To define stardom as “an
image of the way stars live” composed of a contradiction of the spectacular
with the ordinary, Dyer organizes this image around three themes: consumption,
success and ordinariness. ‘Consumption’ surrounds how the image of a star is a
model of consumption for the consumer society, identified by an expensive
lifestyle of large houses, swimming pools, high fashion, parties, etc.
‘Success’ deals with the myth of success, of how anyone can get to the top in
the American society. In relation to stardom, there are several contradicting
elements functioning in the success myth, such as ordinariness being a
distinctive feature of the star; the system rewarding talent (specialness);
luck launching a star’s career; and hard work being necessary to get to the top
of stardom. ‘Ordinariness’ also deals with a contradiction; it deals with how
stars represent typical people of our society, while they belong to a
completely different reality of society. There is a contradiction of stars
being like us, but also being something different transformed by consumption
and success. When writing about Elizabeth Taylor, Dyer’s following quote stood
out to me: “Her love life plus her sheer expensiveness are what make her
interesting, not her similarity to you and me”. This made me think about how
today's stardom is not that different from the one that Dyer analyzes here. A
contemporary example of this is the Kardashian-Jenner family. As they all became
more famous and made more money, their star status evolved around their
expensiveness, luxuriousness. Fans/tabloids/blogs have always cared for the
Kardashian-Jenners’ love life, but as they become increasingly less and less
economically similar to us, the star fascination grows. Keeping Up With The
Kardashians could be what makes their lives relatable by dealing with
universally human topics of love and family. However, this relatability is
contradicting since, in the same way that Dyer writes about star actors, they
are “absent from our actual day-to-day experience of reality”.
The Kardashians also mastered
a technique developed in the early stages of the consumerist Hollywood:
endorsements. Star endorsement is one of the elements mentioned by Charles Eckert
in “The Carole Lombard in Macy’s Window” as he explains the evolution of
capitalist practices in Hollywood, and, more importantly, how Hollywood
contributed to solidify consumerism. Eckert writes about how by adopting
merchandising strategies, Hollywood started to prefer modern films as they
provided more opportunities for product display and profit. Studios would even
ask firms to design products specifically for their movies in return of product
display to audiences of thousands. From Hollywood’s involvement with fashion,
all the way to home appliances and radio, Eckert shows how Hollywood
contributed to consumerism by creating “powerful bonds between the emotional
fantasy-generating substance of films and the material objects those films
contained”.
Not only objects were subject
to consumerism, however. In “Producing and Consuming the Woman’s Film:
Discursive Struggle in Now, Voyager”, Maria Laplace argues that in film,
consumerism can be seen in the capitalist attempt to profit on “women’s desire
for sexuality, power, freedom and pleasure”. Drawing from Now, Voyager to provide examples, Laplace writes about how these
variables, associated with passive consumption of mass-produced commodities, are
present in the conventions of the woman’s film. One of the conventions is that
the story centers on the heroine’s process of self-discovery. The text
emphasizes how Charlotte Vale (Bette Davis) finds her “cure” in the rediscovery
of her beauty and sexuality through expensive clothes, weight loss, and male recognition
– all things that encourage materialism and consumption. Speaking of constructed
female beauty as a source of self-worth boosting consumerism, should we go back
to the Kardashians?
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