Stars and Avatars

Abstract

And teach your friend some manners. Tell him without me he wouldn’t have a job, because without me there wouldn’t be any Paramount Studios.

Norma Desmond (Sunset Boulevard, 1950)

Early in Sunset Boulevard recognition (‘You’re Norma Desmond!’) gives way to affect (‘You used to be big.’). This subjective expression of affect in terms of size is then overturned in a denial of technological determinacy that attempts to restore human agency (‘I am big; it’s the pictures that got small!’). Articulating personal erosion in the production frame of mature technology, Sunset Boulevard enunciates the masochism of cultural prostheticism by telling the story of what can happen after submission to an assemblage – in this case of stardom. In actor network theory, such submission amounts to delegation, inscription or translation of human agency. The human ingredient, as Latour explains, ‘is in the delegation itself, in the pass, in the sending, in the continuous exchange of forms’.¹ The foundation that reconfigured the moving image as cinema and allowed a new industry to flourish was the exchange of forms that calibrated subjectivity, as Norma tells the gatekeeper at Paramount Studios (above).