Reluctant Celebrity: Affect and Privilege in Contemporary Stardom

158 Pages·2018·1.2 MB·English

by  Lorraine York (auth.)

R eluctant Celebrity
Affect and Privilege in Contemporary Stardom
LORRAINE YORK
Reluctant Celebrity
Lorraine York
Reluctant Celebrity
Affect and Privilege in Contemporary Stardom
Lorraine York
McMaster University
Hamilton, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-71173-7 ISBN 978-3-319-71174-4 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71174-4
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962436
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018
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A
cknowledgments
I am anything but reluctant to admit how much this book and its author
have benefitted from the labour, thinking, and care of others. I am fortu-
nate to work with generous faculty and graduate colleagues in McMaster
University’s Department of English and Cultural Studies. I thank, in par-
ticular, former research assistants Kasim Husain, Pamela Ingleton, and
Katja Lee, each of whom has contributed energetically and so intelligently
to this project. I am indeed fortunate to have been able to work with you.
Sarah Brophy, as always, has been a source of valuable recommendations
for reading: thank you for suggesting Eva Ilouz’s book! I thank Pamela
Ingleton and Katja Lee for their perceptive and searching critiques of the
Introduction and first chapter, from which I benefitted greatly. Those
chapters are better because of their suggestions. I’m also aware that I am
privileged to have my research supported by the Faculty of Humanities’
Senator William McMaster chair in Canadian Literature and Culture. I
learn every week from colleague-friends Daniel Coleman, Chandrima
Chakraborty, Sarah Brophy, Nadine Attewell, and others, embodiments all
of critical generosity, and from our supportive, creative thinker of a depart-
ment chair, Peter Walmsley. And I thank, by now, several cohorts of stu-
dents in my graduate seminar on Celebrity Culture for keeping my
thinking about this endlessly fascinating subject fresh and dynamic.
I have been beyond lucky to have brilliant people want to collaborate
with me, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to me. I’ve been
honoured to continue working with Katja Lee on our mutual obsession
with all things celebrity, even from the distance of Australia. Co-editing
our volume Celebrity Cultures in Canada was a delight. A special thank
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
you (the third on this page!) to Pamela Ingleton for bringing her deep
expertise on social media out to play with my interest in reluctant celeb-
rity. I’ve never had so much fun keeping up with those Kardashians.
Jocelyn Smith’s intelligent and witty research on fandom, girlhood, and
socially prescribed femininity is a constant model of how to do academic
work joyfully and for the right reasons. And my cross-Atlantic collabora-
tion with the University of Leeds’s Amela De Falco on Alice Munro, eth-
ics, and affects, has been sustaining and inspiring.
Thank you to the conference organizers, and especially to Gaston
Franssen, who organized the international Celebrity Studies conference in
Amsterdam in 2016, where Pamela and I took our Kardashian work and
I shared thoughts about reluctance as a neoliberal affect, and to the
Carleton University Prestige of Literature conference organizers whose
plenary invitation allowed me to do some embarrassingly preliminary
musing on this subject in 2014. Many thanks to the Association for
Canadian College and University Teachers for letting me show beefcake
photos of Daniel Craig as part of my contribution to their 2017 Toronto
conference, and to the Popular Culture Association of Canada, the Popular
Culture Association (U.S.) and the Canadian Association of Cultural
Studies, who, at their 2016 meetings, allowed me to hold forth on reluc-
tant celebrity as neoliberal affect, De Niro’s taciturnity, and John Cusack’s
activism.
I appreciate the labour that sustains academic archival work; in my case,
I thank Elizabeth Garver, French Collections Research Associate at the
Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, for generously
providing helpful information while I was planning my trip to their Robert
De Niro archive. Once there, I benefitted from assistance above and
beyond from Michael Gilmore, Library Assistant II in charge of cinema.
In addition to his knowledgeable guidance to the sizeable De Niro archive
and interest in my project, I appreciated being greeted with a cheery “Back
for more Bobby D?” as I set up for another day in the archives.
More locally, I thank the staff of the Queen Video on—no surprises
here—Queen Street West in Toronto for assistance with difficult-to-locate
materials. (You are missed!)
At Palgrave Macmillan, I am grateful for the keen suggestions and
insights of the two anonymous readers of my manuscript—yet another
form of invisible labour that sustains academic work. And Lina Aboujieb,
Senior Commissioning Editor for Film, Television, and Visual Culture at
ACKNOWLEDGMENT S vii
Palgrave Macmillan UK, has been responsive and enthusiastic about the
project from the beginning. Thanks also to Scott Uzelman and the copy-
editing team at SPi Global for their work on the manuscript.
Love and all admiration to my circle of wonderful people: Michael
Ross, Anna Ross, Silvia Ross, Mark Chu, David Ross-Chu, Isabella Ross-
Chu, Charles Ross, Reg and Carol York, Peggy Frank and Bob Farrell,
Marie and Dave Thody, Pat and Dave Homenuck and their families. I am
ridiculously lucky to be in your lives.
c
ontents
1 Treasonous Drift: Celebrity Reluctance as Privilege 1
2 Inviting the Shadow to the Party: John Cusack
and the Politics of Reluctance 27
3 Robert De Niro’s (In)articulate Reluctance 67
4 “I’m Not Going to Be the Poster Boy for This.
Although I am the Poster Boy”: Daniel Craig’s
Reluctant Bonding 101
5 Conclusion: Reluctance’s “Other” 137
Index 147
ix
CHAPTER 1
Treasonous Drift: Celebrity Reluctance
as Privilege
As the autumnal closing stanza of Robert Frost’s “Reluctance” suggests,
the frame of mind that we commonly style “reluctant” invariably prompts
thoughts of mixed feelings and ambivalence:
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with grace to a reason
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season? (29)
On one hand, to “go with the drift of things” without paying heed to the
still, small voice of resistance is to betray that countervailing regret, to act
with apparently simple decisiveness when one’s inner state is, on the con-
trary, muddled and vexed. On the other hand, to acknowledge openly the
reluctance that acts like a frictional drag upon our emotional propulsion—
our urge, or the urgings of others, that we “yield with grace to a reason”
and move on—can equally inspire thoughts of treasonous self- sabotage:
the antipathies that rumble mutinously beneath the surface might well
destroy the impression that we are “getting with the program,” as the
contemporary phrase has it. Precisely because this affective state, reluc-
tance, marries apparent equanimity and roiling emotional countercur-
rents, I find it a rich point of access to the phenomenon by which certain
individuals develop a hyper-visible social persona: celebrity.
© The Author(s) 2018 1
L. York, Reluctant Celebrity,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71174-4_1
2 L. YORK
This is not to say that the performed celebrity self is necessarily a
smooth, compliant surface beneath which antipathetic forces bubble;
often, resistances to performing one’s celebrity appear at the surface,
either persistently or intermittently. As Richard Dyer says of his three case
studies in Heavenly Bodies, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Robeson and Judy
Garland, “all in some measure revolted against the lack of control they felt
they had,” a revolt that articulates a reaction against the conditions of
labour under capitalism (6). What interests me in this book, though, is a
slightly different articulation of that reaction: not revolt and resistance, as
much as their weak cousin “reluctance”—a tepid disinclination that, I
argue, is particularly suited to the neoliberal capitalism that has stepped up
the demands upon all social actors to “lean in,” move forward, squash
resistance and dissent, and harness their emotional labour to the cause.
Still, the reluctance of celebrities to be celebrities does not automatically
betoken resistance to the social order, though it might be put to that
use—or it might equally shore up hegemonic values. It is, however, in all
of its manifestations, a product of privilege: the power to publicly avow
one’s mixed feelings, one’s treasonous disinclination to “lean in,” is one
that not all subjects can claim.
In the chapters that follow, I examine three celebrities whose public
stance has been widely recognized to be reluctant, by which I mean that
they persistently depart from a smoothly compliant public performance of
the common expectations of public personalities. It is no coincidence that
these three reluctant celebrities —John Cusack, Robert De Niro, and
Daniel Craig—are white, straight males who inhabit their raced, sexed and
gendered privilege with widely varying degrees of self-awareness, for it is
that privilege that allows them to fashion their reluctance and to place it so
confidently on public display.
In spite of the publication of a number of studies that have engaged
with celebrity phenomena from a feminist standpoint, celebrity studies has
been somewhat slow to consider the gendered dimensions of celebrity in
a systemic fashion. So argue Su Holmes and Diane Negra in introducing
their 2011 collection of essays In the Limelight and Under the Microscope,
the first volume to focus in a sustained way on the gendering of fame.
Holmes and Negra rightly note that “reality TV celebrity is often posi-
tioned as ‘feminine’” in its “apparent evacuation of (masculine-defined
and active) concepts such as ‘talent’ or work” and because of “its micro-
obsession with the ‘private’” (6), but I suggest in this volume that the
gendering of celebrity is more pervasive and fundamental. There is, in the