celebrity gossip, academic style

“I just love that Sandra Bullock.”

“Oh, I know! She’s so natural and perky and down to earth!”

“She was great in that one movie — oh, you know the one I’m talking about, that one with the guy, and they’re from the South, and oh, it’s just adorable. She’s just adorable.”

“Oh I know, I watch that one every year. She’s just great. I just love her.”

This is not an actual transcription of a conversation, but an approximation of one I’ve heard numerous times — at church potlucks, on airplanes, in the waiting room at the doctor’s office. Because WOMEN LOVE SANDRA BULLOCK. More specifically, middle-aged women, many of them members of the ever powerful minivan majority, love Sandra Bullock. They love her for her inoffensive humor; they love her natural, unexotic beauty. They love the fact that she ends up with normal looking, wholly likable white bread men in the movies (Bill Pullman, Harry Connick Jr., Hugh Grant, Benjamin Bratt, Ryan Reynolds) but they most especially love the consistency of her roles.

Normal looking nice guy makes normal looking nice girl happy!

Of course, these women are victims of selective amnesia: Bullock has attempted to complicate her star image with risky roles, including parts in Crash, Murder by Numbers, and the second of the two Capote films, Infamous. (She played the Harper Lee character.) But such roles have done little to alter her overarching image as likable, slightly madcap, and always the recipient of pure and genuine love.

For Bullock is no sex object. She’s a girls’ star — a Julia Roberts, a Meg Ryan. Men do not generally find her attractive, but girls want to be her best friend. The director of The Proposal explained “After I met Sandy for the first time, I remember thinking, This woman has been my friend for 100 years.” She has a beautiful body, skin, and hair, but such attributes are generally revealed through the course of a narrative — she starts out an ugly, somewhat masculine, awkward duckling, only to be transformed through the quiet yet strong love of a good, honest man. Indeed, she is often nearly asexual at the beginning of a film — see her business-minded superboss in The Proposal or her scorned, weepy break-up victim in Hope Floats.

You can tell she loves her career too much by the suit and the unmussed hair.

Bullock’s picture personalities is infused with promises and possibilities: you, too, fair viewer, can be transformed by the power of love. Not all of her films are makeover fantasies — indeed, only Miss Congeniality features an explicit makeover — but the most popular of films repeatedly position a non-glamorous protagonist as a site for transformation, both emotional and physical. Bullock’s presence in the lead encourages identification; she’s an awkward Jennifer Aniston, Julia Roberts with her makeup off and hair flat. She’s the supporting actor/best friend made central, and women love her for it.

Her extra-textual persona supports this image. In Glamour, she is described as follows:

Sandy loves her job but is not defined by it. And she knows how to have a life outside of Hollywood: She splits her time between L.A. and Austin, Texas, where she owns a popular bistro, Bess. She has a barn. She’s done a ton of good work for charities, like giving money to a New Orleans high school impacted by Hurricane Katrina. Hello, she even does her own home renovations, like tearing down walls with her bare hands! (OK, I might be exaggerating a bit.) But if I had to pinpoint what sets her apart, it’d be this: She’s humble. She’s real. It’s easy to lose yourself in this business, but Sandy hasn’t gotten swept up in any of it.

See! She likes people! She’d be friends with you! “She’s humble. She’s real.” She’s not a diva. She probably makes her own food and drives her own car and goes to the grocery store. Or so we are led to believe.

The other day, my friends and I were attempting to make a list of stars that our parents just love: stars who make them feel comfortable. Stars whose movies they’ll rent without any foreknowledge of plot; stars who will entice them to go to the movie theater for one of their 2-4 yearly trips. Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts made the cut. But Sandra Bullock was the most unanimous nominee: there’s something so wholly inoffensive and uniquely attractive about her, something that Julia Roberts has lost and Jennifer Aniston never really had. She makes 50 year-olds go see her fall in love with Ryan Reynolds. Her films make big bucks overseas. Her style and charisma translate. She appears virtually ageless, but not in an envy-inducing manner (Demi More) or as a grotesque (Nicole Kidman, Sharon Stone). She’s not stuck up (Renee Zelwegger/Aniston/Courtney Cox), she’s not intimidating (Jolie), she’s not perfect (Halle Berry) and she’s not too madcap (Roseanne).

Indeed, the only thing potentially controversial about Bullock is her choice of husband: motorcycle producer and heavily-tateooed Jesse James.

Bullock and Her Teddy Bear

Discursively, James has been constructed as the culmination of Bullock’s domestic fairytale. After being chased by many a prince (Tate Donovan, Troy Aikman, Ryan Gosling, Matthew McConaughey, Keanu Reeves) she settled with the least moviestarsish, least expected of the bunch — a man who simply made her happy. (And, coincidentally, recreated a narrative conclusion manifested in her most successful films).

In recent weeks, Bullock has been in the gossip weeklies — not to promote her upcoming The Blind Side or to apologize for the train wreck that was All About Steve, but because of her attempts to adopt James’ daughter from a previous marriage. In US Weekly, the article’s title declares her “Battle for Her Stepdaughter.” Bullock and James are attempting to receive full custody of James five-year-old daughter, whose mother, Janine Lindemulder, is a former drug addict, porn star, and general ne’er-do-well. The article is smattered with pictures of a dressed-down, casual Bullock carrying and holding hands with the young girl. Bullock’s image is placed in sharp contrast with the girl’s porn star birth mother: she is everything this blonde bimbo is not. Bullock is quoted declaring “My greatest joy is…being a good wife, a good stepmom.” She loves this child - and that’s what she’ll fight for. (Again, sounds mysteriously similar to the storyline of one of her films — only The Blind Side involves a black male high school student, not a cherubic blond girl).

Bullock says she doesn’t want to do rom-coms anymore — in fact, with something like The Proposal, she’s attempting to forge a path for the ‘female Judd Apatow film.’ Whether or not this is true is beside the point. For while The Blind Side is certainly not a rom-com, as evidenced by the trailer, it most certainly is a family melodrama. As such, the film caters to virtually the same demographic as the rom-com: females, both single and married, between the ages of 20 and 60. (Did you hear The Fray in the background? Yep, they’re talking to you, Grey’s Anatomy fans. Selfsame demo).

With that said, Bullock does not pull in the lower echelons of that demo. She’s got what I’ve termed her Forever Fans — the 30-60-year-olds who will always see her films, like our mothers — but she has failed to attract a younger demographic. Part of this is merely a matter of age — Sandra Bullock portrays 30-somethings and mothers, not teens and post-grads — but I’d also posit that it has something to do with her star image and its particular resonance. Her particular brand of spunk, quirk, Southernness, and romance seems very 1990s to me. Just as The Blind Side appears to be a remake of every film that’s ever told the story of white people saving black people, so too does Bullock’s star image seem to function as a reactivation and deradicalization of a certain type of female star: she’s Bette Davis without the teeth, Joan Crawford without the snarl. Davis and Crawford often ended their films happily coupled, but just as often they ended them alone — sometimes in tears, but nonetheless triumphant. Bullock’s characters never end unhappy; they rarely weather a storm without a silver lining already firmly in view. Bullock is soft, quick to weep, and quicker to give in, where Davis, Crawford, and even Stanwyk (especially in Stella Dallas) are steely, with a fierceness belied by their porcelain faces. These women were also points of identification, but the women in the theaters at the time were hard-bitten by the times — hungry, over-worked, exhausted, and oftentimes, due to the demands of The Depression and World War II, without even the dream of the help of a man or romance. The endings provided by the ’30s and ’40s melodramas emphasized a female independence that wasn’t simply a madcap act, neutralized by film’s end: it was a way of survival, a way of life.

Joan Crawford might eat Sandra Bullock alive…

Indeed, the ‘softness’ and heteronormatively-coupled endings of Bullock’s films have everything to do with 1990s in general: I could describe most of Julia Roberts’ films using the same language I’ve employed to describe Bullock. These films’ tone and conclusion likewise speaks to what women — and 30-40 year-old women in particular - imagine for themselves: how far they can reach, and what that place, and its potential splendors, might resemble.

Judging from Bullock’s recent films, happiness and fulfillment can come in the shape of a younger man, a retreat from strict professionalism, or venturing out of suburbia to participate in first-hand philanthropy. To me, all of these choices seem to present female self-reliance and independence as a hollow promise; that those women who sacrificed marriage and family for professional development will realize, sooner or later, that they too need a man, a cause, something greater than themselves. We can view this as selfless and a form of sacrifice…or as a troubling message that cultivating oneself, and one’s own desires, will never truly provide fulfillment.

I don’t dislike Sandra Bullock. I like her (early) films. But I do think that those who fail to understand her and her tremendous draw — as most clearly evidenced in Richard Rushfield’s perceptive yet reductive answer to “Why is Sandra Bullock Still a Star?” over at Gawker — they also demonstrate their lack of understanding of a key, if sometimes quiet, demographic. Middle aged women may not ‘open’ a film at number one, but they certainly can keep a film going strong when everyone else is off Megan Fox getting chased by giant robots. Media observers often express surprise when a film like The Proposal goes on to grosses $300 million international (on a budget of $40 million, no less). Those very same observers — oftentimes male — simply forget the tremendous power, however ‘unglamorous’ it may be, of neglected demographics.

This post explicitly concerns Sandra Bullock, but I’m also writing it as hundreds of thousands of girls and women head to the theaters to screen New Moon, which is now headed for a ridiculously huge international opening gross. Industry critics keep patting Summit Entertainment on the back for their luck in optioning the teen text, yet to attribute it to luck is to miss the point: someone at Summit realized that the text wouldn’t just exploit the teen girl demographic, but the adult female one as well. For The Proposal opened big ($33 million), but New Moon will open with $80 million domestic, if not more. Why? Women. Some of them already Forever Fans.

To answer Rushfield’s question, Sandra Bullock is still a star — and will remain a star — so long as her forever fans keep consuming. Her movies cost relatively little to make; even a bomb like All About Steve will not compromise her consistent palatablity. And with small costs and a built-in audience, she’s a much more reliable bet than Angelina Jolie or the over-priced Julia Roberts. The challenge for execs is how to cultivate new stars, equally inoffensive and socio-temporally resonant, to take her place in the years to come. Who will be our Sandra Bullock? Is it Jennifer Aniston? Gennifer Goodwin? Isla Fischer? Kate Hudson? Regardless, it’ll most likely be someone who men disdain, hot cultural critics ignore, and studios relegate to counter-programming.

Sandra Bullock matters, and is still a star, because women and their pocketbooks do, in fact, matter — and no number of billion dollar grossing smashfests will alter that fact.