celebrity gossip, academic style

Back when I was a wee, scared first year Master’s student, I enrolled in course called “Female Hollywood Stars” without any understanding of what it would entail. I liked Hollywood, I liked stars, who knows! But this course, taught byKathleen Rowe Karlyn, was my first introduction to star studies, Richard Dyer’s Stars (the bible of star studies), and my first opportunity to perform my own star study. I totally drank the theoretical kool-aid, as evidenced by my dissertation and this blog, but the first star study was both a marvel and a mess.

I chose Julia Roberts, who has long fascinated me, in part because she starred in the movie I most wanted but was forbidden to see: Pretty Woman. I’d seen Mystic Pizza and learned that you should not buy a dress, wear it, and then return it. My mom said that was unethical. But then my Entertainment Weekly-obsessed self continued to read all about her various travails through the ’90s. I couldn’t ever see the movies (save Hook), but her fling with Kiefer Sutherland, the dark ads for Sleeping with the Enemy, the flop of Mary Reilly — I found it all fascinating. (Obviously I was much more into star studies as a teenager than I ever understood). And then she up and married Lyle Lovett! YOU GUYS, I LOVE LYLE LOVETT. My mom has been listening to him since forever, and I always had a hard time reconciling his crazy hair/face with his beautiful voice, but then Julia Roberts goes and authenticates my love. Stars: They’re Powerful!

Point being, she was the closest thing I had to a movie star from my youth. And in Fall of 2005, she was demonstrating her media savvy with her carefully (yet nonchalant) “reveal” of her twins as she and her husband took them on a walk. I wanted to figure this lady out.

Or, more precisely, I wanted to figure out what Julia Roberts had meant and what she continued to mean. I wanted to figure out exactly what people meant when they said that she was the only remaining female movie star. Never having performed a star study before, I did what most novice scholars do: I did way, way too much research. I read every academic article ever published on any film in which she had appeared (and let me tell you, feminist scholars have had a hay-day with Pretty Woman). More importantly, I read every magazine and newspaper profile from 1988 - 2004. THAT WAS CRAZY. But I did amass a tremendous amount of research, and several “themes” of her star image became abundantly clear. (I also wrote a 55 page seminar paper, which is another problem in and of itself).

Recurring themes of every profile written about Julia Roberts ever:

1.) She is from Smyrna, Georgia. READ: SHE IS SOUTHERN, and her Southernness has made her the person she is today, i.e. polite and private.

2.) Her parents ran an acting school and her brother was an actor. READ: Her talent is natural, and although she grew up around acting, she herself was never “trained.”

3.) She has a beautiful smile and a beautiful laugh, and once you are exposed to it you will be hers forever. READ: She has charisma. She is extraordinary.

4.) She is good friends with everyone on set, from the director to the crew. READ: Stars: They love their hairdressers and lighting techs, just like us!

5.) She is emotional and vulnerable, which explains her various romances, and how much she has been hurt by the press coverage of them. She doesn’t understand what it means to be a “star” and doesn’t care for the lifestyle, which is why she lives in Taos instead of Hollywood. READ: She’s not fake. What you see is what you get.

6.) Pretty Woman was something magnificent. READ: Being a sexual, self-sustaining woman (albeit a sex worker) sucks….until you snag yourself someone who will give you a credit card, take you to the opera, and “rescue you” into monogamy. (That’s where the feminist critique comes in — not so much in the magazine articles, but always in the academic ones).

In many ways, Julia Roberts’ star image is pretty standard. She’s equal parts extraordinary and ordinary, authentic and accessible yet still unfathomably charismatic. She’s a lady and she’s a natural, and her star-making turn in Pretty Woman set the tone for the rest of her star image. As became clear over the course of the next 15 years, when she looked and acted like she did in Pretty Woman (curly, reddish hair, being a general sassy-pants) people went to her movies. When she didn’t look or act that way — meaning, when she strayed from her established star image — they didn’t show up. When she essentially reprised her Pretty Woman role, only this time inflected with politics instead of romance, she won an Oscar. And since then, the pickings have been somewhat slim. Playing somewhat against type in Closer, mocking her own image in Ocean’s 13, voicing Charlotte in Charlotte’s Web. (I did love her in Duplicity, which is horribly underrated. Clive Owen, come back to me! Where have you gone?)

This month, she reappears on the cover of Vanity Fair, publicizing the Tarsem-directed version of Snow White, entitled Mirror, Mirror, which will go head-to-head with the K-Stew-starring version, Snow White and the Huntsman.

If you’ve seen the trailers, the victor of this head-to-head already seems clear.

Mirror, Mirror:

Snow White and the Huntsman:

I mean, obviously K-Stew and Thor are going tromp all over Mirror, Mirror, which has some weird tone issues that I can’t quite put my finger on. Or maybe it’s just Julia Roberts being Julia Roberts? Don’t get me started on annoying voiceover man who just screams Minivan Majority. I could be wrong here; we’ll see somewhat shortly.

But this is Roberts’ first high profile cover in quite some time. Inside and on the cover, she looks great. No doubt.

Note, however, that her hair looks like a slightly less version of Preferred Julia. Her hair is a bit more brown, but the overall look is how American likes to see her. (Roberts understands this: when she was promoting her comeback in My Best Friend’s Wedding, she told anyone who’d listen that “my hair is red and curly just the way you like it — come see this movie!”

In short, this Julia:

Is not all that different from this Julia, circa Notting Hill.

 

The pose, the come-hither closed-lip smile, the demurity, even the red accent color for the magazine — it’s all the same. Less belly button, sure, but that’s only appropriate for a woman as modest as Roberts suggests herself to be. (No nudity, just lots of cleavage and midriff).

And, of course, the profile: same song, 22nd verse. I’ve written about the vapidity of the Vanity Fair profile elsewhere (here and here), but this profile had potential. Sam Kashner, he of Bad and the Beautiful and umpteen classic Hollywood profiles (and recent subject of gossip himself), guides the conversation as Mike Nichols, Roberts’ director in Closer and Charlie Wilson’s War, interviews Roberts. This could be interesting, right? Not really, because a Vanity Fair profile is tasked with one thing: being as seemingly revelatory-while-revealing-nothing as possible. Sometimes you get a gem, like when Jennifer Aniston admitted that Brad Pitt had a sensitivity chip missing, but most of the time, it’s all small talk pretending to be big talk. (Which is part of the reason I adored Edith Zimmerman’s GQ profile of Chris Pine).

But I wanted to see if the same story of the 1990s and 2000s could be spun for a 2010s audience. And, of course, it could:

The Laugh makes an appearance in the first paragraph:

“The first thing I heard was laughter from unheard jokes — it was her laugh the same one that we fell in love with when Richard Gere suddenly snapped the jewelry box shut on her in Pretty Woman.”

“If you are lucky enough to make her laugh, which Nichols does effortlessly, her voluptuous mouth breaks into a radiant grin.”

 

There’s the Uniqueness:

“There has been no one like her for quite a while now.”
“One never tires of her, like seeing a shooting star: where did that come from? You are grateful to simply have seen it all.”

“As far as Tarsem was concerned, the Evil Queen was the first character he was interested in casting. ‘I knew that it would dictate the tone and age of everyone else. I was only interested in Julia.’”

There’s the ‘Natural,’ Effortless Talent:

Nichols: “I don’t know whether you ever found it hard or easy, Julia, because all of the machinery is invisible. It’s a thing of yours in life too. I don’t know whether you work out. I don’t know how you got your shape back in what seemed to be 10 minutes…”
Nichols again: “I’m married to someone (Diane Sawyer) a little bit like you, in that the technique, the machinery of both the person and the work, is not only never discussed, it’s never even considered — it’s so personal that it doesn’t exist. I think tha goes one with what I saw in the first shot of Mystic Pizza — it looks like like; it is life.”

Nichols on first watching Roberts in Pretty Woman. : “I got very excited, because here was this amazing presence. You weren’t young or not young; it had nothing to do with age. The character was all about starting out. But you seemed like you’d always been there.”

 

There’s the Acting Family:

Kashner: “Julia, do you think you would have become an actor if you didn’t grow up in a theatrical family?”
“I don’t think I woudl have. I would’ve have seen it as a real option if my parents werent’ actors and my siblings…..It just wouldn’t have occurred to me [then lists pedigree]…Going to the theater is such a joyous experience.”

 

There’s the attempt to read Pretty Woman into her life/career:

Kashner: “Julia, do you see your life as fairy tale?”

[At which point Roberts says something that makes it clear that she doesn't, yet.....]

Kashner: “Your amazing career reads like a fairy tale.”

 

As evidenced by the exchange above, a star doesn’t decide what parts of his or her backstory will become part of the lore. Sometimes those motifs, pivotal moments, and themes are mapped onto your star image without any input from the star. We understand how this works with negative publicity (a scandal becomes part of the narrative no matter how much a star would like it not to), but it’s crucial that we also see how it happens with more positive events. Angelina Jolie, for example, doesn’t have much positive to say about being the daughter of Jon Voigt — indeed, her mother seems to have been a much, much stronger influence on her — but profiles love to excavate in her Hollywood pedigree. We attribute stars with qualities that make sense, and it makes much more sense that Jolie, for all her uniqueness, would have gotten it through a Hollywood father. What makes sense matters much less than what’s true.

But Roberts surprised me a bit at the end of this quasi-interview. I was absolutely expecting some banality about hating stardom, dropping out of the game, loving her husband, etc. etc. But she offered some actual insight — and as those of you who follow the blog know, there’s nothing I love more than a star who evidences his/her own understanding of the way that star images work. (Most recently: George Clooney).

When Kashner asks her about the “idea of movie stardom,” and whether it’s “a cosmic riddle” she’s been “given to solve,” Roberts replies with a story of being on the streets with her family in Toronto:

“It was on a crowded street, and somebody noticed me, and then another person noticed. Somebody said as we were walking past, ‘oh, That’s Julia Roberts.’ We just kind of kept going, and then Finn said, ‘Yeah, my mom’s Julia Robinson.’ That’s what gives you perspective. It could be Robinson, it could be Johnson, because it has nothing to do with me as a person.”

Indeed. That’s an understanding that only comes with twenty years of the press disarticulating a star image, with its own themes, peaks, and valleys, from your actual life. It doesn’t matter who, exactly, Roberts is. What matters is what she has come to mean.