Stars

"Yes and no. This is the book that most people would say is the foundational work in celebrity studies, but Dyer begins by rounding up all the preceding work that’s been done on the topic. Dyer acknowledges in passing that stars began in the theater, but since his departure point as a scholar is film, that’s what he focuses on. One comes away with the impression that the only celebrities are film performers, even though that’s not what Dyer actually argues. The most interesting contribution of Dyer’s book is his commitment to taking pleasure seriously. He focuses on how stars give us beauty, pleasure and delight. He ends the book with this beautiful passage where he says we can analyze stars backwards and forwards, and that’s what I’ve done in The Drama of Celebrity . But at the end of the day, what’s also important is how they overtake us. He writes, “When I see Marilyn Monroe, I catch my breath; when I see Montgomery Clift I sigh over how beautiful he is; when I see Barbara Stanwyck I know that women are strong.” That’s what he’s trying to understand, as much as anything else. He’s very embedded in a Marxist analysis of culture, but he also questions it. He runs through the answers that certain Marxist cultural critics—like Theodor Adorno—have given for why people like celebrities and says they don’t satisfy him. He’s unwilling to argue that people enjoy stars because we’re all mindless cogs in a capitalist machine. The film industry does try to manipulate the public into liking stars, but not all manipulation works. “Media industries attempt to manipulate the public—it would be silly to deny that—but audience response can never be fully controlled” That’s a really important point. Everybody would concede that media industries attempt to manipulate the public—it would be silly to deny that—but audience response can never be fully controlled, not least because audiences are extremely diverse and heterogeneous, and most of us are not simple-minded. Dyer points out that systems are leaky. Even if you create what you hope will be an airtight system for getting the word out about an industry’s products, people are going to react in ways that you can’t predict. A lot of people have said that the point of stars has been to reinforce the status quo. Let’s say it’s the 1950s in the US, and people believe that young women should be perky and focused on pleasing men, which yields a star like Sandra Dee in the Gidget movies, with her giggling and her blonde ponytail. Dyer’s point is that the status quo itself is complicated. Yes, Gidget movies were promoting very banal 1950s stereotypes about femininity, but they also show Sandra Dee doing something that only boys in her films do: she learns to surf. Her character is doing something quite feminist while being stereotypically feminine in the sense of weak and silly. Dyer also contends that stars rarely have only one meaning or represent just one thing. Rather, stars embody contradictions and debates. The very notion of the Hollywood star is contradictory: stars are special, but they’re also just like us. Dyer coins a term to refer to this multitude of celebrity meanings: ‘structured polysemy.’ Every star generates multiple meanings, but only a finite number of them. So how you understand one star’s meaning relative to another requires analzying the different, often contradictory, but limited set of meanings that attach to a particular star. I do build on his work, but at the end of the day, because of when and where Dyer was writing, he remains more invested in the idea that stars represent ideology than I do. I see him as a transition point from the Frankfurt School and its dismissal of stardom as propaganda for capitalism. Dyer’s primary framework is still capitalism, but he has a more complicated view of how capitalism operates (and misfires). One key difference between Dyer’s work and mine: he is more interested in what stars mean rather than how they mean, and he derives star meanings from the films in which they appeared. Had I been doing a Dyer-type study of Sarah Bernhardt as a celebrity, I would have taken the plays that she starred in as crucial for understanding her celebrity image. But that was not my method. At the end of Stars , Dyer says that there are two major future directions for scholars of celebrity: the publicity materials generated about stars and audience responses to celebrities. I would say I accepted those invitations."