“A movie star is not an artist, he is an art object.”
film scholar Richard Schickel
Recently people like Quintin Tarantino have bemoaned the death of the “movie star” just as others, some of them actors, agree with the overall sentiment but approach it less mournfully. Many attribute it to the accessibility of celebrities on social media. At its worst, social media has proven the adage “don’t meet your heroes”, and brings performers into greater conflict with entitled fans and detractors who reject healthy boundaries from a false sense of ownership. The notion that fame forfeits any expectation of privacy and human decency from others isn’t new, but social media makes it more vivid. At its best, social media allows others to challenge such notions and helps to humanize people. You can’t convince me this particular consequence is a bad thing.
For decades, tabloids and paparazzi exploited the mystique of celebrity for personal gain. I bet nobody mourns the death of the movie star more than people who make a career stalking them for pictures and embellishing or flat out making up stories just to have their, uhm, work upended by celebrities sharing their own candids and stories on Instagram. As far as I can tell from the laser focus on royals, the only people who still indulge in tabloids are those who want to preserve the sociopolitical hierarchies many of us reject (and maybe anyone who’s still emotionally invested in the Anniston/Pitt/Jolie triangle – she moved on, why haven’t you?)
Similar conversations take place in other artforms. I’ve noticed a running theme in my blog and creative writing has been art as a means of connecting to each other and to our own humanity. That, and critiquing the treatment of people as commodities, but few address dehumanization better than Terry Pratchett – which is why I reference the quote “sin, young man, is when you treat people as things” so frequently. Probably why I feel so much discomfort with branding and marketing, too.
The debate of sex in media has reared its head again, and it’s still as lacking in nuance as ever. It’s possible to both disapprove of the Hays code and censorship in general, and still be critical of the ways in which sex and sexuality are presented in film. Silencing criticism is censorship, too.
Just as my first introduction to the concept of toxic masculinity came from a man, so did my first introduction to “the male gaze.” In his review of The Silence of the Lambs, Roger Ebert noted that never before had he been so aware of the male gaze in film. In layman’s terms, the male gaze is an acknowledgement that men dominated the representation of women on film from behind the camera, and the ways in which that often led to objectification (people as things, as it were). Now in the case of The Silence of the Lambs, Jonathan Demme seems to deliberately deconstruct the male gaze, frequently turning the camera back on the male characters doing the gazing at Jodie Foster’s character, Clarice Starling. There’s also that line, “we covet what we see.”
Despite the success of his film and increasing awareness of objectification, the male gaze remains a pervasive element throughout the media. When Brian Fuller and Michael Green brought Neil Gaiman’s American Gods to television in 2017, they expressed a desire to subvert the male gaze and take a more equal opportunity approach to sex and nudity. While there is some debate over the success of their efforts, the contrast with David Lynch’s concurrent Twin Peaks revival was striking. The pervasiveness of the male gaze felt almost comical in the latter, but unlike The Silence of the Lambs, it seemed as accidental as it was over the top – dating the look and feel of the show, even by 90s standards, let alone in 2017. The original Twin Peaks aged better than its revival did straight out the gate. Amazing.
If you dislike my Lynch take, you’d like my Kubrick and Hitchcock takes even less. I’m consistent in my belief we shouldn’t put people on pedestals, even/especially celebrated auteurs. Lynch is at least known for being kind rather than using art as an excuse to mistreat people. I appreciate a lot of his sentiments despite my disappointment with the Twin Peaks revival.
