Week 2 Reading (Core Post #1)

I would like to start out by saying that, like Julie, I too was confused about Hansen's analysis of Valentino and his role and effect on women and men. I was unsure about how he posed a threat to modern masculinity because of his perceived vulnerability and femininity. I also thought that men would want to look up to a person that all the women around them admired and wanted, however, I think that today, a little bit of vulnerability or feminine traits are much more socially acceptable (hence the term, "metro"). I think that at the time, this kind of "man" was somewhat different and as a result caused men to defend their own terms of masculinity and believe that anything that strayed from that belief posed a challenge to them. I also thought the article was a bit confusing because it jumped between a more general analysis of men/women and back to the analysis of Valentino. I was also lost when Hansen was discussing Freud's essay "A child is being beaten" because I was having trouble connecting its relevance to Valentino. To an extent, I feel like the overall effect of Valentino on his female audience was perhaps over analyzed.

I found the other two readings to be very interesting in that they displayed the possible differences between the early star system and the star system of today. I thought it was really interesting what Staiger said about many early screen stars not wanting to be known because movies were not on par with the theater. She suggests that many of them wanted their identities to be kept secret for this purpose. Today, it is almost a reversal of this in which the film industry is that which everyone wants to be a part of. Of course, Broadway and the theater are still incredibly prominent and many still aspire to be a part of it. However (and I'm no expert on this!), it made me think that maybe those who want to be in the theater are those who are more interested in molding one's craft. Some may say that actors of the theater possess a certain kind of talent different from those of the screen since theater requires a continuous and constant performance rather than one that is pieced together by an editor over three months of filming.

In another comparison between theater and film, deCordova discussed how in the early days of the film industry, good acting legitimized a star. Perhaps a star's acting was the first step in ending the initial fascination with the film medium and moving on to a focus on story and acting instead. This made me think, is the path to fame today similar and defined by the same things as it was in the beginning? It used to be that acting would make an actor a star, however, with the onslaught of reality television, anyone can become a star without having any specific skills. In films, we have kind of gone back to the beginning of the film medium in that people are becoming re-fascinated with technology. CGI, HD, home theater systems, 3D, etc. All of these technological advances are beginning to dominate stories and actors. Take Beowulf, for example. Using motion capture technology to capture the actors' performances nicely displayed the technology, however, the performances were dull and lacked emotion. In a way, we may have begun to go backwards in our fascination with films. With so many stars already in Hollywood, people may be becoming more interested in the CGI or the 3D, the things they don't see and hear about in the tabloids and on the news. For example, few people went to see Transformers for the stars, they went to see it for the Transformers (also, James Cameron has said that the star in Titanic is the boat, not Kate and Leo). Thus, the term "star" has become loosely applied to more than just actors but to technology and even animals (penguins could be considered stars of 2006). More than before, people are going to see films for the technology and/or the stars, not just the stars. This is not to say, however, that good acting goes unnoticed because it can still propel actors to stardom (for example, Ellen Page in Juno). However, if good acting was the only thing that makes a person a star today, we would be hearing more about the lives of what are now little known actors who have given dynamite performances in films. It poses the question of what makes a star out of one person but not one out of the next? This may have to do with the way our culture has built a world around stars. This is in contrast to early films in which deCordova says that intertextuality "restricted knowledge about the players to the textuality of the films they were in" (p. 25). At the time, people had to go see movies in order to know a star; today, all a person has to do is read Perez Hilton or glance at a cover of US Weekly. Stars have become much more accessible to us today and this has therefore contributed to the making of a star in our cultural sphere. Ultimately, the notion of a star and what the term even means today has changed drastically from the early days of the industry and continues to shape Hollywood and the world we live in.