Abstract
The career of John Cusack illustrates the theory that celebrity reluctance stores rather than dissipates energy that can then be put to other, in his case political, uses. This chapter argues that Cusack’s “picture personality” as the awkward charmer buttresses his public professions of reluctant stardom. One finds reluctance in the celebrity of John Cusack at several levels: in his explicit public statements on the nature of fame, as a motif in his roles that spills over into understandings of his own public persona, and as a theory of acting that infuses all he does as a performer. The last section considers how Cusack’s reluctance releases energies that he turns to the cause of anti-neoliberal activism.
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Notes
- 1.
Such sports-fan postings are consonant with, for example, his 1988 film Eight Men Out, a cinematic treatment of the fixing of the 1911 World Series. Director John Sayles even joked that he picked Cusack and Charlie Sheen not so much because they were stars on the rise but because they could play ball. In an important sense, this was not a joke; working with a smaller budget that made painstaking digital alterations an impossibility, Sayles needed actors who could move convincingly enough like ball players.
- 2.
Other Fall Out Boy songs make references to Cusack, such as “A Little Less Sixteen Candles…A Little More Touch Me” and the video for “The Best of Me”/“The Starting Line” that parodies Say Anything’s iconic boom-box scene.
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York, L. (2018). Inviting the Shadow to the Party: John Cusack and the Politics of Reluctance. In: Reluctant Celebrity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71174-4_2
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