Abstract
To paraphrase what Jacques Lacan has said about pictures, movie stars are traps for the gaze. As an aesthetic ingredient of mass art, the image of stars, as well as their persons, are as much an object of aesthetic predication and critical assessment as any inanimate artwork—items of attention and appreciation within a larger work. Associations with movie stardom may include a witches brew of qualities we may call “auratic.” Although there are numerous overlaps and intersections between literary fiction and fictional films, one stark difference among them is that novels have protagonists, but no stars. Our acquaintance with movie stars suggests the paradox that they are strangers we believe we know well. And, stars may well be the most important commercial element in widely distributed movies—not only for their box office success but also in a movie’s coming to be in the first place. For what happens when we see stars and how we come to know them and for the issue I will call inside/outside of movies, I will turn to Wittgenstein’s work on seeing-as and its set of related concepts.
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Notes
- 1.
Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis (Norton, New York, 1981), p. 89 (Lacan 1981). See also Stanley Cavell’s, “…some people are both good pitchers and good hitters, but there are so few…(So too)…it is surprising that the word actor keeps being used in place of the more beautiful word ‘star’; the stars are there only to be gazed at, after the fact, and their actions divine our projects.” Stanley Cavell, The World Viewed (Harvard University Press, Cambridge and London, 1979), p. 29. (Cavell 1979)
- 2.
Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon (Straight Arrow Books, 1975), p. 6. Mary Pickford is Little Mary and Kenneth Casey is The Biograph Boy. (Anger 1975)
- 3.
Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir (Oxford University Press, 1958), p. 28. (Malcolm 1958)
- 4.
- 5.
Noël Carroll, Ibid., p. 248.
- 6.
Noël Carroll, Ibid., p. 251.
- 7.
Noël Carroll, p. 250.
- 8.
In the case of the Cavell example, what is presupposed is knowledge of something from another fiction. However, Carroll also has in mind things like: we know certain facts, like the function of the “stewardesses” cart in the film United 93 (Carroll’s example). Here, there is no mention by Carroll of an allusion from the movie cart to the non-movie cart, merely something we need to know to better understand the smashing the cockpit scene in United 93, and there is no suggestion by him that our knowledge of this inanimate object is the result of our acquaintance with previous films, as it is, for example, with the reappearance of the Aston Martin in Skyfall. My guess is, that in order for this point of Carroll’s to be less than trivial, he must confine his examples to objects that are not overly obvious, like the cart in question rather than, say, the plane itself. In any case, what the example in United 93 has in common with the McCrea/Scott example is that each has the audience bring something to the film that is outside a particular fiction in order to understand or appreciate something in it to the extent it was intended.
- 9.
Noël Carroll, Ibid., p. 249.
- 10.
In Walter Benjamin’s essay, “Some Motifs on Baudelaire,” he cites Baudelaire as attributing a lost halo to lyric poets. In this own famous essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” he notes how certain artworks lose their auras, but then allows auras to persons, namely, stage actors, while denying them (writing in 1937) to film actors. Both essays are to be found in his Illuminations, Hannah Arendt editor and translator Schocken Books; 1969. (Benjamin 1969)
- 11.
Noël Carroll, Ibid., p. 261.
- 12.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Last Writings on the Philosophy of Psychology (The University of Chicago Press, 1982), p. 71. (Wittgenstein 1982)
- 13.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (Macmillan, New York, 1953), p. 196. (Wittgenstein 1953)
- 14.
Ibid., p. 196.
- 15.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, ibid., p. 81.
- 16.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Zettel (G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, ed., G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (University of California Press, 1967), p. 42. (Wittgenstein 1967)
- 17.
See Arthur Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1981), p. 163. (Danto 1981)
- 18.
Of course, while stardom implies fame as well as success, there will always be those who do not know, to put it awkwardly, that a star is a star, and they would miss out on that aspect of the reception of movies, perhaps in the same way as someone not knowing enough to get a good joke or someone failing to properly interpret a great painting.
- 19.
David Denby, The New Yorker, October 7, 2013, p. 88. (Denby 2013)
- 20.
I would like to thank Noel Carroll for this important reference.
- 21.
Boris Tomasevskij, “Literature and Biography,” in Twentienth Century Literary Theory, Vassilis Lambropoulos and David Neal Miller, eds. (State University of New York Press, 1987), p. 123. (Tomasevskij 1987)
- 22.
Boris Tomasevskij, p. 118. I thank Noël Carroll for this reference.
- 23.
Of course, stars sometimes play against their own personas. Here we may think of De Niro as Folker’s father-in-law or Russell Crowe in A Beautiful Mind. Put another way, if one were to see only Bogart’s hard boiled smooth-talking roles and his tough guy portrayals, one would never associate those with his under her thumb performance (Katherine Hepburn’s thumb) in The African Queen. A star like Meryl Streep continues to go through many twists and turns from Sophie’s Choice, Mama Mia, Adaptation and Thatcher. Nevertheless, that Bogart and Streep are stars, despite their break from familiar or routine roles, is a matter external to any fiction in which they present themselves but, at some vague point, a constant throughout their careers.
- 24.
Peter Mendelsund, What We See When We Read (Vintage, New York, 2014), p. 2. (Mendelsund 2014)
- 25.
Ibid., p. 2.
- 26.
Ibid., p. 302.
- 27.
Carroll, p. 258.
- 28.
Cavell, p. 26.
- 29.
Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, Hannah Arendt, editor; Harry Zohn, trans. (Schoken Books, New York, 1969), p. 229. (Benjamin 1969)
- 30.
Walter Benjamin, Ibid., p. 229.
- 31.
Frank Capra, The Name above the Title: an Autobiography (MacMillan, New York, 1971), p. 455. (Capra 1971)
- 32.
It should be said that there are many questions to be raised about Benjamin’s aura, even within the framework of its acceptance as a valuable explanatory concept. I will ignore these questions, except to mention, for example, that it is unclear whether auratic art is coextensive with all original or genuine art in the evaluative sense or not, that is, it is not clear whether Benjamin meant that, for example, if a painting did not have an aura, it could not be art. And, one might wonder if there is there a weak sense and a strong sense of aura, where some conditions like the emanation of an atmosphere hold and other, stronger conditions, where a subjective element like contemplation is intimately involved. (Adorno criticizes Benjamin for the subjectivity of the aura.) So, I would not be signing in on those, but instead I will move on to his account of aura and persons in order to get to movies stars, as Benjamin turns away from auratic objects of the inanimate kind.
- 33.
Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 214.
- 34.
Ibid., p. 174.
- 35.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty, G. E. M. Anscombe and G. H. von Wright, editors; Denis Paul and G. E. M. Anscombe, trans. (J. & J. Harper, 1969), p. 6. (Wittgenstein 1969b)
- 36.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p. 188.
- 37.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, Peter Winch, trans. (Blackwell, 1969a), p. 75. (Wittgenstein 1969)
- 38.
Kenneth Anger, Hollywood Babylon, (Straight Arrow Books 1975), p. 6. (Anger 1975)
- 39.
Louis Giannetti, Understanding Movies, 7th ed. (Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1996), p. 253. (Giannetti 1996)
- 40.
Frank Capra, p. 447.
- 41.
Frank Capra, Ibid. p. 447.
- 42.
- 43.
Geoffry Nowell-Smith, in Peter Wollen, “The Auteur Theory,” in Film Theory and Criticism, eds. Gerald Mast and Marshall Cohen (Oxford, 2nd Edition, New York, 1979, p. 682. (Nowell-Smith 1979)
- 44.
Gertrude Stein, Picassso (Beacon Press, Boston, 1959) p. 27. (Stein 1959)
- 45.
Allan Janik and Stephen Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna (Simon and Schuster, New York, 1973), p. 13.
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Goldblatt, D. (2017). Seeing Stars: the Reception and Ontology of Movie Stars. In: Hagberg, G. (eds) Wittgenstein on Aesthetic Understanding. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-40910-8_11
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