Featured Content:
Featured Categories:
Channing Tatum: My Favorite Doofus
Five Crotchedy-Ass Questions about Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Ryan Gosling Meme Has Jumped the Shark
Why You Love The Fassbender
Almost-Winter Media Endorsements
Claire Danes’ Second Act
Classic Hollywood
Scandal
Hollywood Industry
Television
Star reception
Star formation
Latest Content:
Channing Tatum: My Favorite Doofus
Image via GQ.com
Think about every time you’ve seen Channing Tatum onscreen.
From Fighting to The Eagle, from Step Up to Dear John, there’s a clear line that runs through his performances:
*He is a (very heterosexual) man — a fact authenticated by a love interest of some kind.
*He’s working class in some form, meaning he’s in the military (either in the present or in Ancient Rome; see Stop/Loss, Dear John, G.I. Joe, and The Eagle), a foster kid doing community service (Step Up), a street peddler (Fighting), a cop (21 Jump Street), or a stripper (the upcoming Magic Mike). [Notable exceptions: "normal" high school kid in She's the Man and Coach Carter; covert operative in Haywire; I honestly can't tell what he is in The Vow, but he seems to drive a crappy car in the trailer, so who knows].
*He’s very sincere.
*He’s very American. HE’S G.I. JOE. He’s the modern American military personified. Sometimes he’s bitter and f-ed up (Stop Loss), more often he’s stoic and honorable (Dear John). Even when he’s playing a Roman Centurian he speaks with an American accent.
*His character’s goal = 1.) find and/or restore honor (to himself, to his family); 2.) find and/or restore love, usually while doing thething that restores honor; 3.) Look good with his shirt off.
Shirtless in Dear John
Don’t mistake me: I’m not complaining. Because Channing Tatum is by far my favorite lovable doofus, and I’ll seriously watch him in anything. As in I went to the movie theater and watched Fighting all by myself. I am not joking. But what makes him lovable and other bad-acting, Ken-Doll-action-figure-Nicholas-Sparks schmaltzy doofuses intolerable?
Because Channing (Call me ‘Chan’) Tatum is by no means novel. He is the latest in a time-tested lineage of star types, a lineage that includes Gary Cooper, John Wayne, and Bruce Willis. He’s a hard body with a soft heart. His picture personality is static, and his extra-textual life mirrors it with startling symmetry.
Because Channing Tatum, off-screen, is also very heterosexual, with a love interest (read: his wife, who neatly also happened to play his love interest in Step Up; more on that later), (formerly) working class, very sincere, very American, very honorable and loving and LOOKS GOOD WITH HIS SHIRT OFF.
ahem.
I know these things about Tatum because men’s magazines LOVE HIM. GQ adores him. Details has profiled him twice. He’s been the “next big thing” for the last three years — ever since he landed the lead in G.I. Joe – and the boy is game. For his first big GQ interview, he took his (female) interviewer to his Uncle’s spread in Alabama, where they rode around the place on four-wheelers and drank six-packs of beer. Lots of talk about where Tatum would build his modest cabin on the land (it’s the place where he feels most safe — his escape from the outside world) and how his accent thickens when he gets back home. To wit:
He’s just a normal Joe Schmoe: went to high school, almost flunked out, got a football scholarship to small state college, realized it wasn’t for him, and went in search of menial labor. Easy, familiar, accessible points of personal history.
For his second interview with GQ, published during the ramp-up to the release of The Eagle, he takes his (once again female) interviewer to a tiny old mining town. They’re “breaking all the publicist’s rules” — they get wasted on tequila, buy Snuggies, and sleep in Rite-Aid sleeping bags in the bushes. It’s the Rolling Stone-brand profile taken to its 21st century extension: if you can’t pull an Almost Famous and ride along with the band until you find yourself in an airplane that’s about to crash, then you have to make a crazy situation on your own. But there’s no funny business: Tatum steps out at one point to call his wife; they play pool with a guy named “Ordinary Mike,” even the hangover seems underplayed. (Compare this interview to Edith Zimmerman’s interview with Chris Pine, also in GQ,also known as my favorite interview of all time, in which the narrative becomes much more about Edith and the act of interviewing an otherwise bland star and much less about illuminating down home aspects about the subject).
In the most recent issue of Details, he takes the (male) interviewer to go shoot lots and lots of guns while loading up on whiskey, then takes him home, where his wife is waiting, and Tatum spends time dancing with dog.
That's a very sensitive sweater.
The underlying message of the profile, like every profile of Tatum, is that he’s an awesome guy: a fun, beer-drinking, risk-taking, goofy, loving guy. The sub-title for the middle-of-nowhere GQ profile says it all:
Channing Tatum is crazy. That’s not an epithet. That’s his life’s motto. Don’t believe us? We invite you to spend twenty-four hours deep in the California desert (bring some tequila and a sleeping bag) with probably America’s most fun movie star.
Hick-ing out Crappy Diner Style
Tatum can actually dance. He’s not classically trained (how un-American would that be!); he’s self-taught. In Step Up, he naturally plays a self-taught dancer who “spices up” his love interest’s formal choreography. See for yourself:
[My personal favorite dance moment comes earlier in the film, when Tatum does a weird dippy move and pops his collar. So good, SO BAD!] He rejects all the feminine connotations of “male dancer” — he dances in sweat pants rather than tights; the scene when she makes him do ballet is played for pure laughs. His dancing is physical, improvisational, and marked as amateur.
So the dancing is cute. But the “Dancing” component of Tatum’s star image is packed with meaning –
1.) How he started dancing.
Here’s where it gets so good: Tatum didn’t just start dancing around his living room. He was a STRIPPER. A male exotic dancer. There is tape, and it is right here. SO. MUCH. HAIR. GEL. While Tatum didn’t exactly broadcast the fact during his early film career, once it did arise, he embraced it whole-heartedly. As he told GQ, “I had wanted to tell people [...] I’m not ashamed of it. I don’t regret one thing. I’m not a person who hides shit.”
He then proceeded to make fun of himself all over the place — he laughs about it on Ellen and then gives her a lap dance. He developed a script on the inside of the male stripping “industry,” and Steven Soderbergh jumped to direct it. He’s not just “owning” his past as a stripper, he’s exploiting it. A past as a male stripper could be emasculating, it could be gross, it could be embarrassing. But Tatum, working, I’m sure, with some coaching from his PR team, has rendered it endearing.
2.) Dancing —> Monogamy
Tatum met his wife, Jenna Dewan, while filming Step Up. As they danced together, they fell in love, etc. etc. Fans love it when the actors who play characters who fall in love actually fall in love themselves (McGoslings, Twi-Hards), but this is something a little different. Crucially, Tatum has been with Dewan the entire time that he has been in the public eye.
His star text is that of a pure monogamist. Even in his movies, he’s never a philanderer — always into one girl; in fact, totally, selflessly devoted to one girl. It’s the perfect counterpoint to the ostensible “crazy” of his textual and extra-textual roles: sure, Tatum drinks whiskey and shoots guns, but he loves his wife. The moment in the latest GQ profile when he steps out of the house to call his wife is just pure monogamist gold.
3.) Dancing –> Sincerity
Tatum may be a self-taught dancer. He may play his “route” to dancing as a joke. But dancing is totally a sincere thing. Look at his face when he dances! He is SERIOUS about choreography! At other times, he’s just reveling in the dexterity of his own body. He loves to dance, and he doesn’t care who knows it.
That sort of transparent sincerity inflects Tatum’s entire image. You see it in the very earnest way he professes his love in Dear John, and you see it in the way that he talks about “real people” in nearly every profile. When someone in the bar in the old mining town uses the phrase “shit brickhouse,” he replies
“Oh, my God! Yes! Brick shithouse!” Chan says, slapping his knee the next day at Rusty’s. “See! This is why I wanted to come out here. I love these places. You can’t get this good a time in the city! Real people, man. Real people.”
I’m this close to cringing. But then I remember that it’s coming from Channing Tatum’s big, over-sized, attractive face — that he doesn’t want to observe and laugh at these “real people” so much as go back to the time when he was one of them, that I forgive him all his dopey authenticity-seeking. I mean, look at this closer to the Details interview:
You see this sincere Tatum in half of his pictures — the half when he’s straight-faced and doing awkward things with his body, model-y, mooney-looking things. But something about it makes me love him even more, like the guy writing really bad yet really sincere acrostic love poetry.
Lainey Gossip argues that he out-Matthew McConaughey’s Matthew McConaghey. But these days, McConaghey’s just a douche with his shirt off. Tatum, on the other hand, has three high profile movies coming out this year and two in pre-production. The trick, I think, is that Tatum can do what McConaughey has never quite been able to pull off: he can play his sincerity straight, as he does in nearly every film. But he can also play that sincerity for laughs, as he does in the trailer for 21 Jump Street.
I could be wrong, but this actually looks hilarious — in part because it takes Tatum’s established image and satirizes it. Ultimately, this knowledge forms the crux of Tatum’s success: he and his team know his image and how to exploit it, but they also know how to make fun of it. And that, more than any actual acting skill, is a ticket to stardom.
Five Crotchedy-Ass Questions about Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Let’s make this clear: I liked this movie. David Fincher has established himself as a master of making otherwise unexciting and unfilmic activities (computer coding, researching) into heart-pounding, exciting, and filmic montages. The film is still overlong, but it had to set itself up for the sequel and there’s only so much you can cut from a densely plotted narrative in keep it cogent. I don’t think Fincher was trying to be faithful to the book so much as faithful to the actual chain of events: Point A must happen so that Point B can happen, which must also happen so that C can happen, etc. etc. and so on. And while I enjoyed the film more than Mission Impossible: Make People Like Tom Cruise Again, which I saw the day before, my inner crotchedy-ass self has some lingering questions:
1.) No seriously, why the fuck is this film named Girl with the Dragon Tattoo?
This beef is more with the English-language publishers of the book than the film itself, but my complaint holds: in Swedish, the book is titled Men Who Hate Women. This title underlines Larson’s feminist intent with the novels, which was not to make entertainment out of sexual violence, but rather to highlight misogyny in all its manifestations. Girl with the Dragon Tattoo not only makes Lisbeth into a nameless Girl, but also a girl whose overarching signifier is a tattoo. One of the points of the narrative is to encourage us to see Lisbeth as much more than her appearance suggests, and the title does the absolute opposite.
2.) Why is the sexual violence played as catharsis?
The sexual violence against Lisbeth is not cathartic. It’s visceral and horrible and necessary to the plot, and to shy away from it would be to shy away from what makes Lisbeth who she is. (Narratively speaking, it would also decrease her resolution to find the serial rapist/killer). There was a lot of gasping and swearing in the theater by unsuspecting viewers during these scenes. But the scene when Lisbeth takes revenge is essentially played as catharsis: the brutality she inflects upon her rapist is framed not only as just, but as narrative closure. Sure, Lisbeth comes to check up on him, but it’s played for laughs, not as a moment of continued trauma. Within this paradigm, the state, even a progressive state like that of Sweden, will always ignore sexual violence, and it’s up to the victim to take revenge — and after it is taken, she can move on with her life. Do you see how this is problematic? It’s also problematic for the audience, which is encouraged to feel a similar catharsis: that thing that happened to her was horrible, but now that she’s sodomized her killer and blackmailed and tattooed him so that he won’t do it again, whew, problem solved, I feel great, let’s move on to the heady MacBook investigating!
3.) Why is the death of a serial killer played off as a plot point?
YOU GUYS, MARTIN VANGER AND HIS FATHER BRUTALIZED LOTS AND LOTS OF WOMEN. But again, vigilante justice takes precedence: because he dies in giant fireball, his last memory that of a woman (who had just clubbed in the head and forced him to flee) coming slowly towards him, we are to believe that he’s received what’s coming for him. But then nothing! No expose! No information given over to the victims’ families, nothing! He just dies and then we go on to Lisbeth’s dress up party!
In the book, we’re given some hemming and hawing over whether or not the Vanger family should make the information public. But in the film, Martin Vanger dies and we just up and move on to the third act of the film. Seriously! That’s it! There’s not even a mention, save to prompt the woman we believe to be Anita Vanger to contact Harriet.
4.) Why is Lisbeth’s Macbook Pro so much more awesome than mine?
First of all, I couldn’t help thinking of Steig Larson’s totally bizarre fascination with Apple hardware (remember how he detailed the hard drive specifics of each machine Lisbeth touches? I can understand working for accuracy, but there was some serious fetishism going on, and it only gets worse in the (much worse) second and third books). But here’s the thing: we’re used to seeing awesome next-gen technology on-screen. Mission Impossible was filled with it. It makes our heroes seem cooler and more savvy simply because they know that such things exist, let alone how to work them. And we suspend our disbelief in Google Maps that pop on on the windshield of the actual car because we’ve already suspending our disbelief that agents like Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) exist. But Lisbeth is given a machine that is absolutely the same as mine. And they do enough close-ups to make that abundantly clear. But why do her PDFs look so much more vibrant? How does she go through all of them so quickly? Where’s that hacker interface? Can I buy it at the App Store?
Now, I realize that the filmmakers are underlining that Lisbeth does things with “normal” technology that others cannot. She’s not a special agent; she’s just a savant. But instead of making me feel like she’s totally awesome, so makes me feel like I’m a bumbling Grandpa.
5.) How did Fincher manage to turn a narrative about solving an intricate mystery into a contemplation of what Rooney Mara would look like in pretty girl clothes?
Look to the extra-textuals: in the lead-up to the release of the film, nearly every article focused on how Rooney Mara, a cute, blonde, every-girl, transformed herself into an androgynous punk. (See especially the creepy Vogue profile, which I wrote about two months ago). With established stars, a “character” (I won’t say Method) performance such as this one is viewed as an Oscar turn, and most viewers spend a considerable amount of time marveling at how effectively the star has transformed him/herself into something not suggested by his/her image, namely fat, poor, mentally disabled, homeless, genius-level mathematician, etc. But Rooney Mara wasn’t an established star. Her most visible role was a brief appearance in a notable scene in The Social Network. And while many media savvy viewers would have seen pictures of her looking “normal,” many had not. But there’s something in Lisbeth’s facial structure and body that suggests she might be hiding a Hollywood star — the defined cheekbones, the eyes, the near-emaciation that treads the fine line between “hot body” and “obvious eating disorder.”
The film thus becomes a game of “how pretty would this girl be if we could just get some normal clothes on her”? The wonder is only underlined by the scene in which Lisbeth dons expensive, feminine clothing, and physically alters her body to become stereotypically womanly: yes! She’s gorgeous! Look at her legs in those heels! The discourse about Mara’s performance centers on transformation, not the way she portrays vulnerability and strength.
Lisbeth, as is, can’t be beautiful. An actress who actually looks like Lisbeth could never be Lisbeth. She has to be played as masquerade — as something that an otherwise traditionally beautiful girl dresses up as. Otherwise, she, a bisexual, androgynous, intelligent woman who rejects Western standards of beauty, is altogether too troubling of the status quo.
So what are your lingering crotchedy-ass questions? Or do you have answers to mine?
Previously: Five Crotchedy-Ass Questions about X-Men: First Class
The Ryan Gosling Meme Has Jumped the Shark
Three things happened in Ryan Gosling meta-commentary news this week:
1.) The Ryan Gosling Tumblr-sphere expanded to include “Biostatistics Ryan Gosling.” Add it to the pre-existing blogroll of “Medieval History Ryan Gosling,” “Public History Ryan Gosling,” “Feminist Ryan Gosling,” and dozens more discipline-specific Gozes to which I have not even been made aware.
2.) Inside Higher Ed published a (brief) thinkpiece on the phenomenon.
3.) Well-known media theorist Nancy Baym tweeted “What’s up with this Ryan Gosling tumblr meme thing?
4.) My friend Rebecca, pop culture enthusiast and American Studies dissertator, posited “Don’t you think this whole thing has jumped the shark? You need to write about it quick.”
I have to agree. Biostatistics Ryan Gosling is Jumping the Ryan Gosling Tumblr Shark. Not because I don’t like Biology, but because it lacks the very thing that made the original Ryan Gosling Tumblr (Hey Girl) work so well: you could actually imagine Ryan Gosling saying the very phrases that adoring bloggers were photoshopping into his mouth.
To be more precise: The reason “Hey Girl” works is because Ryan Gosling’s image supports it. You can imagine The Goz saying things like….
…because his image is that of a considerate, intelligent, somewhat quirky yet somehow also adorable and amusing man. (For the specifics of Gosling’s image, see my earlier post on “Why You Love the Goz“). His picture personality may dictate otherwise (read: he plays a lot of assholes and weirdos), but somehow the weight of his extratextual image is enough to convince most of America that he’s really Noah Calhoun (of Notebook fame) transplanted off the screen and into the 21st century.
What’s more, the very notion that Ryan Gosling COULD SAY THESE THINGS is reinforced by clips of him being adorable WHILE SAYING THESE THINGS. He knows about the Tumblr; he finds it quite funny (and somewhat absurd); he laughs at himself and his image which, in reality, just reinforces his image. He gets the joke! The Hotness just multiples!
And Feminist Ryan Gosling is “Hey Girl” taken to its natural (feminist) conclusion. Ryan Gosling’s image goes to grad school! But here’s the thing: Ryan Gosling’s image wouldn’t go to get his PhD in Biology. Or Public History. His image has evidenced no interest in biology other than hanging out with those ducks in The Notebook. Ryan Gosling’s image would either sell out and become a lawyer (see, for example, many of his picture personalities) or pursue an altruistic career in the humanities (see Half Nelson), more specifically, English and/or Gender Studies. And I’m not just saying that because I have a Ph.D. in the humanities: if I were interested in making The Goz be part of my cohort, then I’d be arguing that Ryan Gosling Film Studies is awesome, which I’m not. See below).
But Feminist Ryan Gosling is doing more than just placing feminist theory next to well-chosen pictures. It’s combining rigorous feminist theory with something that’s not quite so rigorous — it couples the theoretical stances we believe in with the negotiated way we live them.
Take this image, for example. Yes! I believe that the hegemonic relationship between the state and the prison industrial complex is bullshit, and needs to be eradicated. But I also want someone to hold me! (And in my personal fantasy space, that person could be Ryan Gosling. It couldn’t be, say, Brad Pitt, because his image doesn’t seem like it would want to go to gender studies grad school. Architectural school, sure).
Or here. Yes, gender is a construct. To live that idea everyday — that’s tough (necessary) work. To emphasize it to your students, to your parents, to your kids, to your peers — seriously, that’s tough, because you’re pushing against a whole heavy load of ideology. But again, the idea is paired with the idea that everyone, including those who make theory in personal praxis, enjoy and hunger for human touch and intimacy.
Apart from the fit with Gosling’s image, there’s also an element of pleasure and play at work. As Danielle Henderson, creator of Feminist Ryan Gosling, explains,
Feminists are apparently not supposed to have a sense of humor. I think people are really liking the fact that this site is intelligent while simultaneously silly, and obviously self-referential. A lot of my followers are women’s studies majors, or people who have taken women’s studies classes, and love seeing inside jokes presented in this way. For example, if you’re a women’s studies major, you’ve probably read “The Yellow Wallpaper” at least 18 times. Now matter how much you like that story, it gets a little ridiculous.
There’s a lot of “snark” (hate that word), and a lot of intellectual examination of pop culture going on with most popular feminist sites, but not a lot of fun. I think I’m having fun with feminism, but not making fun of feminism. People recognize and respond to that crucial difference.
That element of play has far less to do with Ryan Gosling’s image and far more to do with feminism‘s image. But again, it only really works because the feminism can actually work with Gosling’s image. Would it work with Will Smith? With Tom Cruise? With Daniel Craig or Jackie Chan or Channing Tatum? You need a very specific constellation of star attributes in order to make it seem plausible that the person in that picture could potentially read, understand, and repeat the theory contained therein. You need an image as inflected with feminism as The Goz’s.
(Note: I realize that part of this process is self-fulfilling and tautological: Gosling’s image seems feminist so feminist theory can be ascribed to him, which, in turn, makes his image seem even more feminist. Star image formation is complicated shit).
As I was writing this post, several of my friends alerted me to “Film Studies Ryan Gosling.” Part of me wants to love this, if only because I want to imagine Gosling’s image’s familiarity with the likes of Bordwell and Thompson. But Ryan Gosling image isn’t that of a cinephile, and it’s most definitely not indicated an interest in apparatus. I so wish he were. If anyone should be responding to these meme, it should be me — someone who loves Gosling AND film theory. But when you apply his name to film studies, it only make sense with knowledge of the meme and its previous application – not by itself. In other words, if “Hey Girl” is Ryan Gosling’s extratextual image turned into a meme, and Feminist Ryan Gosling is the higher ed extension of that image, then there’s just not a space for Ryan Gosling, Film Theoretician.
What’s more, the author gets it wrong: sure, Grad School Gosling would know Mulvey and the theory of the male gaze, but he would also twist the theory so that he wasn’t embodying the very oppressing gaze against which Mulvey was arguing. For Gosling to be the male gaze suggests that he’s fully enveloped in patriarchy — which is the exact opposite of what his image suggests.
Here’s the simple truth: all pop culture phenomenons, especially those which gain traction on the internet, exhaust themselves eventually. Sometimes it happens through overexposure, sometimes it happens by being spread too thin and thus losing their potency. Whether Stuff White People Like or even LOLcatz, there’s a certain point at which the very thing that made it work — made it special, made if hilarious, made it something that you wanted to pass along to your friends and laugh at a common joke — ceases to function in the same way.
Pairing star images with dense theory is funny. Every scholar wants to think that an object of their desire would be interested in the things they’re interested in — would have a discussion in which you share a secret language familiar to a select few (and then, after you’ve had a good debate, you an go to the Farmer’s Market and snuggle). I wish Ryan Gosling’s image wanted to get his PhD in media studies with me. But it doesn’t — he fell in with the gender studies people long ago. That’s where his image belongs. That’s where it works. To take it beyond can be funny……but, if we’re honest with ourselves, misses the point. It’s a meme built on a meme, and thus evacuated of its core.
Maybe Postmodern Ryan Gosling would have something to say about this?
Why You Love The Fassbender
Am I getting ahead of myself? Do you even know The Fassbender? If you do, then you know why this column is worth your time. If you do not, let’s begin with a down-and-dirty orientation.
Plainly put, Michael Fassbender is the next big thing. GQ just put him on its cover as 2010′s Breakout Star, and it’s no joke: this guy was all over the place, but in the very best of ways.
After toiling for many years on the periphery of visibility, Fassbender’s big break came in the form of Steve McQueen’s Hunger, in which he plays the lead role of an IRA hunger striker. The film won the Camera d’Or at Cannes, and both McQueen and Fassbender were suddenly very visible. (Link to disturbing image of Fassbender’s emaciation here).
Fassbender followed Hunger with Fish Tank, a totally awesome and under-seen (in the United States, at least) film about a British teenager and the, uh, unique relationship between her and her mother’s boyfriend. Lots of film festival awards, Jury Prize at Cannes, BAFTA for Best British Film. But Fassbender didn’t become truly visible to American eyes until Inglourious Basterds, in which he plays a British spy (in one of the tensest moments of the film, and that’s saying something).
Basterds led to Jonah Hex, which was primed to be a big blockbuster. All the pieces were in place: big lead stars (Josh Brolin, John Malkovich), sexy girl-on-the-side (Megan Fox), pre-sold comic book franchise….but the film was a STINKBOMB. Panned across the board (12% Rotten Tomatoes score!) and made back only $10 million of its $47 million budget. But Fassbender was already off and filming what would become his gangbuster 2011: Rochester in Jane Eyre, Young Magneto in the rebooted X-Men, Carl Jung in David Cronenberg’s A Dangerous Method, repaired with Steve McQueen as a sex addict in Shame, some sort of secret agentness in Steven Soderbergh’s Haywire (Winter 2012), and the male lead (android) in Ridley Scott’s new sci-fi film Prometheus (Summer 2012).
We’re right in the middle of that list right now: both A Dangerous Method and Shame are in limited release right now, with Oscar Buzz slowly accumulating around Fassbender’s performance in the later.
Add in the fact that Fassbender is spectacularly, unequivocally, viscerally handsome.
But handsomeness does not make a star. And it certainly does not make a cult of fandom, the way that The Fassbender has recently inspired (if you follow the blog’s feed on Facebook, you know what exactly what I’m talking about).
[Quick Clarifying Note: When I title a post using the "second person," insinuating I magically know Why You Love The Fassbender (or, before, The Goz -- who knows, maybe this will become a regular column?), I'm not so much suggesting that I know why you, specifically, find him endearing/attractive/compelling so much as why society/Hollywood has found him endearing/attractive/compelling, a grouping of which the magic 'you' are obviously a part. Perhaps that much is obvious].
So here’s the big (somewhat obviously) revelation: You love The Fassbender because He’s a Method Actor. That seems obvious and facile, so let’s break it down:
1.) THE PRETTY FACE + THE TALENT
First and foremost. Pretty face is one thing, pretty face that can act — and act astoundingly well, in myriad and diverse parts, is like taking “pretty face” and squaring it. It makes the hotness level go off the charts. Pretty face without talent is two dimensional eye candy — a model in a fashion magazine, not someone with whom you’d actually want (or be able) to interact. Pretty face with talent = three-dimensional. Suddenly you can imagine having a discussion. Touching his face. It’s not just because he’s acting, three-dimensionally, on the screen, but because he seems less like a pin-up and more like a person. That’s what skill does to people: it makes them interesting.
And Fassbender isn’t just a decent actor. In all the articles I read preparing for this post, I saw him compared to Daniel Day-Lewis at least a dozen times. That sort of praise is not fucking around. You can nonchalantly compare someone to, say, Brad Pitt, or George Clooney — underlining the way he matches charisma with skill, etc. etc. But Day-Lewis is the contemporary actor par excellence. He is our moment’s Method Actor.
The comparison between Fassbender and Day-Lewis stems from two qualities: Fassbender’s devotion to specific characters, and the diversity of characters to which he has devoted himself. Profiles love to retell the methods of “The Method” — how he holed up and fasted for weeks to emaciate himself for Hunger, subsisting on sardines and nuts. For the famous 17-minute unbroken take in the film, he and his co-star moved in together, practicing the scene twelve times a day. CRAZYTIME. When A Dangerous Method screened at the Venice Film Festival, Fassbender had so effectively become Jung (and not “Fassbender”) that he had to introduce himself and his character when he went on stage afterwards.
Cronenberg calls him a “working class actor,” by which he means that Fassbender works for each role, spends hours devoting himself to the script and losing himself within the character. According to one interview, “To prepare for a role, he’ll read a screenplay as many as 300 times in daily shifts of seven hours.” He’s best known for his performances in minor keys: moody sad-sacks with little way out. Rochester, his character in Shame, Magneto. But his character in Fish Tank is a marvel to behold, all smiles and sun-kissed charisma. Cronenberg calls him a shape-shifter, a chameleon.
From Fish Tank (2009)
In some ways, a chameleon is frightening: you never know which Fassbender you’ll get onscreen, whether he’ll terrify or seduce you. But that chance is also extremely beguiling, and the talent it takes to affect that sort of transformation is, on a meta-level, extremely attractive.
As Carl Jung in A Dangerous Method
2.) THE INTELLIGENCE.
Or, more specifically, the intelligence that stems from Method Acting.
Here, for example, is Fassbender’s take on Rochester:
“[Rochester is]….A Byronic character burnt by experience, arrogant but also eloquent and introspective. He’s world-weary and jaded, sensual, selfdestructive, yet there’s a good sense of humor in there, and at the end of the day a good heart. He sees the freshness and beauty in Jane when everybody else looks past her.”
As Rochester in Jane Eyre
I don’t think Fassbender is smart about everything, but he has evidenced himself to be extremely intelligent about people – and he’s done so not only in the way he speaks about characters (who are, in fact, people) but in the way his performances underline a deep understanding of the diversity of human experience. To be a method actor is to be capable of understanding how other people work, and embodying that understanding with your performance. Fassbender is thus intelligent in the way that all method actors are intelligent. Consider our current crop of method actors: Day-Lewis, Meryl Streep, Robert De Niro, Sean Penn. We associate each of these mena nd women with intelligence. (Poor choices sometimes, yes, especially in the case of De Niro’s late film career, but intelligence nonetheless). Actors that “play themselves,” like, say, Gary Cooper, are likable, but we don’t think of them as necessarily smart. Method Acting is a learned and difficult skill, and it differentiates those who excel at it from the rest of Hollywood.
You — readers of this blog who like to think deeply about the popular culture you consume — are most likely attracted to thoughtful, intelligent men, whether as friends or as objects of affection. With his close association with The Method, ratified by his own meta-textual perceptiveness, The Fassbender is this man.
3.) THE BLANK SLATE.
If you’ve only seen Jane Eyre and X-Men Origins, you might think Fassbender is a type. I certainly did. But having watched his other films, I’ve become convinced of the Method/Talent stuff up above. As mentioned above, I have no idea what this man could do, what character he could embody next, whether or not he’ll be creepy or endearing. He could be anyone.
Including Your Total Boyfriend. Your Best Guy Friend. You can paint him into your elaborate fantasy and it so totally works.
It’s because he’s a Method Actor, but it’s also because he’s Not a Real Movie Star. I know this comes as a surprise — haven’t I been saying that he’s the next big thing? Isn’t he on all of these magazines? — but he’s not a movie star in the same way that Brad Pitt, or Will Smith, or Ben Affleck are movie stars. Not because he’s not a blockbuster star — because with Ridley Scott’s film, he will be — but because we know virtually nothing of his extra-textual life.
Because as much as people love to argue this point,
Star = Picture Personality (accumulation of roles) + Extra-Textual Personality (the image of their lifestyle off screen).
Fassbender has submitted to dozens of interviews. He’s posed for GQ fashion shoots. He’s super visible. But what do you know of his homelife? Sure, you know a bit about his family — that his father is German, that he lived in Germany — but that was emphasized to explain his near-perfect (if accented) German in Basterds. Maybe you know that his father is a chef. Maybe you know that he dated Zoe Kravitz, his co-star in X-Men, over the summer. But it’s unlikely that you knew that, because they were caught a total of ONCE by photographers. The man is intensely guarded about his private life. In fact, the most illuminating thing he’s said about his private life is that he’d like to to model his career on Viggo Morgensten’s, which is to say he’d like to remain intensely private and choose his roles carefully, balancing high profile films with personal projects.
This level of privacy — and the resultant blank slate of his private life — is part of the reason he’s able to recede into his roles so effectively. Even tremendous, transformative actors — like Brad Pitt– can only go so far with a role, if only because every time you see his face, you’re reminded of his everpresent star image. Fassbender, in his current iteration, is free of the heft of a star image.
As a result, we can project our own fantasies of “what he’s really like” onto Fassbender’s highly mutable image, and Fassbender can continue to refine his non-star-image as a method actor. It’s a self-perpetuating cycle. The less we know about him, the more Method he seems, the hotter he becomes…..and The More You Love The Fassbender.
THE FASSBENDER.
Girls’ Media: What are your essential texts?
At the school where I teach, the students don’t have finals. Instead, at the end of each semester, they embark upon two massive, two-week projects of their own devising. For example, I’m sponsoring individual project weeks on Cult Film and classic feminist texts. But students can also pick to participate in a “group” project, which means that a teacher comes up with a very specific idea (kind of like a mini-seminar) and they investigate said idea in detail.
There are about 12 group projects this semester, ranging from The Study of Happiness to The Cultural and Musical Roots of ’60s Rock. As for geeky me, I’m doing Girls’ Media Studies.
I took a grad seminar in Girls’ Media Studies during my first year in my Ph.D. program at UT, but the idea of girls, media, and the relationship between the two has long been a pet project of mine — in part because I was strongly influenced by several media texts as a “girl,” but also just because I find girlhood — as a discursive construction, as a societal point of anxiety, as a generally sucky time — really fascinating, and I love thinking about my own girlhood and where it fits within the historical continuums of girlhoods, including girlhood’s current iteration, marked, as it is, by constant mediation, ubiquitous screens, and contradictory messages about what it measn to be “good,” “pretty,” “smart,” “sexual,” etc. (Of course, all of our girlhoods were filled with contradictory messages on these topics).
So long story short: I’m looking for texts. The class is only two weeks, and I’m going to be doing some background on how “girls” have been conceived over time and in media, some Patty Duke, some Nancy Drew, some old school Seventeen, and, of course, some seminal texts from my own girlhood. The students will also select some texts on which they’d like to focus, and they’ll do final projects on a text of their choice.
If you were teaching a class of 14-17 year old girls, what would you show them? What sort of questions would you consider? What television shows, magazines, books, movies, albums, songs, etc. would you want to discuss? What would you want to say about it? Stuff from now, stuff from then, stuff from whenever. Help me make this class as awesome as possible.
Almost-Winter Media Endorsements
Television:
I’ve already told you how much I love Claire Danes, but seriously, you should be watching Homeland. I realize it’s nearly impossible to obtain without premium cable, but there are ways, media-savvy readers, THERE ARE WAYS. It’s the best thing on television right now.
Speaking of which, did you know that My So-Called Life is streaming in its entirety on Netflix? I’m teaching Girls Media Studies and am going to screen the entire thing — it’s still just as good as it was when you watched it every night at 7 pm on MTV. (Or, if you were like me, it’s just as good as when you watched it every Thursday on ABC and then every night, over and over again, on MTV for the next four years). And if you’ve never seen it…it’s never too late to jump on the best-teen-show-until-FNL bandwagon.
No show — not even Parks and Rec, which I love with abandon — has made me laugh as deeply as Louie. You might not want to watch it with your Grandma or 5-year-old, but it has the verve and honesty that 99% of comedic television lacks. (Season 1, also streaming on Netflix).
Film:
Prestige-film season is in full-swing, but I still think Beginners is the best film I’ve seen this year. Innovatively-plotted, perfectly-acted, beautiful and poignant and elegant and sad. I absolutely loved it, and think you will too. Even the trailer is charming.
(But have no fear — the movie never veers into the overly cutesy or overly sentimental).
I’ve spent two long nights watching Carlos, a mini-series/really long film (three two-hour chunks) about a terrorist/freedom-fighter/Marxist/really complicated real-life guy, commonly known as “Carlos the Jackel.” The plot is convoluted and the politics are complex, but it is gripping as filmmaking gets. Directed by Olivier Assayas, the man behind the gorgeous Summer Hours, with a stunning star turn by Edgar Ramirez. Also streaming on Netflix (do you see a pattern here?).
Music:
First of all, I highly recommend investigating Spotify. I’m still dubious about the way it compensates the millions of artists whose music is available, but for things like, say, yoga playlists, it is aces. I pay $4.99 and have access to pretty much everything released by a mainstream or even quasi-mainstream artist. It’s like Pandora with a whole lot more control.
As for specific albums — I’m listening to so much of the following:
The Head and the Heart, The Head and the Heart, specifically “Down in the Valley.” Just listening to these guys makes me miss the Northwest like whoa.
The National, Boxer, specifically “Green Gloves” (I go through periods of listening to The National when I become physically addicted to an album — as in cannot not be listening to it while I’m awake. I’m just emerging from one of those periods).
Fleet Foxes, Helplessness Blues, specifically “Battery Kinzie”
Feist, Metals, specifically “Anti-Pioneer.” GORGEOUS.
Rihanna, Talk that Talk, specifically “Drunk on Love.” The xx + RiRi = Annie’s new favorite song.
The Bieber, specifically “Mistletoe.” The video! I DIE! No shame!
Reading:
I’ve been spending a lot of time reading things with my students, but I’ve also had a chance to do some pleasure reading on the side, including Jeffrey Eugenides’ much-ballyhooed The Marriage Plot. I liked it quite a bit, but wonder if those who are not familiar with the woes and confusions of first encountering post-structuralism will feel the same. (Tell me? Do those sections make sense?)
Jill Lepore’s essay “Birthright,” on the war against Planned Parenthood, is an absolute must-read, no matter your political affiliation. It’s historical, contextual, and packs a huge punch. It’s behind the New Yorker paywall, but it is so worth the article charge. Or find your favorite New Yorker reader and bum a copy off of them. (Or if you live in close proximity to me, bum my copy).
I generally abhor Caitlin Flanagan. But her Atlantic essay on why girls – and women — read Twilight is, bar none, the best explanation for why the particulars of the narrative (not just the vampire narrative, but this vampire narrative) draws us in. Not behind the pay-wall, and especially appropriate given the release of Breaking Dawn. (If you’re interested in my own article on feminist readers of Twilight, it’s coming out this summer, but I’d be happy to send you a digital copy. Just let me know). The recent Hairpin article on “Our Bella, Our Selves” is also quite good.
So there we go — share your own endorsements in the comments? Or try and fight me on the merits of The Biebs? Let’s go.
Claire Danes’ Second Act
Here is what you need to understand about Claire Danes: for the millions of women (and a few hundred thousand men) who watched My So-Called Life, she will always be Angela Chase. Let me rephrase — for the millions of women for whom My So-Called Life became the seminal text of young adulthood (Generation Catalano, as Slate recently dubbed us) Claire Danes must be Angela Chase. While the show lasted but 19 episodes and Angela Chase remains frozen at age 15, it is essential to think that Angela grew up, grew out of her Jordan Catalano phase, and went on to success. Such is the crux of Danes’ star image: she’s teenage angst made good, proof positive that teenagers became adults (who may sometimes make bad decisions, as evidenced below).
Granted, millions around the world know Danes as Juliet to Leonardo DiCaprio’s Romeo. And although Juliet obviously dies, the fact that Danes lives is, yet again, proof that the intensity of teenage love can be endured, can be “lived through.” Even if you’ve never seen or loved a Claire Danes text, you might still know that she survived growing up Hollywood, and that this girl:
But something else happened around 2004 — something that turned many fans, ardent or casual, against her. During the filming of Stage Beauty (which, admit it, is laughably bad), Danes and co-star Billy Crudup developed some sort of relationship. Crudup left his long-term (and seven-months-pregnant) girlfriend, Mary-Louise Parker. Overnight, Danes became a family-wrecker. Look at her in the corner! Classic “Other Woman” picture placement!
While Dane and Crudup didn’t flaunt their relationship in the press the way that, say, LeAnn Rimes and What’s-His-Bad-Acting-Name did, they did stay together. Danes starred in Shopgirl (woefully underrated) and played a bit-part (as a relationship-wrecker!) in The Family Stone. Crudup’s career stayed in second gear with supporting roles in a smattering of high profile pictures (Trust the Man, Mission Impossible III, The Good Shepherd). It’s difficult to correlate negative P.R. and film performance when the actors aren’t the principle stars, but it was clear that neither Danes nor Crudup were getting big roles. Scandal didn’t make them more interesting to audiences; instead, the details of the scandal made them both seem inconsiderate and cold. (Again, Crudup and Danes maintained that their relationship did not start until after the disintegration of Crudup and Parker’s relationship. Still, Crudup left his pregnant girlfriend. Some actions can never be positively spun).
And I mean look! Adorable! Something about Crudup’s face just screams cad, whereas Dancy looks like he just wants to cuddle.
The marriage marked the beginning of Act II of Danes’ career. Not only had she jettisoned the association with Crudup, but she went back to television, the medium where audiences had loved her the most. Danes transformed herself to play the role of Temple Grandin — an Autistic woman with a truly astounding life story — in an HBO documentary. On the surface, playing Grandin was just a chance for Danes to show that she could transform herself into something more than a pretty face, the way that, say, Charlize Theron did for her turn in Monster.
Which is why Danes’ impressive work on Homeland should be no surprise. On the recommendation of the cultural gurus at the Slate Cultural Gabfest, I started watching earlier this week and quickly burned through seven episodes. I was a bit turned off by the premise — returned P.O.W., War on Terror, CIA operatives, etc. etc…..hadn’t I sorta kinda watched this show before? Isn’t it Rubicon meets 24? But Homeland is everything that I want from a thriller, filled with nuance, moral ambiguity, and intricate plotting. It also escapes the fatal Showtime curse of really shitty supporting characters (Dexter, I’m talking to you). The show is very, very good, and Danes is very, very good in it.
But Danes’ character, Carrie Anderson, also seems to be a culmination of Danes’ star text to date. New York Mag‘s Vulture already established that Carrie is Angela Chase all grown up , but Carrie is also a notorious home-wrecker, very smart, and filled with anxiety about fucking things up the way she did in the not-so-distant past.
The show works because the writing is excellent, the acting, especially on the part of the three principles, is superb, and the production values are high. But it also presents Danes in the way we want to think about her: as an extension of Angela Chase, imperfect and scarred and striving. While stars can change the conversation about their images, it’s impossible to undo an aspect of your established star image. I wouldn’t say that Danes has “embraced” her image as a one-time home-wrecker, but this role shows that she, and the writers of the show, understand the associations that many viewers will bring to the show.
The stars that last are those that understand their own images and make decisions accordingly. It is my hope, then, that the character of Carrie Anderson, and its cognizant play on Danes’ star image, is but the beginning of the long second act of Danes’ career. Angela Chase was (and is) so important to the person I am today — for her to endure is, in some small, significant way, for me to endure. I realize this might sound ridiculous. But that sort of attachment, even by someone, such as myself, with ostensible academic distance from stars, underlines the ways in which stars matter, and why I spent a Sunday morning thinking about Angela Chase, myself, and the way we’ve both changed and accumulated meanings since age 15.
Katy Perry: The Very Good, The Very Bad
The other week I happened upon the latest issue of InStyle. While InStyle popularized the notion that celebrities, as opposed to supermodels, sold fashion (and thus belonged on the cover of a fashion magazine), the magazine is pretty straight up minivan majority. (If you’re unfamiliar with the term — which I borrow from Lainey Gossip — see my early, early post on the subject). Point is: InStyle is fashion for “the rest of us,” and by “the rest of us” I mean people with a modicum of capital. It’s not high fashion — that’s Vogue – but it’s also not cheap. (Sometimes there’s a gesture towards thriftiness, but there are a whole lot of $100-$500 items featured in its pages). Put it this way: people who read InStyle often also read Real Simple. Reese Witherspoon and Katie Holmes are essentially the magazine’s mascots.
But InStyle put Katy Perry on its cover last month, very appropriately mixing her candy cotton pink hair with a super conservative-let’s-all-go-to-the-office-in-metallics dress that covered all that Perry usually bares. But pink hair! YOU GUYS, A GIRL WITH PINK HAIR ON A MAINSTREAM MAGAZINE!
What’s that you say? Isn’t Katy Perry the girl who turned a song about making out with a girl into a number one hit? Who put the words “I Kissed a Girl and I Liked It” onto the lips of millions of American girls? Isn’t that actually subversive? Not really, because while the song explicitly describes a queer activity (a girl kissing a girl) it’s actually a thoroughly heteronormative song. A brief refresher:
This was never the way I planned, not my intention
I got so brave, drink in hand, lost my discretion
It’s not what I’m used to, just wanna try you on
I’m curious for you caught my attention
I kissed a girl and I liked it, the taste of her cherry chapstick
I kissed a girl just to try it, I hope my boyfriend don’t mind it
It felt so wrong, it felt so right, don’t mean I’m in love tonight
I kissed a girl and I liked it, I liked it
No, I don’t even know your name, it doesn’t matter
You’re my experimental game, just human nature
It’s not what good girls do, not how they should behave
My head gets so confused, hard to obey
In other words: kissing a girl is something that you do only when drunk, as an experiment, and can be “tried on” in the same fashion as a piece of clothing. It’s something that you do while you still have a boyfriend and are thus firmly rooted in heterosexual identity. I could go on, but the song (and Perry) construct queerness as an “experimental game,” not an identity or lifestyle. Or, as Beth Ditto, lead singer of The Gossip explains, I Kissed A Girl is a “boner dyke” anthem for “straight girls who like to turn guys on by making out or like faking gay.”
But then again, the song is catchy as shit. So catchy, in fact, that it enabled millions of people who would hesitate to imagine themselves in queer scenarios to ACTUALLY SAY THAT THEY KISSED A GIRL AND THEY LIKED IT. I realize that’s a lot of caps, and I realize this song is deeply problematic…..but that doesn’t mean that putting those words in girls’ mouths isn’t transgressive in some way.
Now, I realize that I’m arguing all sorts of things here — she’s heteronormative! Her vision of queerness is offensive and problematic! She’s transgressive! It’s true: Perry is all of those things. Like most huge stars, her image is polysemic, meaning that it can “mean” many things at once, even if those things seem to blatantly contradict one another.
Because for every transgressive thing that Perry does, there’s something conservative to counter it. For every pink dye job, there’s slightly sussed-up power suit. She sings about getting wasted in Vegas, but her parents are pastors. She appears on Sesame Street, but wears an outfit that shows too much of her breasts. She’s incredibly feminine (she loves pink! dresses! bubble gum!) but in a way that manages to be infused with sexuality. Her appearance consistently evokes the ’50s pin-up, with its mix of traditionalism and explicit sexual gratification.
Or take her relationship with Russell Brand. Russell Brand is RIDICULOUS. After watching Forgetting Sarah Marshall, I was pretty sure he was the funniest/crassest person alive. He was also an alcoholic, a rampant drug abuser, and a general asshole. Even Wikipedia says that he was “known for his promiscuity.” Until he went to treatment, that is, and became follower of the Hindu faith and started a regular meditation practice. Now he’s sober, even if his performances and image still emanate transgressiveness.
And Katy Perry didn’t just date Russell Brand, she MARRIED him. Sure, celebrities often get married because they realize how it can positively affect their brand. And while Perry and Brand didn’t sell the “exclusive rights” to their wedding, they did show footage from it on MTV. But she married him. She didn’t date him; she didn’t have a child with him “out of wedlock,” she MARRIED HIM. And as much as Kim Kardashian persists in making a mockery of the significance of marriage, it is important to remember that marriage is still a very traditional pledge of fidelity, and heterosexual marriage remains the antithesis of moral transgression. But again: she’s married, but she’s married to RUSSELL BRAND. Conservativeness tinged with rebellion.
Which brings me to her other, more recent, even more popular songs. The songs that I quite frankly and unabashedly love. I mean, “I Kissed a Girl” was catchy, but it also kinda sounded like a one-hit-wonder. I kinda hate “California Girls,” but there’s a reason it was the uncontested “Song of the Summer” last year — it’s addicting, it has Snoop Dogg, and it references pure and highly evocative pleasures. Daisy Dukes Bikinis On Top, to be specific. The description evokes skin and suggestiveness, but it’s coated in the saccharine sound of the actual song.
But then came “Teenage Dream,” which effectively reversed everything I’d thought previously thought about Katy Perry. I thought that she was playing the celebrity game with certain savvy, but I also recoiled from her songs. Yet “Teenage Dream” combined a pure pop anthem with a wistfulness, nostalgia, and simply evocative images of what it’s like to be young and think that you’re in love. All of her songs have the same simple imagery, but something about the way she uses it in Teenage Dream — combined, of course, with the actual aural affect of the song — makes it exponentially more powerful.
“Firework” is a classic ballad with pretty little substance (other than HEY LISTENER, YOU’RE AWESOME), and “Last Friday Night,” which is basically a “I got drunk and did crazy shit” song, very much in the vein of “Wakin’ Up in Vegas” (from her first album), is still highly evocative and admittedly, okay, FINE, fun. ”E.T.” is about having sex with aliens! That’s transgressive, right! Only so fantastical as to not actually be transgressive AT ALL? More like a game of make believe? But don’t forget: for the single, she let Kanye West rap a verse, which grants the otherwise derivative, B-Grade Dr. Luke song just enough edge to become popular.
Perry’s most recent single, “The One That Got Away,” returns to the “Teenage Dream” vein, describing what it’s like to be totally into someone, break up, and then think back and wonder what life would have been like. If she added violins and a mandolin, this could be a country song.
And therein lies the crux of Perry’s success. Sure, her image embodies the transgressive and the traditional. You see this in her music videos, in her romances, in her sartorial choices. But with the help of her very savvy producers, she also writes songs WITH STORIES. And as Taylor Swift’s success has made abundantly clear, amidst all the unintelligble lyrics and songs that are essentially European disco tunes (LMFAO, I’m talking to you), there’s something incredibly attractive about a song where you can not only decipher the words, but understand and relate to the ways in which those words turn into a story.
And that, in the end, is what’s so highly contradictory and highly appealing about Perry: she tells highly traditional love stories, but she tells them with pink hair. When she’s talking about getting drunk with her friends and not remembering, she’s doing so while also thoroughly married and abstaining from most drugs and alcohol. She’s traditional and contemporary, topless on the cover of Esquire and suited-up on the cover of In Style.
David Fincher, Rooney Mara, and that Creepy Vogue Profile
The Gossip:
David Fincher, the director of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, has a weird, controlling relationship with his star, Rooney Mara (who plays the iconic Lisbeth Sander).
The Source:
A mid-length Vogue cover story. The photos are worth the click alone. I mean LOOK.
The Evidence:
Several descriptions and quotes of various levels of explicitness.
The most persuasive:
As Fincher talks about the film, his heroine, Mara—with Salander’s awesomely strange hair, bleached eyebrows, and facial piercings—sits next to him, looking for all the world like a troubled college student who takes too much Adderall. She hangs on his every word, her eyes lit with admiration. Their relationship, it quickly becomes clear, is charged with the electric current of the mentor-protégée crush, which is both touching and occasionally uncomfortable to watch. Or, as Daniel Craig, who costars as a crusading journalist named Mikael Blomkvist, says about their working relationship, “It’s fucking weird!”
Oh, and also this:
When a waiter appears to take our order, we are all looking at our menus, but I see out of the corner of my eye Fincher nudging Mara. He says with quiet seriousness, “You can eat.” I look up to see her reaction. Mara rolls her eyes, and Fincher laughs. “You can have lettuce and a grape. A raisin if you must.” She orders a piece of fish and barely touches it. In the book, Salander is described as boyish and awkward, “a pale, anorexic young woman who has hair as short as a fuse. . . .” Noomi Rapace, the magnetic star of the Swedish versions, looked more like Joan Jett. “One of the things that make our version that much more heartbreaking,” says Mara, “is that even though I am playing a 24-year-old, I look much younger. I look like a child.” I ask if she had to get unhealthily skinny for the role. She says, “Umm . . . not really.”
“It hasn’t been too hard for her,” Fincher quickly adds.
Then there’s the simple evidence of her transformation:
Mara is wearing a slight variation of what she had on last night: black leather boots, a pair of gray drop-crotch parachute pants from Zara, and a vintage Swedish military shirt that she pinched from wardrobe. Google pictures of pre–Dragon Tattoo Rooney and you will find a pretty young thing with lustrous brown hair and bright blue-green eyes. “Before, I dressed much girlier,” she says. “A lot of blush-colored things. Now I literally roll out of bed and put on whatever is there. I have really enjoyed being a boy this last year.”
And the fact that a girl that looked like this:
Now looks like this:
But the interview also emphasizes Mara’s inherent transmutability, and how it works well with Lisbeth’s only “cipher-like” qualities:
Once Fincher approached McGrath, she went straight online to see who was playing Lisbeth Salander. “When I saw that it was Rooney,” she says, “and I saw those bony features, those cheekbones, those eyes, I said, ‘I can’t wait.’ I was instantly inspired. It’s like in fashion, when you get a girl who has one of those haunting faces that you can do absolutely anything with.”
At the center of all of this howling evil is the strangely relatable Lisbeth Salander, a damaged, vengeful, brilliant, androgynous cipher…
If it took a lot of work to make Mara look the part, in some ways she already possessed the right stuff. “I am very slow to warm,” Mara says. “I’ve always been sort of a loner. I didn’t play team sports. I am better one-on-one than in big groups.” This, she says, is one reason she gets the character. “I can understand wanting to be invisible and mistrusting people and wanting to understand everything before you engage with the world.”
Oh, and lest you think that Fincher and Mara are totally doing it, the author of the profile (Jonathan Van Meter — it’s not insignificant that the author is a male) notes that Fincher’s partner has been a key component in the Mara to Lisbeth transformation.
[Rooney] also gets to reside, at least for now, in the family-like cocoon of Fincherworld. Everyone raves about Fincher’s secret weapon, his romantic partner (and producer for the past nineteen years), Ceán Chaffin. A cheerful, formidable presence, she seems to be handling the work of a dozen people, including acting as Mara’s publicist. “She’s incredible,” says Mara. “They are the best people to work with. They will tell you exactly how it is, even if they think you won’t like it. Everything is on the table.” As Daniel Craig tells me, “I wish I’d had someone like David at Rooney’s age just to guide me and say what’s good and what’s bad. You don’t know at that age. You are full of confidence, but you are also full of huge insecurities.”
If you didn’t get the implicit message, I’ll make it clear: Fincher is not sleeping with Mara. In fact, his partner is also involved in the process, and they act like her parents. Maybe sorta. Gurus?
Or even better yet, Svengalis.
You’ve probably heard the term bandied about, but don’t know the precise meaning. Svengali was a character in a novel by the 19th century French author George du Maurnier, and he turned a talentless woman into a phenomenal singer through hypnosis. While she was hypnotized, she’d do whatever he ordered — including singing beautifully — but it also meant that she could not function without him. Today, the terms connotes an unhealthy relationship between a mentor and a mentee, in which the mentor psychologically manipulates the mentee, rendering him/her dependent upon the praise and affirmation of the mentor.
The most famous Hollywood Svengali story was between German star Marlene Dietrich and the Austrian director Josef Von Sternberg. In 1930, Von Sternberg cast the relatively unknown Dietrich in The Blue Angel, and the film went on to huge international success. Paramount took note, and brought both director and star stateside and signed them to long-term contracts. The two went on to make seven films together, the beautiful Shanghai Express and super weirdly awesome Scarlett Empress. Plus the two films were Dietrich dresses as a man and famously kisses a woman (Morocco, Blonde Venus).
These seven films are various levels of remarkable, but the real story was extra-textual: how the two related, how Dietrich seemed to be under Von Sternberg’s spell, how they seemed to most definitely be romantically involved in some way.
Von Sternberg and Dietrich with Matching Haircuts
Whatever was happening, it’s clear that Dietrich’s films without Von Sternberg lacked the magic of their collaborations. Indeed, with the exception of Destry Rides Again (1940) and the absolutely jaw-dropping performance in Touch of Evil (1958), her post Von Sternberg career has faded away.
Yet it was always somewhat unclear what was going on between Dietrich and Von Sternberg, just as it’s unclear what’s going on between Fincher and Mara, save an artistic relationship that, as portrayed by this particular author in this particular magazine, reads as creepy. Fincher comes off as exacting director who has molded an unformed actress into his perfect Salander; Mara comes off as a naive young woman who has submitted herself and her career to Fincher’s will, trusting that he will not destroy her.
But again, to be clear, this is a story. Interviews and profiles have a narrative line just as novels and films do. The quotes have been checked and the interviews occurred, but the description is the author’s entirely. I do not doubt that Mara deferred to Fincher; I do not doubt that she looks to him for guidance. But I do doubt that the relationship between the two is as, well, dramatic as the author characterizes.
The author’s stake in making the relationship so sensational should be clear: not only does a story with these sort of details create more interest in the story (and more clicks to the website, more blog posts such as this one), but it also abstractly recreates some of the dynamics of the film. While Salander proves herself to be cunning and the very opposite of passive, there are moments — especially in the first book/film — in which she is passive, and cannot self-actualize (or fulfill her potential) without the guidance/assistance of a man. That man may be a positive figure (her boss, Blomkivst), but the man may also be providing negative reinforcement (her parole officer). But the fact remains: Salander reacts instead of acting, just as Mara seems to be reacting to Fincher’s stimuli instead of acting on her own.
Again, I’m not saying that this is actually happening. It probably isn’t. But a profile that recreates the dynamics of the characters in the film is much, much more interesting to read — and encourages readers to then go see the film — than one that asserts that the actors are nothing like the characters they play onscreen. It’s classic star theory: we want our stars to have coherent images, in which their extra-textual lives mesh and complement their performances on the screen. This profile is indeed creepy and disturbing and treads the knife-edge between feminist actualization and misogyny. But then again, so does the book, and so will the film.
The Modern Pleasures of Downton Abbey
Note: Using mildly nefarious means, I am currently watching Season 2, which will air stateside in a few months. But there are no real spoilers concerning Season 2, save its setting (we are now in World War I, that’s no secret) and the use of a curling iron.
For the last four years, I have been surrounded by media studies academics. In other words, people whose job it is to consume media. Name a television show, a movie, a popular internet site, or a video game, and chances are that 2 out of the 3 people with whom you were speaking had not only viewed that piece of media, but developed a theory of varying levels of complexity to explain it/its popularity/its failure/its aesthetics/its influence on other forms of media, you get the picture.
But when you start work at a new school, one where you are the only media studies scholar in a sea of academics, things change. I first experienced this when I taught at Whitman, and I’m experiencing it again at my new job here at Putney. I don’t mean to imply that my colleagues are uncultured — far from it. More that they aren’t hyper-media-cultured the way that my job (and passions) have required me to be.
Which is all a long way of saying that I’ve had a hard time having conversations about my favorite television shows in real life. I KNOW, LIFE IS SO HARD. You don’t watch The Good Wife, math teacher! You don’t watch Misfits, biology teacher! WHAT’S WRONG WITH YOU? (Unlike Whitman, where television still remains a bit of a dirty word, I will say that Putney’s faculty is well-versed in television that has made its way to DVD: when you live on a farm in the middle of Vermont, TV-on-DVD is the way to go. Friday Night Lights, The Wire, and Freaks and Geeks are all very, very popular). But you know what everyone has watched? Science and math teachers, English teachers, history teachers and librarians and administrators?
DOWNTON ABBEY! And this isn’t some weird New England thing — everyone loves it! Moms and cousins and bosses and students and 13-year-olds, they all love some Downton! (Okay, maybe boys don’t love the Downton as much, but I’d love to hear from those who do). And you know who else loves Downton? Actual British People! As in the show averaged 10 million viewers per viewing….and then 6 million additional viewers when it was rebroadcast on PBS in America. PBS! You guys, when was the last time that 6 million people watched PBS and it wasn’t for a Ken Burns documentary? This is a huge deal. Plus Downton beat Mildred Pierce for the “Best Mini-Series” Emmy, and everyone knows how hard it is to defeat the combo of HBO, mini-series, Kate Winslet, and period piece.
In short: Downton is popular. It has a broad appeal. I was about to assert that it has done so without any of the repugnance that attends other broadly popular shows, such as that good ol’ populist punching bag Two and a Half Men. But the appeal of Downton, like so much broadly popular television, from Two and a Half Men to CSI, stems from two sources. The first is self-evident: Downton has high production values, its well-written, the dresses are obviously fabulous, and the performances are good.
The second should be obvious, but it gets hidden: Downton is genre television. It’s a straight up costume/class drama in the way that Two and a Half Men is a straight up laugh-track sitcom, and CSI: Your Town is a straight up procedural. Sure, Downton is about the slow disintegration of the landed gentry in England, and thus a story about the end of the class/costume drama, but it’s still an “upstairs/downstairs” costume drama of the first degree.
Which isn’t to say it’s bad. Indeed, that’s part of why you probably started watching — because you know what to expect. Costume drama! From Britain! Stuff about servants AND about fabulously wealthy people?! COUNT ME IN!
Because that’s the magic of genre: you don’t need to know the specifics. You know that you like the basics, and that whatever builds upon those basics will satisfy you in some way. That’s why you go see a rom-com on Valentine’s Day, or watch something with the word ‘vampire’ in it, or go see films that open on weekends in July: they’re all genre films. Katherine Heigl is now a genre unto herself; so is The Rock. ”Genre” doesn’t mean that the film is necessarily bad; it just means that it sells itself on the promise of a specific set of pleasures.
In other words: you know what you’re going to get when you see something advertised as a costume drama. That’s why people were so pissed with Sofia Coppola’s Marie Antoinette: it had all the accotruements of a costume drama, but what’s with this punk music?! And whimsical meditations on the way that the grass sways? Coppola betrayed genre expectations, and thus betrayed a solid chunk of her audience.
With that said, the best genre fare doesn’t stick strictly to the recipe. (Which is why I actually really love Marie Antoinette, but that’s another conversation). The Sopranos was a gangster show, but it was a gangster show with its protagonist in therapy. Downton is a costume and class drama, but one that deals with the disintegration of the very division of wealth and social mores that sustained the clearly delineated British class system. It’s a genre show about the end of the genre, if that makes sense.
And that’s also what makes it interesting, because it means that Downton has an American head-of-house, anxiety over the future of the household, maids going to typing school, women having sex with Turkish ambassadors, and [SEASON TWO SPOILER ALERT!] sisters doing low-class work, like NURSING and FARMING. The horror! Or actually, the non-horror! The subtle anxiety and excitement! Because that’s how actual change occurs — not with huge declarations of LIFE IS CHANGING! OUR WAY OF LIFE IS OVER! but through subtle actions and reactions that accumulate into change. [At times Maggie Smith's character can veer dangerously into the "huge declarations of change" territory: I am the Dowager Countess of Grantham, I am aghast at all modern things! WHAT IS A WEEK-END! But the writers cloak her character as comic relief -- as almost a satire of herself -- which, along with Maggie Smith's performance style, is the reason she comes off a woman, once strong and powerful, whose grandchildren merely humor her....an almost tragi-comic reminder of an era now gone, an era revealed as slightly absurd.]
There are other obvious ways that Downton subverts genre expectations: the footman is gay (people were gay before 1960! In Britain!); the driver is an Irish rebel with a penchant for Marxist literature. But what interests me most — what continually pushes Downton‘s plot to clash with the expectations of the costume/class drama — are the recurrent pressures and pleasures of modernity. How does the telephone change the way that the household runs? How does the car change where, and with whom, one can ride? Even the steam engine changed the facility with which members of the household, both “up” and “down” stairs, could go to London. How does shellshock — a phenomenon of modern war — affect returning soldiers and their places within the home? How does the spread of the press, and the self-made men it made rich, affect who someone of Mary Crawley’s status could marry? HOW DID A CURLING IRON CHANGE THE WAY MARY CRAWLEY COULD DO HER HAIR? (I’m not kidding; this is a real question). Modernity, you change everything! But in such subtle, fascinating ways.
Like so many others, Math and Science teachers and cousins and Mothers and teenagers, I came to Downton Abbey for its genre. But I stayed for the way the show — and its grappling with modernity — contorts it. And, okay, fine, the dresses.
