Stars

Film stardom is a phenomenon formed between the industry that produces films, the actual content of films, and the ways in which moviegoers form their relationships with films. To a large extent, the popularity of cinema results from the production, distribution, presentation, and consumption of film stars. Looking at stars therefore provides a focus from which to reflect more generally upon the workings and attractions of cinema.

FILM STARDOM AS A CULTURAL INSTITUTION

In his 1990 history of the formation of the star system in American cinema, Richard DeCordova argues that after an initial period when the names of film performers were not publicly circulated and films actors remained anonymous to the moviegoing public, the first move towards a star system came with the earliest advertising of performers' names from 1909 onward. Ever since, film stardom has worked through the circulation of performer names and it is through the distribution of those names that the identities of film stars enter the broader public culture.

Star names appear in film credits, trailers, posters, interviews, talk shows and fanzines as a familiar and taken-for-granted feature of popular film culture. Why are star names so important to popular cinema? What is the function of star names and what do those names do to films? While a moviegoer may have seen many films, sufficient differences exist between single films as unique cultural artifacts. Moviegoers can therefore never be entirely certain what they will get at the first viewing of a new film. Audiences pay for their tickets at the box office or rent DVDs with an incomplete knowledge of what they are buying. As film production and distribution requires high levels of investment, the film industry bases its business on trying to sell expensively produced products to audiences who have very little idea of what they will get. Like systems of genre classification, stars names are one of the mechanisms used by the film industry to predetermine audience expectations.

A star's name places a film in relation to a string of other films featuring the same performer, working as a marker of continuity. "Tom Cruise" situates Collateral (2004) in relation to Top Gun (1986), Mission: Impossible (1996) or The Last Samurai (2003). Although one Tom Cruise film will never be exactly like the last, nevertheless the name of the star serves to cultivate a range of expectations and to guarantee the delivery of similar performer qualities. At the same time, the name is also a marker of difference: "Cruise" differentiates the aforementioned films from the chain of Mad Max (1979), Lethal Weapon (1987) and Signs (2002) linked by the "Mel Gibson" label.

Star names serve a commercial function similar to product brand names: a star's name links together a string of film performances or appearances, labeling the continuity of certain physical and verbal characteristics across a number of film performances and so creating a "branded" identity. Simultaneously, in the crowded marketplace of films, the star name differentiates a film from the many others in the market. Continuity and difference therefore define the function of star names in the commerce and culture of cinema.

History demonstrates the significance Hollywood placed on the names of performers. In the case of Frances Gumm, it is widely known that MGM renamed her Judy Garland to give the child performer a more glamorous title. In other cases, renaming worked in the opposite direction to deexoticize of the performer's name. When MGM's head of production Louis B. Mayer supposedly claimed the name of the new contract player Lucille Fay LeSueur sounded too much like "sewer," a competition in Photoplay magazine saw moviegoers voting to rename her Joan Crawford. In other cases, renaming has served to mask the racial or ethnic roots of performers: for example, when Columbia signed New York-born dancer Margarita Carmen Casino, her Spanish patrilineage was obscured when the studio gave her the more Anglicized name of Rita Hayworth.

While film stars are known for their performances in films, their fame does not rest upon cinema alone. Aside from film roles, film stars make numerous appearances in other media. During the production of a film, stories frequently appear in magazines or newspapers about a star's work on the set. It is the role of the unit publicist to arrange for stories from the production unit about a film's stars to be prepared and made available to the press. Once the film is completed, the star becomes one of the crucial instruments used to market the film. While the average feature film is a relatively long media text, the poster or trailer must promote the idea of that film in a comparatively small amount of space or time. Stars are therefore frequently foregrounded in these media as a way to summarize and crystallize the larger body of the film. For example, posters for As Good As It Gets (1997) condensed the whole idea of the film into a single image of Jack Nicholson smiling. The star alone was used to represent the larger idea of the film and communicate it directly to the moviegoing public.

Trailers, posters, and advertisements are all forms of paid promotion. Alongside these marketing channels, stars are also used to give interviews for newspapers, magazines, or television. By holding a press conference or a high-profile premiere with stars in attendance, a film may gain front page coverage in a newspaper without paying for print advertisements. While costs are attached to running such events, these channels are classified not as paid promotions but rather as publicity, for they give a film relatively free exposure compared to the high costs of promotional campaigns.

Films, together with promotion and publicity, therefore result in a star's identity circulating across a range of media channels. However, for a star's profile to endure, his or her performances must be critically well received. Critical opinion, as published through the press, is important to a performer becoming recognized as a star. Criticism also works to evaluate stars by circulating opinions about performers. While members of the movie-going public will ultimately decide whether they like a star or not, and those responses may or may not correspond with the opinions voiced in published reviews, professional film criticism nevertheless mediates responses to films and their performers.

Film stardom is therefore a multiple-media construction. Promotion, publicity, and criticism provide various contexts in which the names of stars circulate across a wide range of mass media. While film stardom cultivates belief in the power and significance of the extraordinary individual performer, that individuality is always dependent upon the industrial conditions of mass communication that plan and organize the circulation of star names; without those conditions, the making and dissemination of star identities would be impossible. It is the persistence of those conditions that has made film stardom a modern cultural institution.

STAR PERFORMANCE

While film technique has undergone substantial revision throughout film history, narrative filmmaking has maintained certain basic conventions to center and emphasize the star performer. Leading roles, close-ups, backlighting, tracking shots, or character-related soundtrack melodies are just some of the narrative and aesthetic devices repeatedly used to isolate and focus on star performers on-screen. Despite historical differences between styles in filmmaking, the persistence of these devices for nearly a century has resulted in the establishment of widely instituted aesthetic conventions in star performance.

Between the star and the larger ensemble of actors making up the cast, a distinction can be drawn between what Richard Maltby (p. 381) describes as the "integrated" and "autonomous" qualities of performances witnessed in popular cinema. While performances by the majority of actors appearing in a star-driven feature film will remain submerged and integrated into the flow of the narrative, the presentational techniques of star performance give the stars greater autonomy by lifting them out of the general narrative to isolate and foreground their actions. When Kate Winslet is first introduced in Titanic (1997), she appears on the crowded pier in Southampton among the hordes waiting to board the ship. Centralized and tightened framing, combined with an overhead craning shot, costume, lighting, and a surge of the musical score, all serve to differentiate her from the supporting actors and extras. When Winslet's colead, Leonardo DiCaprio, is introduced, the camera lurks behind his head, immediately creating an enigma within the shot, and the following montage then picks him out from the three other card players he is seated with. It would be easy to believe this autonomous quality is a result of acting or star presence but it is entirely an effect of film technique.

Throughout film history, stars have become associated with particular breakthrough performances that made their reputations: Brigitte Bardot in Et Dieu … créa la femme ( … And God Created Woman, 1956), James Cagney in The Public Enemy (1931), Marlene Dietrich in The Blue Angel (1930), Marlon Brando in A Streetcar Named Desire (1951) or Julia Roberts in Pretty Woman (1990) are just a few examples of performances that could be regarded in this way. Such performances not only serve to give the star a widespread public profile but also become defining statements in that star's on-screen identity.

Where the entire construction of a film seems to rest upon the continuity of a star's established qualities, then it is appropriate to describe such films as "star vehicles," for they maximize exposure of the star's distinctive qualities. In the star vehicle, the continuities of a star's on-screen identity override the differences of character: whatever the particular role, in the films of Cameron Diaz or Brad Pitt, the central character always remains to some extent "Cameron Diaz" or "Brad Pitt." This is not to say that the star vehicle merely displays the "natural personality" of the star performer, for the on-screen identity of the star is as much a performed act as the individual roles he or she plays.

Star vehicles are frequently constructed in order for a star to demonstrate a particular feat or skill for which he or she is well known. After Elvis Presley's rapid rise to music stardom, the melodrama Love Me Tender (1956), set immediately after the end of the Civil War, may not have appeared the most obvious movie debut for him. However, despite its historical context, the film still plausibly integrated songs by Elvis into the narrative, and his subsequent roles in Loving You (1957) and Jailhouse Rock (1957) fully showcased his contemporary youth-orientated musical appeal. Similarly, after several decades working as a performer and director in Hong Kong cinema, Jackie Chan had acquired a reputation for his physical performances combining martial arts maneuvers with slapstick humor. This mixture of talents was subsequently foregrounded once Chan moved to Hollywood, as evident in Rush Hour (1998) and Shanghai Noon (2000). An Elvis song or Jackie Chan fight can therefore been seen as an example of the conscious organization of a film's narrative in order to reserve moments for the performance of the "star turn."

So resonant is the breakthrough performance or star vehicle that any departure from the roles played in those contexts is frequently judged through reference to the familiar type. Critical commentators regarded Jim Carrey's performances in The Majestic (2001) and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) as straight roles aimed at transforming the comedy star's established on-screen identity. In these cases, Carrey's performances received a largely positive critical reception. However, in other cases, the continuity of a star's name may bring such a weight of expectations to a film that it becomes impossible for that star to break from type. For example, When Harry Met Sally (1989) provided Meg Ryan with a breakthrough role that associated her with the contemporary romantic comedy, resulting in further romantic roles in Sleepless in Seattle (1993) and French Kiss (1995). Through these roles, Ryan's name became so burdened with generic expectations and a particular character type that her appearance in the war drama Courage Under Fire (1996) received uniformly poor reviews, conditioned by the apparent implausibility of accepting Ryan in a combat drama. Continuity therefore builds but also restricts the on-screen identities of film stars, and star performance always rests on a delicate balance between the needs of continuity and the limitations of typecasting.

STAR STUDIES

Although film stars are widely-known public figures, few people ever get to meet an actual star in person. Instead, it is through the combination of film performances, promotion, publicity, and criticism that film stars reach the broad moviegoing public. Consequently, films stars are mediated identities. Somewhere in the world there is the real Tom Hanks; however, the vast majority of the public will know only the mediated Tom Hanks. Films, promotion or publicity materials, and criticism are various forms of textual materials that mediate the identities of stars. As star texts cluster around a given name, they define the identities of individual stars, and as they accumulate over time, they also form a public sense of film stardom in general.

CLINT EASTWOOD
b. Clinton Eastwood, Jr., San Francisco, California, 31 May 1930

In an acting career spanning more than five decades, Clint Eastwood achieved stardom by epitomizing tough masculine independence. This image was the product not only of the characters he played, but of a performance style that remained emotionally impassive and contained. Although Eastwood played a variety of roles, his stardom was defined by those he took in westerns directed by Sergio Leone and police thrillers directed by Don Siegel.

Following a succession of minor film roles, Eastwood obtained steady work as the character Rowdy Yates in the TV western series Rawhide (1959–1966). This generic association led to Eastwood's casting in Leone's famous "Dollars Trilogy" of Italian or "spaghetti" westerns: Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964), Per qualche dollaro in più (For a Few Dollars More, 1965), and Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966), in which Eastwood appeared as The Man With No Name, an anonymous bounty hunter practicing his trade along the US-Mexican border. Afterward, Eastwood worked with Siegel in Coogan's Bluff (1968), Two Mules for Sister Sara (1970), and Dirty Harry (1971), where he made his first appearance as San Francisco police Inspector Harry Callahan, a role he reprised in four later films.

Eastwood carried the same performance characteristics across both roles—taciturn manner, emotionless expressions, deadpan witticisms. No Name and Callahan are singular men who refuse allegiance to any larger collective or institution. They represent qualities of independent individualism that convey broader ideas of social and political significance. No Name is a mercenary hero, serving only his own interest and profiting from death. When placed in the context of the American western, the ambiguity of this character questions and subverts the moral ground on which the genre built a sense of national identity. Callahan remains a more reactionary figure, for while he cannot align himself with the institutionalized law, which he regards as inadequate to maintaining social order, he searches for a more effective moral code that legitimates the enforcer's use of brutality, torture, and gun violence. In both cases, Eastwood's emotionless acting underscored the moral ambivalence of the characters.

Eastwood made further westerns, including The Outlaw Josey Wales (1976) and Pale Rider (1985), while the final outing for the Callahan character came with The Dead Pool (1988). Although the Leone and Siegel films continued to define Eastwood's image, he diversified his generic range by appearing in comedy (Every Which Way But Loose, 1978) and romantic drama (The Bridges of Madison County, 1995). Alongside his acting, Play Misty for Me (1971) and High Plains Drifter (1973) also established Eastwood as a critically praised director, and he won Oscars^® for his directing of Unforgiven (1992) and Million Dollar Baby (2004).

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

As Actor: Per un pugno di dollari (A Fistful of Dollars, 1964), Il Buono, il brutto, il cattivo (The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, 1966), Dirty Harry (1971); As Actor and Director: Play Misty for Me (1971), High Plains Drifter (1973), Unforgiven (1992), Million Dollar Baby (2004); As Director: Bird (1988), Mystic River (2003)

FURTHER READING

Beard, William. Persistence of Double Vision: Essays on Clint Eastwood. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2000.

Bingham, Dennis. Acting Male: Masculinities in the Films of James Stewart, Jack Nicholson, and Clint Eastwood. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1994.

Kapsis, Robert E., and Kathie Coblentz, eds. Clint Eastwood: Interviews. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999.

Schickel, Richard. Clint Eastwood: A Biography. New York: Knopf, 1996.

Smith, Paul. Clint Eastwood: A Cultural Production. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993.

Paul McDonald

It was a focus on the mediation of star identities which, during the late 1970s, stimulated and energized the growth of star studies as a distinct stream of research

in film scholarship. The key to this development was the original publication in 1979 of Richard Dyer's book Stars. Dyer drew on historical, sociological, and psychological works to review previous scholarship on film stars and presented his own fresh approach to the study of film stardom. He did not contemplate the biographical truth of a star—the star-as-person—but concentrated instead on what he described as the "star image." Although the term "image" may suggest that Dyer was interested only in the visual texts mediating star identities, he emphasized that the study of star images must encompass the whole range of visual, verbal, and auditory star texts circulated through films, promotion, publicity, and criticism.

Dyer's approach was grounded in a semiotic form of analysis, in which a star's performance in a film is constructed across a combination of signs: visual (for example, hair color or style, the shapes of facial features, aspects of physical build, gestures, and costume), verbal (words spoken from a script or familiar turns of phrase) and nonverbal (the speed and volume of the voice, or dialect). Together these signs combine to form the star's on-screen image.

A star's performances produce the on-screen image but DeCordova argues that American cinema did not achieve a fully formed star system until the second decade of the twentieth century, when the press and other media began to run stories covering the private lives of stars. This trend has continued ever since with newspapers and magazines publishing stories and photos relating to the social events a star has attended, whom he or she is dating, his or her tastes in fashion, or the star's home. As these materials multiply the volume of signs in circulation about a star, they work to produce his or her off-screen image.

Fundamental to Dyer's perspective was a regard for film stars as constructed images. At the most basic level, a star's image is constructed because at any moment an actor's performance is formed through the confluence of many signs and meanings. Star images are also intertextual constructions, for they are produced through the sharing and linking of meanings between a variety of sources of star texts. Finally, the meanings attached to any of the signs that make up the star's image are contingent upon particular historical and cultural circumstances. At different historical moments, images of different stars have defined audiences' ideas of beauty or desirability, for example. Star images are therefore cultural constructions, for the signs they present and the meanings they generate are products of the cultural circumstances in which they are circulated and read.

When the star-as-person is replaced by the star-as-image, the significance of particular stars is no longer explained by recourse to ineffable essential qualities of charisma or magnetism but rather through exploring how a star's significance is, or was, constructed through the tangible textual materials by which the images of stars are circulated.

Reading stars as images concentrates on regarding film stars as mediated identities. Such images are never the straightforward or transparent portrayal of the real personality of a star, but rather, represent an identity made and circulated through channels of mass communication. Whatever meanings are generated through those images may or may not correspond to the actual personality of a star; however, this does not mean the star image is something supplementary, untrue, or inauthentic, behind which lies the hidden truth of the real star. Instead, star image studies regard the image as the only means by which the public knows a star, and so assume that the truth or reality of any star is in the image. It is the work of analysis, then, to show how the various signs and texts that construct the image of a star serve to produce meaning and thereby construct what is known about a star.

Dyer's star-image approach considered how the meanings of star images are formed through, and reproduce, wider belief systems in society. At one level, star images provide us with the identities by which we are able to conceptualize distinct individual star identities, for example "Zeenat Aman," "Amitabh Bachchan," "Theda Bara," "Maurice Chevalier," "David Niven," "Shirley Temple" or "Bruce Willis." Each name represents an individual unique star identity. Equally, however, and in a contradictory manner, star images are also important for their typicality rather than their uniqueness. Star images are marketable or intelligible to the broad moviegoing public only because they represent socially and culturally shared meanings of masculinity or femininity, ethnicity, national identity, sexuality, or maturity, for example. Star images are therefore always socially meaningful images, and it is in their social significance that their ideological meaning can be read.

As a socially meaningful image, the significance of any star image inside the cinema is always the result of meanings produced outside the cinema, elsewhere in society. Dyer further explored the relations between star images and society in his 1987 study Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. Here he enriched the study of star images by seeking to situate the meanings of stars historically, taking star texts and attending to how their ideological significance related to the context in which they circulated. For his study of Marilyn Monroe (1926–1962) in Heavenly Bodies, Dyer used the sexiness of Monroe's image to consider the historical significance of her image in relation to ideas of sexuality and femininity at the time she first reached stardom in 1950s America. He explored how that image in the early 1950s was consistent with beliefs about the naturalness and innocence of sexuality, promoted in particular through the men's magazine Playboy, first published in 1953. For Dyer, the Monroe image appeared to enact the Playboy "philosophy" (p. 28). As Playboy addressed its male readership about the truth and naturalness of sex, so Monroe's image appeared to unproblematically affirm the correspondence of female sexuality to those beliefs.

By constructing his sense of context in this way, Dyer did not seek to situate his reading of Monroe and sexuality in relation to actual sexual practice in the 1950s. Rather, he interpreted Monroe through the ideas or discourses of sexuality circulating in the era, a collection of texts coexisting within a context of other texts, which together constructed notions of sexual truth and pleasure during the 1950s. If Stars made the study of star images into a work of intertextual analysis, that is, reading across a range of textual materials to see how they constructed the mediated identity of the star, then Heavenly Bodies extended that work into an interdiscursive realm by considering how the images of stars related to broader clusters of ideas and perceptions in circulation.

STARS AND MOVIEGOERS

Films, promotion, publicity, and criticism make film stardom dependent on industrially organized channels of mass communication to publicly circulate the names and identities of stars. Equally, film stardom requires a mass audience for the movies. The relationships formed between moviegoers and film stars can be conceptualized in various ways.

As already suggested, star names are part of the marketing address that the film industry makes to potential moviegoers. Stars may influence choices in both positive and negative ways, for a moviegoer may choose to avoid a film precisely because it features John Travolta or Demi Moore just as much as another moviegoer may decide to see it for the same reason.

LILLIAN GISH
b. Lillian Diana de Guiche, Springfield, Ohio, 14 October 1893, d. 27 February 1993

Lillian Gish was one of the first female stars of American cinema, best known for her performances in silent films but the recipient of an honorary Academy Award^® in 1970 "for superlative artistry and for distinguished contribution to the progress of motion pictures" during an exceptionally long career.

After working as child stage actors, Lillian and her younger sister Dorothy joined the Biograph Company in 1912. There they worked with the director D. W. Griffith, making their screen debuts in the one-reel An Unseen Enemy (1912) and becoming part of his repertory company of actors. Gish's rise to stardom came as Griffith moved to feature film production. After appearing as one of the four leads in The Birth of a Nation (1915), she took leading roles in Griffith's Hearts of the World (1918), True Heart Susie (1919), Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), and Orphans of the Storm (1921). While Gish's screen career lasted seventy-five years, during which she was cast in a variety of parts and worked with many directors, her roles in Griffith's films largely defined her on-screen image as the victimized child-woman.

Despite the various roles she played during the silent period, Gish's image was dominated by a particular character type: a fragile young woman, epitomizing innocence and virtue, whose goodness is wrongly judged and/or brutally punished. Frequently placed in dramatic situations in which her characters were vulnerable to injustice and deceit, Gish repeatedly portrayed ethereality and unworldliness. Although victimized by the evils of society, Gish's child-woman characters nevertheless represented an independent spirit ready to confront and challenge the dangers of a hostile world. Through repetition and similarity, these roles produced a strong association between star and genre, with Gish's image operating as a sign of virtue in silent melodrama.

Gish's image was equally based on her uniqueness. Her contemporary, Mary Pickford, similarly displayed childlike virtue in many roles, but Pickford's portrayals never carried the same ethereal or unworldly qualities as Gish's, instead provoking a sense of energy and health that gained her the label "America's Sweetheart." Ethereality also became a significant aspect of the off-screen image of Gish. Journalists and other commentators frequently noted her leisure-time commitment to reading classic literature or poetry as indicating a solitude and serious manner appropriate to her tragic roles. Press commentary therefore worked to create a fit between on- and off-screen images, constructing Gish's private life as the complement to the lives of her characters.

RECOMMENDED VIEWING

The Birth of a Nation (1915), Hearts of the World (1918), Broken Blossoms (1919), Way Down East (1920), Orphans of the Storm (1921), The Scarlet Letter (1926), The Wind (1928), Duel in the Sun (1946), The Cobweb (1955), The Night of the Hunter (1955)

FURTHER READING

Affron, Charles. Lillian Gish: Her Legend, Her Life. New York: Scribner, 2001.

——. Star Acting: Gish, Garbo, Davis. New York: Dutton, 1977.

Gish, Lillian, with Ann Pinchot. Lillian Gish: The Movies, Mr. Griffith and Me. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1969.

Slide, Anthony. Silent Players: A Biographical and Autobiographical Study of 100 Silent Film Actors and Actresses. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2002.

Silver, Charles, ed. Lillian Gish. New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1980.

Paul McDonald

Stars may also become figures with which audiences identify in films. By foregrounding the performance of the star, narrative cinema creates the star's character as a figure of central narrative agency, and so the moviegoer frequently follows and understands the plot largely through the actions and reactions of the character played by the star. In some cases, scenes are constructed to place

the moviegoer in a position to see and hear what the star's character witnesses. For example, In What Lies Beneath (2000), Michele Pfeiffer lies drugged and immobile in a bathtub filling with water as her murderous husband attempts to fake her suicide. The scene is shot and edited to place the moviegoer in a position to build identification with the star's subjective viewpoint.

Aside from showing what the star's character sees, other techniques are frequently used to encourage understanding of, and identification with, what the star's character knows or feels. Again in What Lies Beneath, one sequence involves Pfeiffer's character Claire in her daughter's bedroom discovering an old vest from her days as a music student at Juilliard. This sets off a chain of remembrances as she then leafs through a photo album in the basement. A range of emotional changes occurs during the sequence, from wistful longing to sadness and anxiety. These are not registered by Pfeiffer's acting, for the camera only occasionally looks at her. Instead, the musical score carries over from bedroom to basement, shifting in tone to convey Claire's range of feelings. Here the moviegoer is able to understand the star character's emotional point of view through the music. Identification with a star can therefore be achieved through various visual and aural techniques and these work independently of whether the moviegoer does or does not like a star: they do not depend on audience taste but rather are the effects of how image and sound work to direct and structure relations between the moviegoer and the presence of the star in the narrative.

Subjective viewpoint shots or point of view devices work to position moviegoers with the experience of the star's character in the narrative. In this case the relation between star and moviegoer is constructed through what the film does to the audience. However, the processes of identification involved with the star/moviegoer relationship are more complex than that. While films may place moviegoers in positions of identification with stars, the question still remains—what is it about stars that fascinates moviegoers? For Dyer, star images enthrall because they are able to draw together contradictory ideological meanings in the one figure: Monroe signified both innocence and sexiness in equal measure. John Ellis, in his 1992 book Visible Fictions, has suggested the off-screen images of stars provide audiences with only a scattering of elements from reviews, interviews, or gossip, which leave an incoherent and incomplete sense of the star. Moviegoers are drawn to seeing stars perform in films, Ellis argues, because it is only in those appearances that the various elements are brought together at a point of coherence and completion. Ellis also understands the relationship between star and moviegoer through various psychoanalytic concepts. As the film performance allows moviegoers to spy on figures apparently unaware they are being watched, there is a voyeuristic component to watching stars. Since stars appear to be both ordinary and extraordinary, they are also similar to and different from moviegoers. This closeness and distance makes the star an object of desire, for the star is simultaneously accessible and inaccessible. For psychoanalytic film theory, the identificatory relationship between the movie-goer and the star is based on star images providing ego ideals, making up for deficiencies or divisions in the self by presenting identities who appear to be complete and lacking nothing.

A crucial problem with these broad-based theories is that they tend to generalize the way in which moviegoers relate to stars. Moviegoers form a far wider array of responses to stars, combining adoration, esteem, and respect with feelings of loathing, disdain, and contempt. In a study of letters from female moviegoers remembering the pleasures they had found in watching female stars of 1940s cinema, Jackie Stacey, in her 1994 book Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship, noted how identification took a variety of forms both inside and outside the movie theater. Inside the theater, moviegoers related experiences of forming a loyal attachment to a star, regarding a star as different and unattainable, or otherwise losing a sense of self by fantasizing about becoming the star. Stacey describes this range of identificatory fantasies as instances of "devotion," "worship," and "transcendence." Outside the theater, identification continued, as women described make-believe games of pretending to be the star or otherwise imitating a star's behavior, foregrounding an actual physical resemblance to the star, or copying the star's style. Here identification took various practical forms that extended the significance of a star image beyond the theater and into the everyday lives of moviegoers.

In these cases, identification was the product not of what the film did to the moviegoer, but rather what the moviegoer did with a star image. Stacey's research therefore began to point toward some of the identificatory relationships formed between moviegoers and film stars. Stacey's work provided valuable ground for beginning to think about the complex variety of emotional responses moviegoers have to stars and the manners in which they enact those relationships.

SEE ALSO Acting;Fans and Fandom;Journals and Magazines;Reception Theory;Spectatorship and Audiences;Star System;Studio System

FURTHER READING

DeCordova, Richard. Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990.

Dyer, Richard. Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society. New York: St. Martin's, 1986.

——. Stars. London: British Film Institute, 1979.

Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema, Television, Video. London and Boston: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1982.

Gledhill, Christine, ed. Stardom: Industry of Desire. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

King, Barry. "Articulating Stardom." Screen 26, no. 5 (1985): 27–50.

Maltby, Richard. Hollywood Cinema, 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2003.

McDonald, Paul. "Reconceptualising Stardom." In Stars, edited by Richard Dyer, 175–211. London: British Film Institute, 1998. Original edition published in 1979.

——. "Star Studies." In Approaches to Popular Film, edited by Joanne Hollows and Mark Jancovich, 79–97. Manchester, UK and New York: Manchester University Press, 1995.

Stacey, Jackie. Star Gazing: Hollywood Cinema and Female Spectatorship. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Paul McDonald