PART THREE
Star Performance
7
Spectacular Acts
Stars are performed brands. Whatever other factors contribute to the
production of stardom, film stars are only stars because they perform in
films.
So far this study has explored the broad contextual conditions of
industrial structures, company operations, market trends and contractual
arrangements for how these shape the symbolic commerce of stardom. Any
analysis of film stardom must include, however, consideration of how
stardom is produced on-screen. Script, cinematography, lighting and editing
are active in the construction of the star performance. Agents, managers,
producers, writers, directors and the technical crew all play their parts in
bringing the starring act to the screen. But these inputs exist beyond the star.
The star specifically contributes to the star performance through acting, the
mode of performance specifically concerned with the representation of
dramatic character through the media of the voice and body. It is the
concern of this chapter to examine the dynamics at work in the symbolic
construction of the star performance. It looks at the star performance as an
effect of both narrative and spectacle produced through elements of film
form and enacted by the star’s voice and body. Looking at performance, the
chapter therefore explores how the star brand is enacted on-screen.
To anchor this discussion, the chapter focuses on a single star in a specific
film. According to the Quigley poll, from 1990 to 2009 Tom Cruise was the
period’s most enduring money-maker (see Table 1.1). In the period Cruise
maintained a record of box-office hits rivaled only by Tom Hanks (see
Figure 5.1). In the year it was released, Mission: Impossible 2 (2000)
finished second in the annual box-office rankings for North America and
scored the highest gross of any film in the international market: M:I-2 took
$125.4 million domestically and $331 million internationally. Produced by
Cruise’s sindie Cruise/Wagner Productions for Hollywood major
Paramount, M:I-2 became Cruise’s second most commercially successful
film in terms of worldwide gross (surpassed by War of the Worlds (2005)
with $591.7 million worldwide). Exhibitors voted Cruise the top moneymaker
for 2000 and when James Ulmer compiled his Ulmer Scale that year,
Cruise was ranked third after Julia Roberts and Hanks, with a bankability
rating of 98 percent.1 In Ulmer’s estimation, Cruise was “worth every
penny. He has never had a bad performance. And he promotes his films”
(2000: 15).
With M:I-2, Cruise appeared in an action drama, a genre he’d already
built a strong association with. Cruise first played Ethan Hunt – agent with
the secretive Impossible Missions Force (IMF) – in Mission: Impossible
(1996), and returned four years later to reprise the role for this second
installment of the series. M:I-2 constructs a tale around the endeavors of
Hunt and his IMF team to foil a plot which threatens to not only hold a
major drugs manufacturer to ransom but also unleash a deadly virus which
could kill millions. At the research laboratory of Biocyte Pharmaceuticals in
Sydney, molecular biologist Dr. Vladimir Nekhorvich (played by Radé
Sherbedgia) has cultivated the super-virus “Chimera” and antidote
“Bellerophon.” Anyone infected with Chimera dies a horrible death in a
matter of hours but at the start of the film Nekhorvich injects himself with
Chimera and urgently leaves with a consignment of Bellerophon to take a
flight to the US and seek the assistance of his old friend “Dimitri.” On the
plane it is revealed Dimitri is actually Cruise/Hunt. But all is not as it
seems. Nekhorvich has been duped for “Hunt” is actually rogue former IMF
agent Sean Ambrose (played by Dougray Scott) who kills the scientist to
steal the Bellerophon. Ambrose deceived Nekhorvich by wearing a rubber
mask exactly reproducing Cruise/Hunt’s face and an electronic chip to
replicate his voice. Ambrose and his gang of accomplices escape, taking
Nekhorvich’s case carrying the Bellerophon. Before his death Nekhorvich
sent a video recording of his planned movements to IMF headquarters, and
so the real Hunt is recalled from vacation to track Ambrose. To assist him,
Hunt must link up with Ambrose’s former lover, British professional thief
Nyah Nordoff-Hall (played by Thandie Newton). There then unfolds a
narrative in which Nordoff-Hall goes undercover by re-acquainting herself
with Ambrose but when he discovers the deception, her life is threatened.
Along the way, Hunt learns Nekhorvich developed Bellerophon for the
scientific purpose of creating as an antivirus to combat all strains of
influenza but in order to develop the cure it was necessary to cultivate the
lethal Chimera. Biocyte’s CEO sponsored the research to exploit the
commercial value of Bellerophon and so Ambrose has stolen the drug to
extort a heavy ransom from Biocyte and he intends to use the funds to buy
share options in the company. When he killed Nekhorvich, however,
Ambrose was unaware the scientist was carrying the virus in his own blood.
Ambrose therefore finds himself with a cure but no virus and so must obtain
Chimera before he can leverage the deal with Biocyte. After Nordoff-Hall
injects herself with the last sample of Chimera to avoid Ambrose killing
her, she has only hours to live and the film builds to a climax in which Hunt
kills Ambrose, destroys the evil plot, retrieves the Bellerophon, and saves
Nordoff-Hall.2
Coming after two decades in which action cinema had played a large part
in defining commercial popularity, M:I-2 appeared on the cusp of change in
the film market before fantasy and comic book franchises went on to define
popularity over the next decade. Working with this example, the chapter
therefore analyzes star performance in a film which not only characterized
popular Hollywood in the period but also marked a commercial high point
in Cruise’s career. Furthermore, as M:I-2 includes a number of selfconscious
references to Cruise’s branded image, then the film itself reflects
on stardom and the workings of the star act.
Star Attraction
Writing on early cinema, Tom Gunning describes the tendency for many
films to revel in the “ability to show something” (1986: 57) as forming what
he calls the “cinema of attractions.” In these cases, film created
exhibitionist spectacle, contrasting with the voyeuristic tendency of
narrative film to tell stories. Once narrative production came to dominate,
Gunning suggests this exhibitionist tendency went “underground, both into
certain avant-garde practices and as a component of narrative films, more
evident in some genres (e.g. the musical) than in others” (p. 57). However,
this view maybe unnecessarily limiting, for as a display constructed to be
looked at, any film remains to some extent a form of show or spectacle.
Like theater or opera, film is a “performing art,” a type of show staged for
public exhibition. Narrative film stages stories, combining the voyeuristic
representation of symbolically constructed diegetic worlds with the
exhibitionist presentation of spectacular show.
As figures in film narrative, actors are situated within these dual aspects.
Actors represent characters in the narrative but by appearing in a medium of
public presentation they are also spectacle. Stardom arises from the
hierarchical distinctions between actors formed by the differential
distribution of wages, the creative decision-making powers granted to
actors, or the uses of actor names in marketing media. But the hierarchy of
actors is also produced on-screen. By appearing in a performance medium,
all film actors are spectacle. Stars, however, are distinguished from this
general ensemble – that is, the general spectacle of actors – for they are
spectacular figures. Compared to their fellow performers, stars are
presented in ways to appear more fabulous, compelling, marvelous,
extravagant, incredible, dazzling, stunning and exciting.
This spectacularization of the star is a symbolic effect with a commercial
purpose. While it may be debatable whether the presence of stars can or
cannot actually sell films (see Chapter 5), regardless of outcome, if stars are
to have any value they must at least be visible. Film is a medium of
visibility – it shows something – but intensifying the visibility of the actor
is fundamental to the work of the star performance so that the star becomes
an attraction within an attraction. It is by spectacularizing star performance
that the star is shown off as a film’s key performing asset. While the
spectacularization of the actor is constant throughout star performance, it
reaches particular highpoints where moments are staged precisely to display
the star attraction. Most obvious of these moments is the star entrance.
Before the film is viewed, before the film is consumed, anticipation of a
star’s performance is built through advance marketing media. It may very
well be this hype which draws the consumer to the film. When the film
therefore plays, the star’s entrance is a moment of great significance and
importance, for it fulfils anticipation by finally revealing the star. This game
of anticipation/fulfillment, however, can only partly explain the significance
of the star entrance. Conceivably, many viewers may never have
encountered the marketing for a film they watch, or may have no
recollection of it by the time they come to see a film, particularly if viewed
for the first time in a secondary release windows such as DVD or free-to-air
television. Consequently the star entrance stages the more general function
of announcing the lead performing attraction. The star entrance serves both
the presentational and representational aspects of narrative film with the
spectacular purpose of announcing “here is the star” and the narrative
purpose of announcing “here is the person who (very likely) will play the
central character.”
Due to its importance and significance, the star entrance is a highly
orchestrated moment. In M:I-2, Cruise initially appears on the flight with
Sherbedgia/Nekhorvich, but as will soon transpire, this is actually Ambrose
masquerading as Hunt. Cruise as Hunt therefore actually enters the film in
the next scene following the hijacking of the flight. An accelerated
helicopter shot sweeps over the barren landscape of Dead Horse Point State
Park, Utah, to pick out Cruise/Hunt precariously rock climbing at a dizzy
height on a narrow ridge without ropes or protection (Figure 7.1).
Cruise/Hunt is a man alone, risking his life in an inhospitable wilderness.
Initially it is not entirely clear who the figure is for the camera is too far
away, but as the camera nears the climbing figure, so Cruise’s face becomes
visible. Given the hazards of the situation it would be reasonable to
presume this is a stunt double or the creation of computer-generated effects,
although publicity around the film worked hard to assure Cruise was
actually climbing the rock protected by ropes removed in post-production.3
Both character and star are shown to be in danger, and as critic Manohla
Dargis (2000) noted, the actuality of Cruise performing the stunt creates a
spectacle of the star running counter to the digitally generated show
commonly seen in action cinema of the period.
Much has been made in the entertainment press … that Cruise performed
many of his own stunts … And it’s no wonder – the climbing scene is
spectacular, both in its panoramic beauty and … the audience’s shivery
thrill of recognition that it’s the star himself … In the age of the digital,
this sort of flamboyant stuntwork might seem anachronistic … But
Cruise’s physical daring is necessary precisely because digital effects
have become so persuasive. In the age of virtual reproduction, the star
body has become the test bed of authenticity, the last stand of the real.
Figure 7.1 Extravagant star entrance: Mission: Impossible 2.
Producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner; director John Woo; distributed by Paramount Pictures.
Through music, the scene also makes one of what will become many selfreflexive
plays on Cruise’s on-screen identity, for the soundtrack carries the
song “Souca Na Na,” a reworking by Zap Mama of the frequently covered
standard “Iko Iko,” the song playing over Cruise’s entrance during the
opening credits of Rain Man (1988). Here music adds to the
spectacularization of the star with an inter-textual reference that has no
other purpose than to foreground a common star presence between two
films, forming an in-joke for any viewers appreciative of the allusion.
As if the climb were not dangerous enough already, Cruise/Hunt leaps
from one crag to another but in doing so misses his footing, sliding over the
edge and only saving himself from certain death by grabbing a hold with his
very fingertips (Figure 7.2). When he has recovered his control,
Cruise/Hunt completes the climb, but no sooner has he reached the summit
than he is delivered a message from his IMF controller. Potentially this
could have been transferred very easily by hand, but this is the IMF and
they don’t do things that way. Instead, the delivery involves a helicopter, a
missile and a pair of customized sunglasses through which play a prerecorded
briefing informing Cruise/Hunt of his mission to retrieve Chimera
and link up with Newton/Nordoff-Hall (Figure 7.3). The moment creates a
further reflexive gesture towards Cruise’s on-screen identity, for by the time
of M:I-2 the sight of Cruise wearing black sunglasses had become a
common image familiar from the star’s earlier performances in Days of
Thunder (1990), Rain Man and Top Gun (1986) (where he became a
product placement model for Ray-Ban shades), and receding back to the
moment when he first appears in Risky Business (1982) (Figure 7.4).
Following in the tradition of the Mission: Impossible television series, once
the briefing has played out, Cruise/Hunt is warned the message will self
destruct in five seconds, and he tosses away the glasses just as they explode
(Figure 7.5). With the flashy camerawork, amazing scenery, death defying
antics, highly contrived situations, explosive pyrotechnics, and selfreflexive
quotations, Cruise enters the film in a moment where spectacle
mounts on spectacle. This scene could be regarded as “excess” for it is
highly elaborate and apart from Hunt receiving the briefing it has absolutely
no narrative consequence. However the purpose of the scene has little to do
with telling the story and more to do with creating show, for which it is not
at all excessive but entirely essential, for it serves the key purpose of
introducing and establishing Cruise as the film’s spectacular attraction.
Figure 7.2 Cruise/Hunt hangs on: Mission: Impossible 2.
Producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner; director John Woo; distributed by Paramount Pictures.
Figure 7.3 Cruise/Hunt takes a message: Mission: Impossible 2.
Producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner; director John Woo; distributed by Paramount Pictures.
Figure 7.4 Cruise and shades: Risky Business.
Producers Jon Avnet and Steve Tisch; director Paul Brickman; distributed by Warner Home Video.
Figure 7.5 Cruise/Hunt accepts his mission: Mission: Impossible 2.
Producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner; director John Woo; distributed by Paramount Pictures.
With the “false” appearance on the plane followed by the real appearance
on the rock, Cruise’s arrival in M:I-2 forms a double entrance, a convention
common to many of the star’s films. Frequently Cruise first appears in
moments where he is somehow initially obscured or disguised, so that his
entrance stages a revelation within a revelation. For Minority Report
(2002), when Cruise first appears he is seen from behind until a cut reverses
the angle through 180 degrees to show him face-on walking towards the
camera. With Interview with the Vampire (1994), it takes seven minutes
before Cruise enters, and when he does, only his hand and then his back are
seen before his face is fully revealed. Likewise, in Collateral (2004), with
13 minutes already passed a hand is first seen before the full body of the
star is shown.
Mission: Impossible presents another case of the double entrance. Cruise
appears in the very opening shot of the film but his presence is obscured for
Hunt is wearing a disguise in order to trick information from an
interrogatee, thereby deferring the star’s entrance for a couple of minutes
until the moment where he reveals himself by removing the latex mask he is
wearing. That gesture demonstrates a more standard convention of the star
entrance, in which the showing of the face – usually framed in medium shot
or close-up – becomes the absolute confirmation of the star’s presence.
“Several different bodies,” Richard Maltby notes, “may be used to construct
a single performance: voices are dubbed, stunt artists are used for
dangerous action sequences, and sometimes hand models and body doubles
provide body parts to substitute for the actors” (2003: 371). Notably, when
substituting stars with stunt men and women, or body doubles for nude or
sex scenes, the face is obscured so as not to give the game away and break
the illusion. With so many other bodies capable of dissembling, it is the
face which ultimately authenticates the star’s presence. Consequently, a
great deal of the spectacularizing of the star is actually condensed into the
showing of the face. Revealing the body, or parts of the body, is just not
enough to confirm the presence of the star, and so it is only with the show
of the face that the star ultimately becomes visible. Roland Barthes
described Greta Garbo as “an admirable face-object” (1957: 56) and the
same could be said of stars in general, for their status as both actor and asset
is quintessentially tied into the objectification of the face. In many ways,
the star entrance is a moment predicated on the revelation or
spectacularization of the face as the core physical, symbolic and
commercial feature of star performance.
Many of Cruise’s entrances are extravagant, becoming “over the top”
moments. M:I-2 presents a particularly extravagant star entrance and
similar spectacular moments are created for Cruise’s entrances in Days of
Thunder, Jerry Maguire (1996) and War of the Worlds. To the sound of
heavy drum beats, Cruise first appears in Days of Thunder riding a
motorbike on an empty racetrack but is initially obscured for he is held at a
distance in extreme long shot and it is not until he nears the camera and his
face becomes visible that he is clearly identified. On Jerry Maguire, at first
only Cruise’s voice is heard narrating over a montage of sports men and
women, until two minutes into the film he becomes visible as he springs
into shot from behind a bank of television monitors, putting his face on
show. Cruise/Maguire is attending a convention as the eponymous sports
agent where he plays the room by swiftly moving between delegates and
fast talking promises to everyone he meets. Great energy is brought to the
moment, for the scene is constructed as a rapid series of short shots which
are spatially and temporally discontinuous but are given coherence by the
central presence (i.e. the face) of the star. Overall, the speed of the cuts and
the jumps in time and space give Cruise/Maguire a “whirlwind” entrance.
Maguire dominates the narrative situation as Cruise dominates the screen.
With War of the Worlds an extreme aerial long shot swoops over a freight
yard, and as it hones in on a crane lifting containers, Cruise as Ray Ferrier
is revealed seated in the cabin. Cruise/Ferrier has been in the shot from the
very beginning but the camera works to find and isolate him in the enormity
of the space, with the search ending once his face becomes visible.
In contrast to these ostentatious moments, Cruise’s arrival in other films is
comparatively subdued and understated, yet still shots are organized to
stress the importance and significance of the star entrance. In A Few Good
Men (1992), following a soldier’s death at the US Naval Base at
Guantanamo Bay, a captain assures his fellow officers that the ensuing
investigation will be in safe hands as “division will assign the right man for
the job.” This immediately cues a cut to a new scene where Cruise as
military attorney Lt. Daniel Kaffee is found on a playing field practicing his
batting skills. When compared to the extravagance of M:I-2 or Days of
Thunder, Cruise’s entrance in A Few Good Men appears restrained, but the
moment is still constructed as special and the star is distinguished from the
general spectacle. Although the shot is constructed entirely for Cruise’s
moment of appearance, for a fleeting instant he doesn’t emerge until
walking into shot from frame left. Another actor appears in the background
but use of a shallow depth of field places him out of focus while Cruise is
crisply captured in the foreground (Figure 7.6). In Far and Away (1992) and
Vanilla Sky (2001), Cruise is simply revealed by the camera tilting upwards
or making a short mobile sweep across a room, while in The Firm (1993)
Cruise is distinguished from the melee of a basketball game by isolating
him in a medium shot as he utters an expletive. Although less “showy” than
Cruise’s hyperbolic entrances, these moments nevertheless still work to
show off the star.
Figure 7.6 Subdued star entrance: A Few Good Men.
Producers David Brown, Rob Reiner and Andrew Scheinman; director Rob Reiner; distributed by
Columbia TriStar Home Entertainment.
As a moment entirely orientated toward displaying the actor, the entrance
marks the most obvious instance of spectacularizing the star. Yet the
entrance is just part of the overall dynamic running throughout star
performance which continually seeks to exhibit the key performing
attraction.
The Performance of the Medium
In the star performance, the combination of story and show, of narrative and
spectacle, is achieved at two levels. Together the technological and formal
elements of photographic framing, camera movement, lighting, editing and
sound recording mediate the presentation and representation of the actor to
form the primary performance of the film medium. At a secondary level, the
performance of the actor sees the body and voice used as media to represent
but also present the character. This dual performance – of medium and actor
– applies to all performers in film but contributes to the production of
stardom by how elements of film form and the actions of the voice and
body are used to hierarchically emphasize and thereby spectacularize the
presence of particular performers.
Early in M:I-2 Cruise/Hunt arrives in Seville to intercept
Newton/Nordoff-Hall. The two first catch sight of one another inside a hall
where a group of flamenco dancers are performing. Through the prism of
the film medium, the scene creates four tiers in a hierarchy of performers.
Scattered around the hall are many anonymous extras shot collectively in
groups to set the scene by fleshing-out the diegesis, populating the space
and creating a sense of location and atmosphere. Secondly, the dancers also
contribute to setting the scene but are given greater emphasis as mediumlong
and medium shots are used to identify and isolate parts of a dancer’s
body – the hands, feet, face. This more intimate framing brings the film
viewer closer to the dancers than the extras and an internal audience is also
formed within the scene as the extras fix their looks onto the dancers. This
emphasis on the dancers is enhanced by lighting which is used to illuminate
the low platform they perform on with their audience kept in semi-darkness,
while the camera moves inwards to the dancing group and a single shot
captures dancing feet in slow motion.
Distinguished from these anonymous groupings are Cruise/Hunt and
Newton/Nordoff-Hall. Both are introduced to the scene with medium-shots
separating them from the larger space while at the same time camera
movements track their passage as they walk amongst the people gathered in
the hall. In this respect, both receive equal treatment by the medium, but a
final hierarchical distinction is formed when the two catch sight of one
another. Cruise/Hunt stops as his attention is caught by something out of
frame, and to emphasize the moment the camera moves towards him,
thereby tightening the framing from a medium head-and-shoulders shot to
something nearing a close-up on the face (Figure 7.7). By this movement
and reframing, camerawork is used to communicate the character is about
to experience or do something important. A cut to the next shot reveals
Newton/Nordoff-Hall as the object of that look. Unlike the isolated figure
of Cruise/Hunt, Newton/Nordoff-Hall is positioned amongst a group of
extras. Although she emerges from that group and is thereby distinguished
from them, the framing keeps her in medium-shot and as her head is dipped,
she does not return the look (Figure 7.8). Through the performance of the
medium, Newton/Nordoff-Hall is therefore distinguished from the general
ensemble as someone of narrative significance but her status is exceed by
that of Cruise who is given greater emphasis through framing, camera
movement and an organization of shots which position him as the figure
with greatest narrative knowledge. Here, with these few shots, the
performance of the medium affirms the hierarchical distinction between
supporting actor and star.
Figure 7.7 Cruise/Hunt looks: Mission: Impossible 2.
Producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner; director John Woo; distributed by Paramount Pictures.
Figure 7.8 Newton/Nordoff-Hall is looked at: Mission: Impossible 2.
Producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner; director John Woo; distributed by Paramount Pictures.
Using the medium to construct this look achieves a number of effects.
Through his possession and control of knowledge, Cruise/Hunt is marked
out as the protagonist, the core centre of narrative action and incident. By
knowing, Hunt can now act: he has located the woman and so can progress
with his mission. In terms of narrative structure, the hierarchy of performers
can therefore be explained by how elements of film form create a
“hierarchy of discourses” (MacCabe, 1974) or “hierarchy of knowledge”
(Branigan, 1992: 72–6): Hunt is followed, isolated and emphasized for only
he and the viewer share knowledge about the mission and the plan to recruit
Nordoff-Hall, while she quite “innocently” thinks she is merely there to
steal an expensive necklace, and the dancers and guests are oblivious to all
these goings on. But the significance of the moment comes from more than
just placing Cruise/Hunt in the plotting of the chain of cause and effect.
When Cruise/Hunt looks, he doesn’t just know, he responds and feels.
Cruise/Hunt is more than just a protagonist, an agent of action; he is the
central affective and emotional focus for this narrative moment.
“Focalization,” argues Edward Branigan, “involves a character … actually
experiencing something through seeing or hearing it.
Focalization … extends to … complex experiencing of objects: thinking,
remembering, interpreting, wondering, fearing, believing, desiring,
understanding, feeling guilt” (original emphasis, p. 101). When Cruise
looks, he gives a fixed intense stare which conveys how Hunt feels about
seeing Newton/Nordoff-Hall. It is a look which not only marks recognition
of her importance to his mission but also signals the first glimmers of
desire. This is actually an effect of acting rather than the medium, for
although framing and editing create a point of view exchange, it is only the
use of the body – specifically the face – which can communicate the quality
and manner of how Cruise/Hunt looks. Still the medium contributes to the
moment for the use of close-up not only makes Cruise’s facial details
practically visible and readable but also intensifies his already intense look
by isolating him in frame to mark him as both the central knowing and
feeling consciousness of the film. This combination of effects makes
Cruise/Hunt a figure of identification. Through the organization of shots,
the viewer adopts Hunt’s perspective, sharing his viewpoint, i.e. where he
looks, but also his point of view, i.e. how he responds to, interprets and feels
about what he sees (Maltby, 2003: 347). Identification is therefore formed
by “alignment” between character and viewer (Smith, 1995: 83).
This scene offers just one example of how the performance of the
medium contributes to the production of stardom on-screen through
ensemble differentiation, for the formal elements of film are used to
construct distinctions between the hierarchy of performers. Here the
performance of the medium creates the narratological effects of
focalization, point of view and identificatory alignment to position the star
actor as the centre of the story, while at the same time framing him as the
focal point of the screen spectacle. In the narrative Hunt looks and knows
but at the same time Cruise is also made a figure to be looked at. All
performers in the scene contribute to the production of the narrative and are
also placed on display, but the performance of the medium structurally
orders different tiers of performers towards enhancing and intensifying the
narrative and spectacular significance of the star.
The Performance of the Actor
While elements of film form mediate the presence of the actor and thereby
contribute to the construction of character, it is in the uses of the voice and
body to portray character that the performance of the actor is to be found.
All film acting brings together a figure who is represented (the character)
and the figure who does the representing (the actor). Narrative film aims to
create plausible and believable on-screen worlds and so the standard
measure of success in film acting is the degree to which the actor forms a
credible representational link with the character. Hypothetically this would
result in pure and total representation, with the actor transparently
disappearing into character, yet for an audience knowingly watching a
display of artifice played out on a screen, there is always the lingering
knowledge that this is all “just an act.” Consequently, no matter how
credibly a character is played, the actor always remains visible, and so “the
audience experiences the presence of the performer as well as – in the same
body as – the presence of the character” (Maltby, 2003: 380). Regardless of
whether audience members judge Cruise does or does not make a believable
IMF agent, at every moment he will always be experienced as both Hunt
and Cruise. Combining the representation of character with the presentation
of the actor, this splitting or doubling of the actor’s body relates to the dual
aspects of the film medium: Hunt is a figure of the narrative while Cruise is
a figure of spectacle. It is precisely this co-existence of character and actor
in the same body which ensures the star act is simultaneously both story and
show.
This duality relates to all actors in the narrative but the division becomes
most acutely evident with the star. Many, possibly the majority, of actors
who appear in M:I-2 will be unfamiliar to audiences. For example, when
Scott/Ambrose executes the plan to hijack the plane carrying Nekhorvich,
the co-pilot passes out and collapses over his controls after inhaling the gas
which the villainous plotters pipe through the emergency oxygen system.
The co-pilot character is unnamed and the actor is unlikely to be a familiar
face to most viewers.4 Still there is the doubling of the body for there
remains residual awareness that this is not a pilot but rather an actor playing
a pilot. In Cruise’s case, however, the division between actor and character
becomes more pronounced for in a career that had already seen him play 16
leading roles, Cruise came to M:I-2 as an entirely familiar figure, so that at
each and every moment in the film he appears as both Ethan Hunt and
“Tom Cruise.” In M:I-2, Cruise doesn’t just appear as Hunt but also as the
guy who played, amongst other roles, Maverick in Top Gun, Brian Flanagan
in Cocktail (1988), Charlie Babbit in Rain Man, Ron Kovic in Born on the
Fourth of July (1989) and of course Ethan Hunt in Mission: Impossible.
Knowledge of the actor’s body differentiates the star from other actors in
the on-screen hierarchy of performers. Whoever plays the pilot remains an
anonymous body but Cruise is a recognizable, known and named body.
Moreover, the status of Cruise as a known figure is essential to this whole
early sequence, for Scott/Ambrose’s deception can only fool because it
presumes that not only the character Nekhorvich but also the audience are
already familiar with, and so are able to recognize, a specific voice and
body. Recognition leads Nekhorvich to trust Dimitri (i.e. Hunt) while it can
also be reasonably presumed that foreknowledge of Cruise’s roles in other
films may encourage audience members to believe he will feature in the
film as a force for good and upholder of the law. The killing of Nekhorvich
by someone who looks and sounds exactly like Cruise therefore creates a
shock and is a further part of the film’s self-conscious play upon Cruise’s
mediated identity.
It is precisely because actor and character are one and the same body that
it is with acting that belief in what has been described as the charismatic
theory of stardom (see Chapter 1) holds greatest influence. As the voice and
body are physically part of the individual performer, then star acting
appears as a charismatic statement of individual expression, for any
significance or meaning generated in acting appears innate and to simply
issue from the actor. To break from the seductive appeal of the charismatic
theory it is therefore necessary to recognize the star act, like all instances of
branding, as a work of symbolic and commercial production. This requires
finding the terms to break apart the apparent naturalness of the actor and
character relationship to open it up for analysis. Going beyond the simple
actor/character dyad, Stephen Heath (1981: 178–82) poses a model in
which “agent,” “character,” “person,” “image” are all components in
constructing the “figure” in film. While useful, Heath’s own account of his
model is not only rather obscurantist and oblique but also his application of
the terms is open to misunderstanding and confusion. It is therefore
necessary to clarify the model and in so doing to revise the terms. “Agent”
defines the function, or what can be described as the role, performed by a
person contributing to the progression of the narrative. Character
meanwhile defines the qualities or traits distinguishing a person as an
individual. If role defines what the figure does, character describes who s/he
is. “Person,” for Heath, is the “individual … who actualizes – is the support
for, plays, represents – agent and character” (p. 180), which in the case of
narrative film may be more straightforwardly understood as the actor.
In M:I-2, Cruise/Hunt performs an obvious role: stop Ambrose’s plot and
save the girl. Not only does the narrative play out a clear and unambiguous
structure of hero and antagonist but self-reflexively draws attention to the
archetypicality of Cruise’s role by referring to Greek mythology and the
legendry hero Bellerophon who slay the monster Chimera. Robert Towne’s
script brings this mythological content to the fore: in the very opening
scene, as Sherbedgia/Nekhorvich is seen working in the lab at Biocyte, his
voice-over narrates “every search for a hero must begin with something that
every hero requires – a villain. Therefore, in the search for our hero,
Bellerophon, we created a monster, Chimera.” As the film then unfolds,
structurally Cruise emerges as the hero/Bellerophon/cure while Ambrose is
the monster/Chimera/virus. Part of Cruise’s acting is therefore concerned
with performing the actions necessary to achieve the functions of his role.
At the same time, Hunt is also portrayed as a particular type of person.
Richard Dyer (1998: 106–17) sees a number of elements contributing to the
construction of character in film. Familiarity with a film’s story, characters,
promotional materials, genre, star and criticism may all shape audience
preconceptions of a character prior to viewing a film. Both the names of the
character and the star can define certain traits: the surname “Hunt” holds
resonances of tenacious and lethal pursuit, and when Thomas Cruise
Mapother IV shortened his surname to “Cruise” he acquired a title
signifying cool and controlled movement. Facial features, physical build,
and costume all produce a set of outward appearances that give meaning to
the figure. Hunt works for a quasi-governmental organization and yet
Cruise’s shoulder length hair and preference for tight fitting T-shirts and
leather jackets artfully suggest he is no institutionalized drone. Objects can
become indices of character if they appear to hint at certain traits. When
Cruise/Hunt engages Newton/Nordoff-Hall in a car dual in the hills outside
Seville, his choice to drive an open top Porsche attaches connotations of
speed, power and freedom to the character. For Dyer, elements of mise-enscène
displayed in “lighting, color, framing, composition, placing of
actors … can be used to express the personality or state of mind of
characters” (p. 117). Globe-trotting between Utah, Seville and Sydney, Hunt
traverses a cosmopolitan mise-en-scène. He moves from the desolation of
the desert, to the warm seductive ambience of a Spanish night to the stark
technological fortress of the Biocyte HQ, but with each context he can
function in and command whatever environment he meets. Clearly Hunt is
a man who does bestride the world.
Knowledge about and impressions of character are formed through what a
character says and what others say about the character. Hunt speaks of
himself, and is spoken of, as a man who thrives on embracing danger. When
the IMF controller Swanbeck, played by Anthony Hopkins, explains the
mission to Hunt and the role of Nordoff-Hall in that mission, Cruise/Hunt
immediately rejects the idea; he claims it will be very difficult to get her to
do it, to which Hopkins/Swanbeck responds “Well, this is not Mission
Difficult, Mr. Hunt, it’s Mission Impossible. Difficult should be a walk in
the park for you.” Despite initial reservations, Newton/Nordoff-Hall agrees
to accept the mission, but to avoid Ambrose becoming suspicious when she
suddenly turns up in his life again, she recommends creating a situation
where she’ll land in “serious trouble” requiring help from outside. In reply,
Cruise/Hunt coolly says of himself “Serious trouble, Nyah, is something
that I can always arrange.”
Where Heath’s categories become most confusing is in his account of
“image,” for he seeks to apply the term to both the literal photographic
image shown on-screen but also in a manner similar to how Dyer
conceptualizes “star image,” i.e. as an inter-textual bundle of meanings,
exceeding the particular role, which are derived from pre-existing
performances and other media texts. To avoid this confusion, a distinction
must be drawn then between the technology and aesthetics of what earlier
was described as the performance of the medium, with the star’s transmedia
identity (following the arguments outlined in Chapter 2) regarded as
the brand. As few performers in film carry strong recognition, then the
brand is a component restricted to only stars and other well known actors.
Finally, Heath binds his categories together in what he calls the “figure,”
the “circulation between agent, character, person and image, none of which
is able simply and uniquely to contain, to settle that circulation” (original
emphasis 1981: 182). What figure therefore describes is the flow of
meanings and effects between the other categories.
Adapting Heath’s model provides the foundations for a complex and
dynamic model of star performance. Audiences are presented with the
figure which, according to the revised terms outlined above, is the
combined outcome of role, character, actor and medium. These components
apply to all instances of acting in film but in the case of the star the branded
identity of the performer is added to that mix. This model provides a
framework and terms for understanding star acting as a dynamic process in
which the figure materializes through the constant interaction between
multiple elements of action and meaning. The star brand becomes an
element in the formation of the figure but as the brand is formed across
films, so it exceeds any specific instance of an enacted figure. On-screen
the brand is produced, that is to say performed, by the star playing a
succession of figures across films. As a multiple-media construct, that
brand is equally the product of the star’s appearances in other media (Figure
7.9).
Figure 7.9 Elements of the star performance.
Missing from Heath’s model is an account of how these various elements
are held in combination. To see this model at work, it is therefore necessary
to appreciate how the voice and body materialize and cohere each of the
components to make the figure a distinct and identifiable person
represented and presented in the star act. As already discussed the
performance of the medium records and presents the voice and body of the
star, particularly the face. Bodily form is given to the figure through the
corporeality of the actor. Previously it was noted Cruise brings to M:I-2 a
known and named body and voice. Regardless of the character he plays,
Cruise’s dark hair, short to medium height, athletic build and enduring
boyish looks present a familiar bodily shape and set of features which
maintain strong physical recognizability. For M:I-2, Cruise is costumed in
tight-fitting outfits which show off this body, for example during the rockclimbing
entrance and later with the break-in at the Biocyte laboratories and
the climatic fight with Scott/Ambrose. Vocally, in his performances Cruise
generally speaks with a clear but low pitch, holding an even volume and
steady rhythm to suggest calm authoritative control. It is precisely this
vocal register which the false Hunt (played of course by Cruise) reproduces
as part of the act to deceive Nekhorvich in the plane.
Through the media of the voice and body, the star performs the narrative
actions of the role. At the micro-analytic level of physical gesture, the
narrative chain of cause and effect can only be preserved because Cruise’s
right hand alone performs certain key actions: e.g., retrieving the sunglasses
which the IMF use to send his mission brief; taking from Newton/NordoffHall
a memory card carrying a video revealing Ambrose’s ransom plot;
pressing play to run a sound recording of the Biocyte CEO’s voice to
unlock a door into the company’s laboratories; and pulling the trigger of his
pistol three times to finally kill Ambrose. Equally, the voice and body
represent the distinctive traits of character. In contrast to the general state
of control which Cruise’s voice conveys, frequently the roles he plays give
him brief moments where the volume and pace of the voice is racked up to
convey explosive anger. Both registers are in play during the scene in M:I-2
when Cruise/Hunt must tell Newton/Nordoff-Hall about her part in the
mission and the need to renew her relationship with Scott/Ambrose. Hunt is
confronted with a conflict between love and duty: professionally he must
instruct her about the mission but emotionally he not only fears for the
dangers she will be put in but is also deeply uncomfortable with how the
woman he is falling for will be morally compromised by engaging in a false
but intimate relationship with the villain. Newton/Nordoff-Hall is clearly
angered by the demands placed on her but Cruise/Hunt contains his feelings
and retains his professional cool. He speaks in a composed manner until the
point where he feels compelled to ask her “Would it make you feel any
better if I didn’t want you to do this?” and she retorts “Yeah, much,” at
which point Cruise’s voice breaks control and snaps back “Then feel
better!” Here through the uses of the voice, Cruise is able to convey Hunt as
someone who is both a cold professional and a passionately protective
lover. Using the body and voice to perform the purposes of the role and
traits of character can be explained in narratological terms as the enactment
of “functions” and “indices,” with “the former correspond[ing] to a
functionality of doing, and the latter to a functionality of being” (Barthes,
1966: 93). Although the plot driven narrative of the action film places
heavy emphasis on the functional agency of the voice and body – for the
hero must say and do things of consequence – still the enactment of
character indices are equally necessary to convey the type of person who
can achieve those actions. Hunt kills the hero and foils the plot but he is
also a composed man of noble principle but with a fiery heart.
Branded Performance
After medium, agent, character and actor, it is necessary to consider the
place of the star brand in the performance of the figure. Dyer sees the link
between star and role in terms of how successfully a “fit” is achieved
between the star’s identity and the role/character construction (1998: 126–
31). In the case of M:I-2, the cool self-confident assurance of Hunt
effectively matches the self-assured independence which Cruise had already
portrayed in a string of roles from Risky Business to Top Gun, The Color of
Money (1986), Rain Man, Days of Thunder, A Few Good Men, The Firm
and Jerry Maguire. “Cruise established his onscreen persona” by
performing “the cocky loner who plays by his own rules, confronts a crisis,
then is triumphantly transformed” (Kaufman, Malley, Rammairone and
Weinstein, 1998: 52).
Although the term “fit” may suggest the brand is a pre-existing entity
which is more or less successfully matched with the character, it is
important to recognize the star brand as an identity produced (at least in
part) through acting. If there is a fit between Hunt and the Cruise, the link is
produced only in performance as the brand is enacted through the voice and
body. Reflecting on the actor/character relationship, Barry King (1985: 30)
describes “impersonation” as instances of performance where an actor
transforms the voice and body to represent character differences, which
contrast with “personification” where vocal and bodily continuities are
maintained so that the actor may seem to be simply playing him or herself.
As all acting brings together the actor with the character or role, then no act
can ever entirely be attributed to the role/character or the actor. Rather,
impersonation and personification describe degrees of balance between the
elements which make up the enacted figure. With personification,
preserving regularities in the uses of the voice and body make the actor a
recognizable figure regardless of the particularities of the role or character,
whereas impersonation sees the voice and body used to enact the functions
of role and indices of character specific to the particular narrative
circumstances.
Star acting is forever situated in the co-existence of these two opposing
performance principles, with personification foregrounding the actor over
the role/character to create continuity and similarity, against the privileging
of role/character over actor in impersonation to produce discontinuity and
difference. Emphasizing the presence of the actor, personification is
necessary to spectacularizing the star brand as a visible, familiar and known
figure. With personification, King says “the actor is limited to parts
consonant with his or her personality” (p. 30). As stars are highly mediated
identities, however, any viewer’s perception of a star’s personality is the
product of multiple and serial media representations, and so the star
personality is already a deeply performed identity. If a star is judged to be
playing him- or herself on-screen, it is precisely because s/he is repeating
meanings and effects seen in other film performances, magazine articles,
television interviews, etc. Criticisms of star acting often arise because the
actor is seen to always be the same in each role, but this is exactly what is
demanded by the symbolic commerce of Hollywood. Producers pay stars
inflated compensation packages precisely to be a very visible and familiar
asset. Even so, as each film sees the star responding to particular narrative
circumstances, s/he never creates absolute sameness in each role. In M:I-2,
Cruise’s manner of moving and speaking shares commonalities with not
only his portrayal of Hunt in Mission: Impossible but also his acting in Top
Gun, Days of Thunder, A Few Good Men and The Firm. At the same time,
Cruise had never previously played a role which required him to use his
body and voice to enact the exact circumstances of M:I-2. Consequently,
personification and impersonation do not represent mutually exclusive
performance principles but rather dual components of the star performance.
In M:I-2, Cruise is Cruise but also Hunt. Star acting tailors personification
to the needs of impersonation while achieving personification through
repeated instances of impersonation.
This integration of representation with presentation is configured through
the smallest details of star acting. James Naremore (1988: 4) suggests stars
can be “known for an ideolect [sic], a set of performing traits that is
systematically highlighted in films and sometimes copied by
impressionists.” Ideolectic features exceed the mere somatic substance of
the star body, for they are acted similarities and differences, physically
performed distinctions made in the actions of moving and speaking. At the
most obvious level, the star ideolect is evident in the overt madcap physical
play of a performer such as Jim Carrey, or the vocal multiplication of
identities within a single performance which at one point characterized the
performances of Robin Williams. Other distinctions, however, are not
produced by the body overall but by small isolated actions. One example of
this is Cruise’s famous distinctive smile, a feature shown off numerous
times within and between films. As Cruise established his stardom in the
mid 1980s, he repeatedly played a particular manifestation of swaggering
masculinity, and key to manifesting that attitude was the smile, a broad grin
beamed across an array of pearly white teeth. As Dargis (2000) describes it
During the 80s the smile would become Cruise’s signature, his
trademark … it became synonymous with sex and box-office appeal. It
defined Cruise’s burgeoning star persona as pleasant, extroverted, open,
friendly, neither overly macho nor aggressive, and, crucially, as someone
to whom all things came naturally. It was the easy-does-it, no-problem
grin, a smile without fangs or irony … a mouth crammed with big white
American teeth … turning a simple human reflex into an epic of conquest
and seduction … throughout most of the 80s the essential Cruise
remained the guy who grinned from an F-14 cockpit and laughed his way
around a pool table.
The smile not only featured in Top Gun (Figure 7.10) but was also on
show with subsequent roles in The Color of Money and Cocktail (Figures
7.11 and 7.12). “The smile kept glowing until 1988 and Cocktail,” Dargis
observes, “when all of a sudden it seemed wrong, a sign of Cruise’s
superficiality and the yuppie-scum arrogance he signaled. For six years he
turned down the high beam. For better and for worse, critically and
commercially, he starred in movies that proved just how serious he could
be.” Even so, in Rain Man, where the brash overconfidence of the Cruise
brand was subdued, still the smile briefly broke through (Figure 7.13).
Probably the ultimate confirmation of the smile as a hypersemiotized sign
of Cruise’s presence came as the grin became a thing of self-parody. This
was evident with Cruise’s cameo in the action packed spoof film-within-afilm
pre-credits sequence of Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002), which
culminates in Cruise smiling direct to camera (Figure 7.14). Here the joke
works through many levels of star meaning, as Cruise plays the action star
Cruise imitating comic star Mike Myers in his most famous role as the
oversexed British spy Powers.5
Figure 7.10 Cruise smiles: Top Gun.
Producers Jerry Bruckheimer and Don Simpson; director Tony Scott; distributed by Paramount
Pictures.
Figure 7.11 Cruise smiles: The Color of Money.
Producers Irving Axelrad and Barbara De Fina; director Martin Scorsese; distributed by Touchstone
Home Video.
Figure 7.12 Cruise smiles: Cocktail.
Producers Robert W. Cort and Ted Field; director Roger Donadson; distributed by Touchstone Home
Video.
Figure 7.13 Cruise smiles: Rain Man.
Producer Mark Johnson; director Barry Levinson; distributed by MGM Home Entertainment.
Figure 7.14 Cruise smiles: Austin Powers in Goldmember.
Producers John Lyons, Eric McLeod, Demi Moore, Mike Myers, Jennifer Todd and Suzanne Todd;
director Jay Roach; distributed by New Line Home Entertainment/Entertainment in Video.
In M:I-2 the smile contributes to enacting the furtherance of the film’s
narrative circumstances. When Ambrose masquerades as Hunt to intercept
Nekhorvich on the plane, a complex chain of performance relationships is
created as Cruise must play Ambrose who is pretending to be Hunt as
enacted by Cruise. Although only fleeting, the glimpse of the familiar smile
is just part of this act designed to fool the scientist but also the audience.
Later during the car duel, flashes of the Cruise smile represent Hunt as a
man for whom life-threatening danger is mere play (Figure 7.15). At
another level, the smile also becomes the cause for further self-reflexive
play on the Cruise brand. When confronting Cruise/Hunt during the shootout
in the Biocyte labs, Scott/Ambrose says “You know, that was the
hardest part of having to portray you – grinning like an idiot every 15
minutes.” As the film builds towards its climax, Hunt uses prosthetic masks
to substitute himself for Ambrose’s lieutenant, Stamp (played by Richard
Roxburgh), and then apparently delivers “himself” to Ambrose. Unaware of
the switch, Scott/Ambrose plans to kill “Hunt” but before doing so
addresses his victim with “How about giving us a big smile?” In the one
film, a single physical feature of the Cruise idiolect therefore serves both
impersonatory and personificatory purposes, for the distinctive smile enacts
specific narrative functions (i.e. fooling Nekhorvich) and character traits
(i.e. displaying Hunt’s casual disregard for danger), while also specularizing
the star brand by forming connections between films and drawing attention
to Cruise as Cruise.
Figure 7.15 Cruise/Hunt laughs at danger: Mission: Impossible 2.
Producers Tom Cruise and Paula Wagner; director John Woo; distributed by Paramount Pictures.
It is precisely through the co-presence of personification and impersonation
that the star performance enacts the star brand and negotiates the balance of
familiarity and uniqueness fundamental to the film commodity. By
foregrounding the presence of a star, personification vertically differentiates
a film from films without stars. At the same time, by forming vocal and
physical continuities, personification not only links the films of a specific
star but also horizontally differentiate those films from the films of other
stars. And yet if viewers are to pay for future performances by a star, then
some sense of uniqueness has to be achieved, and so the voice and body
must be used to also create impersonatory differences between roles played
by the one star. This contrast in turn reflects the dual aspects of narrative
and spectacle which characterizes narrative film, for impersonation is
focused on representing a figure in the story world while personification
promotes the presentation and show of the actor. The fascinations of the star
act arise precisely because these principles are not held in opposition but
rather merged through the voice and body of the single performer.
Furthermore, by means of personification and impersonation, the voice and
body of the star manage the balance between familiarity and uniqueness
fundamental to the film commodity. “Stardom, like the movies themselves,”
Dargis notes, “depends on standardisation and differentiation.” Star acting
provides producers and distributors with a means for signaling product
differentiation through the performer and performance. Overall, star
performance combines a series of contrasting symbolic and commercial
principles:
Narrative Spectacle
Story Show
Representation Presentation
Impersonation Personification
Role/character over actor Actor over role/character
Actor-as-representer Actor-as-asset
Star-as-role/character Star-as-star
Difference Continuity
Differentiation Standardisation
Uniqueness Familiarity
Vertical differentiation between films with and
without stars
Horizontal differentiation between films
featuring the same star
Horizontal differentiation between films featuring
different stars
It is in the combination of these principles that the significance and
attractions but also the commercial value of the star performance is
produced.
Turning to matters of genre and marketing further illuminates
understanding of the star act as branded performance. Connecting the star
brand to genre brings together two systems of expectation. “The repetitive
and cumulative nature of genre films,” Rick Altman explains,
makes them … quite predictable. Not only can the substance and the
ending of most genre films be predicted by the end of the first reel, but
the repeated formulaic use of familiar stars usually makes them
predictable on the basis of the title and credits alone … [Star names]
designate more than just actors and actresses – they guarantee a certain
style, a particular atmosphere and a well-known set of attitudes.
(original emphasis, 1999: 25)
Both genre and stardom work as systems for product differentiation as
they equally identify what a film will and will not offer. Genre, as Steve
Neale notes, “is ubiquitous, a phenomenon common to all instances of
discourse: there is a generic aspect to all texts” (2000: 2). Film stardom is
therefore continually produced within and through generic forms. Genres
are “multi-dimensional” (p. 2) for they are categories formed from several
elements, of which stars may be one. Genres are in part defined by the stars
appearing in them, while star brands are in turn defined by genre. Stars
therefore contribute to genre formation, while genres are active in the
formation of the star brand.
As Neale notes, however, “most films are multiply generic,” and the same
can be said of star brands. A star’s career may traverse several genres
although through a succession of roles s/he may become closely associated
with a particular genre, granting of course that the genre itself is probably
not generically pure. Before M:I-2, Cruise had assembled a career which
had seen him take lead roles in comedies of teenage experience (Losin’ It
(1983) and Risky Business), fantasy (Legend (1985)), a biopic (Born on the
Fourth of July), period drama (Far and Away), legal thrillers (A Few Good
Men and The Firm), horror (Interview With the Vampire), and psychological
drama (Eyes Wide Shut (1999)). Starting with Top Gun in 1986, however,
Cruise commenced an association with action that would continue through
Days of Thunder and then Mission: Impossible. Grossing nearly $354
million worldwide, Top Gun became a defining statement in Cruise’s
commercial and symbolic status. When the producing and directing team
from Top Gun overtly repeated that film’s basic formula of maverick
outsider character, speed machines, competition and a girl for Days of
Thunder, maybe unsurprisingly the latter was referred to as “Top Gun 2”
(C. Fleming, 1998: 143) or “Top Car.” Days of Thunder was an attempt to
create continuity with limited variation, although after a disappointing
worldwide gross of only $157.9 million, the film represents just one
example of how even the most sure-fire package of recurrent elements
cannot guarantee success in the film market. But six years later, as Mission:
Impossible grossed $457.9 million worldwide, the combination of Cruise
and action was proved to still make a big impact in the market. By the time
of M:I-2, therefore, Cruise had assembled a career which was generically
diverse but his stardom was founded on commercial success in action. It
was an association which would continue as action was combined with
other generic credentials for the sci-fi action thrillers Minority Report and
War of the Worlds, period action drama The Last Samurai (2003), action
comedy Knight and Day (2010) and further run-outs for the Ethan Hunt
character in Mission: Impossible 3 (2006) and Mission Impossible: Ghost
Protocol (2011).
As these examples indicate, Cruise’s action films are always multiply
generic. M:I-2 provided all the stunts, fights, gun-play and explosions
demanded of an action movie at the very start of the twenty-first century,
but these features were also combined with elements of romance.
Cruise/Hunt saves the world from the deadly effects of Chimera and the
wicked exploitation of Bellerophon but his motivations for so doing are
entirely explained through his wish to save the woman he loves. M:I-2 very
obviously belongs to Cruise’s action oeuvre, but with its romantic current, it
is a film which equally belongs to an alternative lineage of the star’s films
extending back through Eyes Wide Shut, Jerry Maguire, Far and Away and
Cocktail to All the Right Moves (1983). The star brand is therefore a
multiply generic construct produced between and within films. A star may
traverse multiple genres but becomes best known for only one or two, and
with any film combining elements from various genres, the star brand
provides a means for binding together inflections from different generic
tendencies. In the case of M:I-2, the Cruise brand centrally unites the film’s
mix of action with some romance.
Altman argues genre is potentially an ineffective way of differentiating
films in the market: “Like generic supermarket products, genre films can be
made and distributed by any producer … How much more rewarding is a
strategy of avoiding generic identification, instead stressing the particular
plus that the studio brings to the genre” (emphasis added, 1999: 115). “By
definition,” Altman argues, “genres can never be fully controlled by a
single studio, whereas individual studios have exclusive access to contract
actors” (p. 115). Emphasizing the “particular plus” of the enacted star brand
through marketing therefore differentiates between generic products. Film
marketing aims to raise public awareness and thereby influence purchasing
decisions, and it is in this intertwining of communication with selling where
the symbolic commerce of the star brand plays a crucial role. Any star
performance is a marketing device, for casting the star imports the star
brand into a film as a way of signaling similarities and differences to
position the film as a particular offering in media markets. Chapter 1
discussed how marketing media propagate the star name but those same
media also provide the means for circulating and dispersing the star body.
Name and body are disseminated across the promotional media of theatrical
trailers, television or radio spot advertisements, and websites, but also
feature in the publicity channels of press kits, junkets, press screenings and
gala premieres.6
As a vehicle for product differentiation, the star performance must
become a highly visible statement in the market. Not only is the brilliance
of the star attraction achieved on-screen but also through the spectacular
circulation of that performance. By organizing and coordinating the
visibility of the star performance, marketing and distribution strategies
show the brand, or to adopt a term which emphasizes the performativity of
that visibility, they stage the brand. Film marketing and distribution stage
the brand by creating a platform in the market for showing off the star
attraction. Producing a series of micro-messages about a film, marketing
media form highly compressed clusters of impressions conceptualizing
what a film promises to deliver. Promotions for many films involve creating
a number of poster designs but with M:I-2 a single layout was created
which prominently featured Cruise’s name accompanied by an image of his
face and upper torso in an action pose set against a fiery background. Here
the star communicated the film, for the poster entirely conceptualized the
movie through Cruise. Compressing the narrative concept into a single
image of the star was a convention already well established in promotions
for Cruise’s films. More specifically the design for M:I-2 followed the
practice of using Cruise’s face alone (and in many cases only the right
profile) seen with the posters for Jerry Maguire, Mission: Impossible, The
Firm, Days of Thunder, Born on the Fourth of July and Risky Business. In
these cases, the star was the message and the message was Cruise.
Distribution patterns position the star performance in the market, inviting
consideration of how the visibility of the star brand is staged across the
organization of time and space. M:I-2 started its theatrical run in North
America. By releasing the film on Wednesday 24 May 2000, Paramount
expanded the first weekend so that by the end of five days the studio could
boast the film had opened with a staggering $78.8 million gross.
Furthermore, as Memorial Day followed on Monday 29 May, the film also
benefitted from the holiday audience to finish the weekend with a gross of
nearly $91.8 million. Memorial Day is traditionally taken as the start point
of Hollywood’s summer, and M:I-2 was Paramount’s major event movie
offering for the season, although DreamWorks appeared to have
prematurely kicked off the summer three weeks earlier by opening the
Roman epic Gladiator starring Russell Crowe and Disney followed two
weeks after with its animated family feature Dinosaur. Understanding how
distribution uses the star brand as a positioning statement also requires
seeing how the star performance is situated relative to other films on release
at the same time. M:I-2 was followed through June and July by the other
leading event movies from the majors, as Disney released its live action car
theft drama Gone in 60 Seconds starring Nicolas Cage, Warner Bros.
opened the maritime adventure The Perfect Storm with George Clooney in
the lead, Mel Gibson fought the American War of Independence for Sony’s
The Patriot, Disney’s Miramax subsidiary brought out the horror spoof
Scary Movie, Fox commenced a new sci-fi franchise with X-Men,
DreamWorks paired Harrison Ford with Michelle Pfeiffer for the
supernatural gothic thriller What Lies Beneath, and Universal created a
comedy showcase for Eddie Murphy to play eight different roles in Nutty
Professor II: The Klumps. Star and genre therefore combined in M:I-2 to
provide Paramount with the means to differentiate the studio’s key tentpole
movie of the summer season in this congested marketplace.
For the North American theatrical release, Paramount opened M:I-2 wide
across 3,653 screens in Canada and the United States. Over the next six
weeks up to the release in Japan, the film was then rolled out in all of
Hollywood’s major international markets. By the end of its run, M:I-2 had
earned over 60 percent of its worldwide box office in international
territories, with over 77 percent of that share coming from the film’s
performance in just 12 countries (Table 7.1). Worldwide releasing and the
compressed temporality of the international release schedule therefore
meant that for a few weeks at least, Cruise’s performance achieved near
global ubiquity. Subsequently, as that performance was passed through the
secondary release windows of pay-TV and home video, it extended its
commercial afterlife. M:I-2 has long ago disappeared from cinema screens
and may now only occasionally get a television airing, but with the “long
tail” economics of online retail, over a decade later Cruise’s performance is
still available.7
Table 7.1 Global performance of the star act: main markets for Mission:
Impossible 2.
Sources: EAO (2001), www.boxofficemojo.com and www.imdb.com.
As actor and asset, stars are performed and performing brands, symbolic
commercial identities enacted on screens both large and small. Combining
narrative with spectacle, the star act is produced through the performances
of the medium and the actor. Operating as signs of continuity and
difference, star acts are part of the currency of conglomerate Hollywood,
positioning films in the market. With an industry now tuned to
simultaneously pushing its premium titles across globally extended markets,
and then continuing to exploit them through a series of aftermarkets, the
star performance becomes a show distinguished as much by its
omnipresence as by its permanence.
Notes
1 It is not clear when Ulmer’s survey was taken that year but it is likely
the rankings were prepared before M:I-2 had completed its run
internationally and so the outcome didn’t reflect the commercial impact of
the film.
2 Robert Towne’s script for the film also constructs a narrative which is a
thinly veiled copy of the Alfred Hitchcock thriller Notorious (1946) in
which a European woman, whose reputation is tarnished by criminal
association, is required by an American agent to go undercover and spy on
a former lover, but when her cover is blown she is poisoned and must be
saved by the agent.
3 Many stars claim to do their own stunts but before covering a film,
insurance companies usually insist stars are prevented from endangering
themselves (Epstein, 2010: 94–8). Cruise’s work on M:I-2 may therefore
have been an exception to common industry practice. On the “Impossible
Shots” featurette included with the DVD edition of the film, stunt
coordinator Brian Smrz, expert climber Ron Kauk, director John Woo, and
stunt double Keith Campbell all sing the praises for Cruise’s decision to
do his own stunt work on the climbing scene, thereby adding to the hype
around the spectacularization of the star performance.
4 He is television actor Daniel Roberts.
5 As Naremore notes, the existence of a star’s idiolect is often confirmed
by acts of impersonation. Shortly after M:I-2 was released, at the 2000
MTV Movies Awards Ben Stiller appeared with Cruise in a specially
created comedy skit built around the premise of a long-serving stunt
double who obsessively mimics the star. When playing the double,
Stiller’s imitation of the Cruise smile provided a crucial point of
connection between him and his parodic reference. The skit even included
shots of Stiller and Cruise side-by-side pulling the same famous grin.
Cruise has made no secret of his allegiance to Scientology but in January
2008 a rare candid insight into his beliefs became available when one of
the organization’s internal videos from 2004 was leaked documenting the
ceremony celebrating conferment of the International Association of
Scientologists’ Freedom Medal of Valor on Cruise. This included an
interview showing the star talking about his commitment to “KSW”
(Keeping Scientology Working), countering “SPs” (Suppressive Persons)
and claiming “we are the authorities on getting people off drugs, we are
the authorities on the mind, we are the authorities on improving
conditions … we can rehabilitate criminals, way to happiness, we can
bring peace, errrr, and unite cultures.” For most of the clip Cruise spoke
with an earnest tone to communicate his commitment, but in the moments
where he broke into laughter, the flash of his smile was enough to bring
the world of Hollywood film crashing into the scene. Over the internet the
recording spread rapidly through viral video and the clip became an object
of humour with many professional and amateur comedians creating
numerous parodies of the scene. In one of the most effective of these,
comic actor Miles Fisher lampooned the scene for Superhero Movie
(2008), delivering a rambling speech in which he claimed he “can eat
planets” and punctuating the scene with a series of mad, explosive laughs
while mimicking the Cruise grin.
6 In film marketing, promotion describes forms of paid advertising, while
publicity represents any activity intended to attract media coverage but
without buying advertising space or time.
7 Chris Anderson advanced the concept of the “long tail” to explain how
online retailing can supply an inventory extending beyond mass demand
items to minority interest goods, forming a “mass of niches” (2007: 5).
Six months after its North American theatrical opening, M:I-2 was
released in the US on home video formats on 7 November 2000. At that
point it was a mass-market title but, as time passed, demand inevitably
declined. Even so, years later, the film and Cruise’s performance remain
available amongst the thousands of titles for sale through e-tailers such as
Amazon.com.
8
Prestige Stardom and the Awards System
While the A-list sit atop the economic hierarchy of actors, as a cultural
industry, film is subject to other measures of value beyond the purely
financial. In Hollywood, where the A-list are prized for their potential boxoffice
impact, there is an alternative hierarchy of high-profile performers
who are respected, celebrated and esteemed for their artistic achievements.
With some actors, economic and artistic hierarchies intersect, but as in
many other cases they don’t, so artistic prestige functions as an alternative
measure or index of star status related to, yet independent of, commercial
value.
A-list status is produced by economic valorization demonstrated through
the actor’s record of appearing in commercially successful films. Chapter 1
offered alternative configurations of the star with actorly and prestige
stardoms, the products of artistic valorization over commercial credentials
achieved whenever performers accrue a sustained record of performances
which attract illustrious reviews and other critical commentary. As
suggested in the earlier chapter, prestige stars are effectively a subset of
actorly stars: they are the “A-list” of artistically valorized performers,
distinguished by their acquisition and accumulation of cultural honors.
Demarcating “the Best” from the rest, awards offer a direct and tangible
expression of actorly prestige. Awards represent a form of currency in film
culture, the value of which is not defined, at least ostensibly, by the
commercial terms of the money economy but rather by the effects they
achieve in what James F. English (2005) refers to as the “economy of
prestige.” Film awards have symbolic rather than economic value: they are
tokens of esteem, and as such can be understood as representing a form of
what Pierre Bourdieu describes as “symbolic capital” (1984: 230).
This chapter therefore explores prestige stardom as a form of star status
which co-exists with, but does not mirror, the economic standing of the A-
list. As this argument involves making a departure from the more familiar
understanding of stars as signs of commercial value, so the chapter will first
set out some conceptual ground with a discussion of the “anti-economic”
logic which Bourdieu suggests permeates cultural production. This logic is
intrinsic to the configuration of prestige stardom as will be illustrated
through a study of Daniel Day-Lewis. Numerous film awards ceremonies
are held each year, the most famous of which – and of greatest importance
to Hollywood – are the annual awards of the Academy of Motion Picture
Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), or the “Oscars” as they are familiarly known.
In a third section, the chapter therefore examines the factors at work in
producing the symbolic value of the Oscars, before considering how the
awards function to legitimize certain forms of acting performance.
Although the conferment of the awards is based on artistic rather than
commercial achievements, still the Oscars produce effects in the film
market, and so the final part of the chapter is concerned with how the
Academy Awards position the performances of lead actors between both the
prestige economy and the money economy.
Cultural Production and Symbolic
Capital
Understanding the artistic valorization of prestige stardom and the currency
of awards is helped by exploring Bourdieu’s work on what he refers to as
the “field of cultural production.” Bourdieu’s sociology broadly applies the
concept of “fields” to describe specific arenas of interaction, with the field
of cultural production representing the arts. By using the term field, an
explicitly spatial metaphor is adopted to conceptualize how cultural
practitioners and their works occupy structured relations in which they are
hierarchically positioned according to the distribution of different forms of
capital. Conventionally, under capitalism the terms “economy” and
“capital” are applied to describe mercantile exchange, but for Bourdieu this
restricted definition of economy blocks consideration of a broader
“economy of exchanges” which extends beyond commercial relationships
(1983b: 242). He therefore expands the concept of capital beyond monetary
or financial resources to describe others types of asset which can be
accumulated and used to obtain advantage. Of these, symbolic capital, or
what is “commonly called prestige, reputation, fame” (1984: 230), has
value in the field of cultural production because it serves to hierarchically
differentiate between artistic practitioners.
A defining feature of the field of cultural production is how it operates by
a logic which inverts conventional economic reasoning. Symbolic capital,
in the form of artistic prestige, is prized and obtains value precisely for how
it appears to disavow economic (in the financial sense) capital. In
Bourdieu’s terms, cultural production forms an “anti-economy” or “upsidedown
economic world” (1983a: 40), where the value of symbolic capital is
realized by the “‘refusal’ of the ‘commercial’” (1977: 75). Consequently
exchanges of symbolic capital assume the character of “A commerce in
things which are not commercial” (1996: 148). Due to the dominant
perception of financial transactions as the only definition of economy,
“other forms of exchange [are rendered] as non-economic, and therefore
disinterested” (original emphasis, 1983b: 242). In the inverted economics of
cultural production, practitioners may therefore acquire symbolic capital
precisely by creating works or undertaking actions which reject the market
to become statements of economic disinterest. Although not economic in
the mercantile sense, the circulation of symbolic capital in this context still
follows an economic logic. As John B. Thompson (1992: 15) notes,
Within fields that are not economic in the narrow sense, practices may
not be governed by a strictly economic logic (e.g. may not be orientated
towards financial gain); and yet they may none the less concur with a
logic that is economic in a broader sense, in so far as they are orientated
towards the augmentation of some kind of “capital” (e.g. cultural or
symbolic) or the maximization of some kind of “profit” (e.g. honor or
prestige).
Cultural practitioners may therefore “accumulate” and “invest” symbolic
capital in search of symbolic “profits.”
Distributions of economic and symbolic capital hierarchically organize
the positions which are objectively available to practitioners in the field.
Foundational to the structuring of the cultural field is the opposition which
Bourdieu poses between “heteronomy”/“autonomy,” poles on a continuum
which demarcates the degrees to which forms or acts of cultural production
may be judged to be directed either towards or against market forces.
Heteronomous production embraces the market and so, according to the
anti-economic logic of the cultural field, is rich in economic capital but
consequently poor in symbolic capital, with the reverse defining
autonomous production. These opposing principles bifurcate the field
between a sub-field of “large-scale production,” in which producers
produce for the market, and the autonomous sub-field of “restricted
production” governed by economic disinterest where “producers produce
for other producers” (Bourdieu, 1983a: 39).
Although cultural production has long sustained charismatic belief in the
talents of painters, authors and composers as individual creators, it is
commonly acknowledged that the creation of artworks “rests on an
extensive division of labor” (Becker, 1982: 13). For Bourdieu, however,
cultural production involves more than just the collective making of the
work. He describes the work of art as “an object which exists as such only
by virtue of the (collective) belief which knows and acknowledges it as a
work of art” (1983a: 35). For works to become art, they must be recognized
as such, and so the field brings together not only all those engaged in the
collective material production of the art work but also agents,
intermediaries and institutions involved with the symbolic production of
belief in the work (p. 37). Recognition is key to “consecrating” or
legitimizing certain objects or acts as art, shaping the differential
distribution of symbolic capital as some works are recognized and respected
as art while others aren’t. Bourdieu therefore sees the field of cultural
production as bisected by a secondary axis marking high and low degrees of
consecration. Whatever value attaches to that capital of consecration
depends on who does the consecrating. Bourdieu distinguishes the
“charismatic consecration” conferred by cultural producers on the works on
their competitors, against the “bourgeois” or “institutionalized”
consecration endowed by official and authoritative arts organizations, and
the “popular” consecration which results from the choices made by the
consuming public (pp. 50–1). Across the axes of heteronomy/autonomy and
high/low consecration, what the field therefore represents is a “space of
positions” which is expressed through the “position-takings” of those
practitioners who are active in the field (p. 30) (Figure 8.1). Although a
very powerful hierarchical structure, practitioners do not occupy fixed
positions, and the field is a dynamic space in which those involved
negotiate and struggle over their artistic legitimacy through the acquisition
and investment of symbolic and economic capital. Over time, a cultural
practitioner will create a “trajectory,” “the series of positions successively
occupied by the same writer in the successive states of the literary field, it
being understood that it is only in the structure of a field that the meaning of
their successive positions can be defined” (Bourdieu, 1986: 189).
Figure 8.1 Bourdieu’s field of cultural production.
Source: based on Bourdieu (1983a: 49 and commentary 50–1).
Middle-brow Hollywood and the
Prestige Star
What Bourdieu offers is a broad model for understanding the hierarchical
principles at work in cultural production. His own application was however
limited by the historical examples he considered, with the French literary
field of the late nineteenth century a predominant example (Bourdieu,
1983a and 1996). To emphasize the anti-economic logic of the field,
Bourdieu dwelled mainly on the autonomous sub-field of restricted
production, with the result that he had little to say about large-scale,
“heteronomous” commercial cultural production (Hesmondhalgh, 2006:
217). Moreover, his historical focus did not address the emergence, growth
and consolidation during the twentieth century of the mass media industries
of recorded music, film, radio and television (p. 219). Bourdieu’s work
cannot therefore be simply and directly transposed to the study of film.
Instead, what it offers is a set of concepts to work with, principally his
identification of the anti-economic logic which powerfully determines
artistic status in cultural production, the hierarchical organization of the
field through the distribution of symbolic and economic capital, and the
importance of the production of belief to the recognition and consecration
of cultural practitioners and their works. Adapting Bourdieu ideas for
studying the symbolic commerce of Hollywood stardom, it is therefore
necessary to apply these concepts to two questions: where is Hollywood
film positioned in the field; and how does the differential distribution of
economic and symbolic capital configure the hierarchical status of stars?
As a high-cost enterprise directed at large and frequently mass audiences,
feature film production, and Hollywood film-making specifically, is
positioned towards the heteronomous pole of large-scale production. But in
a field which grants greatest legitimacy to anti-commercial activity,
Hollywood film has consequently long faced critical dismissal if not
derision. Tatiana Heise and Andrew Tudor (2007) use Bourdieu’s field
theory for a comparative study of how film art movements emerged in
Britain and Brazil during the 1920s and ’30s. Mapping the range of film
activity in these periods, for both contexts “general Hollywood product” is
placed at the extremity of the heteronomous pole and as lacking in critical
consecration. This position certainly accords with enduring perceptions of
Hollywood film as purely popular commercial entertainment. Yet this
perception rests on a single monolithic conception of Hollywood production
which ignores the diversity of output from the major studios. Has there ever
been such a thing as “general” Hollywood product? Historically,
Hollywood has remained a resolutely narrative cinema, and yet within the
bounds of narrative has produced a remarkable variety of film types
(Bordwell, 2006: 10–11). If considering just the period 1990–2009 which
this study focuses upon, while the major Hollywood studios turned out
event movies aimed at the largest possible audience, they also targeted more
narrowly defined tastes with genre films and movies for kids. Universal’s
Schizopolis (1996), Columbia’s The People vs. Larry Flynt (1996), Fox’s
The Crucible (1996), Paramount’s Orange County (2002) or Warner Bros.’
Eyes Wide Shut (1999) and The Good German (2006) offer just a few
examples of the majors also producing and releasing so-called “specialised”
films.1 Moreover, with the emergence of the Indiewood subsidiary
divisions in the early 1990s (see Chapter 4), the studios created a third tier
of production and distribution situated between the large-scale production
of the majors and the restricted production of the genuinely independent
sector. For example, after its acquisition by Disney, former independent
producer-distributor Miramax made and released the controversial kids
(1995) and biographical drama Basquiat (1996), while Sony Pictures
Classics produced the ensemble drama The Company (2003) and comedy
crime thriller Sleuth (2007), and Universal’s Focus Features subsidiary
produced the homage to 1950s film melodrama Far from Heaven (2002).
Rather than creating a generalized type of product catering for a
homogenized mass audience, Hollywood can best be understood as
proffering a limited diversity of film content variously addressing a
restricted variety of audience tastes. Hollywood may be situated in the subfield
of large-scale production but rather than bundle the whole of
Hollywood output together as a single commercial mass, it is necessary to
recognize the studios produce films which occupy multiple positions
scattered between popular and more “bourgeois” tastes. While avoiding the
elitism or the formal reflexivity and experimentation which characterizes
avant-garde “high” culture, Hollywood otherwise produces across a
spectrum which accommodates “middle-brow” and “popular” tastes
(Bourdieu, 1989: 16; Gans, 1999: 75–93). Hollywood creates plot-driven
spectacles of action, thrills and sensation aimed at the popular market, along
with more “serious,” “thoughtful” and “moving” fare. It is the latter which
defines middle-brow Hollywood. For Bourdieu, middle-brow culture
combines “two normally exclusive characteristics, immediate accessibility
and the outward signs of cultural legitimacy” (1989: p. 323). As the middlebrow
“give[s] the impression of bringing legitimate culture within the reach
of all” (p. 323), so one expression of the middle-brow imagination in film
can be seen in screen adaptations of classic drama and literature
Applying Bourdieu’s model to Hollywood not only provides a framework
for thinking about the positioning of films but also of stars in the field. Film
actors are differentially positioned in the field by how they come to
accumulate and represent economic and symbolic capital in human form.
A-list names are positioned towards the heteronomous pole of the field, for
their status is defined by the actor’s record of commercial success as
measured by box-office grosses or sales of home entertainment units. In
contrast, the prestige star is a figure rich in symbolic capital but, at least
when compared to the market value of the A-list, relatively poor in
economic capital. As leading figures in Hollywood production, prestige
stars can never completely claim artistic autonomy and still belong to the
sub-field of large-scale production, but rather than the box office, it is the
accumulation of award nominations and wins, or of positive critical notices
from the culturally legitimated press, which defines their status. It has
already been established that based on the performance of their films in the
market and the compensation packages they were able to demand, in the
years 1990–2009 the A-list was populated by the likes of Jim Carrey, Tom
Cruise, Mel Gibson, Tom Hanks, Julia Roberts and Arnold
Schwarzenegger. In contrast, taking just Academy Award nominations and
wins as a one measure of status, then Jeff Bridges, Cate Blanchett, George
Clooney, Judi Dench, Morgan Freeman, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Diane
Keaton, Julianne Moore, Jack Nicholson, Sean Penn, Kevin Spacey, Meryl
Streep, Denzel Washington and Kate Winslet provided the period with a
line-up of prestige stars.
Prestige stardom is a product of middle-brow Hollywood. Prestige stars
are distinguished from the leading names of the most commercially popular
forms of cinema but as figures in film they can only claim a certain level of
cultural legitimacy. Bourdieu argues film as a medium has not achieved the
standing of “the fully consecrated arts … theatre, painting, sculpture,
literature and classical music” (1990: 96). Set within this strata of
legitimacy, prestige stars fail to attain the same cultural status as the leading
practitioners of those arts – the acclaimed authors, fine artists, composers
and sculptors, or the actors of the legitimized dramatic stage. Prestige stars
may not belong to the most legitimized forms of art but still gain kudos
from association with consecrated culture. For example, multi-Oscarwinners
Seymour Hoffman and Streep added to their prestige cache by
jointly appearing in the 2008 screen adaptation of the stage play Doubt: A
Parable, winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama and the Tony Award
for Best Play. Hollywood has steered clear of trying to adapt for the big
screen the philosophic writings and high-brow novels of Irish writer Iris
Murdoch, but this did not prevent Miramax and its co-production partners
from hiring Dench and Winslet to share the portrayal of her in Iris (2001), a
film which viewed Murdoch’s life in terms of an enduring romance and
noble battle against Alzheimer’ disease. Dench’s long career includes film
and television adaptations of Anton Chekhov, Terence Rattigan, George
Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Jane Austen and William Shakespeare, and with the
film Shakespeare in Love (1998) she appeared in a much-lauded
fictionalized comedy-drama which was honored with five Oscars. As
Dench shows, unlike the financial index of star status, where the value of
women expires by the time they are in their 30s (see Chapter 1), the prestige
economy may embrace age as a measure of artistic durability.
Prestige status depends on the disavowal of the commercial market. At
one level, this is achieved by taking up a position in the overall system of
production by not appearing in films or genres directed at the popular
market. As already suggested, this need not mean working outside
Hollywood for the major studios themselves create diverse streams of
production. What it does mean though is not working on films directed at
the mainstream. Making this choice will very likely be accompanied by a
further act of economic disavowal, for the star must accept lower financial
rewards than his or her A-list peers. At a secondary level, economic
disavowal is enacted through performance. Whatever positions stars occupy
in the field are always materialized in performance. As the previous chapter
discussed, the representation of character is always enacted through the
media of the voice and body. For Bourdieu (1983b), capital can be
“objectified” (i.e. expressed in material objects) or “embodied” (i.e. as the
inhabited properties of the body). In Hollywood, the star performance is an
enactment of objectified and embodied capital, for the performance is part
of the material content of films and is inhabited through the voice and body.
The previous chapter considered how star performance rests on the tension
between representation and presentation, or impersonation and
personification. In the economic dynamics of the cultural field, this tension
is active in positioning the star performance as an instance of objectified
and embodied capital. For the value of the A-list star to be realized, the
actor must be a recognizable, visible and marketable identity, and so in
performance the presentational aspect of personification must exceed the
representation of character. In contrast, prestige stars acquire their
reputations for how their performances are led by the impersonatory work
of character portrayal, rejecting commercial appeals in favor of
economically disinterested artistic goals. If personification enacts the
heteronomous principle of performing for the market, impersonation rejects
the stable, repetitious identity on which A-list status depends to enact the
autonomous principle of investing in the purely artistic objective of
character representation.
As discussed in the last chapter, however, any performance is balanced
between personification and impersonation, and so the prestige star cannot
and does not completely disappear into the role. Whether playing Queen
Victoria, Queen Elizabeth I, Lady Bracknell or M in the James Bond series,
Dench is always Dench, and even after her carefully crafted vocal
transformations, Streep always remained Streep. Indeed, overt signs of
transformation – changing the shape of the body, adopting a particular voice
or accent, or moving in a different way – may actually become part of the
spectacle of the prestige performance, as the display of transformation
becomes a show of actorly craft. This investment in actorly transformation
on-screen may be complemented off-screen by the prestige star using
interviews to make declarations of personal commitment to the demands of
his or her art, or otherwise refusing interviews altogether, for these are
inevitably linked into the processes of film promotion and publicity. While
an actor’s choice of roles or manipulations of the voice and body can
become gestures against the market, ultimately it is left to the critics to
consecrate and recognize the artistic legitimacy of performance. The
production of prestige stardom is therefore not confined to the production of
performance alone but involves the production of belief in the merits of a
performance. Accordingly, prestige stardom can survive, and may even
thrive on, the poor financial returns of a film if this can then be
accompanied by the riches of positive critical recognition. With their
judgments and reviews, critics and other film commentators frame the
meaning of – and thereby contribute to the positioning of – the actor’s voice
and body in the field.
Daniel Day-Lewis and Anti-Star
Stardom
In a career which has spanned three decades, Daniel Day-Lewis has taken a
succession of lead roles and received widespread star media coverage,
becoming the subject of magazine articles, newspaper interviews and a few
biographies. His fame positions him on a hierarchy which grants him more
power, influence and profile than the vast majority of film actors working in
Hollywood. He is a marketable figure: on posters his name appears above
the film title and trailers emphasize his presence in films. Although a figure
in the symbolic commerce of Hollywood, Day-Lewis’s status is formed
around his overt rejection of the market. Unlike his A-list peers, DayLewis’s
status is the outcome of his self-conscious production of artistic
autonomy and the recognition and acceptance of that stance by the
legitimizing institution of critics. Day-Lewis has never appeared in a “hit,”
if that term in measured in purely in commercial terms, but yet he has
banked a wealth of symbolic capital with award nominations and wins.
Biography does not determine positioning in the field of cultural production
but in Day-Lewis’s case it worth noting he has acquired a certain amount of
symbolic capital by familial association alone. Grandson of British film
producer Sir Michael Balcon, who in the 1920s founded Gainsborough
Pictures and later headed Ealing Studios, and son of Poet Laureate Cecil
Day-Lewis and actress Jill Balcon, even before entering films Day-Lewis
had gained the capital of artistic lineage. These associations were added to
with his 1995 marriage to Rebecca Miller, daughter of Pulitzer Prize
winning American playwright Arthur Miller. Day-Lewis’s fame is based on
embracing artistic autonomy but this does not mean he has not acquired a
branded identity. Rather Day-Lewis’s rejection of the market has seen him
precisely find a place in the market by cultivating what amounts to a
prestige brand.
Day-Lewis articulates the anti-commercial logic of prestige stardom,
acquiring the symbolic capital of award-winning distinction by enacting a
series of gestures of economic disinterest which reject the pull of the
market. His career has seen him repeatedly appear in middle-brow product.
As Bourdieu noted, accessible adaptations of well-known literary works are
a standard category of middle-brow production. Before he started working
in productions from the Hollywood studios, Day-Lewis had appeared in
adaptations of “quality” literature, taking a supporting role in the 1985 film
version of E. M. Forster’s 1908 study of upper-class English Edwardian
society A Room with a View and starring as the surgeon and intellectual
Tomas in the 1988 adaptation of Milan Kundera’s 1984 philosophic novel
The Unbearable Lightness of Being set against the backdrop of the Prague
Spring. This literary vein continued once Day-Lewis entered Hollywood,
where he built up a record of appearing in film versions of well-known
works of literature. He took the lead in Twentieth Century Fox’s 1992
adaptation of James Fenimore Cooper’s lengthy 1826 novel of the French
and Indian War, The Last of the Mohicans, and played the male lead in
Columbia’s 1993 production The Age of Innocence, a screen version of
Edith Wharton’s 1920 novel of 1870s upper-class New York society. DayLewis
starred in Fox’s 1996 production of his own father-in-law’s renown
drama The Crucible, an allegory for McCarthyism, the reputation of which
was confirmed by winning the Tony Award for Best Play when first staged
in 1953. Along with these literary adaptations, Day-Lewis has also
appeared in films inspired by literary works. On Miramax’s production
Gangs of New York (2002), Day-Lewis took a supporting but stand-out role
in a film based on Herbert Asbury’s 1928 non-fiction historical study The
Gangs of New York, and played the lead role in There Will Be Blood (2007)
based on Upton Sinclair’s 1927 novel Oil!. By this cross-fertilization of
media, Day-Lewis has assumed associations with fully consecrated cultural
forms to become a “literary” film star.
In his choice of films and performance practice, Day-Lewis has enacted
the principle of artistic autonomy by a series of refusals or negations of the
commercial marketplace. A-list stardom depends on establishing a strongly
personified on-screen identity but Day-Lewis’s fame has been achieved
without the fixing of a stable image. In the UK and Irish production My Left
Foot (1989), Day-Lewis portrayed the true-life story of Christy Brown, an
Irish born writer and artist who suffers from cerebral palsy. Brown added to
Day-Lewis’s record of eclectic roles, which already included the gay racist
gang member Johnny in My Beautiful Laundrette (1985), upper-class suitor
Cecil in A Room with a View, and the Czech doctor Tomas in The
Unbearable Lightness of Being. When My Beautiful Laundrette and A
Room with a View opened simultaneously in the US, star film critic Roger
Ebert wrote in the Chicago Sun-Times “Seeing these two performances side
by side is an affirmation of the miracle of acting … That one man could
play these two opposites is astonishing” (quoted in Lewis, 2007: 37). Jim
Sheridan, director and writer of My Left Foot, has remarked “A big star is
someone who projects a particular image from one film to the next, like
John Wayne and Clint Eastwood. Daniel disappears so completely into a
role, how can he project an image?” (quoted in Barra, 1996: 90).
Alongside his refusal of image, Day-Lewis has also demonstrated artistic
autonomy by his much reported dedication to actorly craft. With dramatic
film-making, the principle artistic aim of naturalist acting is the believable
representation of character. Acting is legitimized as “good” if it can be
judged to involve some gesture towards closing the gap between actor and
character so that the performer becomes fully integrated into the diegetic
on-screen world. In Day-Lewis’s case, he has cultivated an image of
himself as an actor who “disappears” into character to engross himself in
the dramas he enacts. Stories abound of the obsessive lengths he has taken
to immerse himself into the roles he plays. As the disabled Brown in My
Left Foot, Day-Lewis prepared by reportedly learning to paint with his foot
(p. 91). On The Last of the Mohicans he spent time familiarizing himself
with the life of a frontiersman, learning how to navigate the land without a
compass and to hunt and trap using eighteenth-century tools (Loewenstein,
1997: 94). For In the Name of the Father (1993) he played an Irishman
wrongly convicted on terrorist charges and his preparations included losing
a lot of weight, and before shooting a scene where a confession is beaten
out of him, he stayed awake for three nights and let himself be interrogated
by real policemen (Corliss, 1994: 68). When filming The Age of Innocence
in New York, he stayed at a Victorian hotel, registered under the name of
his character Newland Archer, and walked the streets in period clothing (p.
68). As The Boxer (1997) Day-Lewis trained with former world
featherweight champion Barry McGuigan (Loewenstein, 1997: 94) and to
play Bill “The Butcher” Cutting in Gangs of New York, he spent months
perfecting knife-throwing and reading literature of the time to perfect the
vernacular (Lyall, 2003: 1). For The Unbearable Lightness of Being he
learnt Czech and on The Ballad of Jack and Rose (2005), written and
directed by his wife, the couple lived apart so he could understand the
isolation of a dying man perplexed about his family (Lewis, 2007: 38).
Day-Lewis has explained his motivation for acting is “the gravitational pull
of another life that fires one’s curiosity” (quoted in Loewenstein, 1997: 94).
Michael Mann, who directed Day-Lewis in The Last of the Mohicans, has
said “He doesn’t perform or act but mutates” (quoted in Abramowitz, 2008:
E13). Description of Day-Lewis as “a chameleonic star” (Corliss, 1994: 66)
therefore encapsulates the essential paradox of a Hollywood performer
whose star identity is based on the refusal of a fixed image. It is not that
Day-Lewis does not have a brand but rather that his brand is formed around
projecting the refusal of a personified performed identity and thereby
rejecting the market.
A-list stardom depends on the visibility of the performer – visibility onscreen
and visibility through media reporting of his or her life off-screen.
As a film performer, Day-Lewis is highly visible, yet by his refusal of a
personified on-screen identity and the stories of actorly dedication, he has
cultivated an image of invisibility. Even so, while this dedication to the
representation of character is directed at the disappearance of the actor, as
tales of Day-Lewis’s fanatical working processes have been widely covered
in media reporting, so they’ve become visible and therefore part of a
publicly circulated actorly image. In an article for Vogue titled
“Disappearing Act,” it was noted that “While the typical movie star plays
versions of himself, myths grew up around the rigor with which Day-Lewis
got ready for roles, checked his ego at the door, and vanished inside” (Kerr,
2001: 298). By this mythology, Day-Lewis has paradoxically achieved
invisibility in the midst of visibility as his refusal of image and show of
artistic dedication has cultivated invisibility through the highly visible
channel of cinema, and media reporting has made that invisibility a matter
of public knowledge.
This invisibility is not confined to performance alone. Day-Lewis has
geographically distanced himself from the Hollywood milieu, setting up
home in County Wicklow, Ireland. Possibly the greatest act of invisibility
which any film actor can perform is to no longer appear in films. Between
The Boxer in 1997 and Gangs of New York in 2002, Day-Lewis took several
years out from his film career, and even once he returned to film, he only
irregularly worked, making films every two to three years. “As long as he
keeps acting,” observed the Vogue article, “his performances will be
intense. But they may be fewer and farther in between, like the show put on
by a desert plant that blooms unpredictably, and only when it’s ready” (pp.
341–2). Day-Lewis’s actorly image has seen him accumulate a high degree
of symbolic capital but he has also made gestures aimed at rejecting the
hierarchical status of the prestigious artist by aligning himself with artisanal
activities. While starring in The Crucible, he joined with carpenters to build
the set (Loewenstein, 1997: 90) and during his career hiatus after The Boxer
he was also rumored to have served as apprentice to a Florentine cobbler
(Dahl, 2008: 88). Day-Lewis has been described as an actor who “prefers
the reclusive lifestyle of a male Garbo” (Holden, 1994: 25), alluding to the
famous isolation of the legendary MGM star of 1920s and ’30s. In the
opinion of Paul Thomas Anderson, who directed Day-Lewis on There Will
Be Blood, the star’s low degree of public exposure aids and complements
his immersion into character: “One of the advantages that Daniel has … is
you don’t see him everywhere, so you don’t really know who he is or suffer
through having to see him every day in the newspaper. So he already has
that advantage to be somebody else” (quoted in Dahl, 2008: 84).
This refusal of a stable, marketable identity has been accompanied by a
rejection of straightforwardly commercial production. Before The Last of
the Mohicans, Day-Lewis worked outside of Hollywood, but from that film
onwards he played roles, albeit irregularly, for five of the major studios or
their subsidiaries while starring in films for independent outfits such as IFC
Films and The Weinstein Company. Although Day-Lewis’s stardom was
channeled through Hollywood, his choice of film projects did not however
position him with the commercial mainstream. With the exception of the
costly production Gangs of New York, he worked on medium-budget
features. These films were never hits, generally falling in the mid-to-low
strata amongst the annual rankings of the top-grossing films in North
America (Table 8.1). Domestic box office is just one revenue stream for
Hollywood films, and distributors only receive a portion of the gross, but
even so comparing the North American gross to the production budget, the
films which Day-Lewis has starred in have, in commercial terms, been at
best modest successes and otherwise failures. However, those films have
seen Day-Lewis acquire and bank a wealth of symbolic accolades with
numerous awards and nominations.
Table 8.1 Daniel Day-Lewis: the grosses and the glory, 1992–2009.
Sources: compiled from data at www.boxofficemojo.com, www.imdb.com and analysis of
D’Alessandro (2003: 26), Klady (1995b: 17; 1997: 22 and 1999: 34) and Variety (1993: 22; 1994: 14;
2009: 10 and 2010: 12).
Day-Lewis’s anti-star gestures – his refusal of image, actorly
obsessiveness and overt invisibility – are therefore echoed by his position in
the film market. In the limited economic terms of financial success, Day-
Lewis is not a star because he lacks the commercial clout of the A-list, but
in the anti-economic economy of cultural production, he carries value as a
prestige sign of objectified and embodied symbolic capital. Day-Lewis’s
fame may not be configured around a personified image but yet he remains
a marketable attraction: films are promoted through his name and reputation
as an actor of distinction. Although that fame is largely configured around
his show of economic disinterest and rejection of the conventional
appearances of stardom, it is his anti-stardom which is the very basis for
Day-Lewis’s stardom.
The Symbolic Authority of the
Oscars
Cultural awards represent tangible emblematic resources or assets which
can be accumulated and invested in order to achieve the “profits” of artistic
status, esteem and reputation. In film culture, the economy of prestige is
sustained by an annual international system of awards: festival awards,
industry award, critics awards, and audience awards. All bestow a certain
degree of distinction on recipients but as each category is decided by
different classes of voter, so the source of the award determines the degree
of consecration attached. Audience awards are decided by the personal
likings of “lay” voters and hold little symbolic value because their
conferment is underpinned by the heteronomous interests of the consumer
market. In contrast, industry, festival and critics awards carry greater weight
for not only are they bestowed according to what are seen to be the more
informed judgments of professional practitioners and intermediaries from
the field of cultural production itself, but they are predicated on the
autonomous principle of celebrating artistic merit. The latter categories of
awards therefore incline towards what in Bourdieu’s terms is the
charismatic consecration of producers by fellow cultural professionals.
Individual awards form hierarchical distinctions between cultural
practitioners but there is also a pecking order of annual award schemes.
Amongst film awards the Oscars, bestowed by the Academy of Motion
Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS), hold the greatest authority. This
meritorious system is based on the autonomous principle of celebrating the
artistry rather than the commerce of film, with awards “given annually to
honor outstanding achievements in theatrically released feature-length
motion pictures” (AMPAS, 2009: 1). As Steve Pond observes, “the
importance and significance of the Academy Awards is tied to the
perception that they genuinely are awarded for merit” (2005: 14). Emanuel
Levy (2001b: 338) pinpoints the cultural significance of the Academy
Awards when he describes the Oscars “as an institutionalized yardstick of
artistic quality.” As Levy notes, “Through the Oscar, the Academy
functions as peers, critics, and tastemakers. No other award so well
combines critical and popular judgment” (p. 44). Oscar prestige is therefore
a middle-brow creation, honoring art in popular culture by conferring
artistic validity on products which to varying degrees are commercially
orientated.
Awards provide tangible markers of artistic prestige yet whatever value is
attached to them is entirely arbitrary: why should a 13 1/2-inch statue of a
gold knight holding a sword and standing on a reel of film, the iconic figure
of the Oscars, be so imbued with significance by the film community?
Whatever value the Oscars have is the outcome of the production of belief
in their authority. The value of Academy Awards depends on collective
belief in their value and recognition that the works or acts they celebrate are
things of value. This belief is sustained by a combination of factors. First,
the authority of the Oscars is supported by the commercial and cultural
dominance of Hollywood film in the world’s leading film markets. The
Academy’s membership is predominantly drawn from the US professional
film community, and although the Oscars are open to embracing a wide
diversity of films from across the world, for over 80 years now the voting of
the Academy has overwhelmingly focused on celebrating English-language
– and in most cases American-produced – films which frequently come
from the Hollywood majors. While apparently set apart from the film
market, the hegemonic status of the Oscars in the international system of
film awards mirrors the economic dominance of Hollywood in international
territories, but through the symbolic terms of the prestige economy.
Second, belief in the value of the Oscars is sustained by belief in the
Academy as an authoritative organ for the industry. When the Academy was
formed in 1927, it had two purposes: to create an industry-wide body to
mediate in labor disputes and to guard against perceptions of the moral
turpitude of the movies by “establish[ing] the industry in the public mind as
a respectable, legitimate institution, and its people as reputable individuals”
(1929 Academy annual report cited in Shale, 1993: 2). On the former point,
the Academy received criticism that it acted as “a company union for the
producers” (Frank Gillmore, President of the stage performers union
Actors’ Equity Association, cited in Clark, 1995: 53), and with the
formation of the Screen Actors Guild (SAG) in 1933, the Academy was
defeated in this purpose. However, the inauguration of the Oscars in 1929
provided an instrument for legitimizing the industry. Subsequently, while
moral criticisms of the movies may have receded, the Oscars continue to
serve a legitimizing function: the awards create a circle of belief in their
own value, for by celebrating the art of cinema, they reciprocally confirm
cinema as an art. This authority is also affirmed by maintaining a closed
membership system “limited to those who have achieved distinction in the
arts and sciences of motion pictures” (AMPAS, 2011). By restricting its
members to distinguished figures working in the film professions, the
Academy positions itself as an informed and influential arbitrator in
recognizing art in film.
Third, there is the placing of the Oscars in the annual calendar of
American film awards. Since the 6th Academy Awards were held on 16
March 1934, the pattern has been to host the awards ceremony on a date in
either March or February each year.2 This sees the ceremony occur two to
three months after the conclusion of the year for which achievements are
honored. In the intervening period, other leading rounds in the awards
calendar have already taken place, including the National Board of Review
Awards, Los Angeles Film Critics Association Awards and SAG Awards
(Table 8.2). Since 1944, the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA)
has awarded the “Golden Globes.” It is the mission of the HFPA to
“recognize outstanding achievements by conferring annual Awards of
Merit, (Golden Globe® Awards), serving as a constant incentive within the
entertainment industry, both domestic and foreign, and to focus wide public
attention upon the best in motion pictures and television” (HFPA, 2011).
Held in January each year, the Golden Globes precede the Oscars and by
honoring more or less the same categories of achievement in the same
award year as the Academy, the Golden Globes could be regarded in many
respects as a direct competitor for the Oscars. Yet any excitement or
anticipation generated is repeatedly over-shadowed as commentators only
discuss the Globes for how they may provide a forecast of forthcoming
Oscar nominations and winners. Sitting at the tail end of the awards season,
potentially the Academy Awards could lose their importance, yet the
perception has endured that other events in the film awards calendar are
mere precursors to the Oscars.
Table 8.2 Annual cycle of film-acting awards in the US.1
Finally, the symbolic value of the Oscars is produced through the process
by which the awards are actually decided and conferred. To recognize and
celebrate solitary winners, the Oscars must enact a ritual of exclusion,
conducted under the authority of professional peers. This progresses
through the phases of eligibility and submission, two rounds of voting, and
then the awards ceremony. To be considered, achievements by individuals
must be attached to particular films, and to be eligible for submission any
film must fulfill certain criteria.
All eligible motion pictures … must be:
a. feature length (defined as over 40 minutes),
b. publicly exhibited [using professional standard equipment],
c. for paid admission in a commercial motion picture theater in Los
Angeles County,
d. for a qualifying run of at least seven consecutive days,
e. advertised and exploited during their Los Angeles County qualifying
run in a manner considered normal and customary to the industry, and
f. within the Awards year deadlines.(AMPAS, 2009: 5–6)
Voting for the awards is conducted by secret ballot restricted to active and
life Academy members who are organized under 15 branches defined by
craft specializations, e.g. art directors, cinematographers, editors and visual
effects, with the Actors Branch retaining the largest membership (1,183 in
2011), inevitably including previous nominees and award-winners.
Voting is a two stage process of preferential balloting.3 Initially,
candidates are selected through the nomination ballot. Taking all the films
which meet the aforementioned criteria, the Academy compiles an annual
“Reminder List of Eligible Releases” which is circulated to members in late
December, together with forms to register votes for nominations in 25
categories. Members can only vote for nominees in the category or
categories represented by the branch to which they belong, which in the
case of the Acting Branch means members vote for nominees in four
categories: Actress in a Leading Role, Actor in a Leading Role, Actress in a
Supporting Role, and Actor in a Supporting Role. Forms are returned
unsigned in late January to the accountancy firm PricewaterhouseCoopers
(PwC) and just over a week later nominees in all categories are announced
at an early morning (5.30am Pacific Time) press conference held at the
Academy’s Samuel Goldwyn Theater in Beverly Hills. There then follows
the Final Ballot, where voting is opened up to the entire Academy
membership to cast their votes on nominees in all categories, and the poll
closes a few days before the awards ceremony takes place.
As Bourdieu noted, the value of symbolic capital depends on recognition.
In purely practical terms, the voting process serves the purpose of
elimination, but its larger cultural function comes from how the voting
stages the recognition, and therefore the legitimization, of certain works and
practitioners as worthy exemplars of artistic merit. With the voting
completed, the ceremony therefore becomes the ultimate act of recognition,
as legitimacy is affirmed and confirmed in an act of widespread collective
witnessing. This is achieved at two levels: the witnessing inside the closed
world of the award venue by the Academy and other privileged invited
guests; and the global mediated event of the televised “Oscarcast,” which
allows the general public to observe the outcomes of the Academy’s
decisions. This dual audience for the ceremony exactly articulates the
middle-brow status of the Oscars, for the awards are at once a statement of
elite selection and of popular approval and fascination.
By taking these factors together, it becomes possible to see how the
symbolic value of the Oscars is not the outcome of the individual
accomplishments of award nominees or winners. Rather, the Oscars become
symbolic capital as belief in their value is produced collectively through
Hollywood’s global dominance, the awards system and the institutionalized
force of the Academy as a forum for the recognition and consecration of
artistic achievements in film.
Oscar Prestige and Legitimized
Acting
Acknowledging differences in the nature of achievements made by
nominees, the Academy’s branches are entitled to formulate their own
special rules. In the case of the acting categories, rules are in place to
regulate the distinction between “leading” and “supporting” status as there
is no hard and fast distinction between these categories. Current regulations
permit a “performance by an actor or actress in any role shall be eligible for
nomination either for the leading role or supporting role categories,” with
the caveat that “determination as to whether a role is a leading or supporting
role shall be made individually by members of the branch at the time of
balloting.” (AMPAS, 2009: 11). Tabulation of nominations in leading and
supporting categories is conducted simultaneously and if a single
performance receives nominations under both categories, in the system of
preferential voting it will be entered on the ballot only in the category
where it first receives the number of votes to be nominated. If a single
performance receives enough votes to be nominated in both categories, or if
a performer attracts enough votes to be nominated in the same category for
two different performances, then in either situation the performance or
performer will only be nominated once as determined by the preferential
tabulation process (p. 11). This does not prevent, however, a performer
from achieving nominations for separate performances under the leading
and supporting categories. Historically, dual nominations for performers in
the lead and supporting categories have been rare, although the incidence
has increased since the early 1980s. Most recently, in 2002 Julianne Moore
was nominated for the lead in Far from Heaven and her supporting
performance in The Hours, and two years later Jamie Foxx received a
supporting nomination for his role in Collateral while winning the award
for Actor in a Leading Role with Ray. In the lead-up to the 80th awards in
2007, Cate Blanchett picked up nominations for the lead in Elizabeth: The
Golden Age and her supporting performance in I’m Not There although
ultimately missed the opportunity to take home a statue.
According to the criteria outlined earlier, in any year hundreds of films
fulfill the bureaucratic requirements to be eligible for submission. Yet one
factor severely limits the possibilities for the majority of films to be
considered. Tradition weighs on the Oscar ritual in the form of historically
embedded taste. Future beliefs about whether a particular performance or
film is worthy of nomination or an award is always at least partly produced
through a history of trends in what the Academy has previously believed to
be achievements of merit. Something of those trends can be identified by
considering the 160 performances which represented all the nominees and
winners in the Best Actor and Actress categories from the years 1994 to
2009. In his analysis of winning roles over the first seven decades of the
Academy Awards, Emanuel Levy identified the Academy’s preference for
rewarding performances based on the lives of real-life figures, with a
stronger incidence of this trend amongst men than women (2001b: 194–95).
This trend has persisted: in the period 1994–2009, 21% of nominations and
50% of winners in the Leading Actress category, and 31% nominations and
31% winners in the Leading Actor category, were for performances based
on biographical figures. Within this trend, the Academy has shown
preferences for nominating and honoring performances representing certain
categories of true life figures (winners in bold):
English royalty: Helen Mirren The Queen (2006), Cate Blanchett
Elizabeth (1998) and Elizabeth: The Golden Age (2007), Judi Dench
Mrs. Brown (1997) and Nigel Hawthorne The Madness of King George
(1994).
Popular entertainers, particularly singers: Marion Cotillard La Vie en
Rose (2007), Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon Walk the Line
(2005) and Jamie Foxx Ray (2004). If extended to encompass figures
moving in the general world of entertainment, then this category also
includes Leonardo DiCaprio The Aviator (2004) and Ian McKellen
Gods and Monsters (1998).
Figures from the fully consecrated arts: i.e. literature (Nicole Kidman
The Hours (2002), Judi Dench Iris, Philip Seymour Hoffman Capote
(2005), Johnny Depp Finding Neverland (2004), Geoffrey Rush Quills
(2000), Javier Bardem Before Night Falls (2000), and Miranda
Richardson Tom & Viv (1994) ), concert music (Emily Watson Hilary
and Jackie (1998) and Geoffrey Rush Shine (1996) ), and painting (Ed
Harris Pollock (2000) and Salma Hayek Frida (2002) ). If this category
is defined broadly speaking by figures noted for their “intellectual”
achievements, then Russell Crowe A Beautiful Mind (2001) also fits
here.
The latter ensemble also shades into a uniquely female
category: Kidman as Virginia Woolf, Dench as Iris Murdoch and
Watson as Jacqueline du Pré could equally be grouped with Angelina
Jolie Changeling (2008), Charlize Theron Monster (2003), and
Hilary Swank Boys Don’t Cry (1999) as “the tragic woman.”
In contrast, a body of male nominees and winners have represented
real-life national leaders (Morgan Freeman Invictus (2009), Frank
Langella Frost/Nixon (2008), Forest Whitaker The Last King of
Scotland (2006) and Anthony Hopkins Nixon (1995) ), or otherwise
figures whose lives are touched by actual political circumstance (Sean
Penn Milk (2008), David Strathairn Good Night, and Good Luck
(2005), Don Cheadle Hotel Rwanda (2004) and Woody Harrelson The
People vs. Larry Flynt (1996) ).
With the figure of the boxer (Will Smith Ali (2001) and Denzel
Washington The Hurricane (1999) ), the ring has become a fertile
dramatic arena.
Alongside royalty, artists and politicians, the Academy also likes to see
the lives of extraordinary ordinary people acted out, with wins for Julia
Roberts Erin Brockovich (2000) and Sandra Bullock The Blind Side
(2009) showing the Academy’s fondness for stories of strong mothers
holding the family together while confronting social injustices.
Several of these categories also expand to fictional characters. Julie
Christie Away from Her (2006), Imelda Staunton Vera Drake (2004) and
Julianne Moore Far from Heaven (2002) and The End of the Affair (1999)
all performed the tragic woman. Hilary Swank Million Dollar Baby (2004)
gave a rare female inflection on the boxer, and although Mickey Rourke as
The Wrestler (2008) belonged to a different sport, the film followed many
conventions of the boxing movie. Fascination with music both popular and
classical has also accommodated Jeff Bridges Crazy Heart (2009) and
Richard Dreyfuss Mr. Holland’s Opus (1995).
By selectively legitimizing the acting of certain character types, the
Oscars equally de-legitimize a far wider array of other types of
performances and performers. Whole genres fail to be recognized by the
Academy. As already noted in Chapter 5, in the 1990s action film stood at
the forefront of the box office, and in the following decade fantasy and
comic book adaptations took over, yet nowhere did lead performances in
these films feature amongst the Academy’s preferences. This systematic
exclusion can be understood according to the logic of the cultural field, for
although the value of the Oscars remains within the context of large-scale
production – and so the achievements they celebrate are never entirely
liberated from the trappings of commerciality – as expressions of the
middle-brow disposition the Academy Awards set themselves apart from
the most popular terrain of the market. The Academy does not like horror,
while dual wins for Helen Hunt and Jack Nicholson in As Good As It Gets
(1997), together with nominations for Meryl Streep The Devil Wears Prada
(2006) and Diane Keaton Something’s Gotta Give (2003), are rare cases of
the Academy consecrating comedy acting. Generally the Academy has not
rewarded performances in out-and-out comedies but at most has made
concessions to dramas with comic tones, as seen with the nominations
granted to Judi Dench (Mrs. Henderson Presents (2005) ), Bill Murray
(Lost in Translation (2003) ), Jack Nicholson (About Schmidt (2002) ), and
Dustin Hoffman (Wag the Dog (1997) ). This sample also confirms the
Academy’s preference for recognizing English-language performances.
Between 1994 and 2009, only 3 percent of total nominations and 6 percent
of all winners were in a language other than English: i.e. Marion Cotillard
La Vie en Rose, Catalina Sandino Moreno Maria Full of Grace (2004),
Fernanda Montenegro Central Station (1998), Roberto Benigni La vita e
bella (1997) and Massimo Troisi Il Postino (1994).
There is no set template for the “Oscar performance” and occasions
continually arise where sure-fire predictions are proved empty. Even so,
enduring patterns in the Academy’s preferences suggest that it is possible to
find parameters circumscribing Oscar contending material. Tradition
powerfully defines what the Academy is prepared to recognize but is even
more powerful in determining the types of performance which will not be
legitimized.
Prestige vs. Profit?
The Academy Awards are founded on economic disinterest, rewarding
artistic merit rather than financial profits. Oscar winners do not even
receive any financial compensation for their achievements. Oscar prestige is
therefore overtly disconnected from market considerations, but not entirely
so. Only in the rarest of cases does the Academy consecrate popular hits but
the symbolic capital of nominations and awards is still deployed in the
market with the aim of milking financial returns. Bourdieu argued that
it has to be posited simultaneously that economic capital is at the root of
all the other types of capital and that these transformed, disguised forms
of economic capital … produce their most specific effects only to the
extent that they conceal … the fact that economic capital is at their root,
in other words … at the root of their effects. (1983b: 252)
Symbolic capital is therefore a transformed or “disguised” form of
economic capital: in cultural production, its value may arise from
disavowing the market, but nevertheless it can still achieve economic ends.
This invites the question – does Oscar prestige “cash in on kudos” (Groves,
2001: 10)?
In the years 1994–2009, 126 of the 152 films which represented the 160
nominees continued their release over the period of the nominations and
awards, indicating distributors strategically staged the release of those films
which they strongly suspected to have potential for generating ticket sales
through the Oscar buzz (Figures 8.2 and 8.3).4 By the end of their North
American runs nearly, 67 percent of the films featuring nominated
performances in the actor and actress categories had grossed less than £50
million and only 18 percent grossed over £100 million. Generally, Oscar
prestige was not therefore linked into the hit driven market, although a few
performances appeared in movies ranked amongst Variety’s end of year top
tens. These had either completed their runs (Silence of the Lambs, Gladiator
and Erin Brockovich) several months before the awards season or had
already attracted over 90 percent of their North American gross by the time
of the nominations were announced (The Blind Side) (Figures 8.4 and 8.5).
These were films whose commercial standing was not made by the Oscars.
Where the financial effects of the Oscars could be detected was amongst the
nominees belonging to the mid and lower tiers of the box office market.
Here there was a group of films which attracted the majority of their
audiences through the exposure arising from Academy recognition. Blue
Sky (1994), Dead Man Walking (1995), La vita è bella, Shakespeare in
Love, Boys Don’t Cry (1999), Monster’s Ball (2001), The Pianist (2002),
Monster, Million Dollar Baby, The Last King of Scotland, There Will Be
Blood, The Reader (2008) and Crazy Heart featured 41 percent of all
winners in the Lead Actor and Actress categories between 1994 to 2009,
and all attracted over 60 percent their tickets sales in the period after the
nominations were announced. Of these, Jessica Lange in Blue Sky, Charlize
Theron in Monster and Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland were
the only nominees for these films, and so that whatever economic effects
the Oscars had on box office can only be attributed to the buzz created
around those individual performances. With the others, the Oscar effect was
more dispersed, as award-winning performances featured in films which
received multiple nominations in the main award categories. For example,
Hilary Swank’s award-winning performance in Million Dollar Baby
featured in a film which not only collected awards for Best Picture,
directing and Supporting Actor, but also nominations for Lead Actor,
editing and writing. Likewise, Adrien Brody’s award for the lead in The
Pianist was accompanied by wins for Roman Polanski and Ronald
Harwood in the directing and adapted screenplay categories, with the film
also picking up four other nominations.
Figure 8.2 Best Actor nominees and winners: gross box office, 1994–2009.
Sources: compiled using data from www.boxofficemojo.com and www.the-numbers.com.
Figure 8.3 Best Actress nominees and winners: gross box office, 1994–
2009.
Sources: compiled using data from www.boxofficemojo.com and www.the-numbers.com.
Figure 8.4 Best Actor nominees and winners: box office (%) by award
phase, 1994–2009.
Sources: compiled using data from www.boxofficemojo.com and www.the-numbers.com.
Figure 8.5 Best Actress nominees and winners: box office (%) by award
phase, 1994–2009.
Sources: compiled using data from www.boxofficemojo.com and www.the-numbers.com.
As these cases show, consecration of the award-winning performance can
be surrounded by, and no doubt aided by, a wider base of prestige
credentials which collect around a single film. Equally, the prestige package
can benefit from the accumulated honors which a single performer’s prior
record of awards and nominations brings to a film. This was certainly the
case of Daniel Day-Lewis’s nomination and eventual award for his
performance as oil businessman Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood.
Day-Lewis won his first Oscar for My Left Foot and subsequently gained
nominations in the Lead Actor category with In the Name of the Father and
Gangs of New York. A co-production from Miramax and Paramount’s
Vantage specialty subsidiary, There Will Be Blood opened on 26 December
2007 in the US on just two screens. As a tale of greed, treachery and murder
set in Southern California at the start of the twentieth century, which can be
read as a critique of capitalism, the film was unlikely to tap into the
mainstream popular market and was certainly not the kind of fare likely to
receive much interest in the Christmas holiday period. The timing and scale
of release was strategic, however. By opening in December, the film not
only fulfilled the eligibility criteria to be submitted for consideration in
voting for the 80th Academy Awards at the start of the following year but
was also beginning its run just as the nomination forms were issued. Over
the next four weeks, the release expanded from two to 51 to 129 screens,
following the pattern of platform releasing, a familiar strategy for
specialized distribution whereby a film opens on a few screens in
metropolitan centers with the aim of attracting positive critical notices to
generate the “buzz” and “word of mouth” to support the widening of the
release for an extended run over several months (Figure 8.6). Day-Lewis’s
prestige stardom brought to the film his symbolic capital, which included
not only his award and two nominations from the Academy but also four
Golden Globe nominations. Before the Oscars he’d already collected
numerous awards for his performance as Plainview, including a Golden
Globe and awards from the New York Film Critics Circle, the National
Society of Film Critics, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, and the
Screen Actors Guild.
Figure 8.6 There Will Be Blood: box office and release pattern.
Source: compiled from data at www.boxofficemojo.com.
By the time the Oscar nominations were announced on the morning of
Tuesday 22 January 2008, the film was playing on 389 screens in North
America and had grossed nearly $9 million. It picked up nominations in
eight categories (a standard only equaled that year by No Country for Old
Men) including Best Picture and Achievement in Directing. In the lead
actor category, Day-Lewis was pitched into competition against George
Clooney for Michael Clayton, Johnny Depp in Sweeney Todd: The Demon
Barber of Fleet Street, Tommy Lee Jones for In the Valley of Elah and
Viggo Mortensen in Eastern Promises. In the same award year, Spider-man
3, Shrek the Third, Transformers, Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End
and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix had topped the annual boxoffice
rankings in North America. Transformers and Pirates picked up three
nominations in the technical categories but otherwise these films were
entirely ignored in the Academy’s “artistic” categories. Depp was an Oscar
contender for his lead role in Sweeney Todd, which grossed nearly $153
million across all territories, but while audiences worldwide were prepared
to spend nearly $1 billion on tickets to see him star in Pirates, the Academy
was unprepared to smile on that performance.5
With multiple nominations behind it, There Will Be Blood continued its
run. On the weekend following the nominations the scale of release
expanded to 885 screens and a week later nearly doubled to 1,507, giving
the film wide but still comparatively restricted coverage when measured
against the 4,100-plus screens which all the hits of 2007 had opened on.
Leading up to the awards ceremony on Sunday 24 February 2008, the scale
of release continued at a similar level, and during the few weeks between
the nominations and the ceremony, the film grossed nearly $26 million. On
the night, Day-Lewis picked up the statue and Robert Elswit won for the
film’s cinematography. By the following weekend, There Will Be Blood was
still playing on 1,248 screens before the release was scaled back. Although
the main excitement of the awards was over, following the ceremony the
award winning afterglow was enough to carry the film through to 1 May
2008 when it concluded its run, grossing a further $5 million for an overall
North American total of just over $40 million. Over the five months of the
full run, 65 percent of the gross was therefore accumulated in the five
weeks between the nomination announcement and the awards ceremony. To
take advantage of the international hype created by the Oscars, in that same
small window the film was also rolled out in all of Hollywood’s major
overseas markets except Japan. Compared to the hits of 2007, There Will Be
Blood was small fry: if the entire North American run had been completed
that year, the $40 million gross would have ranked the film just 61st
amongst the year’s film grosses. Based on an average 2007 ticket price in
the US of $6.88 (MPAA, 2008: 4), There Will Be Blood played to an
estimated 5.8 million cinemagoers in North America, compared to the
nearly 49 million who saw Spider-man 3.6 Whatever commercial success
There Will Be Blood did enjoy was almost entirely built on the symbolic
capital of Oscar nominations and awards. There Will Be Blood profited –
both symbolically and commercially – from Day-Lewis’s prestige stardom
and cache of award credentials, while also reciprocally serving as a
platform to further enhance and strengthen his status.
On the evening of 27 February 2011, Melissa Leo took to the stage at the
Kodak Theatre to accept the Academy Award for Best Supporting Actress
for her performance in The Fighter (2010). Closing her acceptance speech,
she concluded on a rousing note with “thank you Academy because it’s
’bout selling motion pictures and respecting the work.” Probably
unintentionally, because such matters are to be disavowed on the big
occasion, Leo drew attention to the dual aspect of the Oscars. As a
meritorious system, the Oscars are all about “respecting the work” but at the
same time the awards are a commercial system for “selling motion
pictures.” According to the anti-economic logic of the field of cultural
production, the symbolic and cultural authority of the Oscars can only be
achieved by denying or disguising the commercial currents of the awards
system, and yet the awards are fully integrated into the symbolic commerce
of Hollywood. Paralleling the meritorious ritual of eligibility, submission,
voting and ceremonial witnessing, there is the commercial ritual by which
the whole buzz created around the nominations and awards becomes the
engine for promoting and publicizing films in the market.
Prestige stardom is a product of the consecrating and legitimizing effects
of the awards system. Unlike the commercial obviousness of the A-list
performance, the acting of the prestige star appears as a gesture against the
market, and the symbolic value of the Oscar-nominated performance is
founded on a show of economic disinterest. Instead, through the eclectic
roles s/he takes, through the refusal of a commercially valuable personified
image, through the actorly craft of vocal and physical transformation, the
prestige star exemplifies the autonomous principle of artistic interest.
Although in every way belonging to the symbolic commerce of Hollywood
stardom, the prestige star appears to stand for art against commerce, a
figure of artistic principle rejecting the market whose eminence is yet
entirely dependent on the market.
Notes
1 By the 1990s, the phrase “specialised film” was widely used by
distributors and exhibitors as something of a catch-all term for any type of
film which departed from the features characterizing mainstream
production. Although widely applied, the term remained rather nebulous,
and possibly the only direct attempt to define what might be included
under the heading came from the UK Film Council. While including
archive classic re-releases alongside foreign-language films and
documentaries, the UKFC’s definition also encompassed certain narrative
characteristics.
Whereas mainstream films might be regarded as falling within popular
and recognisable genres … Specialised films are often less easy to define
and thus more difficult to categorise in this way … With mainstream
films, the subject matter is generally immediately obvious, appealing and
easy to communicate to audiences. Specialised films often deal with
more complex and challenging subject matters that are less easy to
communicate … Within the mainstream … the film’s narrative and
cinematic style are generally quite straightforward, uncomplex,
conventional and with high production values. Specialised films are often
characterised as having a more innovative or unconventional storytelling
style or aesthetic and may deviate from the straightforward narrative
structure found in mainstream cinema. Overall, the film is more
dependent on story, character development and a challenging subject
matter than on high production values, effects and star names.
(UKFC, n.d.)
2 Apart from an interval in the late 1950s to early 1980s when events were
often held in April.
3 According to the preferential system of balloting, each Academy
member holds a single vote and casts that vote, depending on the category,
against a choice of five individual achievements or films in order of
preference. Achievements or films which receive the majority of first
choice votes are thereby nominated and any which receive no votes are
eliminated. Achievements or films gaining the fewest votes are also
eliminated with the votes of those members who made those selections
their first choice then becoming redistributed according to the second
choice of those members, with the process repeated until five nominees
are eventually selected (AMPAS, n.d.). While complicated and potentially
confusing, the benefit of the system is that the vote of every Academy
member is eventually cast against one of the nominees.
4 The difference between the total number of films and the total nominees
arises because Dead Man Walking, Leaving Las Vegas (1995), The English
Patient (1996), As Good As It Gets, American Beauty (1999), In the
Bedroom (2001), Million Dollar Baby and Walk the Line all picked up
dual nominations in the Lead Actor and Actress categories.
5 Although in voting for the 76th Academy Awards he was nominated for
his performance as Captain Jack Sparrow in Pirates of the Caribbean: The
Curse of the Black Pearl (2003).
6 According to Box Office Mojo, in North America There Will Be Blood
grossed $40,222,514 and Spider-man 3 $336,530,303.