celebrity gossip, academic style

Penelope Cruz Looks Pretty (and says little)

Like most major movie stars, Penelope Cruz has led an interesting life. She has worked with many talented and skilled directors; she’s bilingual; she’s dated interesting people and played interesting roles. But from reading her recent profile in Vanity Fair, available here, this is what I’ve learned about Penelope Cruz: She’s nice. She is not your typical version of pretty. She doesn’t like to talk about herself. She works with male directors, many of whom have complicated feelings about her. I only know that they’re complicated because the directors said so. Oh, and she works hard.

The problem is not with Cruz: she’s answering the questions in the best way she knows how. It’s the way that the author (Ingrid Sischy, longtime editor-in-chief of Interview magazine) and the magazine collaborate to make the profile as boring as possible.

In general, Vanity Fair is good at offering up a celeb profile with a few juicy goodies: Brad Pitt admitting he’s not fit for long-term marriage (while still married to Jennifer Aniston), for example. But they’re routinely the least robust piece of ‘journalism’ in the magazine. (Of course, Vanity Fair is neither The New Yorker nor Vogue — it’s pieces, whether dealing with the aftermath of the Bernie Maddox scandal or intrigue in the Hamptons, always employ ample bombast and melodramatic plotting.)

The celebrity profiles reliably employ a ‘Rolling Stone lead’ (think of the line from Almost Famous: ‘I’m flying high over Tupelo, Mississippi…and we’re all about to die) that is intended to illuminate the star’s inner self in some crucial way: in the Cruz piece, we’re offered the following:

Some years ago, when Penélope Cruz was still on her way up the movie-star ladder, I had a behind-the-scenes adventure with her that gave me a chance to see what the Spanish actress is made of. I had arranged for her to do a cover shoot for Interview, the magazine I then edited, and on the day of the shoot I got a call from the photographer, who was freaking out. She had planned a bunch of fun setups, but the day hadn’t even begun yet and now Cruz’s minders were demanding that the photographer make it snappy: there wasn’t time to do anything but a few basic shots. The huffs and snits were about to spoil the shoot, so I headed over to the location, a nightclub on 14th Street, to see if I could fix things. I quickly sussed out the real reason Cruz’s people were trying to cut the shoot short: she had been summoned for a meeting later that same day with the other Cruise, as in Tom, who back then, in 2000, was still considered Mr. It. I got nowhere with her Spanish rep—apparently our rinky-dink photo shoot was chopped liver in comparison with a meeting with Hollywood’s top gun—so I marched into hair and makeup, where the actress was getting spiffed up for the first picture, and pleaded our case directly. She looked horrified that we’d been made to feel rushed and small, and asked me to tell our photographer that she was honored to be working with her and was committed to posing for all the images she wanted.

In other words: Cruz is nice. She is classy. And she was wanted by America’s hottest man. There’s also an unmistakably scent of flattery — always present in the VF celeb profile — that makes the magazine seem more like Dominick Dunne, so pleased to put another star on its cover, than, say, The New Yorker, which regularly uses undercurrents of satire to subtly ridicule the subjects it profiles, whether most recently with Nikki Finke or last year’s sporty undercutting of Ariana Huffington.

Here, style is key. The way that The New Yorker — which has many faults, don’t get me wrong, I’m no absolute NYer apologist — treads the fine line between praise and pomposity is by letting the subject speak for him/herself. The moments when the subject seems most ridiculous — when her words seem to belie the attributes usually bestowed upon him — is when he is allowed to speak at length, or explain his own appeal. A recent profile of “America’s Toughest Sheriff,” Joe Arpaio, simply allowed him to dig himself his own rhetorical hole — granted, that hole was expanded with the atrocities of his inhumane “tent city jails” in the Arizona heat, but he did himself no favors.

Part of this is rhetorical skill. Take this exchange between author and subject in the Finke profile:

One Saturday evening, after we concluded a three-hour call, she phoned back twenty minutes later to say, “Everyone tries to portray me as sad, pathetic, lonely—that’s not me at all.”

“I don’t think of you that way, Nikki,” I said.

“You don’t know anything about my private life,” she said, quietly.

“That’s probably true.”

“O.K.”

And then — paragraph and section break. Affective result = Finke is lonely and sad, and that’s what makes her vindictive and mean.

But Vanity Fair does little with a star’s actual words.

Here’s what we get direct from Cruz’s own mouth:

“That evening was when they told me they wanted me to do Vanilla Sky. I was very happy to hear it because I had done Open Your Eyes“—the 1997 Spanish film upon which Vanilla Sky is based—“and I really wanted to do the movie and do it with them.”

“…One night in 1990 she caught his Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down!, a loony kidnapping/love story/sex-and-bondage caper starring Victoria Abril. That was it. Epiphany time. “That was the day I decided to be an actress,” Cruz says. “I fell in love. I’d found what I wanted to do. I really didn’t want to have to be in an office. I was a good student, but not happy. I thought, I have nobody in my family and no friends who can make a living out of anything related to an artistic profession, but I want to try. I decided to look for an agent.”

She remembers, “When I did my first movie in America, I already had my return ticket to Spain.”

She says, “Pedro would push me to the limit. He really knows how to press all my buttons. You can only go into something like that when it’s somebody you really trust. I always feel like he’s my safety net. Like I can fly and go far, because he’s going to catch me. The biggest [panic] attack I had during the movie was the scene where, for the first time, Lena makes the decision to try to become an actress. I don’t know what happened to me that day, but before and after we filmed I could not breathe.”

“Love is a rebellious bird that no one can tame.”

“Javier is even better at air guitar!”

And that’s the full extension of her own voice in the profile.

In the words of others:

As Woody Allen says, “I don’t like to look at Penélope directly. It is too overwhelming.”

Sophia Loren, for her part, is unstinting in her praise for Cruz. She says, “Penélope is very accurate in her work. She wants to be very precise about what the director wants. And she takes her career very seriously, which she should. I think she loves what she does and it shows on the screen. She has become a real friend. We talked a lot about life and our careers. I talked about De Sica, she talked about Almodóvar. When it was my last day she came to my dressing room. She was crying, and I was crying. This is the first time that I have left a film crying because we got so upset about leaving each other.”

Rob Marshall remembers, “She’d be the last one in that soundstage working, and I’d have to say, ‘Penélope, it’s over.’ The day we were shooting her big song, ‘A Call from the Vatican,’ she was out there working so hard. In the middle of the number she does all this work with ropes—she was swinging on them and it was scary and she had formed calluses and her hands were bleeding. Daniel was screaming to her from the back of the soundstage that she is a warrior.

“Penélope was born to be an actress,” says Almodóvar, who knows her better than anyone in the business.

Comparison to others:

Cruz is poised to become a new member of the tiny firmament of actresses who began their careers in a language other than English and went on to become truly international stars: the Marlene Dietrichs, Greta Garbos, Ingrid Bergmans, Sophia Lorens, Anouk Aimées, Catherine Deneuves, Jeanne Moreaus, and Liv Ullmanns.

In the past only Spanish-American Rita Hayworth (born Margarita Carmen Cansino) got anywhere near stardom in Hollywood, and changing her name was just the beginning of what she had to do.

Because of Cruz’s looks and the fact that the camera loves her as much as it does, her comedic flair has often been left untapped. But she could just be the great 21st-century screwball talent, the Jean Harlow or Carole Lombard of our time.

Through her own words (however few of them — and it’s not that Cruz can’t speak English), the words of her directors/fellow stars, and the author’s comparisons to glamorous, respected stars of yore, the Cruz image emerges as a structured absence: we don’t know her so much as we know how other people describe her. Or, put differently, we conceive of her through the conceptions of others. She has benefited from the tutelage of strong male directors; she is devoted to her craft and immensely talented — especially for an international actress (!!); she has wild, stereotypically ‘Latin’ conceptions of love and passion. (Point of comparison: am I who I say I am, and who I’m revealed to be through enucative acts….or am I the sum of my internet browser ‘cookies,’ Amazon wish list, and Gmail ads?)

Indeed, Cruz is perhaps most ‘present’ in the ways in which she is styled and photographed for the profile. For even though Vanity Fair is replete with rhetoric, it’s also filled with pictures — lots of glossy, Leibowitz-style (or actual Leibowitz) pictures.

Thus we have the cover shot of Cruz unzipping her own dress (see above) and, at least when viewed online, a bevy of additional shots, some taken for this particular article, others from previous photoshoots, yet all reinforcing the same simple message of Cruz’s hard work, class, and foreignness.

Note how she’s paired with her Svengali (Almodovar) and her neurotic American savior (Allen). But also note her engagement with each: Almodovar instructs while she molds her image, while she seems to be propping up Allen’s drooping masculinity. (What he — and his filmmaking — really needs….Spanish passion!) The other two shots clearly situate her as a member of old world Hollywood/European glamor — a semiotic melange of Hepburn, Loren, and Bardot.

Again, what’s most striking — and resonates most strongly — about the entire profile is the images. One shouldn’t be surprised — we live in a tremendously visual culture, after all — but the Vanity Fair profile is only a few steps away from the profiles of US Weekly and People, which pair much lower profile photography with profiles (some official, others hodgepodged from surveillance and sound bites) that manage to communicate as little as possible in anywhere from 1000-5000 words.

Ultimately, we’re dealing with a technique that Mary Desjardins has termed the “systemization” of celebrity scandal and gossip. Weeklies are faced with pressing deadlines; thus they turn a single scandal, such as Jon and Kate, into a string of eight magazine covers — mostly by combining photos to make people appear mad at each other, recycling old quotes, and digging up ‘close friends and neighbors’ to serve as character witnesses.

Vanity Fair may not doctor its photos or manufacture its quotes, but the banality of its profiles is perhaps even more offensive. I don’t expect to learn much from a profile in People. But Vanity Fair manufactures the same high melodrama and vacuous stories — and gossip about New York high society, as opposed to reality stars — in glossier packaging. The ads are for Gucci, yet the stories are devoid of real weight or worth. Of course, the lack of ostensible, worthwhile content, and our attraction to it and its subjects, ironically has tremendous value when we’re trying to get at its significance in society — thus explaining my interest here.

Indeed, I’m not positing that every story in every magazine needs to somehow edify the populace or posit a solution to world hunger. I am, however, suggesting that profiles that pose as journalism — such as those in Vanity Fair — lower our expectations of how we can or should expect to know a person: through her appearance and styling, what other people say about her, her relationship to powerful men, and comparisons to other historical figures, regardless of the accuracy of such descriptions. While a comparison to the way that Obama was sketched in the public imagination may seem far-fetched, the essential connection remains: many listened to his words and ideas, but those who did not judged him on what he looked like, the way he was styled, and, most importantly, what other people said about him.

It’s second-hand image formation. It’s the long-time business of Hollywood star formation. It’s nothing new. But it’s banality — especially when posing as high class quasi-journalism, priding itself on its identity as the anti-People — is no less enervating.