The Adult Cult of Bieber
A year ago, I wrote a post asking (and answering) “What is a Justin Bieber?” That was right after the release of his second album; the song “Baby” was all over the place; people were lobbing around the word “Bieber Fever” and making fun of the haircut. Here’s what I said then:
A few months back, someone on my Twitter feed asked “What is a Justin Bieber?” Obviously he’s a person, and more specifically, a teenage pop star, but the phrasing of the question highlights he’s particular role in the mediascape today. Justin Bieber isn’t just a teenage boy with a baby face. He’s not just the next New Kid on the Block, nor is he a new Justin Timberlake. His fame is organic to the internet, and he’s either a harbinger of the future of the music industry or a model for a new type of teenage fame.
Now, I realize the term and idea of transmedia do not translate perfectly to a star. But I do think that we can think of a star as having a ‘narrative’ — and, as in the case of Bieber, a narrative that has components that are consumed by the majority, while other components are meant for consumption by fans aching for deeper understandings of the ‘story’ that is Bieber [.....]
How, specifically, does Bieber occupy this position? He regularly Twitters; he has a website; his music videos are on Youtube. None of those things make him all that different from other pop stars. Yet I would argue that it’s the existence and tremendous popularity of his original videos — coupled with ‘stunts’ such as “Bieber or Die,” the Twitter account (with its 1.7 million followers), and dozens of videos Bieber made specifically for fans, including “So How Did I Fracture My Foot with Taylor Swift?” and “Justin’s Favorite Girl Response” that make his transmedia status (at least somewhat) unique. Bieber has an immense footprint on the web — and that, more than his signature haircut and plaintive voice, are what helped make him so successful.
Again, I don’t think Bieber is unique in his status as a transmedia star. Rather, I think that his success underscores the necessity of *being* transmedia — whether through Twitter, writing books, serving as a guest judge on a reality program, or having a website that does more than simply reproduce known facts about the star (as in the case of Tom Cruise’s). If you want to be a star today, whether in music or reality television, you’ve got to offer breadth — room to explore, room to be fascinated, room for your fans to feel like they know more about you than anyone else….
So what’s changed? Bieber has gone beyond the role of teen idol to become a veritable cultural touchstone, immediately recognizable not only to tweens and teens, but adults of all ages. His visibility is somewhat akin to Miley Cyrus, but without any of the scandal and annoyingness that attends her current image. But he’s more than just visible — he’s LIKABLE. The combination of Bieber’s own charisma and the discourse around that image have transformed a teen idol into an affable, “head firmly on shoulders,” highly self-aware and self-mocking celebrity…..all before the age of 17.
Bieber’s biographical movie — Never Say Never — opens this weekend, and it will open big. Of course, it’s been timed for the weekend before Valentine’s Day, allowing Bieber to boast that girlfriends the world over will be spending their Valentine’s Day….with him. If this line was delivered with a straight face, it might make me nauseous, but there’s a certain tongue-in-cheekness to it, which performs adds a fascinating, incredible self-awareness to his image.
So how has this self-awareness been amplified — and how does it appeal to adults?
As is the case for all stars, the Bieber Image is a result of a cluster of “texts” — interviews, pictures, appearances, music videos, anecdotes — that combine to create a harmonious understanding of what Bieber is “really like.” Obviously, we have no idea what Bieber is “really like,” unless we happened to grow up in Canada with him. Instead, we have a vision of what these texts communicate as his “really like-ness.” Each text makes some claim to authenticity — this is the “real” Justin because it’s live footage; this is the “real” Justin because it’s an intimate interview; this is the REALLY REAL Justin because he’s ACTUALLY TWEETING THESE WORDS!
In recent months, there have been three major texts contributing to the Bieber Image (and, specifically, it’s visibility for adults and non-”Bielibers”)
1.) The Vanity Fair Cover/Profile
There was a lot of hoopla about this cover leading up to its publication — for some, it was a sign that Vanity Fair had finally and totally sold out, featuring a star they knew would generate page views online and newsstand sales offline. (But really, how is this all that different from publishing yet another Kennedy/Camelot retrospective, as they do EVERY YEAR? Just because it’s catering to a different type of celebrity/scandal/glamour-hungry reader….)
The profile includes several, well, HILARIOUS photos — (all photos from VF.com)
Note that all of these photos are at once invoking and softly satirizing Bieber’s teen idol status — and whether or not they were Bieber’s idea (doubtful), they nonetheless communicate a willingness on his part to participate in the mockery of teen idolhood. What they photos boldly communicate: Bieber doesn’t take himself too seriously, and gets that this whole deal — the fact that hoards of screaming girls clamor after him, the fact that photos of him blowing bubbles are “cute” - is absurd. I especially like the one of him singing to the girl above, as it acts out the promise of his songs, e.g. a devoted Bieber will ask you, love-sick girl, on a picnic in the park, and serenade you with a love song written just for you.
The meat of the interview is also quite good — as if Vanity Fair knew that this article would be held up to scrutiny, and they couldn’t offer the usual pabulum that passes for the VF celebrity profile. (Don’t get me started). The author is Lisa Robinson, well-known for her rock journalism over the last thirty years (she was also behind the recent Gaga profile). Robinson makes ample use of testimony from those who surround Bieber, but mixes it with her first-hand account of her time spent with him, painting a portrait that at once makes it easy to understand why young girls love him….but also encourages adult readers to appreciate him. In other words, this profile is not written for teen girls — even if they may have been the ones buying the magazine en masse on the newsstand for the pictures. At several times, she uses a lists of Bieber’s traits/accomplishments to create an aura of maturity. For example:
“A huge Lakers fan, Justin had dinner alone with Kobe Bryant, who reportedly advised him ‘Don’t take any shit from anybody.’ Justin shot hoops and had a dance-off with Shaquille O’Neal on Shaq’s TV show last summer and came across as a sophisticated, smart kid. He can act — a stint on CSI was more than respectable, and his skits with Tina Fey on Saturday Night lIve were funny. He can breakdance and do ‘the Dougie’; he can learn or mimic something in a minute; he can solve a Rubik’s Cube in less than two minutes. When Scooter taught him the Hebrew prayer the Sh’ma, Justin incorporated it into the before-show group prayer on a nightly basis. He’s a phenomenon. This is not your typical teen idol.”
She compares him to the charismatic idols that came before:
“He’s hyper; he’s an athlete — he’s played hockey and golf and by all accounts is excellent at both. In a way, he reminds me of the very young Michael Jackson: with a direct, focused gaze and akeen curiosity, just like Michael did, he asks me almost as many questions as I ask him.”
She draws attention to the way he’s preserved his appeal to teens, and, even more importantly, how interacts with adults:
“He has been linked to and photographed with performers such as Miley Cyrus, Selena Gomez, and Jasmine Villegas, but he keeps his private life private — lest he destroy his fans’ fantasies. The ‘kid’ sitting in front of me is a huge flirt; he even flirts with every older woman who has ever interviewed him - including Barbara Walters and Oprah Winfrey, both of whom appeared to fall under his spell.
Other parts of the profile — as well as another published in New York Magazine this Fall — point to the fact that he lives his life surrounded by adults; his bodyguards, voice coaches, manager, mother, back-up dancers, mentors (Usher, et. al.). And while he still acts like a kid from time to time (there’s a particularly hilarious section that details the fact that he spends a good amount of time plotting practical jokes and throwing candy at his manager) he spends the vast majority of his time conversing with adults, surrounded by adult conversations, and — this is crucial — keeping the schedule of a workaholic adult. Indeed, one of the traits that emerges from all writing on Bieber is a sort of consummate professionalism: he possesses a keen understanding of exactly what makes his image work, and the sort of work (posing with hundreds of girls for photographs before each concert; going to bed on time so as to preserve his voice; keeping his hair/trademark in tact; not having a serious girlfriend) necessary to preserve that image. He’s a teen beloved by teens, but has few peers. Or, rather, he has become a peer to adults — and that’s why he’s so fascinating/compelling to us, as adults ourselves.
No seriously. Think about the kids you’ve known — whatever their age — that have spoken to you as if you were both adults. Whether it’s a sort of flirting (I used to get this all the time when I was a camp counselor; junior high kids “flirting” in a decidedly un-sexual, yet charisma-infused way) or just communicating about serious issues in an articulate way, these are the kids that adults are drawn to. I have little interest in “being friends” with a 15-year-old who uses teen-speak; but some of 15-year-olds I taught at Gifted and Talented Summer Camp (Nerd Camp, as they called it) had, through a combination of nature and nurture, talking with adults and being treated like adults, learned to communicate and convey themselves like adults, and, in the process, made it much easier for adults to, well, like them. [Because, let's face it, a lot of teenagers are unlikable. I say this as someone who, at several points, as decidedly unlikable myself, even if I did have bursts of likability, but never during my 8th grade year. Ask my mom.]
2.) The 502 Television Appearances
Bieber is in full-out promotion mode for the new film, which means he’s been all over the talk show circuit this past week. But he’s not doing traditional appearances. Instead, he’s mocking him image yet again:
Switching Bodies with Jon Stewart
Satirizing ‘The Roommate’ with Andy Samberg on SNL:
Doing the “Top Ten Reasons It’s Fun to Be Justin Bieber” on Letterman (and then playing the drums with the band):
Highlights:
“Cross me and I”ll have 50,000 screaming girls come to your house and mess you up”
“At the Barber Shop, I can say, ‘Give me the ‘me’”
Appearing in a Best Buy Super Bowl Ad with Ozzy Osborne:
Note that he not only mocks his own image (and Bieber Fever) with a straight-faced sell of “Bieber 6G,” but also, in disguise at the end, plays on the fact that his looks are often compared to those of a girl.
In all three of these high profile appearances, he mocks himself — and appeals to adults who want to have a similarly mocking attitude towards teen culture in general.
3.) The Movie and The Music
Here’s where Bieber’s image gets really polysemic. (Polysemic is a word that Richard Dyer, the scholar who basically founded star studies, used to describe the way that star images worked — each image could hold many meanings, which resonated differently with different people). For even as Bieber uses “adult” media sources to appeal to non-teens, he’s still incredibly skilled at cultivating and sustaining the teens that compose his base. The movie is a straight-faced tale of hard work and devotion, with ample use of clips from Bieber’s past — a testament to the fact that YouTube viewers and fans really and truly made him a star.
TRAILER HERE
The home videos also convey an undeniable authenticity: if even 2-year-old Bieber was talented, that’s proof positive that his talent is neither manufactured nor mediated. Other footage makes it clear that he works hard, which makes it easier to embrace him, as his riches and fame are not a birthright or a matter of chance, but the result of a good old fashioned American(Canadian!) work ethic. (Americans particularly despise those whose fame seems unearned: see Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, et. al.)
While Bieber’s been busy mocking himself on screen, he’s also appealing directly to his SEVEN MILLION Twitter followers to come see the film. Seven million, you guys! Last year, Twitter refigured the way that it tracks “Trending Topics,” because #justinbieber so consistently dominated the top spot. [Think about that: His fans so voraciously Tweeted his name that Twitter had to re-conceptualize the way that it tracked popularity] But his fans got around the #Bieber-ban, conjuring a new way to get him in the trending topics by hashtagging the number of days until the movie opens: #Sixteendays, #FiveDays, etc.
Bieber has accelerated the trend by participating in it himself. Yesterday, he Tweeted #4Days, which was then retweeted by 100+ followers (I’m guessing hundreds of thousands; Twitter refuses to keep track when the number tops 100)
And unlike his old-fogey celebrity elders, Bieber Tweets like a teen. As the New York mag profile points out,
According to Billboard magazine, he tweets at least four times more often than any other celebrity, almost as if he’s filling a quota. He follows more than 70,000 people. He actively cultivates an online conversation, maintaining the illusion that it is not one-sided by frequently giving “shout-outs” to particular fans (“allison in the purple tye dyed shirt it was nice meeting u”) or to his female audience in general (“how u doin ladies 
”). The belief that, unlike other artists, he is “real” and that he “really cares about us” is a common refrain among devotees—and what they feel separates him from the genetically blessed and vigorously managed young stars forged in the Disney or Nickelodeon machines. For many fans, having him follow them on Twitter is a lifetime goal, though few have ruled out the possibility that he might one day swoop down into the crowd and choose a lucky girl to be his one and only.
And then there’s the matter of the music. Sure, it’s sweet and a little treacly. But it’s also near-perfect pop. Slate’s music critic, Jody Rosen, cites Bieber’s “Baby” as his favorite of the year, explaining:
I couldn’t resist Justin Bieber’s “Baby,” which struck a perfect balance between hip-pop production and circa-1963 malt-shop throb. (Listen to Bieber’s opening “oh-oh-oh-oh-ah-ah-ah”; listen to that doo-wop chord progression. A cheeky history lesson, courtesy of Tricky Stewart and The-Dream.) “Baby” reached only No. 5 on the Billboard charts, but it was clearly the people’ choice. The video is the most viewed in YouTube history: as of this writing, 444,225,275 viewings and counting.
For snobs, Bieber is an easy punchline. But of course, Bieber is playing a time-honored teen idol role: easing a new generation into the joys of pop and the mysteries of eros, singing songs flushed with romance but notably free of sex itself. He pulled it off with a mix of guilelessness, showbiz panache, and social-media-age savvy that I found charming. Above all, he did it with good music. My World 2.0 is full of excellent pop/R&B songs that Bieber performs with occasional ingénue awkwardness, but mostly in fine style. I like Bieber’s raspy vocal tone. He still hasn’t sung as well on record as he did on those adorable early home videos that got him a record deal.
And hey! I like “Baby!” You know why? Because like Rosen, I love “malt-shop throb.” How different is Bieber, really, in both tone and topic, from Sam Cooke? In this way, his sound appeals to a base audiences (teen girls) and the secondary audience (those, like Rosen, who appreciate a finely-wrought pure pop song).
When Robinson compares Bieber to Michael Jackson, she’s hinting at Bieber’s potential future: as his voice changes and he grows into young adulthood, he’s going to have to figure out what his next step is. If he — and his producers — can figure how to further broaden the appeal of his sound, the same way that Jackson did, he really does have the potential to become much more than a teen idol. Clearly, he has the intelligence, the self composure, the self-awareness, the sense of humor, the work ethic, and the skill needed to do so. If handled wrong — and compounded by a life of abuse — they can lead to tragedy, as manifested in the twilight of Jackson’s career. But all of these profiles of Bieber are also doing a second, equally necessary task: they underline the fact that Bieber comes from a solid, loving background, surrounded by people who want to give him as normal a life as possible — and, in the process, cultivate the charisma and talent he shares with Jackson while avoiding the delusion and grotesquerie.
But only time will tell.
So do you like the Biebs? Even if you don’t like his music, do you find him — and his self-mockery — amusing?
The ‘Eternal Styling’ of the Grace Kelly Star Image
About once a year, Vanity Fair likes to feature a classic Hollywood star — and a classic rhetorical rehashing of their established star image — on its cover. Last year, if memory serves, it was Marilyn Monroe; this year it’s Grace Kelly.
The article, entitled ‘Grace Kelly’s Forever Look,’ featuring a slideshow of her ‘Eternal Style,’ ostensibly celebrates the opening of the exhibition ‘Grace Kelly: Style Icon’ at London’s Victoria and Albert Museum, which will ‘retell her story’ in ‘artifacts.’
But the real purpose of the article is to reactivate the memory of Kelly, highlighting exactly what made her, and her image, so culturally resonant in the 1950s — and to do so in a way that further mythologizes and reifies Kelly as all that was virginal, sophisticated, proper, and perfect about that time. In this way, she becomes the last artifact of true class — and true Hollywood. And, in the process, makes me want to vomit all over her ‘pure-white cupcake of a skirt.’
My repulsion is not with Kelly — how I love her in To Catch a Thief! And that aforementioned white dress in Rear Window — I covet! - but the rhetorical twists and turns employed throughout the article render her into something saccarine….a play-thing with princess-dreams. Or, to quote directly from the profile,
The rare beauty and stunning self-possession that propelled Grace Kelly into the Hollywood pantheon, onto the Best-Dressed List, and ultimately to Monaco’s royal palace were more than captivating—they were completely genuine.
Which, of course, is how she has endured in the public memory. A blonde exemplar of the 1950s, so perfect in the Dior silhouette, demure and everything that that hussy Marilyn Monroe was not. What troubles me is the ways in which that particular memory is reproduced for contemporary consumption — and unchallenged. And, in positing her as the last ‘true star’ of classic Hollywood, the profile enacts some serious (and seriously flawed) revisionist history.
How is this accomplished? In classic Vanity Fair celebrity profile style: with an immense amount of banality, false invocations of intimacy, and quotes from ‘experts’ regurgitating the profile’s thesis, e.g. that Grace Kelly was effortlessly, eternally, and ethereally sophisticated, classy, and stylish. That much is quite explicit. Less explicit are the undertones; namely, that Kelly’s sexuality, at once virginal, clean, authentic, unthreatening, and immaculate, was, and remains, ideal. She’s sex drive dressed in fine pearls — orgasmic yet without a fear of vagina dentata….the virgin/whore dichotomy washed of all negative connotations. And she’s a figment of our imagination — an image of complex ideological maneuvering whose persistence highlights the regressive sexual politics that continue to structure our understandings of women, sexual desire, pleasure, and, even more importantly, how each of those is attached to class.
Along these lines, the text of the profile emphasizes three overarching traits: sophistication/class, authenticity, and ‘passion.’
1.) SOPHISTICATION
Kelly came from money: ‘The Kellys built a 17-room home in the Philadelphia neighborhood of East Falls, overlooking the Schuylkill River, upon which Jack rowed. And there they stayed, enviably wealthy, sailing through the Great Crash without a dip because Jack didn’t play the stock market.’
It was Irish-Catholic money, so it wasn’t as high society as many believed, but it helped craft her image as ‘well-bred.’ Her family is likened to the Kennedys, those shining beacons of Eastern patrician sophistication: ‘bright, shining, charismatic, Irish-Catholic Democrats, civically and politically engaged.’
Kelly’s voice (elocution) and poise are repeatedly emphasized — the voice hadn’t always been that way; rather, ‘she put a clothespin on her nose and worked to bring her voice down a register, to achieve clarity and depth. The result was diction with a silver-spoon delicacy—slightly British—and the stirring lilt of afternoon tea at the Connaught.’ Kelly had taken years of ballet, and she never ‘lost her ballet posture or a dancer’s awareness of her limbs in space…..This too contributed to a poise, an inner stillness, in the way she moved. Her walk became something unique: regal above the waist, shoulders back and head high, and a floating quality below, akin to a geisha’s glide, or a swan’s.’
Crucially, the voice and posture were, and remain, shorthand for class. Not because they magically ooze class….but because they indicate the amount of money spent on training.
Kelly’s clothing of course signified class as well: she wore white gloves, little make-up, nude hose, creating a ‘Bryn Mawr look.’ Later in her career, she was outfitted in ‘light, airy, and ineffable’ fabrics, including ‘chiffon, watered silk, unlined linen, and that most levitational textile, silk organza.’ In this way, she ‘became shorthand for a very polished and well-accessorized look’; while ‘no one wore white’ quite like her. The Kelly Hermes bag, renamed for her, became ‘the icon of impeccable breeding and quiet good taste.’
Just look at those adjectives! Polished, white, quiet, light, ineffable, Bryn Mawr…..put differently, she wasn’t garish, or speaking, or taking up too much space. She knew her place, and occupied it. According to this understanding, she never did, or wore, something that was untoward, never stepped out of place. And that brand of understanding — of knowing where she belonged and not challenging it — is here elevated as the very pinnacle of achievement. To be a Goddess and a Princess, it seems, is to shut-up, look virginal, and float across the room with good posture and clothing that suggests, rather than displays, the fact of sexuality.
2.) AUTHENTICITY
The invocation of authenticity infuses the article. Kelly is consistently referred to as ‘Grace,’ effectively creating a a sense of intimacy and knowing: the author knows ‘Grace’ like a close friend; when she tells you that Kelly’s ’voice, walk, and reserved bluestocking style’ all ‘came together in a kind of crystalline equation. You couldn’t say it was calculated. Grace was well brought up, and disciplined, and cultured, and shy. She was only highlighting what she had,’ it seems believable. Of course it wasn’t calculated!
It doesn’t really matter whether not it was calculated: what matters is that the reader and consumer of the Kelly star image believe that it wasn’t. Because calculation is artifice, and artifice is the opposite of class.
Kelly is likewise constructed as destined for her role as a princess — the absolute pinnacle of class and sophistication, where men and women are literally bred for their roles as models of wealth. The author recounts an anecdote of Kelly’s childhood, when she apparently “‘told her sister Peggy, “One day I’m going to be a princess.’” Particular roles are singled out for their immaculate conflation of the ‘true’ Kelly and the performing one: when she played Tracy Lord in The Philadelphia Story, ‘it was the beginning of the potent, sometimes prophetic connection between life and art that would reverberate’ throughout her career.
And then, in the biggest claim of all, she’s heralded as the last genuinely charismatic and sophisticated star — ’With the newer generations we subconsciously know there’s artifice involved. And we don’t quite believe what we see. But we did believe what we saw with Grace.’
I can’t overemphasize the falsity of that claim. People knew there was artifice involved in all of the Hollywood stars — see, for example, the lengthy fan magazine articles detailing Rita Consuelo’s transformation into Rita Hayworth, including photos of the electrolysis of her hairline. Then, as today, some fans chose to be more excepting or oblivious of the strings of construction than others. Many, many stars had extra-textual lives that mirrored their onscreen ones; many, many stars had back stories that seemed to magically and perfectly support to their adult star images. What is essential to understand, then, is that discourse picks up on the parts of the background and lifestyle that fit with our perception of the star — such as Kelly’s history as a ballerina, her parents’ wealth, her role as Tracy Lord — while selectively ignoring those that do not fit. People believed what they saw with Grace, but they also believed what they saw with Diane Keaton, with Tom Cruise, with Julia Roberts. Believing what you see is part of a well-maintained star image — not indicative of ‘innate authenticity.’
3.) PASSION
Finally, Kelly is not sexual, per se, but passionate. Passionate about sex. But not sexual. Hitchcock loved her ‘potential for restraint’ and ‘sexual elegance.’ She was ‘ladylike yet elemental, suggestive of icy Olympian heights and untouched autonomy yet, beneath it all, unblushing heat and fire.’ Under her ‘snowcap’ was a ‘volcano…surprisingly active and full of fire.’
Following her death in the early ’80s, a number of biographies alleged that she slept with every man who crossed her early Hollywood path. The profile makes it very clear that she did not. Rather, she was ‘romantic and passionate. She followed her heart, which might or might not lead to bed. All her biographers agree that she never used sex to win roles. Judged in retrospect, not by 50s standards but by feminist ones, she was as self-possessed about her sexuality as she was about her work.’ She wasn’t constantly having sex; rather, she was ‘constantly falling in love.’ She was ‘devout, an absolutely sincere Catholic’ who ‘took full advantage of Catholic mechanisms for private misdemeanors.’
And she wasn’t frigid. This is essential. According to actor Alexandre D’Arcy, “She was … very warm indeed as far as sex was concerned. You would touch her once and she would go through the ceiling.”
What emerges is a portrait of Kelly’s sexuality that defends the posthumous revelation of her sexuality….but simultaneously maneuvers it to fit in with the established image of class and elegance. Sure, Kelly had sex — she even had sex before she was married, and with multiple men. She wasn’t a virgin when she was married, but she still signified as virginal (‘no one wore white like Kelly’) and that was what mattered. Her sexuality is turned into passion; her desire turned into love. She is not over-sexualized, but appropriately sexualized — especially in hindsight. She’s a proto-feminist!
Importantly, while Kelly herself may have been far more progressive in her personal and private actions and beliefs than was ever represented at the time, the ways in which she is crafted retrospectively is not, in any way, feminist or progressive. The author yokes sophistication to money, beauty to demurity, desirability to a very specific (and heterosexual) and unarticulated form of sexual appetite. This profile is imbued with nostalgia for a certain type of womanhood and legible class distinction. And it’s that untempered nostalgia — not Kelly herself — that makes me want to vomit.
Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue Digest
I realize I’ve complained at length about Vanity Fair and the celebrity profile. But that doesn’t mean that Vanity Fair doesn’t offer the biggest, lushest, juiciest, and all-encompassing collection of Hollywood stories every year — and this year is no exception. As my brother has lectured me, VF is actually quite respected in all of their non-Hollywood reporting — especially the financial expose stuff that interests me far less than it probably should. And the Hollywood industry reporting, while not necessarily groundbreaking, is expansive, gossipy, and equal parts historical and contemporary. The choice of this year’s cover models has been a hot topic and thoroughly debated elsewhere, so I’m going to stick with what’s inside — and much of it is very, very interesting, and probably touches on aspects of Hollywood history and industry with which most are unfamiliar.
Having read the issue in its entirety, I’d like to alert you to the best of the bunch. I will say, however, that you should definitely fork over the measly $12 for a year subscription — this is a magazine that’s best consumed in print form, as the interwebs simple does not to do the luscious photography justice.
Which segues nicely into the most compelling (and visual) aspect of the magazine, This Year’s Hollywood Portfolio, which features compelling shots of directors and their actors. The pairing of Cameron with his camera is particularly hilarious, but I most love this one of Jeff Bridges and Crazy Heart director Scott Cooper.
If you’re interested in power rankings, this list of the Hollywood’s Top 40 will provide food for thought. Most interesting: that all three of the Harry Potter leads broke the top fifteen, that the director of 2012 (Roland Emmerich) gets to hang out at #4, and that Ben Stiller and Tom Hanks are both making ridiculous amonts of money and rounding out the top ten. Apparently I’m forgetting the fact that everyone else in America went to go see Night at the Museum.
Relativity Media-head Ryan Kavanaugh
But look at this smutty/industry-minded look at Relatively Media, the hedge-fund-funded production company headed by the “brash, glamour-loving Ryan Kavanagh.” The kid’s 35, he thinks big, imagines he has the business mastered, but also released some of the biggest bombs of the season, including State of Play, Land of the Lost, The Taking of Pelham 123, and this week’s The Wolfman But he’s also behind Paul Blart and Dear John, so he must be doing something right. Right? The piece starts out laudatory and subtly turns into a quiet study of hubris and its place in Hollywood today….fascinating.
The retrospective of John Hughes, building on the notes and scribblings of the late scribe and the comments of his sons, is interesting, if a bit fluffy. Die-hard Hughes fans will undoubtedly enjoy.
Ali McGraw
Best of the bunch, though, is this profile of Ali McGraw, who, for a brief moment in time, was the hottest female star in Hollywood. Studying for my comps led me to appreciate the brilliant marketing of Love Story, which was basically the Twilight of the early ’70s, only it featured a hot dying Ivy Leaguer instead of hot vampires.
To my mind, McGraw is as unique as she is fascinating: she graduated from Wellesley, worked as a stylist/photography assistant, and found her way into pictures relatively late. Her star burned bright and fast, quickly marrying Robert Evans, producer of Love Story and then-head of Paramount, before falling for Steve McQueen on the set of The Getaway and retreating from Hollywood. The interview doesn’t reveal as much of McGraw so much as what it must have felt like to be a gorgeous woman in Hollywood who was at once intelligence and romantic.
But the story that I really wanted to tell you about is unlinked and unavailable — a detailed if fawning history of how De Niro and Scorsese brought Raging Bull to the screen. Having spent many hours in the De Niro archive at the Harry Ransom Center — and certainly counting Raging Bull amongst my Scorsese pantheon — the story was delectable, even if it rehearsed many historical points with which I was already familiar. And perhaps that’s the function of the best pleasure reading: it reinforces things that you already know, yet fleshes out your understanding in ways that make you feel smart and informed and satisfied.
Because that’s the thing about this Vanity Fair Hollywood Issue: it’s not challenging, nor is it necessarily groundbreaking. But it’s the apotheosis of pleasure reading for a media scholar.
The Banality of the Celebrity Profile: Vanity Fair and Penelope Cruz
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.
How to Mend a Drug Scandal in Three Steps or Less: Heath Ledger and Wallace Reid
This month’s Vanity Fair
There’s been a bit of fanfare over Peter Biskind’s recent Vanity Fair piece on Heath Ledger — available only in summary form here. (You know, for those of you interested in celebrity, Vanity Fair costs a ridiculous $12 dollars a year — definitely worth it for the airplane reads alone, let alone glossy photos).
Biskind is a well-known Hollywood ‘historian,’ best known for his book on the ‘silver age of Hollywood,’ Easy Riders, Raging Bulls, and his look back on the rise and fall of the ’90s indie movement, Down and Dirty Pictures. (Both of which are required reading in each and every Tom Schatz class — I think I’ve read or skimmed some sections five times now). Biskind is also a regular contributor to Vanity Fair, a past editor-in-chief of Premiere, and a general smut-monger. If you’ve read his books, you understand — he loves stories — the more lurid, the better. There are a few in his books that genuinely test the limits of good taste. He doesn’t care whether they’re true or not — he even oftentimes reports a counter-narrative — but loves to put such things in print. It certainly sells. One of my advisors (on friendly terms with Biskind) told me that he never does research — has no theoretical or Variety background, never goes to archives — but remembers EVERYTHING that ANYONE has ever told him in an interview.
In other words, he’s perfect for Vanity Fair, which loves to make any story — whether it’s about Bernie Madoff, Sarah Palin, or Heath Ledger — into a melodramatic, thrilling tale of smut, back-stabbing, andhe-said/she-said. The celebrity profiles are notorious soft, but they’re also responsible for some of the most notorious recent celebrity admissions: Brad Pitt basically admitting that he doesn’t think that marriage is forever (when he was still married to Aniston); Angelina Jolie disclosing that her rendezvous with certain men in hotel rooms for sexual gratification (and nothing more) so that she could concentrate on being a mother to newly-adopted Maddox.
This look to Heath Ledger is a nice combination of the Biskind and VF-profile style. Usually, this sort of piece would NOT be the cover — VF subjects are usually living, promoting something, and hot. But when “new information” about a beloved figure is discovered (or manufactured), it sometimes spurs a cover: sometimes with Marilyn, othertimes with a Kennedy, and this most recent cover with Ledger.
A Los Angeles Times columnist has declared the article “celebrity porn,” ridiculing the Biskind/VF style and claiming,
Virtually everything in the piece, even the tales of how Ledger pals Johnny Depp, Colin Farrell and Jude Law volunteered to help Gilliam finish “Parnassus” after Ledger’s death, has been reported elsewhere. After a while, you start to focus less on Biskind’s meddlesome reporting and more on Gilliam, asking yourself: Why is the filmmaker still talking endlessly about Ledger 18 months after his death? Is it just because he lost a friend and collaborator? Or is it because Gilliam knows that a Vanity Fair cover story will help him continue to beat the drums for his movie, which still hasn’t found a U.S. distributor?
Excellent point. And I’m sure this was, at least in part, strategic on the part of Gilliam — he realized that rousing anticipation for the film would encourage distributors to bid for the film, which, from the sounds of it, promises to be as weird as The Fountain meets Alice in Wonderland.
But the article also serves a less overt or financial function — in providing the details of Ledger’s life, demeanor, and artistry, including his emotions and actions in the months and days leading up to his death, it soothes concerns and provides a form of cultural ‘closure’ to the rupture that was his unexpected death by drug overdose. When a celebrity dies in some ‘scandalous’ way — most commonly drug use, sometimes, as in the case of Keith Carradine, in a more illicit fashion — it tears a hole, if you will, in the ideological fabric that resassures us of societal solidity and our place within. Put differently, an unexpected death makes us question what we believed to be true.
For instance, I had no connection to Heath Ledger. I greatly admired his performance in Brokeback Mountain and knew of his upcoming role as the Joker, but was not what I would term a ‘fan.’ Yet I remember exactly where I was when I heard NPR announce his death — and keenly recall how surprised I was. I had a vision of Ledger as a doting father and, albeit separated from Michelle Williams, not in danger of eminent death. I had heard the stories of his ‘absorption’ into the role of the Joker — and Jack Nicholson’s words of advice on maintaining the self, lest it be sucked into the psychosis — but that didn’t mean I thought he was going to die. His death thus served, for me and millions of others, as a surprise — especially as it was laden with smutty overtones in the early hours of reporting, when it was associated with one of the Olson twins, a masseuse, dozens of pills, nakedness, etc.
What we need, then, to resolve this problem, to restitch this hole, to reassure us that method acting isn’t destructive, that we didn’t pay money to see a money slowly killing himself onscreen, that handsome young talented men don’t succumb to addiction, is an answer: some sort of reckoning.
In the case of Ledger, this has been accomplished in two ways:
1.) The overwhelming awarding of his performance in The Dark Knight.
I’m in no way saying that the performance wasn’t incredible, or didn’t merit recognition. But awarding it certainly served as an affirmation of Ledger’s talent — that his life, and specifically this peformance, was not for naught. To NOT award it would be tantamount to declaring his life — and the method of his death — to be a scandal, unworthy, worthy of scorn.
2.) This Vanity Fair article — and others of its ilk.
Here I turn to another drug scandal — one that few remember yet rocked Hollywood when it occurred. Along with the Fatty Arbuckle scandal, the death of Wallace Reid (due to complications from withdrawl from heroin) is considered one of the greatest scandals of the classic period. As mentioned, it’s generally forgotten, but as a compelling chapter in Headline Hollywood (Mark Lynn Anderson’s “Shooting Star: Understanding Wallace Reid and His Public) explains, the scandal of Reid’s death was not only a huge scandal — but also a huge victory for the newly organized Hays Office, which successfully parlayed what could have been a story of Hollywood excess and sin into a narrative of a star sacrificing his all for his public and a “national lesson” for the masses.
Briefly, the Hays Office was instituted — at the insistence of the studios — to regulate Hollywood films, which were under fire from all sides for ‘encouraging vice.’ Instead of subjecting themselves to a national regulatory agency, the studios decided to regulate themselves. The Arbuckle scandal was the final straw in putting the agency in place — not only would it regulate the content of films, but the behavior of the actors as well. With the Hays Office in place, there would be no more drunken fat men supposedly raping starlettes in hotel rooms!
But then Wallace Reid succumbed to heroic addiction. In the early ’20s, Reid was one of the biggest stars — rivaled only by Pickford and Fairbanks — with a star image as a strapping young man who, at least in his film roles, would exhaust himself for the sake of the greater good (laboring all night to help others out of a mine disaster, for example). Thus the idea of his addiction rang incredibly out of character — how could such a strong body fall victim to such a drug?
Therefore, before he died — when he was in treatment — his wife, with help from the Hays Office, helped to create a brilliant media manipulation that framed Reid’s addiction as:
a.) the product of an early on-set injury (he became addicted to pain killers after a back inury). His addiction was thus transformed into a something that occured while he was trying to get back into shape to do his job for the people — he just wanted to please his public!
b.) the fault of a national crime syndicate. Constructed as such, it reinforced federal calls for a national crack-down on drugs (the first war against drugs — quickly followed by prohibition, which probably should have taught us a lesson about wars on addictive substances). He was thus a figurehead for larger governmental forces — and a VICTIM!!
c.) using MORPHINE, not heroin. Heroin was a poor people’s drug — and thus had to be disassociated with film stars, which were already on a slippery slope as members of the nouveau riche. But morphine — that was a high class drug. It’s like the difference, today, between crack and cocaine. Or maybe between meth and prescription drugs.
Wallace Reid’s widow even participated in a film against drug use — the equivalent of a PSA for “don’t use drugs,” only not as thoroughly as acknowledged as propaganda. In the end, Wallace Reid’s star was recuperated — instead of a junkie, he was transformed into a victim, both of his desire to please and devious men of ill-repute.
So how does this relate to Heath Ledger?
While the Biskind article is neither as sincere nor bald-faced manipulative as the discourse surrouding the Reid overdose, there’s a fair amount of image repair going on throughout the piece.
First: Remind us of the immense talent lost
“This final performance, while not the tour de force of weirdness that was the Joker, is good neough — more than good enough — to remind us that Leger’s death has deprived the movies of one of their most accomplished, and promising, talents”
Second: Remind us of his immense commitment to both craft and family
Multiple mentions of his performance in Brokeback Mountain, connection and intense loyalty to Gilliam (for whom he had previous starred in The Brothers Grimm — and who he apparently credits with ‘liberating’ his acting). What’s more, he LOVED his daughter: “above all else, Ledger was devoted to his young daughter and feared he might lose custory. ‘He was absolutely obsessed about Matilida,’” according to Gilliam. And he was such a class act that three top actors agreed to step in and finish the film for him.
As for his break-up with Willaims: She courted stardom, he didn’t. She bought into the Oscar campaigning, he didn’t. He reportedly had an anxiety attack when his handlers tried to turn him into a teen idol. He was the anti-star star: he didn’t want the renown pushed upon him. He was, overall, the victim: of too much talent and too much audience fascination.
Third: Explain and innoculate his addiction.
Ledger was on drugs because: 1.) He had battled pneumonia, 2.) He was overworked (only two weeks between The Dark Knight and Parnassus) 3.) He was in a constant struggle with insomnia — caused by anxiety over needing/wanting to see his daughter after the separation from Williams. The only release he found was in massage, acting exercises, and, apparently pills.
Importantly, the death was not the result of an OVER-dose, but a negative combination of doses. He had too many things in his system - he was not hedonistic in his abuse, just needy for release.
Even more importantly, the cause of his anxiety was NOT (or at least entirely linked to) his role as the Joker — instead, it was the confluence of over-work and dedication to craft and family that precipitated his death. This is an essential move: for if it was the role as the Joker that caused his death, we, as an audience, would in effect be pleasuring in his demise each and every time we viewed, and found pleasure, in his performance as The Joker. Audience guilt assuaged.
Now, please bare in mind that I’m not saying that Ledger isn’t any of things this article claims of him — or that he didn’t care about his daughter, wasn’t dedicated to his craft, etc. I’m just looking to way that the discourse concerning those dedications is deployed to mend over the rupture created by his death — and how such narratives can still prove effective, even 18 months after the event. Star drug abuse, like any other star scandal, demands a reckoning. Some reckonings — like this one — are simply employed more deftly, and more invisibly, than others.
