Michael Cera is Buster Keaton
So I saw Scott Pilgrim today: in part on the advice of my general film sage Dana Stevens (who also writes for Slate and was my main reason for becoming a regular listener to the Slate Cultural Gabfest; listen here for their collective thoughts on Pilgrim), in part because I knew that it was something that would make me think — for better or for worse — about the state of cinema, youth culture, postmodernism, etc. etc. today.
And that it did. Feminist Music Geek has some excellent overarching thoughts on the film — like me, she found it rather masculinist (DUDE, THESE ARE CHARACTERS, NOT CUT-OUTS) but also recognizes the ways in which the film’s plot and 8-bit references hail our middle-class, educated generation.
I realized that while I’ve liked Michael Cera since his halcyon days on Arrested Development, and while dozens of others have commented on the rise of his particularly consistent brand of passive, quirky masculinity since appearing in Superbad, Juno, Paper Heart, Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist, Youth in Revolt, and now, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, I hadn’t really thought critically about what this consistently meant — or if it had antecedents.
I don’t particularly want to argue about whether or not Cera is the same character in all his films. I mean, he is. No question. While Feminist Music Geek points out that:
Cera’s screen persona tends to be defined by reticence, discomfort, displays of grave maturity that belie his age, and being put upon. Scott Pilgrim is supposed to be relentlessly youthful. Cera looks like he’s lived through 45 years of other people’s bullshit. But Cera struck a competent balance between how he’s defined himself and what’s expected of the role.
Nevertheless, he’s still playing a very slight — albeit necessary — version of the characters he’s played in other roles. Stumbling, mumbling, lacking general self-confidence, pining after a girl but lacking the verbal resources and gumption to tell her so. As those of you well-versed in this blog and its terminology, that’s his picture personality — the image of what Cera is based on the string of characters he has played thus far.
But here’s the kicker: there’s no outside. By all accounts, paratexts, interviews, pictures, what have you, there is no “real” Cera behind the picture personality. They are one and the same.
Now, several actors have built their success on versions of this idea — Gary Cooper, for example, was famous for just playing Gary Cooper onscreen. Julia Roberts, Tom Cruise, Cary Grant, Will Smith — all of them have been cited as exemplars of this particular sort of “matching” between picture personality and extra-textual personality. Of course, that’s part of what made them all stars: their “real” lives matched with their onscreen lives, making them more coherent, making their images more simple — which, in turn, makes each of them more likable. People who like these stars aren’t stupid, just as people who like a really good steak or a perfect peach aren’t stupid. The “taste” of each of these stars is so unified — so purely a manifestation of an authentic core, a pure “Gary Cooper-ness” — that it’s irresistible and near-universal. But as much as Julia Robert’s real life seemed to compliment her screen persona — see, for example, her whirlwind romance with Kiefer Sutherland right after Pretty Woman hit big — she never was Vivian. She wasn’t a prostitute. They both had big curly hair and liked boys, but there was no 1-to-1 correlation.
Cera, however, is a different story. He may not be a high school track athlete from Minnesota, but that doesn’t mean that we don’t disbelief the idea that the real Cera could have been. Nothing — and seriously, nothing — contradicts his onscreen roles. In short: Cera’s offscreen “self” is a pure extension of his picture personality.
You want evidence? Okay, let’s go.
As the Atlanta weatherman.
As the quirky cheek-kisser of Jason Schartzman.
Just chillaxing and getting a make-over with the cast of Jersey Shore
Improvising a song with Ellen Page for Jason Reitman the director of Juno
Trying to show that he’s not one-note on Letterman (most excellent clip of very young Cera on La Femme Nikita included; it does little show that when he tries to be “scary,” his “real self” shows through)
Ridiculously funny in the CBS web-series Clark and Michael
Interviewed “Between Two Ferns” by Zach Galifinakis on Funny or Die
Offering spectacular resume advice in “Impossible is the Opposite of Possible”
And I could go on and on.
Sophia Bush makes real life Cera feel awwwwwkwarddddd
To Note:
*The cadence, tone, and vocabulary in the above clips, all of them “extratextuals,” matches those of each of his film roles.
*Cera plays guitar; several of his film characters play guitar.
*His body never changes. His face never changes. His wardrobe never changes. His hair never really changes. No matter the film — save, of course, Year One and Youth in Revolt (see below). He looks the essentially the same today as he did when he started on Arrested Development.
*In the weatherman clip with Jason Schwartzman, he’s passive and awkward and uncomfortable, especially in comparison to the more outré partner in weather crime. Exactly like he is in every single one of his films.
*He’s friends in real life with the people who play characters in his movies. See also: Jonah Hill, Seth Rogen.
*He’s uncomfortable and out of place when faced with “cool,” social people of his own age (see: Jersey Shore). His recourse = awkwardly interact, pretend to be cool himself, even if that means making himself look like a fool (even literally — see his hairstyle at the end of the segment) in his attempt. Of course, this a-sociality is at the heart of his charm, but it’s important to note that it’s consistent both on- and off- the big screen.
*The evidence that he hasn’t always played the same role (see La Femme Nikita) in fact reaffirms the fact that he can’t play any other role. And certainly not someone evil. Which might be why his turn as someone moderately evil (or at least cool and cunning) as the alter-ego in Youth in Revolt was intended as a source of comedy.
Now, I realize there are slippages — at least three major ones:
1.) The Girlfriend (???).
Paper Heart was supposedly a fictionalized account of the relationship between Cera and Charlyne Yi. They may or may not have dated three years. But Yi has denied that they ever “actually” dated, even though Cera has denied her denial. Obviously the confusion was part of the intended aura surrounding the quasi-documentary. But I love the idea of Cera thinking he’s in a relationship with someone and the girl denying it — which could totally be a Cera plot point.
Still, there’s no girlfriend in “real” Cera life. But again, this is perfect: each of Cera’s movies is about getting a girl, but only at the film’s end. We never really get to see Cera in an actual relationship — he’s either recovering from a break-up or striving for a girl or both. To see him in the quotidien, contended relationship rhythms — even if it just meant holding hands at an awards show or premiere — would be out of character.
2.) The Arrested Development Reticence
In short, Cera has been the long hold-out on the Arrested Development movie, spear-headed by Jason Bateman. The rest of the cast signed on years ago; only Cera held out. Lainey Gossip attributes it to Cera’s prideful desire to build his own career. Indeed, now that his last few films have underperformed, he’s publicly voiced his intent to join the cast. So how do we read this? Coupled with the fact that Cera apparently bad-mouthed Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s short film at Sundance, are we to take this as evidence of Cera’s inner prickishness?
I think this can be read two ways. First, it’s been misinterpreted, or misreported. Second, and more likely, is that it’s the part of the Cera picture personality that comes out when he gains a modicum of power. It’s the part of Scott Pilgrim that cheats on Knives and can’t muster the courage to break up with her. It’s the part of Evan in Superbad that abandons his friends when they’re in trouble. There’s an inherent selfishness and self-absorption that comes with the pursuit of unrequited love.
3.) Year One???
So I haven’t seen this film. Why? It’s supposedly horrendous. Like really and truly unwatchable. Cera and Jack Black as……CAVE MEN! But here’s the thing: at least judging from the preview and clips I’ve seen, it’s just the same Cera personality, only in caveman clothes.
Like it’s Halloween on the set of Superbad or something. But recall: this film was a flop. We might attribute it to bad screenwriting, but as both Transformers and G.I. Joe attest, a bad movie does not necessarily entail a flop. Obviously, people weren’t into seeing Cera in a role in which he didn’t wear a hoodie and Converse. See also: Youth in Revolt, in which Cera “plays bad” for half the film. Big underperformer, even though it’s still half filled with vintage Cera. The lesson = audiences want their Cera persona served straight up, sans period costuming or evil dopplegangers.
The conclusion, then, and the way that I hooked you into clicking through to this blog post, is that Cera is this generation’s Buster Keaton. He doesn’t have the same performance style; he’s not as funny. But that’s not the point. Cera, like Keaton, is a comedian with no “outside.”
Keaton was one of the most accomplished (and my personal favorite) of the silent comedians — you can watch him here in one of my favorite of his short films, One Week.
As evidenced above, Keaton’s trademark was his straight face. In fact, it was so much a part of his picture personality — and his general appeal as a comedian — that his studio contract stipulated that he not smile in public.
Now, I don’t know exactly how this was accomplished (by all accounts, Keaton was a dour drunk in real life, so it might not have been too much of a stretch) but the effect was a clear, visual, one-to-one correlation Keaton’s picture personality and “real” self.
Even the 1920s version of the Youtube Video — aka the publicity photo — used Keaton’s picture personality to its advantage, as displayed in the shot below, taken to publicize Keaton’s move to MGM.
And when Keaton was desperate for money in later years, his picture personality was exploited once again — this time for Levy’s Rye bread.
Of course, Keaton was not altogether unique. Charlie Chaplin had a similarly unified picture personality centered on his depiction of “The Tramp” — but his un-Trampish antics off-screen were widely reported, including his multiple romances and marriage to a 16-year-old girl. The early silent comedians were part of a Hollywood that relied upon extremely close relation between picture and extra-textual personalities — see, for example, the star images of Gloria Swanson, Pola Negri, and Theda Bara.
Casting “against type” would not become a popular practice until the studio system. But casting against type was, and remains, the provenance of dramatic actors, as the ability to convincingly play different personalities and personas helps emphasize an actor’s dramatic (not comedic) talent. And while we generally associate dramatic transformation to those actors practicing The Method, that’s a relatively recent phenomenon. In the case of Bette Davis, this talent and hard work — her ability to play the bitch, the sympathetic mother, the Jezebel, the self-sacrificing woman — reinforced her overarching star image as a diligent, talented, hard-working actress.
Even now, a “good” actor, even a good popular actor, is someone who can convincingly play good and bad. Take Tom Cruise’s turn in Collateral, or Magnolia, for which he was nominated for an Oscar: proof-positive that he was more than just Tom Cruise playing Tom Cruise.
For comedians, however, it’s an entirely different game. When Robin Williams played “evil” in One Hour Photo, audiences didn’t know what to do with him. When Seth Rogen was a complete asshole in Observe & Report, again, people didn’t know what to do with him. John C. Reilly can do both evil and funny, but he’s a character actor. Will Ferrell always has to be the same guy — even when he’s an Elf, he’s the same guy. But he is married — to a total Swedish babe — and has a child, things his own characters may or may not do (maybe in Tallendega Nights?) Russell Brand seems to be the guy he plays in Forgetting Sarah Marshall in real life, although he will be appearing in Julie Taymor’s vision of The Tempest shortly. Sascha Baron Cohen not only has three distinct picture personalities, but an entirely “serious” and real self that has babies and gives straight interviews on Fresh Air.
My conclusion? We’re generally less interested in comedians extra-textual lives, as what makes them compelling — their humor — is difficult to generate off-screen. Steve Martin, Martin Sheen, Billy Crystal, Eddie Murphy — we know relatively little about their real lives. But in the contemporary star environment, there’s no such thing as not being interested in someone’s extra-textual persona. You can’t just do a few talk shows and call it good. Extratextuals — making viral videos, doing off-kilter promotions — are just as, if not more, crucial in publicizing a movie as any trailer or billboard or interview. Stars are no longer contracted to the studios, but the current film environment is precarious and unstable; someone like Cera (and his films) will only thrive if he can keep up the consistency and basically provide sequels of himself, on-screen and off.
The necessity of Keaton’s particularly unified image said a lot about the state of silent cinema and the state of stardom during the period, and the same principle holds for Cera. The necessity for such coherency reveals more about the state of the industry (and our current needs in order to be drawn to a film or persona) then it does about Cera himself.
New Antenna Post!
If you don’t follow me on Twitter (and I mean seriously, if you like blogs, why not the Twitters?) you might have missed notification of my most recent Antenna post, “Sheesh, What’s It Take to Make a Teenage Heartthrob These Days?” It’s got RPattz, Taylor “Teen Tom Cruise” Lautner, Marlon Brando, and the phrase “allergic to vaginas.” Go for it.
Twitter is Ruining Celebrity! (And Other Anxieties)
For whatever reason, last week seemed to be a tipping point for celebrities on Twitter. When Jim Carrey tweeted “Tiger Woods owes nothing 2 anyone but himself,” then criticized Woods’ wife, Elin, posting “No wife is blind enough to miss that much infidelity…Elin had 2 b a willing participant on the ride 4 whatever reason,” it was enough to prompt two separate articles, one from EW, the other on Jezebel, with the shared thesis that ‘Twitter is Ruining Celebrity.’
Here’s Jezebel’s explanation:
I’m just suggesting that certain people reconsider how goddamn annoying they can be. Because it turns out that plenty of high-profile people are not that smart, at least not all the time. Or at least not without the intervention of lots of people whose job it is to make them look good. And sometimes I would just rather not know how far short they fall.
If you’ve ever met a public figure you previously admired, you know it can seriously undermine whatever drew you to them in the first place. When I was pounding the pavement as a media reporter, there were plenty of writers and editors I met who more than lived up to fangirl expectations with their sparkling in-person insights. Then there were the ones that sloppily regurgitated conventional wisdom, or were giant social climbers or total leches. Still sorta ruins it every time I encounter their byline!
Twitter is like that, all the time.
The article then (rather hilariously) details how annoying/banal/mildly offensive some of these celebrities can be: Susan Orlean, who writes good pieces for The New Yorker, is a piss-poor and annoying Tweet author; Margaret Atwood is way too verbose; Kirsty Alley defends mild racism.
And, of course, there’s the whole John Mayer saga, exacerbated by his Twitter presence. Conclusion: when it comes to the Internet, some people should consider shutting up. Or, more specifically, some celebrities should consider shutting up — lest they shatter our illusions of celebrity and its function altogether.
So let’s be clear: these authors aren’t worried about overexposure. God knows the vast majority of celebrities who have taken to Twitter are already throughly, and arguable over, exposed. What seems to be at the crux of this anxiety — and what I find quite interesting — is this anxiety that the ‘authentic,’ unmediated sharing of Twitter will make the celebrity TOO real, TOO authentic…..too much like a real person. (You can see this anxiety invoked in the quote pulled from the Jezebel article in which the author compares Twittering to meeting someone you admire in the hallway — when you meet him/her in the flesh, she becomes an *actual person,* with blemishes, bad breath, bad jokes, whatever).
Undulating beneath both articles is an unstated assumption about celebrities: namely, that they are IMAGES, not people. We are attracted to the ideas — of race, of gender, of relationships, of Capitalism, of America — that they represent, not who they actually are. As I tell my students over and over again, it doesn’t matter who a celebrity is in the flesh, or what he/she ‘truly’ believes, or whether he/she is ‘actually’ a nice person. All that matters is how he/she is mediated — sometimes more successfully than others — and whether the public finds that image salient.
Some Twitter celebrities do a fantastic job of further extending their well-pruned image through Twitter use. Justin Bieber, Taylor Swift, Conan O’Brien all come to mind. (Importantly, all three use Twitter somewhat sparingly: their Tweets become fetishized, heavily retweeted, and are rarely all that banal. Each one seems to perfectly fit with the stars established image, as when Bieber tweets “a cool thing about 2day is that North Tonawanda, NY has 32k people in it…just like my town. Maybe the next kid with a dream is there.” It’s cheesy and sincere, but so is Justin Bieber….or, more accurately, so is Justin Bieber’s image.
Celebrities are ‘ruined,’ then, when they become too much like people — and disclose so much, and in such an uncontrolled fashion, that their images are impugned. We want the celebrity image to cultivate the crucial tension between the extraordinary and ordinary — between the knowledge that the celebrity eats food and the also goes to premieres and buys expensive clothes. But when the ordinary overwhelms the extraordinary, it creates an imbalance in the celebrity image. The celebrity image becomes imbalanced via his own disclosures, whether linked to bathroom habits or preference for ‘chocolate’ men. To stick with the metaphor, such imbalance causes the image to fall, causing a rupture….and the unseemly ‘real’ person behind the finely wrought celebrity image seeps through, causing disgust.
When you get down to it, celebrity twitter exposes are desire for celebrities to be ‘just like us’ as a fallacy. We don’t want them to be just like us. We don’t want them to Tweet just like us. We want them to be a simulacrum of ‘just like us.’ Put differently, celebrities should represent our ideal what a ‘real’ person is like, but we can’t look at that representation too closely, or ask it to Tweet….lest it reveal the hollowness beneath.
I’m not suggesting that celebrity culture — or our fascination with it — is hollow, or worthless. Rather, that the anxiety over Twitter (and other new media means of over-disclosure) are highlighting the disparity between what we think we want from celebrities….and what we actually want.
What is a Justin Bieber?
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.
It’s tempting to just think of him as a pop idol. His songs are pure treacle; he looks like he’s still around 10. But he’s quite different from the likes of, say, Zac Efron, both in his provenance and in the way that he’s manipulated his fame since he was ‘discovered.’
The Bieber Creation story is both fitting with our current digital moment…and somewhat creepy. Bieber taught himself to sing and play multiple instruments, eventually entering some contest in his native Canada and coming in second place. His mom then started posting videos of Bieber covering various songs (like this one from Usher) to YouTube, and poof, several months and several millions hits later, he’d caught the eye of music producer, who flew Bieber to Atlanta and had him sing for Usher, who immediately took interest. (Rumor has it that there was a bidding war between Usher and Timberlake; it’s unconfirmed).
Bieber’s first album, My World, was released in November 2009, featuring the single “One Time” (featuring Usher). The video for the song (see below) has accumulated a RIDICULOUS 65 million hits. He even sparked a riot in a Long Island mall when someone yelled that he was going to appear in Abercrombie Kids.
But I don’t think Bieber really made it into the public consciousness (and by public, I mean people over the age of 17) until the release of his song “Baby” in January. The song, like the rest of the Bieber oeuvre, features benign promises of chaste love and devotion, only this one gets a special rap from an uncharacteristically clean-mouthed Ludacris.
He also got to sing the first verse of the new ‘We Are the World’ to benefit Haiti, prompting many old fogies to remark “who the hell is this kid?” He is the subject of “3 year old Crying Over Justin Bieber,” a glorious and hilarious home video with a inconsolable toddler bawling because “I just love Justin Bieber” and “I know that he loves me back” that went viral last month. Trust me, this video is incredible. Even more recently, he was the ‘recipient’ of an intimate letter from the normally pop culture-phobic Atlantic, and became the pivot of ‘Funny or Die’s’ April Fool’s Joke, in which the website was ‘overtaken’ by Bieber to become “Bieber Or Die,” featuring videos of Bieber gone power crazy, Justin Bieber “just wants to tell you he loves you girl,” and a dozen others.
So what is a Justin Bieber? He’s a transmedia product — and one who has achieved that status without the help of Disney or Nickelodeon. ’Transmedia’ is a term generally applied to storytelling techniques — defined by one transmedia storyteller as “the art of conveying messages themes or storylines to mass audiences through the artful and well planned use of multiple media platforms.” Lost is a good example of transmedia storytelling, as are Heroes, and The Matrix - all of which have had additional content published online or in alternate formats that can be consumed by fans as a means of adding to their understanding of the show and its narrative.
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. Stars were transmedia before narratives were transmedia: dating back to Classic Hollywood, gossip and ‘story’ magazines lured readers with unknown details (and re-writings) of stars and the narratives in which they were featured (see Janet Staiger’s piece on Marlene Dietrich in Perverse Spectators for a particularly compelling instance). Just as today’s transmedia consumers were lured by the ‘tip of the iceburg’ that is the show/movie proper, so too are fans of stars — you see the star in a movie, on a YouTube video, whatever — and are drawn to seek our further details. To satiate your curiosity, sure, but also as a means of pleasurably expanding your understanding of the star and his/her meanings. Again, compare this activity to that of fans of Lost engaging in discussions, role-playing, fan-fic, and reading deep into the alternate and ‘fringe’ histories beneath the show on The Fuselage. In that case, it’s as if the show were the star, and the backstory provides the same pleasures that seeking personal history, dating habits, etc. function for a celebrity.
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. At this point, I don’t think the paradigm applies to ‘organic’ movie stars (that is, stars whose stardom is either rooted and long-perpetuated almost exclusively by movie roles, with Johnny Depp, Robert Downey Jr., George Clooney Angelina Jolie, Brad Pitt as specimens par excellence) — but then again, I don’t think that transmedia storytelling applies nearly as much to movies as it does to this relatively recent wave of heavily serialized television. To resist that pull is, to quote John Mayer’s analysis of Jennifer Aniston’s career, pretending like you still live in 1997.
To conclude, I could go into elaborate detail about how Bieber’s lyrics and look cater to ‘tween audiences that actually want a highly asexual crush. But instead, I’ll just point you to the startlingly full collection of “Lesbians Who Look Like Justin Bieber.”
Tom Cruise, Rebooted
The blog lives! Sometimes, you teach at a college with a two-week Spring Break, and that Spring Break is extended by an unexpected flu, and suddenly it’s been nearly three weeks since your last blog post. But trust that I spent that break collecting and processing ideas, as well as attending the national conference for media studies scholars (SCMS in L.A.), throwing my best friend a bridal shower in Seattle, and frolicking sunburning and eating my way through my beloved Austin. There should be ample posting in the weeks to come. If you’re even slightly sports-minded, do check out my recent post on Bill Simmons (aka ‘The Sports Guy’) over at Antenna. While you’re there, I’d also recommend looking at star scholar Diane Negra’s brief piece on Sandra Bullock and “Transforming the Academy’s Winners into Losers.”
So Tom Cruise. I’ve thought a tremendous amount about this man and his star image: my first published article (parts of which make me cringe, but whatever) was on Perez Hilton and his treatment of Cruise; this Fall, I wrote about Cruise’s embarrassing attempts to play the new celebrity game, joining Twitter and revamping his website.
And as much as I still believe that Cruise fundamentally misunderstands how stardom works today, you’ve got to hand it to him: he might be back. Not only is he requeued for Mission Impossible 4, but he’s got a new summer blockbuster, Knight and Day.
The trailer speaks for itself, but I can only say that it plays up the very best, most likable, and most charismatic aspects of the Cruise image. There’s not an eyepatch or a bad British accent to be found. Judge for yourself:
So why does this work? First of all, it’s a good trailer. Muse’s “Uprising” at the end is particularly well-chosen. But it works for Cruise for two major reasons:
1.) It reactivates the very best memories of Cruise.
He is cocky here, but not ridiculously so. It’s as if Maverick made Top Gun, switched to covert ops, spent some time as Ethan Hunt, and developed a few neuroses. But now here is he is — still looking young (there is ZERO DOUBT that he’s had some very expensive and very skillful procedures performed) and active and not like a nerdy dad who tries to do the awkward white man air motorcycle dance on BET. He’s not acting serious, he’s not yelling catchphrases that will be ridiculed. In short, he holds himself like a movie star. There’s a sense of regained confidence. And it doesn’t make me cringe or want to make a YouTube remix with him jumping on couches.
2.) There is no explicit romance.
You may disagree with me here, but I think this is absolutely crucial in order to get people into the theaters. There may be actual romance in the film; Cruise and Diaz may make out, they may have sex, who knows; it certainly seems to point in that direction. But there’s no kiss in the trailer. And the reasoning for this, at least to my mind, is that people are not ready to watch Tom Cruise being romantic — Cruise romance is still equated with Katie Holmes mind control, Eiffel Tower proposing, attempts at dirty dancing and above-mentioned couch jumping, and the visceral repulsion is still too strong. When Tom Cruise imploded his career back in 2006, I was most struck by how negatively women of all ages responded to him — many of whom used to consider him one of the sexiest, most attractive, and most romantic of stars. Whether middle-aged, in their late 20s, or teens, the overwhelming response was yuck.
In the end, if Cruise wants to regain his place as leading man and major star, he’ll have a.) make himself less of a punchline and 2.) disassociate himself from the yuck factor. He’s spent the last two years taking slow and deliberate steps in that direction — and grosses for Knight and Day (and the publicity leading up to it) will serve as harbingers for Cruise’s future in Hollywood.
So you watched the trailer. Does he still yuck you out? Or might you see this film?
Jen Tries So Very, Very Hard to Get Dirty
Biggest post-Oscar celebrity news: the long-anticipated Jen/Gerry W Cover. Here’s the sneak preview that went viral earlier today, prompting blog posts from both Lainey Gossip (here) and Jezebel (there). And while Lainey did a nice job of pointing out how posed and awkward Gerald Butler looks, she failed to touch on the real juice of the story, passed along by Jezebel — the entire thing was shot by Steven Klein, the man responsible for the (in)famous W Magazine shoot for Brad Pitt and Angelina, pictured (in part) in all its ridiculous glory below.
Recall, please, that this particular spread was published when Aniston and Pitt were still together, way back in 2005. Jolie and Pitt were purportedly posing in simple publicity for the forthcoming Mr. and Mrs. Smith. (It’s widely believed that this particular photo shoot was part of what prompted Jennifer Aniston, in her post-break-up interview with Vanity Fair, to declare that Pitt lacked “a sensitivity chip.” What’s more, as Jezebel points out, Klein is a good friend of Pitt. And so the plot thickens.
So here’s what we know:
1.) Jennifer Aniston is attempting to add much-needed life to her image following the abject failure of Love Happens.
2.) The Bounty Hunter, starring, of course, Aniston and Butler, opens NEXT WEEK. Aniston has been cultivating — but not actually confessing to — the suggestion of a romance for months, through formal appearances (Golden Globes gross-out posing, see below) and ‘gotcha!’ paparazzi photos that effectively suggest that she and Butler have been privately vacationing (read: her publicist and his publicist agreed he should be photographed with her in Mexico).
2.) In that film to succeed, Aniston understands that she needs a viable romance, preferably, but necessarily, with her co-star (See, for example, the hoopla over the ‘supposed engagement’ leading up to the release of The Break-Up). No matter how much John Mayer emphasizes his respect for her, she still doesn’t have a cute relationship to flaunt for the gossip mags and thus keep herself visible. It’s simple old Hollywood logic, and she (and her publicists) knows it well: the more she insinuates the possibility of a relationship with Butler, the more curious people will be to see their chemistry, and more the film will gross.
3.) Aniston is also attempting to diversify her image ever so slightly. To my mind, this is the most transparent attempt to ‘Angelina’ herself that we’ve seen. First off, the film they’re promoting is basically a vanilla version of Mr. and Mrs. Smith (just check out the trailer — it’s like Brangelina Lite… far less sexual gravitas and far more stilted attempts at bad humor).
Secondly, there’s the shoot itself. Oh, look, Jen’s such a bad girl! She’s stealing money! Getting arrested! Role playing, how dirty! (Side note: all images below are screen shots from the W website, as images from the actual spread have yet to be put online — thus the blue lines, which allow you to see how and where to buy the clothes she’s wearing).
Even look at the specific articles of clothing depicted below, all of which she’s wearing in the cover shot. We’re used to thinking of Jennifer Aniston naked and wrapped in the American flag, as she appeared last year on the cover of GQ. But Aniston in quasi-burlesque lingerie? What’s going on here?
The most fascinating attempt to associate Aniston with dirt is, well, quite literal. The ‘Behind the Scenes’ tell-all, Chris McMillan, Aniston’s long-time stylist, ‘best friend,’ and the man behind ‘The Rachel,’ highlights the dirty details of the shoot, both figurative and literal:
This is not exactly Jennifer as we know her.
We got there and the storyboards were kind of Kim Basinger in9 1/2 Weeks. Which is even better, because then it started getting good.
How did you arrive at this particular look for Jennifer’s hair?
Well, Steven [Klein] was talking to Jennifer for about an hour and a half while she was doing fittings and her hair dried into this naturally curly head of hair. So we just refined it from there. But it’s not her typical blown-out hairstyle. It’s a little rougher, we liked seeing the flyaways.
What about day two of the shoot?
At the end of the first day Steven came up to me and goes, “Could you please ask her if she could not wash her hair tonight and just show up tomorrow?” I mean, she was rolling in the dirt, it was windy and she had hairspray in her hair.
She said yes to that? Dirty hair?
Yeah, we left her hair dirty. It just created a nice chunky texture. The key to Jennifer’s hair is no matter what you do with it — straight, frizzy, dirty — it looks like it actually grows out of her head. She’s someone for whom her hair doesn’t wearher, she wears it.
This is a rhetorical gold mine. Main points: Jen conflated with sex star; Jen with a ‘new look’; Jen ‘spends all day rolling in the dirt’; Jen ‘game’ for dirty hair. Adds up to: Jen, crazy, dirty, up for anything girl! In other words, not the staid, always-the-same-blown-out-hair, sartorially and stylistically conservative girl, dumped by Brad for exotic sexpot.
I’m also struck by the visual similarities to another Brangelina photoshoot, also in the Arizona desert, only for Vanity Fair, that was published after the pair came out publicly as a couple -
Now, you might sense an abundance of vitriol directed towards Aniston, and you would be correct. Long time readers (read: those who have read for the 9 months that I’ve maintained this blog) will know that I harbor general disdain for her. Part of disaffection is certainly subjective — there’s just something about her, and about the stock character that she plays, that grates against me. (Note, however, that I really love her in both The Good Girl and Friends with Money — in part because those characters are so different from the recurring-Rachelness of her mainstream fare, but also her role in Friends with Money seems so much more honest about what it feels like to be a woman in her late 30s surrounded by other women with marriages, money, and oscillating levels of happiness).
It’s not that I dislike Aniston for playing the publicity game. Obviously, judging from my general admiration and fascination with The Brange, I don’t dislike those who manipulate their images. Rather, it’s that Aniston is so transparent about that manipulation — but not on purpose. She’s not ridiculously bad at it, like, say, Lindsay Lohan, or ridiculously obvious about it, like Heidi and Spencer. She’s trying play at the level of Pitt and Jolie, and she fails. The efforts of her — and her team — are derivative (again, see the photoshoot….five years too late). A for effort, but a solid B overall.
And here’s where I make a big inflammatory claim and piss people off: I think they’re B level because she’s actually a B level star posing as A-level. Once a television star, always a television star. Not only has her beginning on Friends limited the extent to which she can successfully stretch her star persona (Rachel-like character = success; un-Rachel-like; no-go), but also the limits to which she can successfully manipulate her image. She’s beautiful, yes; she has an incredible body, of course. But is she special? Can she use specialness — that uniqueness that distinguishes the most enduring of movie stars- to elevate her above and help us forget the way she plays the game? I don’t think so. In the end, we see her manipulations so vividly because her star shines so dimly. She’s not a bad star, or an unsuccessful one. But she’s not one for the ages, no matter how dirty she gets her hair.
John Mayer Mis-plays the Celebrity Game…..Or Does He?
If you’re at all in the generation and reception of celebrity, stop what you’re doing, reserve ten minutes, and read this somewhat lengthy and admittedly explicit Playboy interview with John Mayer.
The release of the interview on Playboy’s website has made major waves: everywhere from USA Today to Huff Post, from TMZ to Perez Hilton, from ABC to US Weekly is excerpting and covering the reaction to the piece. Mayer added fuel to the fire earlier today when he Tweeted (to his 3 million followers) to apologize for using the ‘n’ word — in what he claimed to be an attempt to ‘intellectualize’ the word. (Details here; see John Mayer’s Twitter feed here).
There’s no doubt that what Mayer said in this interview was offensive. Inappropriate. Guilty of kiss-and-tell. Weirdly and obsessively honest. Borderline repulsive. Racist, sexist. This is all made very, very clear not only in this particular interview, but in Mayer’s other interviews — see, for example, last month’s equally odd and frank interview with Rolling Stone.
But more interesting, at least in terms of the celebrity paradigm, is the way in which this particular interview functions to produce Mayer as a very certain — and discourse-worthy - type of celebrity. While I do not condone or agree with the behaviors, word choice, or attitudes that he espouses throughout the interview, as one who studies celebrity culture, I find his disclosure and image generation absolutely genius. Disagree if you will, but consider the following:
1.) He’s generating a tremendous aura of authenticity.
Richard DeCordova, following Foucault, argued that the disclosure of sexual secrets is equated, at least in our culture, as the disclosure of the ‘real,’ authentic self. Usually these sexual secrets are disclosed without the consent of the subject — think Fatty Arbuckle, think Tiger Woods — but even when the subject is doing the disclosing himself, it’s still the rawest, most honest, most ‘real’ path of access to the star.
So when John Mayer extrapolates, at length, on his masturbation habits, and reveals that Jessica Simpson is “crack cocaine” for him (“sexual napalm”!), it’s so apparently honest, so apparently not the sort of thing that you’re not supposed to publicly disclose, that it can’t be anything but true. Let me rephrase: because ‘normal’ people, whether celebrities or laymen, are not supposed to talk this way, let alone talk about sex this explicitly, when Mayer does it, breaking those taboos, it is de facto taken as truth.
Which is part of the reason that the anger towards Mayer — at least the anger towards his sexual disclosure — is, at least on some level, amusing. He could be making this up just as easily as he could conjure a tale of him buying roses, making dinner, massaging feet, going on romantic walks, writing poetry, or “sneaking moments,” a la Jennifer Garner’s own disclosure last week concerning her and Ben Affleck’s “romantic” relationship. Mayer’s disclosure reads as pure truth — because who would lie and make themselves look like a douche? — when, in reality, it’s absolutely part of image production. Mayer says over and over again that he just wants to be real, transparent, honest. And isn’t that just as much of a constructed image as a star who puts himself forward as romantic, needy, giving, head over heels in love?
But so what? So he’s ‘real’? Isn’t everyone ‘real’ in the age of reality television? Sort of, but not quite. ’Authenticity’ has long been privileged in the celebrity game — look to Richard Dyer’s seminal essay on Judy Garland and the generation of authenticity — and it often has much to do with a certain coherence between extratextual life and textual narratives. In this way, Mayer’s confessional songwriting style certainly affirms this interpretation. But I think it has far more to do with the fact that Mayer is…
2.) …Playing the celebrity game for the 21st century.
Part of which is, of course, the generation of authenticity and transparency in an era when everything can be digitally enhanced or otherwise manipulated. Mayer generates his authenticity through traditional means of disclosure, e.g. the tell-all interview, which has long been a fixture in a star’s strategy to “set the record straight” or “show my fans the real me.” But he is also a faithful user of Twitter, which, as I’ve argued both here and here, is equated with the star’s unmediated voice. When you read a John Mayer tweet, it’s really him — whereas a quote in a magazine can be doubted, as it’s going through the filter of an interview, an editor, etc.
Mayer, like Ashton Kutcher, understands the ways in which Twitter can, in Kutcher’s words, “take back our own paparazzi.” It’s his means of setting the record straight, of establishing the real and authentic self that will, and should, take precedence over any mediated or unauthorized versions. In his words,
With Twitter, I can show my real voice. Here’s me thinking about stuff: “Wouldn’t it be cool if you could download food?” It has been important for me to keep communicating, even when magazines were calling me a rat and saying I was writing a book.
Indeed, the fact that Mayer even used Twitter to “set the record straight” about this very interview only further authenticates the process. Even more interesting, however, is the way that Mayer contrasts his understanding of celebrity with that of Aniston, who rose to stardom during a very different period. His take:
One of the most significant differences between us was that I was tweeting. There was a rumor that I had been dumped because I was tweeting too much. That wasn’t it, but that was a big difference. The brunt of her success came before TMZ and Twitter. I think she’s still hoping it goes back to 1998. She saw my involvement in technology as courting distraction. And I always said, “These are the new rules.”
For me, such a comment underlines the divide in celebrity culture today — those who know how to play by the new rules, and those who try and play by the rules of the 1990s and before. Tom Cruise obviously had no idea how the new game was played, and Mayer points a fine point on the only means for Cruise to return: I said, “Tom Cruise put on a fat suit.” That pretty much sums up the past decade: Tom Cruise with a comb-over, dancing to Flo Rida in Tropic Thunder. And the world went, “Welcome back, Tom Cruise.”
When the interviewer asks if Jennifer Aniston maybe bittorrented his completed album, he even responds “if Jen knew how to bittorrent I would eat my shoe.” He’s not making fun of her, per se — indeed, he tries to emphasize how much respect and love he has for her throughout the interview — but it underscores the fact that Aniston, and her cohort, have no idea how to operate within the incredibly mediated, networked word. None of them — apart from Demi Moore — know how to use Twitter correctly. Tom Hanks signs all of his Tweets ‘Hanx’ for goodness sakes, which is just like the way that all of my relatives and friends on Facebook over the age of 40 use a salutation at the end of a post, as if it were a letter. (Sorry, over-40s, but you totally do). Mayer knows how his actions will be amplified and proliferate across the internet at a moment’s notice. He knows how Perez operates; he knows how TMZ operates. Which leads me to the conclusion that…
3.) …Mayer is much smarter than you think.
Sexism and bigotry are not smart. But sexism and bigotry are by no means mutually exclusive with intelligence — and celebrity intelligence in particular. Mayer will get flack for this interview; it may or may not alter his overall star text (really, it does little save confirm what most already thought of him). It will most likely not significantly affect the sales of his new album. This is the guy whose most popular songs are “Your Body is a Wonderland” and “Daughters.” Those two images might seem discordant, but such songs only help to diffuse comments such as ”My d*** is sort of like a white supremacist” in reference to his lack of experience with black women in bed.
But when it comes down to it, his name is all over the internet. He’s only heightened interest in his album, his Twitter account, and his celebrity brand. It may be negative attention, but it’s attention nonetheless, and as the maxim goes, all publicity is good publicity. Obviously, he’s a douche. As Lainey Gossip says, he’ll always be that fat nerdy kid on the inside, desperate for you to know that he does, indeed, attract women. But he’s also playing the game better than Brange, and certainly better than Aniston herself, whose staged Mexico getaway photos with upcoming co-star Gerald Butler scream manipulation and desperation. He’ll be around a long time — and I’m not just saying that because I have a secret thing for that “Georgia Why” song from his first album. He’s cunning and adaptable, dynamic and compelling, quotable and effusive — characteristics that describe some of the most durable and enduring of celebrities.
And don’t forget that this is Playboy. There are reasons the interview was framed the way that it was. John Wayne made himself an uncontestable bigot in its pages in the 1970s, and John Mayer, facilitated by its editorial policies and interviewer questions, continues the tradition today.
Brangelina: Only Over When They Say So.
See this PR machine? It'll only break when it's good and ready.
Maybe you didn’t hear the news on Saturday night. Maybe you weren’t like me, at home, preparing a journal article at 7 pm, and were thus out of reach of all internet gossip. But if you were online or in any way attached to social media, chances are you heard or saw the tsunami-like progress of the Brangelina Break-Up through the internet. Of course, it was false. But for a few hours, for many, it felt very true.
Lainey Gossip does a superb job of laying out the very specific reasons why this rumor could not have been true. As she underlines,
These two are manipulative and obsessively controlling. Especially HIM. And they’re not lazy. They’re not Tiger Woods. They are experienced. They lock their sh-t down tight. And for something like this, if they really are prepared to call it off, it would have been engineered and masterminded months ago. They would have had a game plan in mind to run the message the way they want to run the message. Just like Pitt made the announcement of his split from Jennifer Aniston strategically on a Friday afternoon, after everyone had gone home, while he was away on holiday, as the least opportune time for the media.
In other words, they’re the best. I’m not saying this because I like them or I’m fascinated by them; I’m saying this because they have a tested and true record of brilliant and immaculate publicity manipulation. Please recall: Angelina Jolie, whose image had theretofore been characterized by brother-kissing, amulet-wearing, and associations with the likes of Billy Bob Thorton, “steals” Brad Pitt from all-American Jennifer Aniston. They don’t get married. They adopt many, many non-white children; they have three children out of wedlock. And they got away with it! Not only that, they are beloved. Indeed, they are, without a doubt, the biggest stars in America. Their auras are the largest; they may not be able to open a film like, say, oh, John Travolta in Wild Hogs, but trust me, their brands are much, much more valuable.
This wasn’t some magic trick or intrinsic quality; it was the product of impeccable and incredibly savvy P.R. Just see Nikki Finke on Jolie’s manager, Guyer Kosinski, who was recently hired by Nicole Kidman to revamp her struggling career. He may be referred to as “Guyer the Liar” and have a general reputation in Hollywood for sleaziness, but the guy is so effective that Jolie does not even have an agent. Many of you already know this about Pitt and Jolie. But for those of you who don’t, the lesson is: when, and if, they ever separate, it will be a masterpiece of P.R. manipulation.
And it will most certainly not come from the likes of The News of the World, whose story, published on Saturday afternoon, was the source of the rumor. Now, as Lainey again points out, U.S. tabloids have been trumpeting the demise of Brange for the last four years. Life and Style is especially keen on declaring the various reasons for their tragic break-up: Angelina cheats on Brad with tutor, Brad’s secret rendezvous with Jen, etc. etc. But when you read it in Life and Style in the supermarket aisle, the vast majority of us, even those who love gossip, put absolutely zero stock in such a claim. Why? We’ve been trained. We’ve seen so many false claims on the tabs — and I’m not necessarily talking about The National Enquirer, which, as the John Edwards and Tiger Woods cases prove, are actually oftentimes ahead of the curve — but the truly unresearched, sensational, and derivative tabs like L&S, The Sun, and The Star.
Why, then, did so many believe it? Let’s be a bit more specific. Why did so many Americans believe it? The answer is pretty simple: lack of international media literacy. In other words, they didn’t realize that News of the World was a British tabloid. Doesn’t it kind of sound like, oh, I dunno, The Globe and Mail? Or something else super official? It’s promising to offer the News of the World! Not Life and Style!
And many people believed this story — including reputable people — which only facilitated the spread of the rumor. Even Roger Ebert, who’s developed quite the devoted Twitter following, retweeted the news. When it first broke, I was in Twitter “conversation” (oh god, supernerdtastic) with fellow media scholars Christine Becker and Alisa Perren, and all of us were looking for TMZ to break the news. And if you ever hear news of such a split again — or of any major celebrity news — that’s where I’d absolutely advise going to confirm. As I argue in my recent article on TMZ, which just came out in print in Television & New Media, TMZ has a rock-solid network of informants, inside-men/women in the legal system, and immaculate fact checking. They’re basically lawsuit proof, in part because they don’t publish rumor. They publish confirmed facts. When they broke news of Michael Jackson’s death hours before anyone else, it wasn’t because they were jumping the gun. He was dead on arrival, and they had the sources within the ambulance/EMT network to confirm it. But they’re more than just libel-proof — they’re also right. No matter your feelings about their garish and intrusive style, they get the dirt, and they publish it first, and if it’s not there, it’s not true.
Of course, when Pitt and Jolie (and their publicists) realized they needed to counter this unexpected rumor, they didn’t call TMZ. TMZ rarely trucks in publicists. Instead, they called People, which relayed an official statement as to the continuing integrity of their relationship. And while official statements are often bunk, this one rings true. Again, if they were going to break up, it most certainly would not be leaked, scooped, or scandalous. It would be handled with kid-gloves, it would sustain the auras of both Pitt and Jolie, and it would make all involved parties look saintly.
So let this be our lesson: don’t trust British tabloids, don’t trust sources just because they have “news” in the title, and don’t believe a Brangelina break-up tale until it involves an official statement, TMZ confirmation, and a dramatic surge of damage control pictures featuring beautiful children.
Our Golden Globes Hangover
Today’s post features a roundtable of various scholars from the Twitter media studies universe, all of whom (myself included) are invested in the Globes for rather different reasons. Read on — and make sure to weigh on the question posed at post’s end.
Hollywood’s only shining moment of the night
Annie:
I’m going to go ahead and say it: this year’s Globes was a game changer. And while it isn’t in any way predictive of who will actually win the Oscar (or the Emmy), this year’s show was markedly different than those of past years. Different, and, in my humble celebrity opinion, worse. It was more transparently commercial — and the artists involved registered their cognizance of that commerciality (and the general practice of studio bribing) accordingly. (See Nikki Finke’s incisive take down here). To my mind, even though it aired from 5-8 on the West Coast, it had all the trappings of NBC primetime: unfunny, trite, and throwaway. The electricity and spontaneity the Globes historically connote: gone. Here’s a brief break-down of what went wrong.
1.) Gervais stunk. I’m sure we’ll elaborate on this further, but let’s just agree that his particular brand of humor did not lend itself well to the Globes format.
2.) At the risk of sounding elitist — and again, this is a point that we’ll have to discuss at length — several wrong things won for all the wrong reasons. The wins for Glee, Robert Downey Jr., Sandra Bullock, Up in the Air, or Avatar made this much abundantly clear. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t like Glee or RDJ, or that I didn’t appreciate most of Up in the Air, or that I don’t value the achievement and innovation of Avatar. Heck, I even kinda sorta like Sandra Bullock. But they weren’t the best in their categories — that much is near universally agreed upon. They’re popular and likable, but not the best. Which is why I repeatedly Tweeted that this year’s Globes were resembling The People’s Choice awards — not lauds from a group of critics. I’m particularly incensed by Bigelow and Mulligan’s losses.
3.) 90% of the celebrities were wooden. There was obviously not enough champagne drinking going on. Maybe it was the rain? The general spark and spontaneity generally associated with the Globes was gone, and I blame James Cameron’s massive ego for sucking all the oxygen out of the air. When Robert De Niro has the best and juiciest speech (okay, okay, rivaled by that of RDJ) you know something’s off. There was no Pitt Porn, there were few bitch faces (save that of Jessica Lange, who gave two excellent ones — one for Drew (who didn’t even thank her) and another for Cameron’s trite call to “pat ourselves on the back.”) There was one moment when it looked like George Clooney’s Italian Queen was perhaps giving him a happy ending under the table, but they cut away too quickly.
4.) No really. Nothing exciting happened. I thought we were headed for greatness when the now-skeletal Felicity Huffman went off the rails in the early moments of the ceremony, but hers was the last gaff of the evening. I also loved Julia Roberts vintage asshole behavior during the red carpet — with Tom Hanks by her side, she made fun of NBC and yelled “who’s Natalie?!?” when Billy Bush decided to cut his losses and leave them be. But shots of her flirting with Paul McCartney simply couldn’t salvage a dry night.
5.) And I blame the director. Of the broadcast, that is. There was a paucity of choice reaction shots. There were all sorts of opportunities to catch the stars reacting poorly — when Gervais was digging on writers, say — but there was a lot of rushed panning and random celebrities. Why couldn’t we have more shots of William Hurt’s beard? Like all the time? Enough of Julia’s smile and Meryl looking quietly bemused. Let’s get some extended Clooney nookie action, or at least Cameron passive aggressively looking out the corner of his eye at how hot his exwife still is.
It’s like a party where you drank a lot and know you’ll be hungover the next day, but didn’t actually get the feel the joyful and giddy pleasures of being intoxicated. And that’s just the worst. Almost as bad, that is, as Sandra Bullock winning Best Actress for a movie about white people saving black people.
Myles McNutt (Graduate Student, TV Critic/Blogger)
I don’t want to sound as if I’m speaking out in support of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association, but I think it’s important to clarify that this is not, in fact, a group of critics. They are (primarily) members of the press and little more, closer to tabloid reporters than to a Roger Ebert (not to suggest that Ebert himself is perfect, but he is unquestionably a critic and not a reporter). Perhaps it’s because I’ve spent so much time in the past ranting about how the HFPA fetishizes the new, continues to elevate HBO over the rest of television, and somehow has never realized how inane their supporting acting categories are, but I’ve come to the point where I’m almost rooting for the Globes to go off in bizarre directions.
The problem is that, while most of us have written off the show, the industry has not: the Globes have an influence on the Oscar race (Bullock, for example, is now guaranteed an Oscar nomination), and every star (except for Robert Downey Jr., who revealed the “HFPA are nuts” line of argumentation in his speech) thanks the Hollywood Foreign Press Association as if they are a voting body that deserves to be recognized as a legitimate sign of a film/show/star’s quality. I don’t blame them for this, but I do always worry about providing the show any sense of legitimacy. I might, in a bubble, be fine with Sandra Bullock’s win in terms of the Globes being the only non-fan-voted awards show crazy enough to give her an award for making history as the only woman to topline a film earning more than $200 Million, but I’m not so fine with the idea that her performance could knock out a more deserving competitor (Mulligan is safe, I think) come the Oscars.
What’s convenient about viewing the show from a primarily television perspective, however, is that they have extremely little impact: their love for things which are popular or airing on cable means that few shows are going to be “rescued” by a Golden Globe win, and because there’s such a long gap before the Emmys (and because the Supporting categories are organized so differently) there’s really no correlation. So on that front, I’m sort of glad Glee won a Golden Globe, since its chances of coming close to winning an Emmy are slim; the Globes sit in that liminal space between popular and legitimate, and I think that defines Glee almost perfectly, so it feels “right” (in so much as it feels kind of wrong, but in a way that I’ve come to accept).
I agree with Annie that Gervais was a failure, and would argue it was a combination of both the format not being built for a host (too many categories, too little time to develop rhythms) and Gervais not bothering to try very hard (which I expand upon here). And while there may not have been much exciting happening in the ballroom itself, I thought there was some great banter on Twitter: without the online engagement, I probably would have found the show excruciating. In the end, though, I guess my expectations were such that what we saw felt almost comfortably precisely, and I guess my Golden Globes-related cynicism might finally be close to depletion.
Hopefully next year will provide a refill - I don’t like being the closest thing we might have to an HFPA advocate.
Noel Kirkpatrick (Graduate Student, Blogger)
This had to be the dullest, least surprising Golden Globes in…well…forever (was no one drinking?!). Which is odd, since the thought of Ricky Gervais hosting had all of us very excited. In fact, that Gervais wasn’t very entertaining was probably the biggest surprise of the evening. The Globes don’t have the leisurely pace of the Oscars, and Gervais has always taken over an awards presentation in a leisurely way. There’s no room for him to do his awkward comedy bits (with Steve Carell) when you have to move so briskly. It’s that scruffy, pig-nosed guy coming in from nowhere and tweaking the institution that makes us laugh, not him getting swallowed into it.
I’ve never been a fan of how the Globe organizes its dining tables, and it’s telling. The television folks feel scattered, sometimes way in the back, while the cinema folks are all very up front, easily shot for the cameras (though, the camera work in this telecast was ABYSMAL). It perpetuates this sense of stratification between cinema and television. Indeed, the telecast not only does it with its seating chart, but how it presents awards. The television awards are mostly up first, instead of scattered throughout. Why? To keep the audience, that they assume cares more about movies, watching to see who will win. (Even more telling is the presence of an award for lifetime work in film but not one for television.) This is a well stood upon soapbox, so I won’t belabor the point any longer save to say that people watch these award shows on TV, not on a silver screen and that matters. (Or it should matter more.)
Interestingly, however, I think this ties back into the elitism that Annie mentions. I can’t comment on most of the film winners simply because I haven’t seen most of the nominees, and neither did/could most of the people watching from home (How many people in the home audience saw An Education? My mother hadn’t even heard of The Hurt Locker). Yes, it’s not the People’s Choice Awards, but Bullock, Downey, Jr., and Cameron essentially, as Myles noted in the Twitter conversation, bought their Globes with box office dollars, not with merit. Perhaps in the face of sagging award show ratings, the HFPA decided to do the arty television (notice that we’re not really chiding them for their television votes (except for ignoring Neil Patrick Harris, c’mon people!)) and the mainstream movies to keep people viewing.
I personally always tune in for drunk celebrities.
Lindsay H. Garrison (Ph.D. student, blogger):
So the celebrities weren’t drunk, but the broadcast’s director could have been. So many shaky floor shots and awkward zooms - all for boring reactions and rushed walks to the podium. I’m with Annie: more of William Hurt’s beard, please.
The People’s Choice Awards Golden Globes were less than spectacular last night, with surprising wins that seemed more like picking the quarterback and the head cheerleader for homecoming court than the best acting talent or films. But I’m not sure I’d go as far as calling this a game-changer. While it’s easy to dismiss the HFPA for voting Avatar best picture along with Sandy B. and Meryl as best actresses (in a drama and comedy/musical, respectively), there were at least a few other head nods that didn’t seem like total celebrity suck-up: Best Original Song could have gone to U2 or Paul McCartney, but Ryan Bingham and T Bone Burnett took home the trophy for Crazy Heart. Jeff Bridges won over George Clooney for Best Actor. (Okay, that’s a stretch; Jeff Bridges isn’t a total ingenue, but his speech was great - who else thanks their stand-in?) Seriously, though. Yes, the Globes felt flat and too mainstream this year, but I’m not sure the Globes were ever really a truly magical event that their mediocrity is something I’m going to mourn for too long. I think their role as an Oscar barometer and box office nudger are still intact.
I mean, Avatar was already a clear front-runner for Best Picture; The Hurt Locker, Inglorious Basterds, and Precious have already made their Oscar mark with dominating wins at the Critic’s Choice Awards. I’m not sure this totally means Oscar failure for them or necessarily guarantees a win for Cameron and Avatar. Streep was already a front runner in the actress category, and yes, Bullock’s win does perhaps make her more of a stronger contender to Streep. So, we’ll see. But in the meantime, here are my thoughts on other parts of last night’s broadcast.
Notable TV win: Julianna Margulies for The Good Wife (in its first season on CBS). Margulies finally wins after being nominated six times for her work on E.R. (did you see her get a congratulatory kiss from George Clooney? Oh, Dr. Ross and Nurse Hathaway.) But The Good Wife is a show that intrigues me; there’s something about it that I really like, but something that keeps me from all-out loving it. Just renewed for its second season, its win here will hopefully allow Margulies and team to develop the show further and let it find its stride.
Most Wheels-Off Presentations: Harrison Ford looked like he hated being there and just wanted to go to bed (hopefully video will find its way online soon). Felicity Huffman could hardly get the words out of her mouth, and Taylor Lautner could hardly be heard over everyone still talking in the ballroom. Presenting the award for Best Comedy suited him well, but even on TV, it was obvious no one was paying him any attention.
Best Moments in Acceptance Speeches: My personal favorite goes to Julianna Margulies, who snuck a jab in at NBC (who was airing the awards show) when she thanked Les Moonves “for believing in the 10:00 drama.” Mo’Nique brought a tear to my eye in her heartfelt speech; too bad it was the first one of the night and seemed to be quickly forgotten. Scorcese gave a great speech in his win for the Cecille B. DeMille Award, captivating the room with his love for the art and desire to see it preserved. And James Cameron, G-d bless him, spoke a sentence or two of Na’vi while accepting the award for Avatar. (I know. Seriously).
Kristen (Phd, Late to the game blogger)
I can only blame CP time for why I’m late to this roundtable. But uh..I’m here. So here it goes.
First, I want to say that this whole section is in great part a conversation I had with some of my most trusted and respected bedfellows. So thanks IC.
Second, I disagree about Gervais. I thought he was a great host. Funny, smart, timely, and not afraid to state things the way they are and not the way publicists would like it to be. I’m not quite sure I want to return to the Hugh Jackman-esque/Billy Crystalitis that has been award show performers. I want someone who can make the celebs a little uncomfortable. They don’t just exist in that ballroom. They exist on the Pacific Coast Highway inebriated to the utmost and bedhobbing from star to star. Let’s not pretend like all is wel just cause you’re in some loaned pretty garments. And that is what I loved about Gervais.
I disagree with Annie on the being irate at the Golden Globes thing. In my opinion, to look to the Golden Globes as an indicator of “quality” like looking to the Nickeoloden summer awards to know who’ll be the next “it” person. A futil enterprise, indeed. I’ve said elsewhwere that I believe the Golden Globes are the Walmart of award ceremonies. Complete with Rollback prices. To expect anything LESS than populist award winners is problematic. As had been said about the “HFPA” (in scare quotes because if they’re journalists, then I’m Lady Gaga..and I ain’t), they are more concerned about partying with celebrities than about actually being concerned about awarding good films their due. Also, as I was reminded in an earlier conversation this move to the popular has slowly been emerging. Recall, the changes made to the Oscars to accommodate more populist movies by expanding the nominees from 5 to 10 selections in various POPULAR categories. Perhaps the Globes are following suit(especially since they can construct the winners as they see fit).
Which leads me to this point: I may sound a bit ornery but really, what is the point of televised award shows? Is it really to elect the “best” film? Is it really to appreciate and give praise to the films we won’t forget about by the time Memorial Day rolls around? No, as Laineygossip says, “it’s about style.” And, you know what, we need to be honest about that and admit that that is what it is. I will remember that Reese Witherspoon wore a fantastic gown and had fantastic hair and makeup. I will remember that Clooney and his Italian new young thang were there and she may have been entertaining him in ways untold underneath that tablecloth. I will remember that Julia Roberts needs to go ahead and retire because it’s over. I will not, however, remember The Hangover. I will not, however, remember The Blind Side (well, I might if it makes into my dissertation). Why? Because they will fade with time. And the things I remember are more about extratextual things rather than the films themselves. Think about it: Aren’t the less televised, lesser known critic circles really where we should be looking to determine what the worthy (that is, respectable, important, relevant, quality) cinema is? Televised award shows are placed in a set of boundaries that pertain to ratings and advertising revenue and popular acceptability. Forget Julia Roberts, “Who’s Natalie?!” deal. Insert into the masses’ mouth: “Who’s Kathryn Bigelow?!” I rest my case.
Finally, I really do think there’s something to minority actors and international actors acceptance speeches that functions to set the tone and generate some sort of appropriation device by which all other winners restate what the formers acceptance speech was. I’m thinking particularly about Mo’nique’s winning speech and Drew Barrymore’s “redo” of that. Drew don’t know Mo’nique. Probably won’t know Mo’nique. So for her to “shout out to her” in that way (despite Barrymore already being a nutter) is interesting.
Enough for now.
Kelli Marshall (UToledo, Unmuzzled Thoughts)
I think everything that can be said about this year’s Golden Globes ceremony has been said:
Ricky Gervais was less than thrilling. However, as some have pointed out, it’s not necessarily all his fault.- NBC (aptly?) was reamed throughout the ceremonies, e.g., “Let’s get going, before they replace me with Jay Leno” (Gervais); “Just want to say thanks to Les Moonves for believing in the 10 o’clock drama” (Julianna Margulies).
- The speeches of Mo’Nique (earnest), Robert Downey, Jr. (sarcastically amusing), and Meryl Streep (reflective) stood out.
- William Hurt’s beard was a highlight of the night. Just ask Noel Kirkpatrick.
- Witnessing The Hangover, The Blind Side, and Sherlock Holmes receive accolades prompted many to rename this year’s broadcast The People’s Choice Awards.
- Slow-talking Harrison Ford and eye-rolling Jennifer Aniston evidently did not want to be presenting.
- Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker were inexplicably shut out.
- De Niro and Di Caprio’s tribute to their mentor and friend, “Marty” Scorsese, was touching, funny, and well deserved.
- Upon accepting his award for Avatar, James Cameron spoke Na’vi. WTF?
My colleagues have already skillfully (and humorously) analyzed many of these events, discrepancies, and surprises. To this end, I will keep my analysis to a minimum, politely redirecting you to the above bullet points. I would like to mention, however, a bit about Twitter and its role in my Golden Globe experience this year.
Generally, I don’t watch award shows in their entirety. With TiVo remote in hand, I often fast-forward only to the categories that interest me (e.g., comedy/musical, drama, best film). This year, however, I decided to view the Golden Globes as they aired, tweeting while I watched.
Last night, my Twitterverse consisted of about 5 of 6 “film and media people,” grad students and professors, firing off tweets at each other about every 30 seconds. (Yeah, it’s hard to keep up!) Short statements about fashion (or lack thereof), awards speeches, winners, and losers flooded our Twitter accounts (apologies to my followers who had no real interest in The Globes). In 140 characters or fewer, we dissected the evening in real-time, cheering virtually for Dexter, Mo’Nique, and Glee, and booing virtually for Sandra Bullock, Sherlock Holmes, and Avatar. It’s a strange little community, Twitter. But it sure does make a three-hour event much more entertaining than it’s ever been before. Perhaps you’ll join us at the Oscars?
Annie Again:
Having slept on my earlier comments, I do agree that this year’s Globes was not as much as a ‘game changer’ as I’d like it to be. I want people to be weirded out by this Globes, but listening to the chatter online, in the blogs, and on the air, no one seems to think this was all that special. WHICH KINDA FLOORS ME. Am I experiencing selective amnesia? Between the show itself (boring) and the chose of awardees (populist), it still seems much different — a return to Weinstein/art-house backlash that brought us a win for Gladiator and The Lord of the Rings over at the Oscars. Thus, in conclusion, I’d love to hear others’ thoughts on whether this particular Globes signified as different or as par for the course….and, of course, your own favorite and least favorite moments. Let the roundtable continue.
James Cameron: Star Maker?
Cameron and His Raw Clay
James Cameron makes huge, monstrous movies. I’m not going to delve (too deeply) into the critical melee concerning his most recent film - I saw it; it’s tremendously striking and aesthetically pleasurable, it’s also ridiculously, embarrassingly ideologically f-ed. (You wonder why this film is doing so well internationally? Because it makes Americans look destructive, one-minded, intolerant, profit-minded, and controlled by roided-up guys with bad scalp scars. I’m just sayin’.) Jonathan Gray at The Extratextuals has a compelling take on Avatar’s ‘anti-fans’; Maria Bustillos at the always dourly and smarmily entertaining The Awl shreds the film’s progressive claims; I appreciate the balance of appreciation and critique at work in David Denby’s review.
But what few people are talking about — in part because they’re too busy arguing how Avatar will or won’t change the way that films are made forevermore — is the fact that James Cameron has further established himself not as a director, or an innovator, or a somewhat derivative writer, but as a tremendously skilled star maker.
Before we get to Sam Worthington, let’s take a trip in the wayback machine. Remember these kids?
Leonardo DiCaprio was sorta kinda a rising star when Cameron cast him in Titanic. That is, if you can call a head-turning performance in This Boy’s Life, an Oscar nom for What’s Eating Gilbert Grape and a recurring role in Growing Pains credentials for the mantle of ’rising star.’ Remember: Cameron cast him before he appeared in Baz Luhrmann’s Romeo + Juliet. Cameron knew what could happen with this kid. As for Kate Winslet, she was, at that point, pure arthouse. She had attracted attention for her roles in Heavenly Creatures and Sense and Sensibility (including an Oscar nom) and starred in Jude and Kenneth Branuagh’s Hamlet, but she was certainly no household name. She didn’t have a Cameron Diaz body; she didn’t star in action films; she wasn’t funny. And while Winslet has mostly kept with arthouse fare (Hideous Kinky, Smoke, Quills, Iris, Finding Neverland, Eternal Sunshine, Little Children, The Reader, Revolutionary Road, to name only half) and wouldn’t be trusted to open a film, she’s a hot prestige commodity. As for DiCaprio, following a few manic years of “Leo-mania” post-Titanic, he has managed to tread the line between action star and prestige commodity (not to mention Scorsese’s new muse).
Most importantly, Titanic — and Cameron’s selection of them to star in it — effectively made their careers what they are today.
Go back a little further and you’ll find Cameron’s most brilliant find: Arnold Schwarzenegger. See The New Yorker‘s profile of Cameron from a few months back for details, but suffice to say that Cameron not only convinced Schwarzenegger, then known only for Conan the Barbarian, to take the role, but also wrote the lines that would allow his particular enunciative qualities to endure in American culture for decades.
And then there’s Avatar. How can you make stars out of ‘Real-D’ digitally rendered characters? THAT ARE BLUE AND LOOK LIKE CATS? You don’t. But with a human component, you don’t have to make the cat smurfs themselves stars. The Na’vi and their likenesses can be synergistic moneymakers — can you imagine how many kids are going to dress as Na’vi next Halloween? — but Cameron also knew that he needed human bodies to make this film profitable. As was the case in Titanic, most of the roles in Avatar are purely utilitarian, put in place simply to advance the narrative: what do we know about the Colonel (Stephen Lang), the asshole corporate guy (Giovanni Ribisi), the pilot (Michelle Rodriguez), the nerdy scientist (Joel Moore) or the other nerdy scientist (Dileep Rao) other than clipped statements or actions that establish them clearly as good or bad guys?
Do you see Zoe Saldana here?
The character of Neytiri, voiced by Zoe Saldana and modeled on her facial features and body movements, is a unique case. Zoe Saldana herself has been a long struggling Hollywood actress — please recall both Center Stage and Crossroads — and is coming off a key franchise role in Star Trek. She has a handful of biggish movies in post-production; she’ll be in Neil LaBute’s Death at a Funeral and several action-esque movies that make ample use of her midriff. My guess is she’ll end up a star, if not a huge one — but not necessary because of Avatar. Her face is too absent from the film.
Sam Worthington, however, is another story entirely. Here’s a guy who, as has been well-rehearsed in publicity for this film and Terminator, was LIVING IN HIS CAR before he was cast in Avatar. He apparently went to an audition to an acting school with his then-girlfriend; he got in, she didn’t, they broke up. When he was 30, he wanted to “reboot” his life, so he sold all of his belongings, netted $2000, bought a car, and ended up living in said car. He tried out for an unnamed project with no director’s name attached; a few days later he received a call from Cameron, who wanted him to come in for six months of auditions. He eventually got the part. While Cameron was endlessly tinkering in post, he “sent” Worthington to McG, who was directing the fourth installment of Cameron’s former baby, Terminator. Granted, Terminator: Salvation was no tremendous success, but it put Worthington’s name (and face) on the map. In essence, Cameron was prepping the market for his new star.
Worthington, Terminator-style
With both Terminator and Avatar on his resume, Worthington was cast in three big films, each of which are now in post and scheduled for release within the year: espionage thriller The Debt (with Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson); quasi-rom-com Last Night (with Keira Knightly) and, most significantly, CGI-orgasm Clash of the Titans, in which 300 meets Avatar meets Grand Theft Auto. He’s basically establishing himself as a Matt Damon/Russell Crowe hybrid — equally adept at action, thrillers, drama, fantasy, and historical epics.
Worthington, historical-CGI-epic style.
I mean, the guy’s a babe. He has that sweet hint of Australian accent sneaking out in his speech (you can hear it distinctly in the voiceover for Avatar); he has big arms; he’s got that look of the innocent and the slightly busted and the huge-hearted, all of which are crucial to pulling off the action/heartthrob role. (See Daniel Craig and Crowe for exemplars in this vein). He kinda looks like Tom Brady, which is to say he kinda looks like he wants to be America’s hero; he’s genial in interviews; he has a fantastic ‘origin story’ (I mean seriously, living in your car? Only Hilary Swank can compete!); and he’s hungry. He appeals to men and women, which is, of course, crucial. Even older women like him, as emphasized by this fawning EW blogger.
Tom Brady's dimple-less doppleganger
He’s not as pretty as Leonardo DiCaprio, but he’s pretty enough. His muscles aren’t as big as The Terminator’s, but they’re big enough. He’s just unique enough to be interesting, but not crazy or volatile and thus uncastable like Colin Farrell or old school Johnny Depp and Robert Downey Jr.. His image was completely malleable going into the publicity for Avatar, which was exactly what Cameron wanted. Just as in the case of the technology he uses in his films, Cameron molds his tools — and that includes his stars — to fit his purpose. Worthington will most likely go on to huge success following this film. But he did it on Cameron’s terms, and Avatar will always be the ground note of his stardom. Cameron isn’t doing anything novel — star makers such as Selznick, Mayer, Henry Willson, and others have long practiced this sort of career manipulation.
Ultimately, it’s fascinating to me that we, as media studies academics, film critics, and informal industry observers, make such noise about everything to do with Cameron — his bombastic filmmaking style, his visionary use of technology, his insistence on playing by his own set of rules, his rejection of the maxims of contemporary conglomerate Hollywood — yet fail to see the very clear ways in which he operates very much like an independent producer, and star maker, of classic Hollywood style.
