Week 7 Reading Response #4

I found Gledhill’s argument about the role of the melodrama in both stardom, as well as cinema today, to be particularly of interest both in how we perceive stars onscreen, as well as in the role stars play in our everyday life. She notes that the popularity of the melodrama has given way to realism and I couldn’t help but think about reality television, and how this manipulated form of “realism” has actually blurred the lines between the melodrama and realism. Reality television, in its name alone, promises the voyeuristic entertainment of reality, and yet we all know that very little on these shows is “real.” However, they are constructed to seem real, and to suggest realism; in shows like “The Hills,” for example, they show people chatting inarticulately and incessantly, obsessing over the mundane goings-on of everyday life, the technology we are plugged into... There is very little substance to these shows, and yet they are full of emotion, with the characters constantly mugging for the camera. The melodrama, much like reality television, is overwrought with emotion; as Gledhill notes, this emotion is externalized through gesture and expression. Furthermore, “the moral forces” Gledhill speaks of, much like in the melodrama, are externalized in reality television in “physical being, dress, and above all, in action.” The people on these shows are inarticulate in expressing anything intelligently, especially something as deep as morality, and so they wear it on their sleeves.

But because this is a class about stars, and I’m too much of a snob to consider the people on reality television as anything more than novel celebrities, I’d like to take Gledhilll’s melodrama theory into consideration in the context of today’s cinema and stars. Perhaps melodrama has given way to realism because we no longer want to see our problems given significance onscreen; with the current administration, the problems in the Middle East, and the constant onslaught of self-help books telling us about a new problem we didn’t even know we had, our problems have enough significance in real-life that we don’t need to see them overly dramatized onscreen. Perhaps that’s why fantasy films like “Pirates of the Caribbean” or comedies like “Knocked Up,” which make light of our problems, are more successful at the box office. “Juno” is a perfect example: the film is about a teenager who gets pregnant. This idea is a melodramatic Lifetime movie just waiting to happen, and yet this film transcends that, confronting a real problem with comedy and heart. Juno seems much more real, much more relatable, because her problems aren’t overly signified – they just are, and she deals with them. I would much rather watch a teenager flippantly tell her dad, as she roots through the fridge, that she’s “dealing with things way beyond [her] maturity level,” than to watch her sob and sniffle it to him, because the first scenario allows for character and quirkiness; the second, suggestive of melodrama, is blander, more stereotypical and expected. And these days, we all want to possess Juno’s individuality, rather than the broad stereotypes of ‘woman in distress’ or ‘handsome heroic man,’ that perhaps better applied in, say, the WWII era.

I also think that perhaps we do not need the melodrama onscreen because we get our dose of it, in the context of stardom, in the tabloids. Gledhill comments, “If melodrama, while confirming the boundaries of social convention, derives its energy through the villain’s willingness to break them, the star system promotes model domestic lives irradiated by exciting hints at scandal” (213). We get our dose of excitement, of overly signified problems, not in the stars’ roles, but in their personal lives these days: take, for example, Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt. They may take on roles of realism (notably, Jolie in “A Mighty Heart”), and yet we get the melodrama in the tabloids, as they confirm the social convention of raising children, with just enough willingness to break social convention in Pitt divorcing Jennifer Aniston for Jolie, and starting a family out of wedlock. Their story is ripe with exciting hints of scandal.

I’d like to conclude with a look at King’s analysis of impersonation. Impersonation dictates that actors disappear into a role, and any trace of their personality that bleeds into the role is an indication of poor acting. I think that while this is a valid point on performance, as characters need to be original, unique, and organic, the audience also often goes to a movie expecting to see a star persona, and thus see that persona played out onscreen. Furthermore, I’d like to take King’s theory into question in the context of child actors – take Lindsay Lohan, who was raised to be a star. Her personal character is made up of stardom; she was never allowed to cultivate a sense of self before she was pushed into pretending to be other people, so there is little sense of self that can seep into her roles. It becomes self-reflexive. At a certain point, it seems that stars become lost in their own personas – is this the point at which they begin to impersonate themselves? And then, do they even exist outside of stardom? It is tragic cases like Britney Spears, who seems to exist in such a vacuum of stardom that the little girl from Louisiana she once was no longer is. And what about Paris Hilton, who’s famous simply for cultivating an image of herself – she’s said that the Paris on “The Simple Life” is an exaggeration of herself, so is she impersonating herself? With reality television and the immediacy of the internet and all of its gossip blogs, has stardom become so personal and self-reflexive that stars are impersonating themselves? Granted, King does acknowledge that for actors without ability to impersonate, cultivation of a persona is paramount to their staying relevant and serving as an economic commodity. However, the lines between impersonation and personification become blurred when one can make a star out of oneself, with no acting talents beyond that – Hilton’s “The Hottie and the Nottie” is a sad example of this. Gledhill notes, “The first promise of the star is access to the personality itself” (226) – have we become too reliant upon this, in the age of gossip blogs, paparazzi terrorism, and reality television?