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Star turn on our enduring relationship with movie icons
By Caryn James |
February 24, 2013, Sunday
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Print Edition
Print Edition
ADMIT it. You idolize George Clooney and know he'd be your close friend, or at least a good drinking buddy - if only you'd ever met. And that mass schadenfreude the culture indulges in whenever Lindsay Lohan crashes another car - isn't that comforting? Stars may be rich or beautiful, but we get to feel sane in comparison.
In "Gods Like Us," a penetrating, lively cultural history of movie stardom, Ty Burr doesn't lose sight of those and other paradoxes as he examines the idolatry and the illusion of intimacy, the worship and the resentment, the willed belief in an image we secretly know to be a mask. That focus and a sophisticated sense of how films both reflect and shape culture, add freshness to what sounds like a worn-out topic.
Burr, a film critic for The Boston Globe and a former writer for Entertainment Weekly, has a witty, readable style, but don't let that pop facade fool you. There is substance here, as he dissects how each period in American history finds or creates stars to serve its needs.
Back in 1910, the now forgotten Florence Lawrence was at the center of the first movie-related street crowd, as fans tore at her clothes trying to get near her during a personal appearance in St Louis.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Bette Davis showed women that they could be strong-willed, Ava Gardner that it was OK to be blatantly sexy. Clark Gable, at the height of his stardom during the Depression, gave audiences an image of masculine swagger, confidence and virility at a time when unemployed men may have felt emasculated.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the old movie-star model - a steady, studio-crafted persona carried through film after film - gave way to a natural approach, which, Burr notes, is merely the illusion of naturalness. Dustin Hoffman embodied this new "dialectic in star culture," reconciling art and celebrity. Was he really an ordinary schlub or acting like one?
But heading toward the present, Burr shrewdly discerns how stardom changed with television and video, as the celebrities got closer to home, closer to our size. Today, as movie stars flash across cellphone screens, "they are finally much smaller than we are." When anyone with a cheap camera and Internet access can be a YouTube star, fame itself becomes devalued. If we feel drawn to Clooney in the old paradoxical way, it's because he follows the archaic Cary Grant model: a consistent personality no matter the film.
What does this mean for us? I think Burr overstates his case in saying that America once found stable identities in stars and that losing this "luxurious fantasy of the fixed self" leaves us adrift. But it's the mark of a valuable, provocative book that it can make us laugh, think and argue about the starry contradictions that are so profound a part of our lives, whether we acknowledge their importance or not.
In "Gods Like Us," a penetrating, lively cultural history of movie stardom, Ty Burr doesn't lose sight of those and other paradoxes as he examines the idolatry and the illusion of intimacy, the worship and the resentment, the willed belief in an image we secretly know to be a mask. That focus and a sophisticated sense of how films both reflect and shape culture, add freshness to what sounds like a worn-out topic.
Burr, a film critic for The Boston Globe and a former writer for Entertainment Weekly, has a witty, readable style, but don't let that pop facade fool you. There is substance here, as he dissects how each period in American history finds or creates stars to serve its needs.
Back in 1910, the now forgotten Florence Lawrence was at the center of the first movie-related street crowd, as fans tore at her clothes trying to get near her during a personal appearance in St Louis.
In the 1930s and 1940s, Bette Davis showed women that they could be strong-willed, Ava Gardner that it was OK to be blatantly sexy. Clark Gable, at the height of his stardom during the Depression, gave audiences an image of masculine swagger, confidence and virility at a time when unemployed men may have felt emasculated.
In the 1960s and 1970s, the old movie-star model - a steady, studio-crafted persona carried through film after film - gave way to a natural approach, which, Burr notes, is merely the illusion of naturalness. Dustin Hoffman embodied this new "dialectic in star culture," reconciling art and celebrity. Was he really an ordinary schlub or acting like one?
But heading toward the present, Burr shrewdly discerns how stardom changed with television and video, as the celebrities got closer to home, closer to our size. Today, as movie stars flash across cellphone screens, "they are finally much smaller than we are." When anyone with a cheap camera and Internet access can be a YouTube star, fame itself becomes devalued. If we feel drawn to Clooney in the old paradoxical way, it's because he follows the archaic Cary Grant model: a consistent personality no matter the film.
What does this mean for us? I think Burr overstates his case in saying that America once found stable identities in stars and that losing this "luxurious fantasy of the fixed self" leaves us adrift. But it's the mark of a valuable, provocative book that it can make us laugh, think and argue about the starry contradictions that are so profound a part of our lives, whether we acknowledge their importance or not.
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