Core Reading Post #4 The Actor as a Storyteller

Over the summer, I volunteered at L.A.'s International Short Film Festival and sat in on a discussion between actors and directors that centered on fostering better communication between the two.  One question that was proposed was whether actors are storytellers.  A heated debate arose between a director claiming actors are conduits of their storytelling but are not the storytellers themselves and an actress who insisted she was a storyteller because it was her mouth and expressions that told the story.  Barry King's article, "Articulating Stardom" speaks of the role of actors and the differences between film and theater for their roles.  King states that the full participation of an actor in the narrative as character depends upon the suppression of the literary conception of the author.  This is a statement I agree with in regards to film.  The actor is not the author, the director and screenwriter are, while the actor is one of many devices, often the most visual, used to tell the story.  It is interesting however that because actors are in the spotlight, they are referred to as possessing the film in an authorial way.  Perhaps this is because it is easier to say "Robert DeNiro's new film" instead of "the new film in which Robert DeNiro acts."  Actors become stars because they, as Barry King describes, are a "behavioral commodity" and it is their face that is used to market and sell the film, but perhaps they are given a little too much credit or at least credit in the wrong place.  This does not necessarily mean directors and screenwriters should become celebrities because that is not always a desire or reward, but they simply should be appreciated more.

In regards to Barry King's comparison of theater to film, and ultimate favoring of theater as an actor's medium, I do not believe such a comparison is fully dissected as theater and film have many more complexities to them than what was mentioned by King.  It is interesting, however, to think about the types of actors such as Daniel Radcliffe who began in the theater, transition to film, and then when they have proved their chops, go to Broadway.  If theater is truly an actor's medium, why do actors even aspire to work in film?  Is this aspiration purely an economic or egotistical motivation?  In the case of A Streetcar Named Desire, for me, this was an example of a play being converted to the screen and sticking true to its theatrical origins in terms of set design and location while enhancing the emotional impact of the character portrayals through the intimacy the camera provides.  Marlon Brando's performance did not take less skill because he got multiple takes instead of a singular shot.  If nothing, else, film provides a larger platform for great performances to be enjoyed by larger audiences.  Additionally, while there is more creative manipulation in film and more ways to harness technology, no level of editing can create a great performance that is essential to deeming a film great.

Core Post #3:: Performance and Collective Authorship

If acting is impersonation then who is the author? If performance is the actualization of the text, and if actualization encodes within it technical and creative labor, then who is the author? If the audience is dynamically integrated in the processes of signification then who is the author? Barry Hill's Articulating Stardom is concerned with how stars are constructed out of the interplay of representation and identification and how then stardom is an adaptive resource that delimits acting, interpretation and impersonation.

This essay delineates the different ways characters, personalities and images structure, organize and act as conduits for the the transference between the audience and the authors. My main interest throughout this essay was the idea of collective authorship, which neatly segues into a framework for collective ownership. This is particularly relevant given that as I write this, my twitter feed is burgeoning with discussions on the Oscars. The awards season is known to hierarchize various forms of labor, actors and directors often function as the "faces" of a film, while the producers are the film's more latent backbone. Other creative workers are relegated to their segmented positions -- costume designer, editor, cinematographer, etc. Rarely do those who are compartmentalized represent the totality of the film.

Why?

King's, concerned with the economy of the star system and cultural significance, provides intellectual excavation that collapses these hierarchies; it showcases the way in which how even though acting is subsumed in performance, it often gets equated with it. Actors, galvanized with the hypersemiotics of their characters, their public/private selves, the host ecosystem of which they are a part, get credited with the sole ownership of their performances and characters. King lambasts this logic, referring to being "authored" as "meaning emergent from a collective art of representation." This is incredibly exciting for anyone who thinks about the relationships between bodies, culture, labor and capital (me). King's articulations on stardom helped me inch closer to a film world which does not operate through machinations of hierarchies of celebrity, but one that acknowledges its allegiance to the audience and the processes of signification it is engendering, and also one that understands that "authorship" cannot encumber the labor contributions of "lesser" bodies. 

Supplemental Post #1 Dear Carly Rae Jepson, I Really Really Really Really Like You

After several tough months at work and trying to keep my head above water with school, I was so looking forward to checking out of life for a few hours and going to see Carly Rae Jepsen at The Grove in Anaheim. Since I don't live under a rock, I was familiar with the pop princess's 2012 smash "Call Me Maybe," but last fall a good friend of mine raved about Jepsen's sophomore album EMOTION, so I had to check it out.

And I loved it. The album is just pure fun. It's 80s pop, break up/make up songs galore, and totally underrated. I was super excited to see her live.

To be honest, I was really surprised by who my fellow concert goers were and how Jepsen and her music related to them. Apparently, I had been living under a rock and didn't know that Jepsen is an advocate for gay rights and has a HUGE following of gay fans. So I was rocking out as a single white female (I went to the concert by myself) with a slew of gay men and their boyfriends who could dance better than I could.

I thought it was ironic, considering we had just discussed the masculinity vs. femininity qualities in class. Jepsen is a straight pop artist who's singing about heterosexual love and relationships. She's never been heavily sexualized in the media. Her music has always been about emotion, fun, dance, and self actualization. Comparing her to the list of things we came up with for femininity, she doesn't match up, especially now that she's cut her hair short and showed up for her concert fully clothed. She didn't wear stilettos, she didn't wear pink, she was neither a sex kitten nor an ice princess, and although she had a band of boys...that girl owned the stage.

The men I was dancing next to didn't match up to our masculinity list either. And they were so completely diverse within the gay community. There was virtually an even amount of white gents and gents of color. There were a lot of interracial couples. There were guys in tight shirts with muscles and guys with big bellies wearing Carly Rae T-shirts. They danced with hands in the air and cuddled and swayed during slow songs.

The only thing screamed toward the stage was "We love you, Carly" There was no "you're so hot," "I wanna marry you," or "you're so sexy." It was just a bunch of people from all walks of life and different representations of masculinity and femininity singing and dance to music we all loved.

Supplemental Post #2: NY Times, Diversity, Inclusion, Disparities

This interactive has been making the rounds and provides anecdotal evidence for Hollywood's overwhelming white maleness via personal narratives.

http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/02/24/arts/hollywood-diversity-inclusion.html

I mulled over this brief tweet series about it, and think it is particularly relevant given that this week's focus is on performance. I also think these tweets provide connective tissue between last week on femininity and this coming week on "acting" -- what do we expect from young white starlets like jennifer lawrence, shailene woodley, margot robbie? There is a supposed "raw" quality to star energy & magnetism, one that can sometimes be attributed to a lack of training, an innocence. I think these actors benefit from the low bar set for their own performances and commitments, while highly trained and experienced black women continue to be willfully ignored.

Core Post 2: Big Women - Femininity and the Fifties

This week’s reading was relatable to me on a personal level on so many instances. Being a woman who doesn’t identify as straight, is not white, and is not traditionally ‘feminine’ by the traditional 1950’s model of femininity mostly captured by Marilyn Monroe, I’ve struggled a lot with accepting myself for not being a shining model of what Western culture idolizes. Surely this idea of not feeling desired/wanted can be applied to essentially any other ethnicity and/or sexual identity, etc. - though I can only speak for myself and my own experiences. I bring this up not to pity myself, but to put into perspective exactly how and why I feel this way, and to investigate how these structures affect my life, to ultimately figure out how I can work to change those for future generations. Dyer mentions in Heavenly Bodies that, “The white woman is offered as the most highly prized possession of the white man, and the envy of all other races. Imperialist and Southern popular culture abounds in imagery playing on twentieth century. Thus there is the notion of the universally desired ‘White Goddess’”(40). Tracing back to the foundation of America (and Western Imperialist culture, for that matter), the white woman has been seen as the token of desire and the ultimate pedestal of attraction that a man, and all of society should strive to be. Clearly, this isn’t attainable for anyone who isn’t white. While you can bleach your hair and potentially your skin, too, that is NOT something I’m about to do, because I am in the process of embracing my own beauty and individuality as a queer woman of color. When it comes down to it, Caucasian people / those of European descent are really just another race of people. The only reason they’re idolized is because of how our society has been programmed through years and years of reinforcement to teach new generations that that specific race is beautiful. In other cultures, beauty is defined in an entirely different way.

In the context of the entertainment industry, I’ve realized a lot of connections from the readings to the diversity crisis happening in The Academy. Dyer’s book was first published in 1986, and, unsurprisingly, not much has changed about the entertainment industry’s inclusion crisis. Similarly derived entirely from Western Imperialist culture, minorities have been shut out (as if it weren’t obvious enough already). I’m not going to emphasize this point even further - though I was very interested by his reference to the career of Lena Horne, who was a very light-skinned black woman. Dyer writes that, “she was unplaceable except as the ultimate temptress in an all-black musical, Cabin in the Sky, where the guarantee of her beauty resides in the very fact of being so light. Otherwise she could not really be given a role in a film featuring whites, because her very lightness make her an object of desire, thus confusing the racial hierarchy of desirability” (40). Though Lena Horne was very light-skinned and could pass as white if no one ever mentioned it in Hollywood, the mere fact that she was half black prevented her from getting roles because it could disrupt and confuse the entire social structure of desire within America. While I do think our perception of beauty is slowly being guided away from this traditional model from the 1950’s, I do think it’s still there. These are not issues of the past. After all, Marilyn Monroe’s career really only happened 60 years ago or so. I do think that the conversation is there, and we are living within a window of incredible opportunity. Things are currently changing, and I hope to be a part of this wave of change, though ultimately this systematic issue will be solved with time.

Supplemental Post #2: Lana Del Rey, (White) Womanhood, and Nihilism

In class today we began to discuss the notion of femininity and how whiteness plays into the construction of it. This discussion reminded me a great deal of the discourse around Lana Del Rey. She is often labeled one of the whitest and most feminine pop stars in American pop culture and pop music. Her mysteriousness and sex kitten characteristics embody the virgin and whore dichotomy. Her videos exemplify this with her brooding about older men dressed often in flower crowns and white lacy dresses echoing The Virgin Suicides. 

However, at the same time she is often characterized by her embracing of death and the morbid. This dichotomy of feminine and nihilism often confuses many media critics. I found this article by Salon to be of particular interest in this discussion because it poses that we as a culture are accustomed to this nihilism characterizing our male cultural figures. 

Supplemental Post: Kanye and Tay Tay

I was infuriated and perplexed after reading an article titled "Why Kanye West and Taylor Swift are Just As Bad As Each Other." As the title suggests, the article, written by Stephanie Smith-Strickland, argues there are commonalities between Taylor Swift and Kanye, specifically in their extreme presentations of stardom and self-celebration. Here is the general claim that this article makes: "Swift has merely cultivated a friendlier image and mastered the art of the humble-brag while Kanye apparently can’t be bothered to package his self-celebration in a way the rest of the world might find more palatable. We’re still swallowing the same pill for both, Kanye’s merely appears more bitter."

To give this discourse a little more context, we could start with Taylor's acceptance speech at the Grammy's for her Album of the Year Award just a couple of weeks ago, which is interpreted by many as an implied attack on Kanye's new song, "Famous." "As the first woman to win Album of the Year at the Grammys twice, I wanna say to all the young women out there: there are going to be people along the way who will try to undercut your success, or take credit for your accomplishments or your fame..." So how is this an attack on Kanye's new song? Well, there is this one line in his song: "I feel like me and Taylor might still have sex/ Why? Cuz I made that bitch famous," with the second line being a reference to when Kanye interrupted Taylor's acceptance speech at the VMAs in 2009.

Reading about the controversy at the Grammy's, I had nothing but utmost respect for Taylor's daring comment, which extends beyond her own strife with Kanye to an inspirational note to young female artists. To top it off, she attacked Kanye without even mentioning his name. Kanye, on the other hand, uses Taylor's name (not to mention without getting permission) in his song in a misogynistic manner and overtly takes credit for "making her famous." I can hardly imagine a sensible person who would agree that's true to any extent. So as you can imagine, it was hard for me to follow the article's logic.

To start it off, the article discusses the two stars' similar paranoia over paparazzi: Kanye fears "an unmanned paparazzi drone would crash-land in his backyard pool and electrocute his daughter, North West"; while Taylor "freaks out" about wire-taps and suspects a janitor is paid by TMZ to bug her production. Smith-Strickland argues that although their paranoia can be understood as byproducts of fame, the measures they take to quell that fear are both extreme. Sure, she's got a point here. She's basically saying that they are both enormous stars who are constantly fearful of paparazzi, which is absolutely correct. But does it warrant the claim that they are just as "bad" as each other?

Second, the article talks about how the two similarly engage in "decimation of enemies through song" and misconstruing general commentary as personal attacks. Examples include Taylor's Dear John (which was interpreted as an attack on her ex John Mayer) and Kanye's skit from "My Dark Twisted Fantasy," which was supposedly a "dig" on Amber Rose. The point is that these two stars have both been publicly hostile to other members of the entertainment industry and made similar mistakes when they misconstrued people's comments. To be fair, Smith Strickland's claim comes from the concern that Taylor seemingly gets away with it more than Kanye does because of the packaging of her comments and social media presence, which is nothing but the truth. But again, I had to ask, does it mean Taylor is just as "bad" as Kanye? Why does Taylor not get credit for managing her public image? It is only natural to curtail one's hostility or downplay one's mistakes in public when it goes overboard.

The article goes on to talk about the two stars' self-celebration in social media, their narcissism, and "shrewd legal teams and a huge appetite for profit." I won't go into detail about the validity of the examples, because they all share the theme that although Taylor has a lot of the same negative qualities as Kanye, she is the more embraced and respected one in popular culture.

It is an interesting argument and it makes some insightful points, but at the end of the day, this claim completely takes away the merit of star image control/construction that Taylor and her PR team excel in. I am not saying that Kanye should be more careful with his star image, because it is obvious that he chooses his route, and he is free to do whatever he wants to. I am merely saying that it is a star's responsibility to manage, control and construct his/her star image if he/she cares about it, and he/she should be at least acknowledged in doing a good job.

This article also carefully avoids discussing Kanye's overtly misogynistic overtones in his new song, "Famous," which is a quality that Taylor clearly does not possess. And if you think about it, Taylor would never go up on stage and interrupt Kanye's acceptance speech either, even if she felt that there was any injustice in the award. So, are there commonalities between the two stars? Of course there are; but is Taylor as "bad" as Kanye? Heck, no. One can defend Kanye's artistry, ambition, creativity and passion for art as much as he/she wants, but one can never defend his explicit misogyny.

Here is the article: http://www.highsnobiety.com/2016/02/22/kanye-west-taylor-swift-beef/?utm_campaign=SF+Highsnobiety+Post&utm_source=Facebook&utm_medium=Social

P.S. To be honest, I was disappointed when Taylor won Album of the Year, because Kendrick Lamar had an undoubtedly superior album, "To Pimp a Butterfly," than her "1989." But it's the Grammy's, so we kind of had to expect that. It's not Taylor's fault for winning the award, and now I'm glad that she won, because she called out Kanye perfectly.