Lombard in Macy’s window 30 Charles Eckert 4 The building of popular images: Grace Kelly and 41 Marilyn Monroe Thomas Harris 5 Fatal beauties: Black women in Hollywood 46 Karen Alexander Part II: Stars and society 6 Charisma 58 Richard Dyer 7 Shirley Temple and the house of Rockefeller 62 Charles Eckert 8 ‘Puffed sleeves before tea-time’: Joan Crawford, 77 Adrian and women audiences Charlotte Cornelia Herzog and Jane Marie Gaines 9 The return of Jimmy Stewart: The publicity photograph 96 as text Charles Wolfe v 10 Three Indian film stars 111 Behroze Gandhy and Rosie Thomas 11 A Star is Born and the construction of authenticity 136 Richard Dyer 12 Feminine fascinations: Forms of identification in star- 145 audience relations Jackie Stacey Part III: Performers and signs 13 Articulating stardom 169 Barry King 14 Screen acting and the commutation test 186 John O.Thompson 15 Stars and genre 201 Andrew Britton 16 Signs of melodrama 210 Christine Gledhill Part IV: Desire, meaning and politics 17 In defence of violence 235 Michel Mourlet 18 The politics of ‘Jane Fonda’ 239 Tessa Perkins 19 The glut of the personality 253 David Lusted 20 Pleasure, ambivalence, identification: Valentino and 262 female spectatorship Miriam Hansen 21 A queer feeling when I look at you: Hollywood stars 287 and lesbian spectatorship in the 1930s Andrea Weiss 22 Monster metaphors—Notes on Michael Jackson’s 305 Thriller Kobena Mercer vi Select bibliography 322 Index 337 NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS Karen Alexander has taught film and video at St Martin’s School of Art and works extensively in the field of black people and representation. She is currently writing a fiction film for Channel 4’s TV with a Difference. Andrew Britton has lectured at Warwick and Essex Universities and has published widely in film, including articles in Movie and CineAction! and two monographs, Cary Grant: Comedy and Male Desire (Tyneside Cinema, 1983) and Katharine Hepburn: The Thirties and After (Tyneside Cinema, 1984). Richard deCordova teaches film and television studies at DePaul University. His book, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America, was recently published by University of Illinois Press. Richard Dyer teaches film studies at the University of Warwick and is the author of Stars, Heavenly Bodies and Now You See It: Studies on Lesbian and Gay Film. He is currently working on collections of articles on entertainment, representation and (with Ginette Vincendeau) popular European cinema, before beginning a study of the representation of white identity in film. Charles Eckert (1927–76), taught at the University of Indiana, Bloomington and at the time of his death was working on a book about Hollywood in the 1930s. ‘The Anatomy of a Proletarian Film: Warners’ Marked Women’ appeared in Film Quarterly, 27, 2, Winter 1973/4. Jane Gaines and Charlotte Herzog have written several articles together on motion picture costume and co-edited the recent Fabrications: Costume and the Female Body (Routledge-American Film Institute, 1990). Herzog, Associate Professor of Art at William Rainey Harper College in Chicago, is currently working on nineteenth-century women illustrators and television as interior decoration; Gaines has just published Contested Culture: The Image, the Voice, and the Law (University of North Carolina Press, 1991) and is Assistant Professor of English at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina. viii Behroze Gandhy is an independent television and film producer, most recently for the Channel Four series On the Other Hand and Kumar Shahani’s A Ship Aground. She also works part-time as a film and video examiner for the British Board of Film Classification. She has had articles published in Screen, Framework and Movie, has organised a number of seasons of Indian films at the NFT, ICA and the Pesaro Film Festival, and has lectured in film studies for the University of London. Christine Gledhill works in the Research Division of the British Film Institute, is a freelance writer and lecturer, and mother of two sons. Her publications include contributions to Re-Vision, Essays in Feminist Film Criticism (American Film Institute, 1984), Female Spectators: Looking at Film and Television (Verso, 1988) and an edited anthology on melodrama and the woman’s film, Home is Where the Heart Is (British Film Institute, 1987). Miriam Hansen is Professor of English at the University of Chicago. Her most recent book is Babel and Babylon: Spectatorship in American Silent Film (Harvard University Press, 1991). She is co-editor of New German Critique and is currently working on a study of the film theory of the Frankfurt School from Kracauer through Kluge. Thomas Harris published ‘The building of popular images: Grace Kelly and Marilyn Monroe’ in Studies in Public Communication, 1 (1957). Barry King currently lectures in media and cultural studies at Widener University, Chester, Pennsylvania. He is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of Screen and the author of a number of articles on acting and the semiotics of performance. He also worked as a consultant for British Actors’ Equity on a survey of employment conditions in the UK. This research is continuing in the USA. He is currently completing a text on stardom for Polity Press. David Lusted is a freelance media educationist and runs The Media Education Agency. Writing includes Raymond Williams: Film, TV, Culture (BFI, 1989) and The Media Studies Book (Routledge, 1991) as editor. He is cultural consultant to theatre productions and an occasional actor. Currently, he is teaching part-time in the University of Reading sub- department of Film and Drama. Kobena Mercer has written widely on the cultural politics of race and sexuality in visual representation and currently teaches in the art history department at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Michel Mourlet is a noted contributor to Cahiers du Cinema, a novelist and author of a book on cinema, Sur un art ignore (Paris, La Table Ronde, 1965). ix Tessa Perkins trained and worked as a stage manager, worked as a secretary, read sociology as a mature student at Essex in the sixties, raised (and is raising) children, taught sociology, researched women’s part-time employment and wrote about it, wrote about stereotypes, and Doris Day, and other matters, and is now senior lecturer in communication studies at Sheffield City Polytechnic teaching popular culture, television fictions, feminist film theory, media studies and cultural theory. Jackie Stacey teaches media studies and women’s studies at Lancaster University. She is co-editor of the forthcoming collection Off-Centre: Feminism and Cultural Studies (eds Sarah Franklin, Celia Lurey and Jackie Stacey, Unwin Hyman, 1991), and has published articles on feminist theory, representation and sexuality in Screen, Feminist Review and Media, Culture and Society. Janet Staiger is an associate professor teaching critical and cultural studies of film and television at the University of Texas at Austin. Her most recent book is Interpreting Film: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema, forthcoming from Princeton University Press. Rosie Thomas is a senior lecturer in film theory at Harrow College of the Polytechnic of Central London and is course leader of the BA Hons in Photography, Film and Video.