celebrity gossip, academic style

The details: Sandra Bullock is/has adopted a baby from New Orleans, Louis Bardo Bullock. Bullock and estranged husband Jesse James began the adoption process four years ago; they took Louis home in January, but chose to keep the adoption a secret at the time. In March, it was revealed that James had engaged in multiple affairs, including one with a woman who had dabbled with Neo-Nazi apparel/performance. Now that Bullock has separated from James and announced plans to seek a divorce, she has continued the adoption process as a single parent.

The Strategy: Bullock enjoyed an enormous amount of positive press surrounding her Golden Globe/Oscar win — she had at last usurped Julia Roberts and Reese Witherspoon as America’s reigning sweetheart; she was box office gold (just forget about that pesky All About Steve; and even if the critics lambasted The Blind Side, America loved it. She looked gorgeous at the Oscar’s and accepted her award with grace and poise — all with Jesse James by her side. The revelation of James’ affairs — including one dalliance that apparently took place when Bullock was accepting an award — was the equivalent of beating an adorable and likable puppy. (Side note: women always get compared to objects in situations like this — John Mayer’s treatment of Jen Aniston was like ‘burning the American flag.’ Find me an instance when a man is turned into an object to describe his treatment at the hands of another?) When I heard the news, I actually gasped. Not because I necessarily love Sandra Bullock — I actually only really like her in Hope Floats — but because the scandal, and its timing, was so ridiculously unexpected.

Bullock basically maintained media silence since the James story broke. She moved out; she apparently wasn’t wearing her wedding ring, she made an announcement clarifying that she and James had not, as rumored, made a sex tape. But she kept her visibility to a minimum. This was crucial, as it effectively amplifies the current announcement…and makes it seem far less manipulative, or, at the very least, less part of an overall strategy. The message of a singular, unified message, with a singular, unified story is clear: Sandy just wants to be happy — and she’ll let us have this one glimpse, but she doesn’t play that celebrity game!

What’s not being said: While many outlets, from E! to Lainey Gossip, are expressing surprise and admiration that Bullock was able to keep the secret for this long, very few are being explicit about what a truly adroit move this is on Bullock’s part. But the finesse isn’t limited to the fact that she kept it secret this long: Bullock made three crucial decisions concerning the adoption of this baby and the publicity surrounding it.

1.) Keeping Quiet During Awards Season.

To my mind, this is the most crucial move — and the one that no one, at least no mainstream outlets, are talking about. In the interview with People, Bullock explains the silence around her adoption as ‘it being so crazy.’ In other words, she’d be all over the place promoting the film and her awards run, and wouldn’t be able to handle the concurrent publicity. Okay, fine, maybe.

But pause for a second and consider WHAT A HUGE CLUSTERF*** it would be if Bullock would’ve announced the adoption of a black kid while campaigning to win Hollywood’s highest honors for playing the role of a woman who ADOPTS A BLACK KID.

Of course, we want our stars’ extra-textual lives to mirror their textual lives, but usually this mirror-effect is reserved for personality traits and relationships. Not the adoption of children. And no matter how much Bullock emphasized the fact that she had begun the adoption process four years ago, the timing would read as highly manipulative, and her actions would seem ingenious…..the exactly opposite of Bullock’s star image.

My guess is if the news would’ve come out, Bullock wouldn’t have won the Oscar. Not because Hollywood frowns upon adoption (or inter-racial adoption), but because it would’ve read as too calculated….and the predominant wisdom in Hollywood is that Bullock won not on the strength of her performance, but on the strength of her likable personality in the business. This move = not likable, at least not in the awards run-up, no matter how they spun it.

2.) Keeping Quiet During the Maelstrom

Again, crucial for appearances. One of my students referred to the adoption (and the concurrent divorce announcement) as the equivalent of the ‘break-up puppy.’ In other words, the dog that someone gets after a break-up to sooth one’s emotions. Now, please do not mistake this analogy as me actually calling this young child a dog, but the comparison — a new lovable distraction — holds.

The baby thus functions as the redress necessary for Bullock to move beyond this scandal. Scandal theorists have written at length about how every scandal — whether Bush’s mistake in going to war in Iraq or the revelation of Tiger’s sexual activities — demands some sort of redressive action in order for society to smooth over the rupture caused by the revelation of the transgression. There has been no redress for the Iraqi War — and thus it is still a scandal — and Tiger’s attempt at an apology (accompanied by a trip to sex rehab) was no true salve. Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie adopted a child and had a baby; Rita Hayworth married a prince and gave birth to a princess. And Sandra Bullock — who actually wasn’t the cause of the scandal, but the victim of it — adopts a baby.

But how does a baby function to redress the scandal? First, babies are a distraction. They’re adorable and become the topic of discussion. Why talk about how your husband had sex with a tattoo model when you could talk about how cute your baby is? The adoption/birth process effectively changes the narrative — a strategy that political strategists have long employed. From this point onward, Bullock’s narrative is all about moving on, growing up, and being happy — with a child of her own.

But in order for this narrative to monopolize the gossip space, Bullock had to wait until things quieted down. James went to sex addiction therapy; her things were out of the house. She even filed for divorce last Friday — a move that went undetected, as she filed under mixed-up versions of both of their initials. Now, when the story comes out, it functions as a complete and clean break.

Babies are also a signifier of wholesomeness. Bullock is rejecting the aspects of her past that have emerged as unsavory — specifically, the Hitler-costume wearing, motorcycle-repairing husband — and re-embraced her domestic image. The movie is exactly what will please her ‘Female Forever Fans’ most — a demographic I theorized at length here.

3.) Keeping Quiet Until a People Magazine Cover Can Be Arranged

Bullock (or rather, Bullock’s PR team) approached People. This is no secret — the managing editor of the magazine just talked about it on The Today Show. For those unversed with the celebrity game, this might seem like Sandy was just trying to allow fans a window into her life and inspire those who want to start over again. Okay, fine. But People is where stars go to announce big decisions — see, for example, myriad announcements of homosexuality, pictures of babies (even Brangelina’s), Elizabeth Edward’s decision to seek a divorce, etc. It’s sanctioned, it’s totally clean, it holds punches and, chances are strong that Bullock got full approval of the text of the article (not to mention the pictures) before it went to press.

I’d also echo Jezebel’s point in “Five Biggest Questions Sandra Bullock and Her Baby” that the fact that Bullock effectively hid a child for nearly five months underscores the fact that most ‘breaking news’ in the celebrity world is planted…and calls our understanding of what is and is not sanctioned (including paparazzi photos) into question. Put differently, if you can hide a baby, you can certainly hide a budding romance, and anyone who says that the were attempting to stay low key is not only lying, but attempting to garner press attention. Bullock’s ability to hide illuminates somewhat ironically illuminates the machinery of the celebrity industrial complex. And that makes us all feel somewhat ashamed in buying the spontaneity its selling.

And so she pulled it off. And it’s the biggest gossip news of the week, even the month. The other gossip magazines are most likely seething…and preparing their own covers for next week. But what ideologies are undulating beneath this move — and the semiotic playground of the pictures/feature itself?

First off, look at the cover. And look at Baby Louis, in close-up below.

As Jezebel (and many others) have pointed out, the beaded necklace signifies, for better or worse, as ethnic or African. Apparently the necklace was a gift from Bullock’s other daughter, Sunny, one of James’ kids from another marriage, and is intended to represent all of the kids in the family. [I'm unclear as to whether Bullock officially adopted Sunny, and what role she will play in those kids' lives from now on.]

Which brings us back to the glaring question that no one’s really talking about — DID YOU NOTICE THAT THIS CHILD IS BLACK? Please don’t mistake me: I think that adoption is so wonderful and necessary, and I think that the fact that most white parents in America don’t want to adopt black children (many of them are adopted by European parents) illuminates some crucial tensions still very present in American culture. What I want to emphasize, then, is that the adoption is a ideologically potent decision, underscored by the fact that her soon-to-be ex-husband IS A BIGOT. Take, for example, Bullock’s own (deflection) on the topic:

I want him to know no limits on where he can go. I want him to experience all culture, nationalities, countries and people like I did. I want his mind to be open and free. We were raised that we are all the same. No one greater, smarter, more powerful. We are all equal. I would love for Louis to know that . He has a big, beautiful, diverse family. As long as he know he is loved and protected and given the opportunity to touch and see everything, then I will have done my job as a mama.

This is multi-cultural rhetoric at its height — and has been espoused throughout both Crash (also starring Bullock) and The Blind Side. What it neglects is cultural specificity. Again, I think that every child deserves a loving home, but to neglect the power of this decision — and the fact that Louis is black — is to pretend we live in a post-racist/racial world, which we definitively do not. Again, this isn’t to say that mixed-race adoption is bad, but that there are a whole set of considerations when dealing with the white adoption of black children…ones that we haven’t entirely worked through in America.

When I posted the cover photo on Facebook, I garnered a number of responses, including the following one from my aunt:

i suppose it just isn’t possible that she wanted a baby, found a baby that needed a home, adopted that baby, and loves him to pieces? and sadly, in the process, some one didnt know how to behave like a grown up and she had the fortitude to kick him to the curb?

My aunt’s response encapsulates what a lot of Americans are feeling about the announcement today — and legitimately so. It’s certainly the message of the article and the specifics of its release. And, to step out of my analytical role for a second, I really do think that Bullock will love and cherish this child. But at the same time, we need to remember that yes, Bullock is a real person, with real desires and emotions, but she is also an image. And what that image does — and our response to it — says so much about our current understandings of the way that race, sex, family, and single motherhood function in our society today.