"Marketing
tool" and "mechanism of identification", these are the two
phrases Marie Laplace uses when describing the way in which the star system
targets "the female spectator" (145). Laplace also writes
that stars are not solely made by an audience enjoying a film, but by the additional
knowledge the audience learns of the celebrity as a “real person” (146). But, what
happens when an audience begins to show
signs of media fatigue?
Take
Bette Davis for example. Laplace states that Davis was a media darling for
approximately five years (146). However, Davis acted for several decades. Davis
went on to receive an Oscar nomination for her role as an aging star in All About Eve (1950) and she gave a memorable performance in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962), so what happened to change her
importance in the eye of the media?
At the height of her career, Davis was loved for her “resourceful, ‘self-made’ woman” image and “down-to-earth” personality off-screen, but by the end of her popularity she became known as an argumentative diva (148). Yes, Davis was no longer a young woman and she no longer could play a youthful independent woman, but it is arguable that her aging appearance only made her more relatable. Not all audiences are made up of young women, and Davis had a huge following, but the youth market is coveted and she made the terrible mistake of embracing her age, and so she became less and less relevant as the years passed.
While Laplace is understandably only looking at a smaller section of Davis’s career, it is worth noting that Bette’s ambition and normalcy is what the media would later grow tired of seeing from her. Even today, there appears to be a time limit on how endearing it is for a celebrity to be “down-to-Earth” and “real”. Anne Hathaway and Jennifer Lawrence are recent examples of this treatment, and it begs the question does the star system only work for a limited amount of time or is there a flaw in being too easy-to-identify-with as a star?
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