Cinema’s Melodramatic Celebrity: Film, Fame, and Personal Worth: ‘Fame is an interesting thing.’– Dora García 9781911239758, 9781911239819, 9781911239772

Table of contents :
Cover
Contents
List of Figures
Acknowledgements
1 Personal Worth and Public Attention
2 ‘The Drama of a Recognition’: City Lights
3 Imitations of Celebrity
4 Women’s Pictures
5 Melotrauma
6 Melodrama, Celebrity, The Queen
7 Home from the Hill: Weiner
8 A Star Is Born – Again
9 Unmasked: Hacktivism, Anonymity, and Celebrity
Notes
References
Index

Citation preview

Cinema’s Melodramatic Celebrity

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Cinema’s Melodramatic Celebrity: Film, Fame, and Personal Worth ‘Fame is an interesting thing.’ – Dora García

Mandy Merck

THE BRITISH FILM INSTITUTE Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA BLOOMSBURY is a trademark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2020 by Bloomsbury on behalf of the British Film Institute 21 Stephen Street, London W1T 1LN www.bfi.org.uk The BFI is the lead organisation for film in the UK and the distributor of Lottery funds for film. Our mission is to ensure that film is central to our cultural life, in particular by supporting and nurturing the next generation of film-makers and audiences. We serve a public role which covers the cultural, creative and economic aspects of film in the UK. Copyright © Mandy Merck, 2020 Mandy Merck has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as author of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover design: Louise Dugdale Cover image: A Star is Born, Judy Garland, Charles Bickford, 1954 © Everett Collection / Mary Evans All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Control Number: 2020932026 ISBN: HB: 978-1-9112-3975-8 ePDF: 978-1-9112-3977-2 eBook: 978-1-9112-3976-5 Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com and sign up for our newsletters.

Contents List of Figures Acknowledgements 1 Personal Worth and Public Attention 2 ‘The Drama of a Recognition’: City Lights 3 Imitations of Celebrity 4 Women’s Pictures 5 Melotrauma 6 Melodrama, Celebrity, The Queen 7 Home from the Hill: Weiner 8 A Star Is Born – Again 9 Unmasked: Hacktivism, Anonymity, and Celebrity Notes References Index

vi viii 1 35 55 83 105 125 145 165 189 227 239 258

List of Figures Cover image: Vicki Lester (Judy Garland) as her Oscar is announced in A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954, Transcona Enterprises), Mary Evans Picture Library.   1 The homeless tramp (Charlie Chaplin) asleep on a monument to Peace and Prosperity in City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931, United Artists) 37   2 The tramp (Charlie Chaplin) contemplates a nude sculpture in City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931, United Artists) 38   3 The flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) offers the tramp a rose and a coin in City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931, United Artists) 48   4 Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers) poses for the shop sign in Imitation 66 of Life (John Stahl, 1934, Universal Pictures)   5 The completed sign for ‘Aunt Delilah’s Pancake Shop’ in Imitation 66 of Life (John Stahl, 1934, Universal Pictures)   6 Summertime crowds at Coney Island in Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959, Universal Pictures) 72   7 Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) searches for her lost child in Imitation 73 of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959, Universal Pictures)   8 Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) in the chorus line in Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959, Universal Pictures) 75   9 George Romney’s ‘Lady in a Straw Hat’ repainted in the guise of Vivien Leigh for That Hamilton Woman (Alexander Korda, 1941, Alexander Korda Films) 87 10 Sir William Hamilton (Alan Mowbray) embraces a new acquisition in That Hamilton Woman (Alexander Korda, 1941, Alexander Korda Films) 88 11 Emma Hamilton portrayed as Circe by George Romney, repainted for That Hamilton Woman (Alexander Korda, 1941, Alexander Korda Films) 90 12 Tracey Emin triumphant at the end of Why I Never Became a Dancer (Tracey Emin, 1995) 118 13 Helen Mirren on the DVD cover of The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, Pathé Productions and Granada) 130 14 The Queen (Helen Mirren) examines the dead stag in The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, Pathé Productions and Granada) 137

List of Figures

15 The Queen (Helen Mirren) and Prince Philip (James Cromwell) watch news of Diana’s death in The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, Pathé Productions and Granada) 16 The Queen (Helen Mirren) is made up for her broadcast in The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, Pathé Productions and Granada) 17 Wade Hunnicutt (Robert Mitchum) in his ‘man’s room’ in Home from the Hill (Vincente Minnelli, 1960, MGM) 18 Headline from the New York Post in Weiner (Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg, 2016, Edgeline Films/Motto Pictures) 19 The defeated Anthony Weiner with his family in Weiner (Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg, 2016, Edgeline Films/Motto Pictures) 20 Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) is made up for her screen test in A Star Is Born (William Wellman, 1937, Selznick International) 21 Norman Maine (James Mason) removes the make-up from Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland) in A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954, Transcona Enterprises) 22 John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson) is made up in A Star Is Born (Frank Pierson, 1976, Barwood Films/First Artists) 23 Ally (Lady Gaga) has her make-up removed in Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper, 2016, Warner Bros) 24 The ‘V’ mask in V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, 2005, Warner Bros) 25 The title shot of We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (Alex Gibney, 2013, Jigsaw/Global Produce) 26 Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) goes viral in The Fifth Estate (Bill Condon, 2013, Dreamworks) 27 Edward Snowden on the Hong Kong news in Citizenfour (Laura Poitras, 2014, Praxis Films) 28 The memory card inserted into the Rubik’s Cube in Snowden (Oliver Stone, 2016, KrautPack/Vendian/Endgame Entertainment) 29 Julian Assange uncorks a bottle in Risk (Laura Poitras, 2016, Praxis Films) 30 Styling Chelsea Manning in XY Chelsea (Tim Travers Hawkins, 2019, BFI/Pulse Films)

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138 140 146 152 157 176

177 177 178 192 194 201 206 211 213 219

Acknowledgements My work on this study was greatly assisted by a 2011 Leverhulme Research Fellowship which supplied leave to conduct the research for this book in London, to view Andy Warhol’s More Milk, Yvette at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, and to consult the papers of Susan Sontag held in the Special Collections repository of the Charles E. Young research library at UCLA. My thanks go to the Leverhulme Foundation and to the very helpful staff at MOMA and UCLA’s Special Collections. I am also grateful for the sabbatical leave provided by the Department of Media Arts at Royal Holloway and for the funding it provided for a tour of the historical settings of Sontag’s novel The Volcano Lover and Antonietta de Lillo’s film Il resto di niente in Naples. The writing of this book was stimulated by very kind invitations to present papers on ‘Revelation’ and ‘Imposture’ to workshops convened by the Institutionen for Tema at Linkoping University in Sweden, and on Melodrama, Queenship, and Celebrity to the departments of English at the universities of Berne and Zurich. In Britain I greatly benefitted from feedback given to work presented to the Department of Film at Kings College, London, and to the 2012 University of London Screen Studies conference on ‘The British Monarchy on Screen’ whose proceedings were published in the Manchester University Press collection of the same name in 2016. I was honoured to address the international ‘Approaching Celebrity’ conference convened at Royal Holloway in 2014 by my colleague James Bennett, whose advice improved my commentary on the cinematic portrayal of ‘hacktivism’. Throughout this process Elisabeth Bronfen and Barbara Straumann, their colleagues, and research students at the University of Zurich have been wonderful interlocutors on Queenship and Celebrity. While at Zurich I also benefitted from meeting David Marshall and learning about the ‘mediatization of the self ’. Jennifer Doyle has been an abiding source of insight into the art of Tracey Emin. Matt Hoffman was an invaluable guide to the Neapolitan sites of the Parthenopean Republic. Together with Mireille Michel he also translated the Italian dialogue of Il resto di niente. Mireille not only aided my understanding of that film but of her doctoral subject, the talking doll, in the classical and neo-classical versions of Pygmalion. Nina Hatfield shared her expertise and

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enthusiasm about the many images of Ariadne. My cinephile colleagues, Jacob Leigh and Steven Marchant, fired my interest in film melodrama and Chris Townsend did the same with Chaplin. And I am hugely grateful for the very detailed and encouraging comments offered by the three anonymous readers commissioned by BFI Bloomsbury to respond to the initial manuscript of this study. An earlier version of Chapter 6 of this book was previously published as ‘Melodrama, Celebrity, The Queen’ in Mandy Merck (ed.), The British Monarchy on Screen, Manchester University Press, 2016. An earlier version of Chapter 9 was published as ‘Masked Men: Hacktivism, Celebrity and Anonymity’ in Celebrity Studies 6 (3), 2015. My thanks to the publishers for permission to include these articles, now significantly revised, in this volume. I am particularly grateful to Rebecca Barden, the Commissioning Editor of this book, and to Anna Coatman, Rebecca Richards, and especially Camilla Erskine for their intelligence, patience, and support in the progress through commissioning, production, and publication at Bloomsbury BFI. Nick HelmGrovas has provided invaluable research assistance in the final stages of its writing and Clarissa Jacob has patiently enabled its illustration with digital screen shots. The most enjoyable part of writing this book took place in the company of my friends David Isaac and Paul Keane and my partner Nel Druce over a series of holidays together. Their presence as I wrestled with its ideas and expression has been more sustaining than they can possibly imagine. Final thanks go to them.

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Personal Worth and Public Attention

All the Wrong People When a television personality who had never run for office was elevated to the White House in 2016, his election was greeted with the familiar litany of celebrity condemnation. Invoking the key terms of this discourse, the British newspaper columnist George Monbiot denounced the public’s ‘obsession’ with celebrity, its transformation of ‘dominant values’ and creation of ‘mass distraction’: Actors and models now receive such disproportionate attention, capturing much of the space once occupied by people with their own ideas. (Monbiot 2016: 33)

Monbiot’s rhetoric could be described as melodramatic in the common usage of the term: moralizing, exaggerated, emotive. Moreover, his concern about the wrong people monopolizing attention anticipates the agenda of melodrama in the generic sense – as a genre or narrative category, a mode inflecting other genres or an ‘imagination’ evolving from the theatre to the moving image which engages the public through highly expressive contestations of personal worth. Melodrama stages moral evaluation, dramatizing the individual’s appeal for recognition, the process of judgement, and the revelation of vice and virtue. Its symbolic mises en scène and histrionic performance style enable its characters to personify these ethical forces, externalized in gesture, voice, and appearance. As Christine Gledhill (1991: 214) has observed, so physical a representation of personal morality effectively identifies the character with the performer, merging actor and role in a prefiguration of the movie star ‘who embodies social values and identities’. In a commercial valuation that is also profoundly moral, these stars have to be ‘worth it’, ‘it’ being our attention. A central claim of this study is that contemporary celebrity continues to develop within this problematic of moral judgement, heightening the controversy that has traditionally surrounded it.

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In his anxieties about value and proportion in the allocation of public attention, as well as in his rhetoric, Monbiot echoes condemnations of unwarranted prominence and unreliable repute that have resounded down the ages, from Virgil’s (1982: 89) first century BCE characterization in the Aeneid of the gossiping goddess ‘Fama’, who ‘holds fast to falsehood and distortion as often as to messages of truth’, to the capricious mistress of Chaucer’s medieval The House of Fame, whose icy walls are inscribed with the names of ancient warriors and poets – names that are melting in the sun. At her gates a crowd gathers, petitioning the unreliable goddess – again, and indicatively, female – for renown. While many meritorious supplicants are refused their wishes, those of others are granted despite their confessions that We have done neither that nor this but spend our lives in idle play. Nonetheless we come to pray that we should have as good a fame, And great renown, and well-known name As those who have done noble deeds (Chaucer 1957: 298)1

Chaucer’s satire on the fame-hungry multitudes and the arbitrary ruler they petition has been read as a Christian rejoinder to the epic quest for glory, placing personal virtue above public esteem (Braudy 1986: 249–50). Refusing to pray to fickle Fame, the poem’s narrator declares: ‘I know myself best how I stand’ (Chaucer 1957: 300). Deprived of that certainty in secular societies, the search for what contemporary cultural historian Fred Inglis (2016: 27) calls ‘solid, ungainsayable achievement, and achievement what is more, of a morally admirable kind’ persists. If The House of Fame remains relevant today, it is because the debate it stages about the relation between a morally connoted personal worth and public reputation remains unresolved. Where the medieval poet ridiculed the conferment of renown on those who have done nothing, the twentieth-century sociologist Daniel Boorstin (1961: 57) coined one of postmodernity’s most abiding tautologies when he defined the ‘celebrity’ as ‘a person who is well known for his well-knownness’. Boorstin’s House of the Famous for Being Famous, as his phrase is remembered, opened to the public in 1961. The term ‘celebrity culture’ came later. In 1985 Richard Schickel’s Intimate Strangers redirected Boorstin’s criticism from celebrities to their fans. Where his predecessor had focused his indignation at movie stars overshadowing the heroes of politics, science, industry and ‘the serious arts’, Schickel – who, not insignificantly, was himself a biographer of famous film actors and directors – criticized their admirers’ fantasies of intimate relationships

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with them. This the subtitle to his study dubs ‘the culture of celebrity in America’. Schickel’s exemplary fan is John Hinckley Jr, who in 1981 shot one celebrity – Hollywood actor turned US President Ronald Reagan – in order to demonstrate his love for another – film star Jodie Foster – and promptly became a celebrity, in the sense of a recognizable name, himself. Although the delusion of erotic connection with eminent people had been psychiatrically classified by the French psychiatrist Gaetan de Clérambault in 1885 (Jordan and Howe, 1980), Intimate Strangers blamed television, in its delivery of ‘famous folk into our living room in psychically manageable size’ (Schickel 1985: 10), for spreading the pathology, cancelling the perceived distance between the powerful and the powerless. Moving beyond the question of fame as a verification of merit, or the famous as deserving objects of esteem, Schickel challenged the sanity of a culture in which Hinckley could declare himself rational to the press, since he had succeeded in creating a lasting public association with Foster as ‘a historical couple’ – ‘whether’, as he wrote to the newspapers, ‘Jodie likes it or not’ (1985: 284). Although Schickel assigned what psychologists had already designated as ‘parasocial’2 relations with the famous-to-television viewers, Hinckley’s fantasies were clearly animated by the subject of this study: cinema. At the age of twelve, Foster had played the child prostitute rescued by the insomniac Vietnam veteran in Taxi Driver (Martin Scorsese, 1976). Portrayed by Robert de Niro, the increasingly deranged vet decides to assassinate the presidential candidate who employs a woman who has rejected him. When his attempt is averted, he instead kills the girl’s sinister pimp and becomes a hero, thanked for sending her home to her parents. As though to confirm the ‘copycat’ connection, a year after Hinckley’s crime, Scorsese’s The King of Comedy was released, in which De Niro plays a would-be comedian who kidnaps a chat show host in order to replace him on a live broadcast before being arrested. After a short sentence, he emerges from prison as a celebrity in his own right. In both the crime film and the satire, the acquisition of fame is deeply ironic, as capricious as it is in Chaucer’s poem or Hinckley’s assassination attempt. The contemporary use of the term ‘celebrity culture’ retains both Boorstin’s scepticism about the celebrity and Schickel’s about the audience, magnified many times by subsequent transformations in the media environment. With the arrival of reality television in the late 1980s, a new phenomenon was created – the ‘ordinary’ individual who emerges from the numberless casts of TV talent contests, collective living experiments, observational documentaries, lifeswaps, endurance eliminations, docusoaps, cook-offs, sales competitions, matchmaking, makeover and quiz shows to appear in subsequent programmes,

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not as a dancer, or chef, or fashion model, but as a ‘celebrity’. At this point, the term acquired nearly parodic overtones, since these figures are not the ‘big names’ cited by Boorstin, or even ‘celetoids’, as Chris Rojek (2001: 20–1) has dubbed those who make tabloid headlines for lottery victories or sex scandals. Reality TV celebrities are typically fashioned in reality shows for further reality shows. External criteria of distinction – previous achievements, public acknowledgement – are largely irrelevant. In lieu of a recognized ‘talent’ or skill, celebrity TV rewards something like high-school popularity. Teen viewers’ intuitions that they might be selected for it on the basis of their looks and personality, although almost as unlikely as traditional talent-spotting, are not wholly misconceived.3 As these contests generate their own rosters of newly minted ‘celebrities’, the ‘invitation to cynicism’, in Juliet John’s description, ‘is combined throughout with the encouragement to simple moral judgment’ (John 2018: 292). In 2011 the derogatory use of ‘celebrity culture’ was prominently invoked by leading Conservative politicians to explain public disorder and educational failure in working-class Britain. In December of that year, the then Work and Pensions Minister Iain Duncan Smith blamed TV talent contests like The X Factor for contributing to the looting and robbery that took place during the riots that had erupted across the country during the previous July. Such programmes, he claimed, celebrated an acquisitive consumer culture represented by ‘all the wrong people … We do not celebrate people who have made success out of serious hard work’ (Wintour and Lewis 2011). In a lecture at Cambridge University the previous month, Conservative Education Minister Michael Gove identified one such celebrity when recalling an 1879 speech on free trade by Liberal Prime Minister William Gladstone to a group of Scottish miners and farmworkers. Gove noted that these men and women were assumed to be ‘either familiar with or, at the very least curious about’ Gladstone’s references, which ranged from Pericles and Dryden to the principles of Liberal policy, beginning with the fiscal austerity vehemently applied by their Conservative successors, ‘a limit on legislation and public expenditure at home to conserve the nation’s strength’. Conversely, today’s working class, Gove continued, would be better represented by the epitome of a celebrity famous for being famous. A contestant in the crudely exploitative TV game show Big Brother she was singled out for notoriety because she appeared so tragically poorly educated. She didn’t know where or what ‘East Angular’ was, she seemed at sea with any literary, historical, cultural or political reference – and therefore she became a poster girl for general ignorance and terminal educational failure. (Gove 2011)

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Gove’s subject, a 2002 Big Brother contestant who later rose to stardom on the Celebrity and Indian versions of the show, was a remarkably apposite illustration for the Victorian values he was espousing with reference to Gladstone, George Eliot, and Charles Dickens. His mention of the last was particularly pertinent, not only because his subject was brought up on the Dickens estate in the Bermondsey district of South London, but because her highly connotative name deserves to be included with those of the factobsessed teacher Mr Gradgrind in Hard Times and the financially aspiring Herbert Pocket in Great Expectations  – ‘Jade Goody’, the virtuous whore. The star biography that Gove outlined – from ignorant slattern to parental educator – recalled another venerable aspect of Victorian culture, the moral plotting of stage melodrama, sister to Dickens’s sentimental novels. In one brief career, Goody undertook five of melodrama’s major character types: comic proletarian – in the cheerful ignorance lamented by Gove; warmhearted slut – haplessly attempting a blow-job under the covers in Big Brother; villainous bully – of Bollywood actress Shilpa Shetty on Celebrity Big Brother; innocent victim – of the cervical cancer that fatally recurred during her reconciliatory appearance on the Indian Big Brother; and finally, to Gove’s immense approval, sacrificial mother, working up to her death at the age of twenty-seven to fund her sons’ private education. Since her candour about her illness encouraged other young women to undertake cervical screening and vaccination for the human papillomavirus, fans often added a sixth – heroine. Conducted and conceived in entirely melodramatic terms, ‘Jade’s life was so eventful’, her ghost writer Lucie Cave marvelled, ‘a film-maker couldn’t have dreamed it up’ (Goody and Cave 2009: ix). As this study will show, they can and do. The rise of the ‘previously unfamous’ celebrity continues this process of evaluation in the restatement of its perpetual problem, the identification of individual human worth, proclaiming that ‘ordinary lives can be, at least for a bit, worthy of attention’ (Gamson 2011: 1067). Considering the success of celebrities like Goody, Ellis Cashmore (2006: 206) asks, ‘what is talent for? Is it a natural gift, or a capacity to enthrall us?’ To those who would criticize the absence of ‘solid achievement’ in her career, he replies, ‘Appearing on a reality show is an achievement; maintaining a presence in the show is an even bigger achievement … There’s no mystery about why we’re attracted to the likes of Jade Goody: it’s because of her achievements, not least of which is appearing on Big Brother’ (Cashmore 2006: 203). Anticipating this contestation in his historical study of renown, Leo Braudy has argued that democracy is characterized by both an ‘ideology of personal validation’ through fame and – conversely – ‘greater and

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greater disagreement over what constitutes worthy activity – worth doing, worth knowing about, and worth conveying to others’ (Braudy 1986: 588). But where Cashmore (2011: 405–13) extends his argument to claim that today’s celebrity culture has liquidated the traditional social divisions between stars and fans, or leaders and followers, other scholars see the media’s narration of celebrity creation as a commercial and ideological strategy – cheapening production costs, while disguising a continuing exclusivity. In his analysis of this phenomenon, Graeme Turner argues that contemporary celebrity culture tends not toward democracy but what he calls ‘the demotic’ – colloquial, vernacular, popular in expression but not in control. Turner characterizes this demotic tendency historically, invoking Gustave Le Bon’s 1895 description of the crowd ‘in all its unharnessable, exciting, but anarchic character: energetic, over-responsive, excessive and capable of instigating but not easily organizing or managing social and cultural change’ (Turner 2006b: 163).4 The heyday of the crowd was also that of the stage melodrama, which emerged from a similar ‘movement of equalization’, as Geoffrey Nowell-Smith describes it, and ‘supposes a world of equals’ (1987: 71). This tradition can trace its origins to the fairground shows of seventeenthand eighteenth-century Paris. Developed outside the regulated theatre system which restricted the performance of dialogue plays to a few royally licensed venues, these spectacles exploited the dramatics of monologue, pantomime, dancing, acrobatics, and music. The eighteenth-century Paris fairs featured clowns, freak shows, magicians, dancers, puppeteers, tumblers, animal trainers, and ventriloquists. By 1765, an auditorium was built on the Boulevard du Temple to present these attractions, and real theatres followed, offering ballets, comic turns, and pantomime. With increased revenue the latter developed its stock characters and conflicts into spectacular presentations that could include fairytale illusions, battle scenes, vivid storms, and even fireworks. Pantomime became pantomime dialoguée, and unlicensed theatre began to combine song, dance, and spoken drama. The patent houses attempted to suppress this competition, or claim a large share of its receipts, but the Revolution rewarded its supporters on the Boulevard, and in 1791 the National Assembly abolished the licensed monopoly of classical drama and all other commercial restrictions on the Paris stage. Not surprisingly, the first offerings of these newly unregulated theatres echoed the turbulence that surrounded them, and the popular productions of the 1790s featured Gothic settings, persecuted maidens, brutal villains, and terrifying effects in a feast of sensational violence. To come, in the year 1800, was the story of a beautiful heiress, her upright

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young lover, a shady suitor, and a mute beggar with a kind face – the first great success of what became known as ‘melodrama’.

Popular Melodrama and Its Predecessor Coelina, ou l’Enfant du mystère, was adapted by René-Charles Guilbert de Pixérécourt, from a popular novel by François Ducray-Duminil; adapted in its turn by Thomas Holcroft in 1801 as A Tale of Mystery, it became the first English play to be termed a melodrama. The title holds out the prospect of mystery, inaugurated in a Prologue enacted without dialogue: at a picturesque mountain pass in the Savoy, a young painter sets up his easel near a mill. To the ominous sound of distant thunder, two men dressed in long cloaks approach and seem to recognize him. They throw the painter down and stab him as he writhes on the ground. The assailants escape, but an old woman who has witnessed the attack comes to the aid of the victim, who is unable to speak. A group of peasants answer her cries and help the wounded man into the mill as the storm reaches its climax …5 Act One introduces Coelina as the child of her uncle’s deceased brother, a connection whose questioning in the course of the play will become moral as well as familial. A beautiful and virtuous heiress whose very name has a heavenly connotation, she is the centre of the play’s ensemble of highly typified characters. Her uncle Dufour is a country squire so ethically fastidious that he would rather entertain the suit of a little-known relation for his ward than risk the impropriety of assigning her dowry to his son Stéphany, despite his love for her. The handsome and upright Stéphany is the counterpart of Coelina, who returns his love. The prospective arrival of the suitor’s father Trugelin arouses apprehension in the young man, who pronounces him ambitious and greedy. Coelina herself recalls her deceased mother’s warning against him. The villainous outsider is counterposed to another new arrival in the household, Francisque, a mute beggar who has aroused Coelina’s pity. The mystery of Coelina is one of paternity and property. In the course of the play she is introduced as the orphaned inheritor of a Dufour fortune, denounced as a bastard and finally redeemed as the legitimate daughter of the dispossessed Francisque. The genetic enigma of this plot – the determination of family relation  – is supported by the physicality of its character typing, which Pixérécourt borrowed from many sources. The innocent beauty, the handsome youth, the mute victim, and the cloaked villain were already stock

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figures which become wholly formalized in melodrama. The effect of this characterization is to render good and evil identifiable by physical appearance, costume, gesture. In keeping with melodrama’s subordination of verbal to visual effects, we see Coelina’s goodness as clearly as Trugelin’s evil. This interplay of visual registration and moral meaning is at its most intense in the mute figure of Francisque, who cannot voice his claim to his daughter, his deceased wife or indeed his own identity – and yet is instinctively loved by Coelina, and therefore by the audience. Francisque partakes of another traditional role, the figure from the past who arrives unrecognized to reclaim what is rightfully his, a figure as old as Homer’s Odysseus, who returns from the Trojan wars to his kingdom disguised as a beggar. Mutilated and made destitute, Coelina’s father is rendered an object of sympathy, as Dufour’s denunciation leaves her. Trugelin emerges from that same past, and the project of the play is to arbitrate their claims for Coelina. The eleven years that separate its debut from the onset of the Revolution are not many fewer than those of the heroine’s own life, and there is a sense in which the ‘enfant du mystère’ is the ‘enfant de la patrie’. Although the play is set in the prelapsarian innocence of 1770, Coelina represents the nation at a later moment of moral possibility. Yet this morality, Brooks argues, will never enjoy the religious or political certainty of the pre-revolutionary period. Even the scrupulous Dufour will be vulnerable to error, unable to see that Trugelin is after his niece’s money. In melodrama such moral crises are often punctuated with the suspension of a play’s action in a tableau, a pictorial arrangement of its principals at a moment of high emotion. Anticipated in the Prologue’s painter at his easel, this pictorialism arrests and intensifies the climax of Coelina. The young woman is about to marry Stéphany when a letter arrives from Trugelin naming her as the daughter of his unfaithful wife and Francisque. Father and daughter embrace while the company freeze in amazement – until Dufour turns the older man out of the house and denounces Coelina as ‘the child of crime and adultery’ (Marcoux 1992: 80). The scene’s interplay of picture and motion, stillness and animation, has obvious implications for melodrama’s survival in the cinema, but it also manifests the neoclassical interest in artistic creation as the enlivening of a static object, one that gives rise to an earlier play, the first to be termed a ‘melodrama’. That work has its origins in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s experiments in musical drama. In 1752 his one-act opera, Le Devin du village, was performed at the Theâtre du Palais-Royal in Paris, its melodious rendition of a soothsayer’s resolution of a quarrel between a pastoral couple becoming a favourite of

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the royal family and the patent houses. The opera’s theme of peasant fidelity threatened by courtly seduction is developed by a pantomime interlude performed to music, a form identified with the theâtre de la foire. The grateful Louis XV offered Rousseau a pension for life, which he declined, together with any further ventures into opera. Instead, he went on to denounce French opera on the grounds of the language’s unsuitability for singing. Not until the 1760s did he undertake another musical work for the theatre, in which the libretto is recited in alternation with pantomime performed to music. The result, first produced in 1770, was Pygmalion, a one-act play based on Ovid’s telling of the myth, which Rousseau described as a mélodrame. In his influential study of this period, Peter Brooks assigns Pygmalion to opera rather than popular melodrama, which he dates from the French Revolution’s destruction of the sacral and the hierarchical, and their replacement with an ethos founded on individual self-understanding. Nonetheless, he notes the relevance of Rousseau’s melodramatic personalization of ethical choice in his 1761 novel Julie and his posthumously published Confessions. The latter work is singled out for its ‘insistence on the uniqueness of his individual inner being, his difference from all other men, and on the necessity of expressing that being in its totality’. Brooks (1995: 16) perceives this emphasis on the person in what he calls the melodramatic imagination, imparting moral lessons through the ‘strongly characterized’ stage figures of works such as Pixérécourt’s to a populace whose ethical certainties have been annihilated by the overthrow of both church and crown as the legitimate arbiters of authority. There is an echo here of Max Weber’s concept of ‘disenchantment’, which the sociologist appropriated from Friedrich Schiller, himself the author of several eighteenth-century protomelodramas, including the model for a film discussed in this study. Where Weber (2004: 30) describes ‘the disenchantment of the world’ in which ‘the most sublime values  … have retreated into the abstract realm of mystical life or into the fraternal feelings of personal relations between individuals’, Brooks (16) argues that post-revolutionary ‘mythmaking could now only be individual, personal … In fact, the entity making the strongest claim to sacred status tends more and more to be personality itself ’. Challenging this highly influential characterization of this rupture, Matthew Buckley has argued against the theatrical history that Brooks propounds. To the claim that from about 1800 the French popular stage inaugurates a new ‘drama of morality’ for a ‘post-Sacred age’, he replies that melodrama’s dramatic predecessors, from Athenian tragedy to Molière, share ‘a basic trajectory of moral crisis and redemption’ appealing to a ‘popular-collective moral imagination’

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(Buckley 2018: 25). In regard to melodrama’s use of music to intensify action and emotion, he counters with ‘widespread developments in comedy, opera, popular music and illegitimate drama that span the whole of the eighteenth century’ (22). Maintaining that melodrama’s history is ‘not revolutionary but evolutionary’, Buckley concedes that its role as a moral tutor for the post-revolutionary populace may have coincided ‘with the crisis of belief in the traditional order that it articulated, but its origins cannot accurately be located there’ (26). In anticipation of such arguments, Brooks stresses that ‘melodrama appears to be a peculiarly modern form … located within the context of the French Revolution and its aftermath. This is the epistemological moment to which it contributes: the moment that symbolically, and really, marks the final liquidation of the traditional Sacred and its representative institutions (Church and Monarchy)’ (14–15). In a longer history of the ‘modern’, this study will acknowledge the foundational importance of both the popular melodrama of the period after the French Revolution and the neoclassical predecessor which claims its name, arguing that the two share important dramaturgical features, as well as the ideological influence of an earlier revolution, the English Civil War of 1642–51.

The Melodramatic Imagination The ‘melodramatic imagination’ was conceptualized in 1972 in two articles by different authors, each apparently unfamiliar with the other’s writing. While Brooks discussed theatre and the novel in the Partisan Review, Thomas Elsaesser described family melodrama on stage and film in the cinema journal Monograph. There the latter uses the term ‘imagination’ to explain melodrama’s traversing of ‘different artistic forms and … different epochs’, ranging from medieval morality plays to the ‘cloak and dagger’ theatre of the nineteenth century to the novels of Richardson, Hugo, Balzac, and Dostoyevsky to Brecht’s sung dramas, with their exploitation of an ironic musical counterpoint derived from folk ballads. The ‘Hollywood family melodrama between roughly 1940 and 1963’ is proposed as a culmination of these developments, with its constants of style, technique, theme and period amounting to a ‘specifically cinematic mode of expression’ (Elsaesser 1987: 43). While also acknowledging the melodramatic tenor of works stretching from Euripides to Jacobean tragedy, Brooks stresses melodrama as ‘an important and abiding mode in the modern imagination’, with ‘mode’ designating an ‘analytical

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perspective’ more broadly applicable – particularly to the nineteenth-century novel – than ‘melodrama as a dramatic genre and an aesthetic’ (xiii–xiv). In her introduction to Home Is Where the Heart Is (1987: 1) Christine Gledhill follows Brooks in describing melodrama as ‘a specific cinematic genre’ as well as ‘a pervasive mode across popular culture … It refers not only to a type of aesthetic practice but to a way of viewing the world.’ In order to explain the melodrama of celebrity, this study will employ both modal and generic usages, the first applying its underlying epistemological principles to questions of personal worth, the second relating specific aspects of its dramaturgy to films in which some form of public attention is contested.6 Elsaesser’s and Brooks’s choice of the term ‘imagination’ to unite both usages reminds us of its reference to the formation of mental images, a picturemaking faculty that is central to melodrama’s impulse to disclose, reveal, make seen what Brooks calls ‘“the moral occult”, the domain of operative spiritual values which is both indicated within and masked by the surface of reality’ ­(5). This impulse to visualization is particularly relevant to this study’s interest in melodrama’s typology, characterization through physical appearance. In parallel with montage, Eisenstein describes this as typage, which he employed in choosing both professional and non-professional actors for particular parts.7 The practice survives in what is familiarly known as typecasting. Arguing that melodrama manifests a post-Enlightenment ‘thirst for the Sacred’ confronting the impossibility of its conception in ‘other than personal terms’, Brooks claims that ‘Melodramatic good and evil are highly personalized … Most notably, evil is villainy; it is a swarthy, cape-enveloped man with a deep voice’ (16–17). (The vocal register of this otherwise-visual description is best explained by Elsaesser’s comment (51) on the melodramatic quality of ‘American cinema as a whole … [in which] dialogue becomes a scenic element, along with more directly visual means of the mise en scène’.) Taking up this argument, Gledhill claims that this personification of ethical forces can be argued to link melodramatic characterization with cinematic stardom, albeit in a complex evolution. Here she cites Elsaesser (44–5) on the two opposing impulses in the mode, a pre-modern immersion in the mythological and a subsequent turn to the psychological. The first appropriates character to articulate the action, the second emphasizes individual feelings and morality. In Brooks’s claim for melodrama’s reliance on ‘the personality itself ’ as the sole source of post-revolutionary ‘myth-making’ (1991: 209–10), Gledhill perceives a resolution of this contradiction as well as the lineaments of the movie star. Melodrama is claimed to anticipate both the individualist ideology

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of Hollywood and the representation of that individual in an emblematic visual code of physical appearance, facial expression, gesture, movement, costume, and lighting. These ‘excessive mises en scène’ constitute what Monique Rooney (2015: 131) calls ‘expressive subjects’, emotionally intense characters played from the early 1800s in a hyperstylized manner by ‘vedettes’, headliners cast in recurrent roles. Although the celebrities of popular melodrama were not the first theatrical stars – a tradition that dated back to Globe Theatre luminaries such as Richard Burbage and continued in the licensed drama of both England and France  – the nineteenth-century identification of the actor’s physical person with highly charged moral roles enjoyed by huge audiences turned figures such as Marie Dorval and Frédérick Lemaître into ‘idols …. living their lives with a full theatricality’ (Brooks 1995: 86). As the offscreen existence of first the stage’s and then the cinema’s leading performers became an increasing focus of the new media of mass publicity, so their star ‘personae’ played exemplary parts in real-life dramas of personal conduct, the ‘repertoire of melodrama’ that Joke Hermes (1995: 198) has identified in the moralizing, sensationalism, and intense stereotyping long purveyed by celebrity gossip magazines and intensified by social media. In Joshua Gamson’s description of this economy of publicity, ‘the commodity at stake is embodied attention’ (2011: 1062) and its price is an abiding anxiety about its deservedness. That this attention is, as Olivier Driessens (2012: 644) observes, characteristically attracted by ‘emotionalization and dramatization’ points to an imagination that is persistently affective and dramatic – melodramatic, as this study will show. Indeed, David Beer and Ruth Penfold-Mounce (2009) perceive ‘a new melodramatic imagination’ in the sexually provocative Vanity Fair coverage of the pop celebrity Miley Cyrus and her apparent flouting of her Southern Baptist background, ‘a vision of a dramatic choice between heightened moral alternatives’: a tension formed between the pure and the impure, often with the polarization of emotional and extravagant perspectives that we ought to expect from a melodrama.

Power and Esteem Although Brooks grounds popular melodrama in the ideological upheavals of the late eighteenth century, those of the previous 150 years had their expressly philosophical manifestations, in which the assumptions of religious

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revelation and divinely ordained rule were challenged in regard to the ethical and political theorization of the subject’s relation to others. With remarkable frequency these inquiries consider the question of fame. Variously articulated as honour, reputation, and public esteem, fame is examined from very different perspectives in the writings of Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, Adam Smith, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau. In the earliest – if in many ways the most contemporary – of these commentaries the seventeenth-century Englishman, Hobbes, dismisses the existence of inherent human worth, to extol reputation as a sign of marketable power. The eighteenth-century Scots Hume and Smith, although mindful of the economics of renown in their professional careers, deploy the concept of sympathy to defend the desire and circulation of esteem. Their French contemporary Rousseau pursues the theme of sympathy to reverse effect, arguing that it is obviated by the competitive ambition for distinction. Taken singly or together, these perspectives do little to correlate personal worth and public regard. If they persuade us of anything, it is the abiding difficulty of aligning these two registers. Yet their repeated interrogation of that relation is its own statement, one that in many ways anticipates the elaboration of melodrama as a narrative mode beyond the stage itself. Brooks (14–15) locates the origins of melodrama in the aftermath of the French Revolution, ‘a world where the traditional imperatives of truth and ethics have been violently thrown into question, yet when the promulgation of truth and ethics, their instauration as a way of life, is of immediate, daily, political concern’. Gledhill, whose purview is Hollywood cinema and its Anglo-American theatrical predecessors, broadens this transformation to encompass ‘bourgeois’ revolutions more generally. But neither Brooks nor Gledhill consider the first of these, the English Civil War of 1642–51, or the dramaturgical rhetoric that features so strongly in the writing of that war’s most significant philosophical commentator, Thomas Hobbes. In the notorious chapter of Leviathan (1651) which declares that ‘without a common power to keep all in awe’ human life is condemned to be ‘solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short’, Hobbes claims that ‘men’8 have three principal motives for quarrel – gain, safety, and reputation. Not only will they use violence to appropriate and retain ‘other men’s persons, wives, children and cattle’ but to challenge ‘any sign of undervalue, either direct in their persons, or by reflection in their kindred, their friends, their nation, their profession, or their name’ (Hobbes 1996: 70). Hobbes’s earlier treatise on The Elements of Law (1649–50) proposes that ‘the value or worth of a man’ is estimable ‘according to the signs of honour and dishonour’ (1969: 35), and in Leviathan he describes honour as the

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acknowledgement of power: ‘To be conspicuous, that is to say, to be known, for wealth, office, great actions, or any eminent good, is honourable’ (1996: 53). His initial list of such signs of honour is highly conventional, but rather than values in themselves, they are said to be indications of power – defined in Leviathan (Hobbes 1996: 48) as the capacity ‘to obtain some future apparent good’ – from which honour flows. In The Elements of Law (1969: 35), Hobbes claims that riches indicate ‘the power that acquired them’; authority the ‘strength, wisdom, favour or riches by which it is attained’; beauty ‘power generative’ or fertility. But since, as Leviathan proclaims, ‘honour consists only in the opinion of power’ (Hobbes 1996: 53), it may also be signified less conventionally. Actions that many would regard as immoral or unjust may to others be signs of honour. For the ancients, Jupiter’s adulteries were evidence of his power as duelling, Hobbes observes, functions for his contemporaries, despite its illegality. The latter, he predicts, would continue to be identified with courage until ‘such time as there shall be honour ordained for them that refuse, and ignominy for them that make the challenge’ (Hobbes 1996: 53). The possibility of a divine determination of honour outside the parameters of power is wholly discounted, since God’s sovereignty is itself argued to be derived not from goodness or justice, but from ‘his irresistible power’ (Hobbes 1996: 397). This equation of honour with power, and power with a contextually interpreted series of signs, is first articulated by Machiavelli in The Prince (1532): ‘the masses are always impressed by the superficial appearance of things’ (1992: 35). It is made bourgeois, made modern, in Leviathan, where Hobbes sets out a calculus of honour based on a mercantile theory of value expressed in the fluctuations of price. Writing in the century in which the meaning of ‘esteem’ had evolved from the more commercial ‘estimate’ or ‘appraisal’ to ‘high regard’, he argues that The value, or worth of a man, is as of all other things, his price; that is to say, so much as would be given for the use of his power: and therefore is not absolute; but a thing dependant on the need and judgment of another. An able conductor of soldiers is of great price in time of war present, or imminent; but in peace not so. A learned and uncorrupt judge is much worth in time of peace; but not so much in war. And as in other things, so in men, not the seller, but the buyer determines the price. For let a man (as most men do) rate themselves at the highest value they can; yet their true value is no more than it is esteemed by others. (Hobbes 1996: 50)

Hobbes allows that one may exult in one’s imagined ability, a competitive pride he calls ‘glorying’. If such pleasure is founded on previous success, it can

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be enjoyed with confidence. If based on fantasy or the flattery of others, it is ‘vainglory’ (Hobbes 1996: 34) and will prove so in the market.9 Neither the economic nor the martial references are metaphorical. Midseventeenth-century England was in the grip of a dispute over religious doctrine and royal authority that repeatedly erupted into armed conflict. Leviathan was written after its royalist author had himself fled to France in fear of political persecution. From 1642 until 1651, England saw three outbreaks of civil war between those of his persuasion and the parliamentarians, the execution of Charles I in 1649, the exile of his son Charles II (who Hobbes would tutor in Paris), and the establishment of parliamentary rule by the Commonwealth. And much of this conflict concerned the conditions under which the crown could raise revenue. Not surprisingly, the functions that Hobbes particularly identifies with power in these circumstances include the provision of protection, a service available at a price set not by the seller but by the aggregate of buyers. In Leviathan these purchasers are urged to become contractual partners and surrender their rights to an absolute sovereign granted the power to enforce all other contracts. Absent such authority, the treatise advises, social existence would continue to be as violent and frightening as it had been in the Civil War, as it reportedly was ‘for the savage people in many places of America’ (1996: 71), since humans are said to be naturally competitive, insecure, and violent. The Elements of Law argues that only a union of ‘many wills’ could replace this contention with consent (1969: 63) and Leviathan characterizes the state thus created as an ‘artificial man’ (1996: 9) speaking ‘the voice of the greatest number’ (1996: 90). This ‘one person, natural, or civil’ would combine the powers of this multitude to hold ‘the greatest of human powers’, ‘the power of a commonwealth’ (1996: 48). Developing this anthropomorphic figure, referred to in The Elements of Law as the more familiar ‘body politic’ (1969: 125), Leviathan blends religious and theatrical ideas of the ‘person’. The title page of its first edition is illustrated with the Parisian artist Abraham Bosse’s depiction of a gigantic man standing above a city. At the head of the engraving a Latin verse from the biblical Book of Job (41.33) proclaims of God, or Jehovah, ‘There is no power upon the earth to be compared to him.’ (The verse offers a stern reminder of Jehovah’s powers: not only is he Job’s creator, he is the creator of monsters like the leviathan, a seagoing dragon that ‘makes the deep to boil’ – 41.31.) Beneath this legend, the giant holds a sword in his right hand and the bishop’s crozier in his left, uniting the powers of church and state. On his head he wears a jewelled crown and on his body what appears to be shirt of mail or armour plating. If its linked

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detailing initially suggests the leviathan’s reptilian scales, closer examination reveals the outlines of a crowd facing the regal body which it both beholds and visibly constitutes. While Hobbes looks to the Old Testament to express the power and magnitude of sovereign rule, it is in the Christian doctrine of the Trinity that he finds a theory of its representative function. This equivocally monotheistic teaching holds that there is one God, but with three divine ‘persons’ – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. Arguing that group dissent makes sovereignty possible only in the singular, Hobbes (1996: 96) radically adapts this doctrine to define the Commonwealth as a single institution granted by the multitude the ‘right to present the person of them all (that is to say, to be their representative)’. In linking ‘personation’ to political representation, he combines his quasi-Christian conception with the then familiar use of the term to mean performance of a dramatic role. A brief chapter initiating his argument for the representative authority of the monarch defines ‘persons, authors, and things personated’: The word person is Latin: instead whereof the Greeks have [prosopon], which signifies the face, as persona in Latin signifies the disguise, or outward appearance of a man, counterfeited on the stage, and sometimes more particularly that part of it which disguises the face, as a mask or visor: and from the stage has been translated to any representer of speech and action, as well in tribunals, as theatres. So that a person is the same that an actor is, both on the stage and in common conversation; and to personate, is to act, or represent himself, or an other; and he that acts another, is said to bear his person, or act in his name. (Hobbes 1996: 88)

Here Hobbes exploits the ancient trope of the world-as-theatre, or in the royalist poet Edmund Waller’s tribute to the amphibious Leviathan, ‘the whole ocean for his theatre’ (Hardacre 1948: 431), revived by the Elizabethans. In the same tradition, his contemporary Andrew Marvell (1971: 92–3) stages the execution of Charles I as a tragedy in his ‘Horatian Ode’, probably written in the year that Leviathan was published: That thence the royal actor borne The tragic scaffold might adorn: While round the armed bands Did clap their bloody hands.

Developing this theatrical metaphor to advance his theory of contractual absolutism, Hobbes relies on different, if overlapping, meanings of

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‘representation’ – representation as authorized agency and representation as artistic semblance.10 As agent he names the rector of a church, the legal guardian of a child. As semblance he cites the ‘disguised actor’ in the ‘outward appearance’ of a character ‘counterfeited on the stage’ (1996: 88). In carrying out its representative function this figure takes on a suprahuman aspect: as God created beings ‘of greater stature and strength than the natural’, so Hobbes’s readers are exhorted to create ‘that great Leviathan called a commonwealth, or state … which is but an artificial man’ (1996: 9). Of persons artificial, some have their words and actions owned by those whom they represent. And then the person is the actor; and he that owns his words and actions, is the author: in which case the actor acts by authority. (Hobbes 1996: 88–9)

In the next chapter of Leviathan, Hobbes urges his contentious countrymen to relinquish the right to govern themselves and instead authorize ‘One person, of whose acts a great multitude, by mutual covenants one with another, have made themselves every one the author, to the end he may use the strength and means of them all, as he shall think expedient, for their peace and common defense’ (1996: 96). Hobbes’s defence of absolutism on the grounds of practical necessity rather than natural superiority was rejected by most royalists, while both Catholics and Protestants deemed his eccentric theology anathema. His assertion of what has been described as ‘the inevitable dominance of possessive market values’ (Macpherson 1962: 86) finds far more favour in contemporary neoliberalism than it did in the seventeenth century, although it too remains fiercely contested – not least, as we shall see, in discussions of public recognition. Most pertinently for this study, his dramaturgical rhetoric – ‘disguise’, ‘stage’, ‘mask’ – can be seen to reinstate the uncertainties about honour that his realpolitik seeks to dispel, since it characteristically draws attention to the differences between reality and appearance, nature and artifice, glory and vanity – differences that take on a further dimension when the artifice in question is an actor’s impersonation of a fictive character created by an author. If Hobbes’s theory of sovereignty is remarkably contemporary in its emphasis on spectators’ identification with the state actor performing on their behalf,11 both he and his readers know what happens when, as in the case of the theatre-loving Charles I, the obstinate autocrat misses his cue. (As Marvell suggests, the king was made to mount the scaffold because he was only an actor, unlike the victorious Cromwell.)12 The king may have been convinced of his own worth, but Leviathan must charge him

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with vainglory if that assessment contradicts that of the (tax-) paying public. In his personification of the state as an actor beheld by the crowd Hobbes ironically undermines the power of the monarchy while asserting that of the theatrical spectacle which would become the model for modern celebrity.

The Aspiration to Fame In the century after Hobbes’s death in 1679, the circumstances of intellectual inquiry changed and with them the meanings and possibilities of fame. Hobbes had supported himself by tutoring the scions of noble families, accompanying them on their tours of Europe and advising their fathers. For much of his life he enjoyed the patronage and protection of the ducal Cavendishes, and after the Restoration a pension from Charles II. His controversial writings were circulated with care, sometimes anonymously, often in manuscript copies prior to printing for a limited number of educated readers. Even late in life he chose to burn many of his papers to escape prosecution for heresy. With the subsequent relaxation in religious tensions and print licensing requirements, and a huge extension of literacy, British writers’ dependence on private patronage diminished. At the beginning of the eighteenth century, changes in copyright law enabled authors to have a proprietary share in their works, while the expansion of the reading and buying public made those works potentially valuable properties. The enlarging market in both fiction and non-fiction was abetted by an expanding publicity machine which grew to some sixty newspapers in London alone. Literary success became commoditized, and with it literary fame, but neither its conferment nor its meaning were unambiguous. In the brief autobiography he wrote shortly before his death in 1776, the Scottish philosopher David Hume left a critical and financial inventory of his authorial career. My Own Life opens by acknowledging the love of literary fame as its author’s ‘ruling passion’ (Hume 1980: 611), albeit one that was frustrated for much of his life. Born into an aristocratic family, but with the meagre income of a younger son, he travels abroad to study with ‘rigid frugality’ in rural France. There he undertakes his three-volume Treatise of Human Nature, published in 1739–40. When it fails, he stalwartly continues to write, recasting the Treatise in a number of shorter discrete works in a more popular style. This attempt to reposition himself in the market strikes a contemporary note, but it is not met with success. Meanwhile, he takes up short-lived diplomatic appointments including a stint as aide-de-camp of the ambassador to the courts of Vienna and

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Turin while rewriting the first part of his Treatise as the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. On his return from Italy, Hume discovers that its publication has been ‘overlooked and neglected’ (1980: 612) while a new edition of his Essays, Moral and Political has met with little more success. Although his bookseller assures him that his works are beginning to be discussed, in 1751 the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ‘incomparably the best of all my writings’, comes ‘unnoticed and unobserved into the world’ (Hume 1980: 613). Appointed Librarian to the Edinburgh Faculty of Advocates, he avails himself of the library to switch subject, attempting the period’s best selling literary genre with a history of the Stuarts: ‘and as the subject was suited to every capacity, I expected proportional applause. But miserable was my disappointment.’ Hume’s attempt to rehabilitate the reputation of Charles I succeeds in infuriating every section of political opinion, while a volume on the reign of Elizabeth is equally ‘obnoxious’ to its intended readership. It is only in 1761, with the publication of two further volumes on pre-Elizabethan England, that he receives ‘tolerable, and but tolerable, success’. But notwithstanding their mixed reception, Hume’s histories eventually begin to sell, and then sell in great numbers, finally exceeding ‘anything formerly known in England’. By the age of fifty he has ‘become not only independent, but opulent’ (Hume 1980: 614). Beneath Hume’s satisfaction it is not difficult to discern a characteristically eighteenth-century frustration with the vagaries of esteem in an increasingly amorphous and unpredictable literary culture (Brock 2006: 9). The philosopher declares himself ‘callous against the impressions of public folly’ but not so callous that he fails to mention ‘my literary reputation’s breaking out at last with additional luster’ (615) at his autobiography’s conclusion. To understand this contradiction we need go no further than his own Treatise of Human Nature. In Book Two’s discussion of pride and humility, he considers ‘the love of fame’, observing that ‘Our reputation, our character, our name are considerations of vast weight and importance; and even the other causes of pride; virtue, beauty, and riches; have little influence, when not seconded by the opinions and sentiments of others’ (Hume 2000: 206). Here it is important to understand the parallel Hume draws between pride, or love of self, and esteem, one’s pride in and love of another. To explain their interrelation, he advances the concept of sympathy, which at the time referred not to particular feelings, such as pity or compassion, but rather to the means of communicating feelings and opinions. Where Hobbes sees humans as motivated solely by selfish ‘passions’ or emotions, Hume – who finds the dark psychology of

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Leviathan as remote as Plato’s Republic – maintains that they can both experience and exchange feelings of benevolence. Citing the suggestibility of both children and ‘men of the greatest judgment’ (206), as well as the uniformity of mood within social groups as large as nations, the Treatise argues that we receive ideas of other’s opinions or feelings through their appearance and speech. The praise of others conveys their esteem, their loving pleasure in one’s achievements. This is first felt sympathetically as one’s own pleasure, a pleasure then increased by its association with one’s existing pride in oneself. Such a correspondence between self-esteem and the esteem of others is intensified, Hume claims, by the shared affections and interests of social connection: ‘we receive a much greater satisfaction from the approbation of those, whom we ourselves esteem and approve of, than of those, whom we hate and despise’ (209). Conversely, in an apparent allusion to his lonely composition of the Treatise in France, he observes that the disregard of strangers is more bearable in the absence of sympathetic bonds. But if the respect of one’s peers is most desirable, what of public esteem? Dismissing those who acquire it by plagiarism – and thus acknowledging that fame may be won by the undeserving – he concedes that ‘popular fame may be agreeable even to a man, who despises the vulgar; but ‘tis because their multitude gives them additional weight and authority’ (210–11). In so doing, despite his differences with Hobbes, Hume endorses Leviathan’s calculation of worth: while the lack of love diminishes one’s honour, that of many multiplies its power. As quantifiable as the sales it encourages, the esteem of even those one doesn’t esteem adds weight and authority to a reputation, and with it may come wealth and independence.13 Hume had occasion to test his own feelings in this regard when he became famous in the country where he had languished as a fledgling philosopher. Taking up a diplomatic post in Paris in 1763, he was presented to the royal circle at Versailles. Among his many admirers at court, the wife of the prime minister, Madame de Choiseul, and the King’s mistress, Madame de Pompadour, seemed to have read Hume’s translated writings ‘with some care’. ‘I know you are ready to ask me … if all this does not make me very happy’, he writes to his friend Adam Smith, whose own Theory of Moral Sentiments, Hume assures him, was just then being translated in France: ‘No, I feel little or no difference.’ Asserting his suspicions of this courtier ‘species, that would scarce show me common civilities a few years ago’, he proclaims more satisfaction with the hospitality of the British legation ‘than from all these external vanities’ (Hume 1932a: 408). A month later, however, after being congratulated on his ‘reputation dans ce pays-ci’ by the ten-year-old child who would become Louis XVI, Hume remarks

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to another friend ‘how much greater honour is paid to letters in France than in England’, and confesses in a postscript ‘I daily reconcile myself more to this place, and expect soon to be a Parisian’ (Hume 1932a: 415). In The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), Smith maintains that this pleasure in approval, together with an aversion to offend, are inherent human traits, suiting us for the moral demands of social life. The desire for praise originates in the desire to be praiseworthy, ‘to be that thing which, though it should be praised by nobody, is, however, the natural and proper object of praise’. Like Hume, Smith (2009: 136–7) regards this as an effect of sympathy, in which our love and admiration for others makes us crave ‘the like agreeable sentiments’. Indeed, he argues that ‘the love of just fame’ (141) is founded in our admiration for others. Smith thus urges his readers to view themselves through the eyes of others, but where Hobbes posits public valuation as the sole evidence of worth, Smith acknowledges the possibility of error and counts the approval of ‘ten thousand ignorant though enthusiastic admirers’ (2009: 298) as less than that of a single wise man. Exploiting the vulnerability of Leviathan’s theatrical rhetoric, he decries the ‘groundless applause’ (2009: 138) awarded the woman whose cosmetics win praise for her complexion. Here vanity is assigned its traditional femininity, a theme that Rousseau was simultaneously elaborating in his attack on female actors and a recurring undertone in the disparagement of fame. Vanity is a major concern in Smith’s account, since the acceptance of undeserved approval cancels the equation between praise and praiseworthiness claimed to foster social harmony. In 1714 the Dutch essayist Bernard Mandeville had argued in an influential polemic, The Fable of the Bees, that all good deeds were performed out of vanity, as he defined the self-interested pursuit of commendation. In reply Smith (2009: 364) acknowledges that an affinity between vanity and the love of true glory, as both these passions aim at acquiring esteem and approbation. But they are different in this, that one is a just, reasonable and equitable passion, while the other is unjust, absurd, and ridiculous. The man who desires esteem for what is really estimable, desires nothing but what he is justly entitled to, and what cannot be refused him without some sort of injury. He, on the contrary, who desires it upon any other terms, demands what he has no just claim to.

But what Smith must also acknowledge are the many claimants to regard situated somewhere between the extremes of this opposition, such as the man ‘who while he desires to merit approbation is at the same time anxious to obtain it … his motives have a greater mixture of human infirmity’ (2009: 365). Much

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of the most arresting discussion of esteem in The Theory of Moral Sentiments concerns such mixed motives. The youth with pretensions to accomplishment ‘would not pretend to them if he did not earnestly desire to possess them’ (304). Where mathematicians and scientists appear indifferent to the public approval of their discoveries, poets and practitioners of other arts with less certain criteria of excellence often require it. Most troubling for Smith’s argument that praise and blame express praiseworthiness and blame-worthiness is the plight of those condemned and executed for crimes they have not committed. Religion alone is able ‘to tell them, that it is of little importance what man may think of their conduct, while the all-seeing Judge of the world approves of it’ (144–5). Here, unlike the sceptical Hobbes and Hume, Smith invokes a second, superior, arbiter of worth – God. In so doing, he maintains the asocial evaluation of personal merit that would also influence Rousseau, one which maintains ‘two sets of thoughts’14 about fame.

Art and Amour-Propre In a much-noted paradox, the fiercest philosophical criticism of celebrity comes from the most famous philosopher of the century, whose writing for and about performance takes this discussion to the stage. In 1766, when Hume conveyed the exiled controversialist to political asylum in England, he could describe Jean-Jacques Rousseau as ‘of all the writers that are or ever were in Europe … the man who has acquired the most enthusiastic and most passionate admirers’ (Hume 1932b: 27) and admit that their friendship swelled his own importance. Rousseau, for his part, refers to the Scot as ‘the famous Hume’ in his Confessions (1995: 484). Throughout his career Rousseau had received acclaim for his philosophy, dramatic works, and criticism, but this was hugely magnified by the 1761 publication of his novel of passion and renunciation in an idealized provincial community, Julie, ou la nouvelle Héloïse. Its combination of love story, ethical teaching, and – in what proved a potent stimulant of public interest – apparent autobiography made it the bestseller of the century. In his posthumously published memoirs, Rousseau admits his strategies for this success. Not only did he give advance readings of Julie’s stirring letters to a prominent Parisian hostess, Madame du Luxembourg, he encouraged the members of her circle to believe ‘that I myself was the hero of this novel …. Everyone was persuaded that one could not express so vividly feelings that one had not experienced at all, nor depict the raptures of love this way except after

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one’s own heart’ (Rousseau 1995: 458). If this were not enough, his preface to the novel teasingly asks whether ‘the entire correspondence [is] a fiction? Worldly people, what matters it to you?’ (Rousseau 1997: 1). The ensuing identification of author with character produced a new kind of literary fame, one in which the public wanted to see Rousseau. He himself became a spectacle, both the ‘one who owns the words’ and their ‘personation’, to invoke Hobbes, and this was fittingly demonstrated in a theatre. In London, Hume took Rousseau to the Drury Lane Theatre, whose actor-manager David Garrick was the first English performer to be described as a ‘star’,15 but it was Rousseau who attracted a crowd in the street outside.16 Sitting in a box opposite him, the King and Queen were observed by Hume looking at the writer more than the players, an upstaging at which the Frenchman excelled (Brock 2006: 23). Did this attention, as Adam Smith might have asked, make Rousseau very happy? In his Confessions he protests his dismay – and at times alarm, given the violence of those scandalized by his views – to find strangers travelling great distances to see him after the publication of his novel: Those who had come to see me up to then were people who, since they had some talents, tastes, and maxims in common with me, alleged them as the cause of their visits, and immediately introduced matters about which I could converse with them … [Subsequently] it was officers or other people who had no taste for literature, who for the most part had never read my writings, and who did not fail, according to what they said, to have traveled thirty, forty, sixty, a hundred leagues to come to see and admire the famous, celebrated, very celebrated man, the great man, etc. … (Rousseau 1995: 511)

Read through Hume, Rousseau could be understood to experience his mass esteem with a sympathy weakened by social as well as geographical distance. To this enthusiast of the city state as the ideal political entity, the sheer extent of his popularity, as well as the valuation of fame for its own sake, might vitiate its capacity to communicate pleasurable regard, but this was not his sole objection to modern renown. Throughout his writing, the thematics of personal virtue and public esteem link Rousseau’s philosophical essays to his dramatic works. His early play Narcissus, or the Lover of Himself takes vanity as its subject in the comic treatment of a young man who falls for his own portrait repainted in the guise of a woman. For the playwright, convinced of the inferiority of that sex, this gender revision and its grip on its unwary subject marks a moral descent, meeting halfway the dubious new female ambition for esteem. Yet the author’s

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anxious identification with his eventually chastened hero is apparent in the preface written for its belated publication in 1752. Fresh from the success of his prize-winning Discourse on the Sciences and Arts (1751), he pledges that if he ever begins ‘to court the favor of the public’ or if his ‘love of reputation’ causes him ‘to forget that of virtue’, he will throw his writings ‘into the fire’ (Rousseau 2004b: 127) Having warned in the Discourse on the Sciences and Arts against ‘the disastrous inequality introduced among men by the distinction of talents and the debasement of virtues’ (1992a: 18), Rousseau elaborates his argument in its successor. Reversing Hobbes, the 1754 Discourse on Inequality portrays humanity’s evolution from a benign primitivism to the relentless competition of civilized existence. Rousseau’s state of nature is one of solitude, where ‘the savage man’ desires only ‘nourishment, a female, and repose’ (1992b:  27). In this presocial state, the acquisition of language is unnecessary, since early humans neither need nor have communication, and, without such intercourse, have no experience of ‘vanity, nor consideration, nor esteem, nor contempt’ (38). It is only with the development of sociality, from the conjugal family to larger communities, that each person begins ‘to look at the others and to want to be looked at himself, and public esteem ha[s] a value’ (47). With the privatization of property and the division of labour, economic inequalities are formalized in the distinctions of merit, power, rank, and wealth. (The degree to which the first three become reducible to the fourth, become commoditized, is said to measure the corruption of primitive existence.) Circumventing these distinctions is only possible by acquiring, or even feigning, intelligence, beauty, strength, skill, talent – by making oneself other than one is. And so to the present day, in which the civilized competition ‘for reputation, honors, and preferences … devours us all’ (63). In a rare divergence from his overarching argument in the Second Discourse, one that would be developed in Emile and The Social Contract,17 Rousseau attributes both the ‘best and worst among men, our virtues and our vices’ to this craving for distinction, but as ‘a multitude of bad things as against a small number of good ones’ (63). Such eminence, he complains further, is sought as an expression of domination, to subordinate others rather than to give pleasure to those that achieve it. Like the property relations from which they derive, those of esteem are deemed essentially privative: its beneficiaries value them ‘only insofar as the others are deprived of them; and because, without changing their status, they would cease to be happy if the people ceased to be miserable’ (63).

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Where Hume regards pride as a defensible manifestation of self-love, one that can be sympathetically communicated as pride in another, Rousseau divides it in two. In a note to the Second Discourse he distinguishes amour de soi, the drive for self-preservation, from amour-propre, vanity, or conceit. The first is said to be instinctual, the second a product of the reflection induced by social existence. ‘In the genuine state of nature’, Rousseau explains, amour-propre ‘does not exist; for each particular man regarding himself as the sole spectator to observe him … and as the sole judge of his own merit, it is not possible that a sentiment having its source in comparisons he is not capable of making could spring up in his soul’ (1992b: 91). Conversely, sociality is specular – it requires that one see and inevitably submit to identification with what is seen by the other, inevitably alienating the self: ‘the sociable man, always outside of himself, knows how to live only in the opinion of others’ (66). (Thus Rousseau’s Narcissus unwittingly regards his feminine semblance – from so far outside himself that, seek as he may, he cannot find the original.) Four years later, in response to an article advocating the establishment of a theatre in the Calvinist purviews of his native Geneva, Rousseau replied with a polemic written as a letter to the article’s author, the critic Jean-Baptiste d’Alembert. In it he exploits the ambiguity of the French term for theatre, ‘spectacle’, to indict not only drama but the theatricality of urban existence. Comparing the small Swiss republic to Paris, ‘where everything is judged by appearances because there is no leisure to examine anything’, Rousseau (2004a: 294) argues that the theatre formalizes the alienation demanded by social competition. ‘What is the talent of the actor?’ Rousseau (309) asks. ‘It is the art of counterfeiting himself … of saying what he does not think as naturally as if he really did think it … It is a trade in which he performs for money … and puts his person publicly on sale.’ The actress’s paid exhibition of herself is even more stridently condemned (317) for approximating the transactions of the prostitute: ‘how unlikely it is that she who sets herself for sale in performance would not do the same in person and never let herself be tempted to satisfy desires that she takes so much effort to excite?’ Hobbes draws his dramaturgical analogy to illustrate the sovereign’s representational role as the agent and semblance of his subjects. Rousseau turns it to the opposite effect, stressing both the mimetic and political failure of theatrical representation. Comedies deceive their audiences with romantic illusions and tragedies indulge them with the pleasure of irresponsible tears. Alienating agency from its onstage performance, theatre reduces citizens to spectators. But the answer Rousseau proposes for Geneva is not the suppression of theatre by

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the state but a kind of state theatre, an immersive drama in which all the citizens would be actors as well as spectators. Instead of viewing fictions in the playhouse they would encounter each other in public balls and athletic contests, fêtes of masculine strength and feminine beauty. Commentators continue to disagree about the political character of such a society: is Rousseau prescribing the civic incitement of vanity in order to control the population through supervised competition (Marshall 1988: 165)? Or is he advocating vanity’s replacement with the rites of festive communality, ‘that which is ordinary, everyday, even vulgar’ (Strong 1994: 75)? In the light of his criticism of the stage, Rousseau’s interest in writing for it is also a puzzling, if not uncharacteristic, contradiction. In any case, when Rousseau writes a piece for performance in 1762, he returns to the theme of art and amour-propre, this time in a markedly experimental way. Pygmalion derives from Ovid’s tale in Book X of the first century CE Metamorphoses: a king who shuns the company of his immoral female compatriots carves the ivory image of a beautiful woman, falls in love with it and prays to Venus that she grant him a human equivalent. After sacrificing to the goddess he returns home and kisses the statue, which comes alive. The myth had become a cultural craze in eighteenthcentury France for its narrative of matter’s animation, its emphasis on human creation and its theme of self-discovery. The results were works including Jean Raoux’s 1717 painting Pygmalion amoureux de sa statue and André-François Boreau-Deslandes’s 1741 philosophical novel Pygmalion ou la statue animée, as well as actual sculptures, such as Etienne-Maurice Falconet’s 1763 Pygmalion aux pieds de sa statue. In 1778, the German philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder published an aesthetic manifesto, Sculpture, which proclaims the medium’s superiority to mere depiction in its three-dimensionality and free-standing independence. Subtitled Some Observations on Shape and Form from Pygmalion’s Creative Dream, it declares: ‘A sculpture before which I kneel can embrace me, it can become my friend and companion; it is present, it is there’ (Herder 2002: 45). Herder travelled to France and may have attended a performance of Pygmalion, but its narrative was anticipated by the 1754 philosophical Treatise on the Sensations by Rousseau’s friend Etienne Bonnot de Condillac, a work on human cognition which imagines the self-realization of a statue coming to life and discovering space and solidity by touching itself and external objects. In 1748 Jean-Philippe Rameau had composed a ballet opera on the same theme, but Rousseau (1998: 497) had long dismissed French opera, arguing that the language, ‘destitute of all accent, is not at all appropriate for music’. As a musician and occasional composer himself, he preferred Italian opera’s rhythmic

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combination of words and melody, seeking a language capable of reuniting speech with the song lost to it in modern times. ‘Determining to what point one can make language sing and music speak is a great and fine problem to resolve’, Rousseau (1998: 495) declares. His solution was to replace the sung librettos he found impossible in French with a hybrid form in which words and music are heard in succession, the spoken phrase ‘announced and prepared by the musical phrase’ to which the actor adds silent gestures. The silence of the actor then says more than his words; and those reticences, well placed and well handled and filled on the one side by the voice of the orchestra and on the other with the mute acting of an actor who feels both what he says and what he cannot say … produce an effect superior even to that of declamation.

Such a method, he argues, would offer ‘to the French spectator the type of melodrama most suited to his language’ (Rousseau 1998: 497). Rousseau is thus often credited with the invention of the theatrical form that would flourish on the nineteenth-century stage; yet the classical origin and unified time and space of his play are far from the folkloric plotting of popular melodrama. Arguing that Rousseau’s term is merely an adaptation of the Italian ‘melodramma’ for opera, Brooks (1995: 217) assigns Pygmalion to that art. Yet he also notes Pixérécourt’s description of his own 1798 Victor, ou l’Enfant de la forêt, originally written as an opera and then reworked with an orchestra but no singing, as ‘the first born of melodramas’ (1995: 87).18 Moreover, Brooks (1995: 217) acknowledges that Pygmalion’s use of ‘pantomime and mute gesture’ exploit the conventions of the fairground shows prohibited in pre-Revolutionary law from competing with the dialogue drama of the licensed theatres, while its scenes of revelation and antinomic rhetoric anticipate melodrama proper. Following Rooney’s (2015: 93) attention to its formal composition by ‘elements that remain unreconciled with one another’, we might join her in designating Pygmalion an ‘ur-melodrama’. Not staged until 1770, after the amateur composer Horace Coignet19 had contributed a score to Rousseau’s overture and andante, Pygmalion, like Narcissus, adds a contemporary inflection to its Ovidian theme. In his studio a sculptor (not a king – the play follows eighteenth-century convention in making its hero an artist) is discovered dreaming ‘with the attitude of a restless and sad man’ (Rousseau 2004c: 230). He rises to work, then downs his tools in despair. As if overwhelmed by the arguments of the First and Second Discourses, he declares the arts and philosophy ‘insipid’ and himself beyond the pleasures of ‘praise and glory’. Wandering disconsolately from stone figure to figure, he stops and

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hesitantly unveils the most beautiful of his works, a statue of the nymph Galatea, whose mythological identity as a sea spirit suggests a prior metamorphosis. In her celebration of melodrama’s plasticity, Rooney evokes its founding spirit as a liminal creature, ‘on the threshold between stasis and movement, old Ovidian myth and new mélodrame, divine and secular worldviews, sight and touch’. But she errs in describing Ovid’s statue as a stone sculpture of an identified figure (2015: 5). In the Metamorphoses the king carves an unnamed maiden in ivory, the pale substance becoming waxen to his warming touch. This organicism suggests a vital principle lost to his countrywomen, turned to stone by Venus for denying her divinity; but, despite their subsequent marriage and child, even Pygmalion’s enlivened figure remains significantly unnamed and uncharacterized. In Rameau’s ballet opera, as well as the eighteenth-century artworks which depict her, she is referred to as ‘the statue’. The name ‘Galatea’ is Rousseau’s addition, borrowed from another Greek myth elaborated by Ovid in Book 13 of the Metamorphoses, in which the mortal lover of the sea-nymph is killed by the jealous giant Polyphemus and then transformed into a river spirit. In Greek mythology nymphs are nature deities: their half natural, half divine existence informs Rousseau’s melodrama of selfhood and its creative origins. Steeling himself to uncover a statue he fears to be somehow sanctified, the frightened sculptor declares ‘Pygmalion! it is a stone; it is your work’ before lifting its veil and kneeling at its feet. His prostration at the base of his statue creates a revelatory tableau of two posed figures, much portrayed in painting and sculpture: the beautiful nymph and her human admirer, stone and flesh so still that their differences of matter and origination are briefly suspended. Proclaiming his homage to Galatea, Pygmalion pays tribute to his own artistry, denying the contribution of both the gods and nature to his creation: Vanity, human weakness! I cannot grow weary of admiring my work; I intoxicate myself with amour-propre; I adore myself in what I have made …. No, never has anything so beautiful appeared in nature; I have surpassed the work of the Gods … (Rousseau 2004c: 232)

If Narcissus is unaware that the image he loves is of himself, Pygmalion knows very well whom he adores. But where in the earlier drama the feminization of the specular other ascribes a comic vanity to its unsuspecting model, in Pygmalion it will come to signify the distance between the sculptor and his resistant subject. When the amorous artist attempts to perfect his creation by chipping away its stone bodice, the statue seems to repel his chisel, as though already

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alive. His terrified discovery of this limit on his control renders him unsteady, suspended between a series of dramatically declaimed oppositions – sense and delirium, cold and warmth, dead marble and living being. If his exclamatory rhetoric is consistent with popular melodrama’s ‘dramaturgy of admiration and astonishment’ (Brooks 1995: 40), so too are the play’s scenes of anagnorisis, or dramatic revelation. Galatea’s unveiling is only the first of these, leading to the sculptor’s realization that his love is not for a idealized figure but ‘a living being who resembles it … whatever hand may have made it’ (Rousseau 2004c: 233). Freed from his passion for his reified creativity – the paradigm of the commodity fetishism lamented in the Second Discourse20 – to acknowledge the existence of other makers, Pygmalion prays that Galatea may live so that he might love and be loved by her, the desublimation required for any reciprocity (Michel 2017: 61). This is a wish beyond his own artistry, exceeding the mere semblance of sculpture for Galatea’s enlivenment by ‘heavenly Venus, by whom everything preserves itself and ceaselessly reproduces itself ’ (Rousseau 2004c: 234). The sculptor’s plea that the goddess who guided the carving of his creation now divide his animating ardour between them is granted in the play’s final scene of revelation, the coup de théâtre in which the statue comes to life and descends from her pedestal. Galatea’s transformation from marble to mortal reverses another artistic trope of the period, in which actors or artists’ models were painted in poses or ‘attitudes’ imitating classical statuary. Her descent from this idealized iconicity achieves a spatial levelling which is accompanied by the play’s move from monologue to dialogue, albeit one distinguished by its use of the first person singular. As the amazed artist falls to his knees, Galatea touches herself and says, ‘Me’ to Pygmalion’s startled echo of ‘Me!’ Again she touches and identifies herself, before her contact with another marble figure elicits ‘This is me no more’. Approaching the sculptor, she places her hand on him, and he rises to take it to his heart. At this she sighs, ‘Ah, still me’, and the ecstatic Pygmalion concludes the play with: Yes, dear and charming object: yes, worthy masterpiece of my hands, of my heart, and of the Gods … it is you, it is you alone: I have given you all my being; I no longer live except through you. (Rousseau 2004c: 235–6)

Galatea’s self-nomination fascinated spectators in 1770. One was struck by the statue’s ‘sublime’ proclamation of its existence, while another declared it ‘a bit metaphysical’:

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But if ‘I’ is the first thing on Galatea’s mind, it is also the last on Pygmalion’s, who proclaims his existence even as he surrenders it to his creation. Although he is finally able to acknowledge the gods’ role in his masterpiece, his self saying, like that of Galatea, signals no extinction of amour-propre.21 Challenging any imputation of self-transcendence, Paul de Man (1979: 186) maintains that ‘this radical negation of the self is in fact its recuperation’. Not only do creator and creation initially predicate themselves in difference and singularity, they restate themselves in their address to each other, leaving their romantic rapport, the possibility of ‘we’, in question at the play’s conclusion. Pygmalion was performed to private gatherings in Lyon and Paris from 1770 onwards. It was not shown to the public until 1775, and then in the elite precincts of the Comédie-Française, far from the spectacles of the Paris fairs and the Boulevard du Temple. Yet this ‘ur-melodrama’ borrows many formal elements from those works, while the polarities of its rhetoric and dramatis personae anticipate those of the popular plays at the beginning of the nineteenth century. Most importantly, Rousseau’s abiding attention to the self as source and object of artistic creation foreshadows not only its centrality to the ethics and characterizations of stage melodrama but to the individual search for social recognition in the films that succeed it. As this study will show, cinema’s celebrity partakes of both eighteenth- and nineteenth-century melodrama, combining characters, stories, and styles from their effectively imbricated traditions. Both ‘melodramas’ – the neoclassical with its narrative of self-discovery and assertion, and the popular with its discernment of moral worth – converge in the personal claim to public regard.

Case Studies The chapters which follow this introduction are case studies of films selected for their contestation of personal worth in narratives in which one or more characters seek recognition of their achievements, veracity, or virtue. In all these films public attention – its benefits and liabilities, power and evanescence – is a

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central concern, one that can derive from or extend beyond the diegetic world of the narrative. The works under consideration range from conventionally identifiable fictional melodramas through docudramas and documentaries to an artist’s film made for gallery exhibition, yet they all share markedly melodramatic characterizations, narratives, and mise en scène. In regard to the latter, the two identifying motifs of celebrity stand out: the emphasis on the image in Rousseau’s neoclassical melodrama Pygmalion recurs in the importance of statuary, paintings, stage tableaux, commercial signage, make-up scenes, newspaper illustrations, TV news images, and filmed self-portraits; the disclosure of the mysterious name in Pixérécourt’s popular melodrama Coelina is repeated on theatre marquees and newspaper front pages, in award ceremonies and roll calls of fame and at key moments when anonymous whistle-blowers identify themselves. Cinema stardom has always been a metatextual construction – now encompassing official biographies and publicity (including Twitter feeds and Instagram postings), media reviews and reportage, fan-produced material, online exchanges between stars and fans, and gossip circulated on the internet and social media as well as performances. Although the case studies in this book focus on films rather than individual stars, they necessarily range beyond a particular film or group of films to include related cinematic, theatrical, televisual, press, literary, and critical texts chosen to examine the contestation and consequences of celebrity. Below is a brief description of these chapters. Chapter 2: Charlie Chaplin’s slapstick melodrama City Lights (1931) might seem an unlikely opening to this sequence of celebrity films. Here his perennial protagonist, the little tramp, is continually forgotten by those he befriends, for whom sobriety and sight ironically stifle the powers of cognitive and moral recognition. Yet the victim of this amnesia is played by the most famous person of the period, setting up a final scene in which the international regard bestowed on Chaplin is reversed to render him an enchanted fan gazing at a florist as though she were a movie star. In a film made shortly after the scandal of divorce from a teenage bride citing Chaplin’s infidelity and abuse, the actor’s relation to his star persona as a figure of pathetic virtue became a central issue in its interpretation, with commentators still debating their relation today. Who do they ‘recognize’ in the tramp? Reviewing the work of Axel Honneth and Paul Ricoeur on the ethics and epistemology of recognition, this chapter considers City Lights in terms of the acknowledgement and esteem analysed in their studies and the celebrity which they largely ignore.

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Chapter 3: One of the most abiding anxieties about contemporary celebrity culture is that it encourages the emulation of impossible or unsuitable role models. While psychologists discern a pathological descent from fans’ admiration to identification with their ‘idols’, moralists on the right and left denounce the inculcation of false values, absurd ambitions, and political misjudgments. Conversely, film scholars have defended the creativity in fans’ mimetic responses to the stars they admire. As this chapter will show, the paradoxical nature of subject formation, the way that art or self-assertion may nonetheless derive from the imitation of others, comes into view in a sequence of texts that take imitation as their titular theme and celebrity as their recurring narrative. In Fannie Hurst’s 1933 novel Imitation of Life, its 1934 and 1959 film adaptations directed by John Stahl and Douglas Sirk, and several pastiches and parodies, both the ontological and ethical status of ‘imitation’ vary, putting into question any simple condemnation of the ‘imitation of life’. Chapter 4: Filmed in Hollywood to encourage the United States into the war via some remarkably reflexive star casting – the adulterous couple Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier play the adulterous lovers Emma Hamilton and Horatio Nelson – Alexander Korda’s That Hamilton Woman (1940) is less remembered for its propagandistic daring than for its success as a ‘woman’s picture’, in which its once glamorous heroine recalls her rise to fame, a fame represented as being pictured. Korda’s historical dramas are distinguished by their pictorialism, in which the history ‘brought to life’ is often a painting, notably in this film’s recreation of George Romney’s portraits of Hamilton. Its rendition of stardom is read through Susan Sontag’s The Volcano Lover, a novel published fifty years after her childhood viewing of the film. In this ‘romance’ of celebrity and counter revolution, the female star’s complex relation with her image is reconsidered by a writer then at the height of her own fame. Chapter 5: Famed for portraying her personal suffering, the art of Tracey Emin has consistently faced a scepticism that reveals pervasive understandings of both trauma and fame. As a matter of opinion, devoid of intrinsic properties, celebrity inevitably invites contestation, and the testimony of trauma victims is notoriously subject to doubt. To these two categories of suspicion, Emin’s short film Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995) adds melodrama, traditionally the genre most suspect for its emotional intensity, conspicuous stylization, and moralizing narratives. In its denunciation of the double standard in sexual conduct, this autobiographical film, despite its holiday seascapes and contrastingly explicit narration, is surprisingly comparable to D. W. Griffith’s paradigmatic melodrama of victimized virtue, Way Down East (1920). But Emin’s cinematic appeal for moral vindication is also an

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appeal for the public prominence sought in her teenage dancing, a celebrity which this early work helped to secure in another field. Chapter 6: In 1955 the English pundit Malcolm Muggeridge warned that ‘the application of film-star techniques to representations of a monarchical institution is liable to have disastrous consequences’. But in 2006, Stephen Frears’ The Queen created what one film critic hailed as the Crown’s most sophisticated publicity boost for twenty years. In its depiction of the fateful week after the death of Diana in 1997, the film is indebted to Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 romantic melodrama of Elizabeth I’s rivalry with her cousin, the Scottish queen Mary Stuart. As with the first Elizabeth, the second is Queen of the Nation, but she must regain the mass mediated popularity of Diana, the Queen of Hearts. In a highly reflexive narrative, the film foregrounds its contemporary identification of its star (the Oscar-winning Helen Mirren) with the world’s most prominent living monarch as ‘celebrities’, concluding with her declamation on ‘glamour and tears’. Chapter 7: The harm that obsessive virility can wreak on both women and men is an abiding theme in melodrama. Vincente Minnelli’s 1960 Home from the Hill, in which an inveterate philanderer alienates his family and provokes his own murder, echoes Victor Ducange’s 1827 drama of the moral descent of a compulsive gambler, Thirty Years or A Gambler’s Life. In Weiner (2016), Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg update this theme in a documentary on the comeback attempt of a US Congressman sent home from Capital Hill after a sex scandal. The familial crisis they portray has been hailed as a melodrama – with one reviewer remarking on its ‘exaggerated’ characters including a protagonist described as ‘his own villain’ and a wife who seems his ‘willing victim’. When this film of political celebrity as compulsive exhibitionism became a cause célèbre in the 2016 presidential election, the harm wreaked by male obsession arguably reached global proportions. Chapter 8: The Pygmalion myth of a male creator’s love for his female creation has enjoyed an abiding life on screen. From 1937 to 2018, Hollywood has made and remade the story of a talented nobody discovered by a waning star four times, always with remarkable success. Recharged with rock music and the addition of cocaine, A Star Is Born has long since switched its original Oscar scenes to the Grammys while diluting the male star’s dominance, but the iron law of succession is still in force: for a star to rise, another must fall. In addition to this edict, feminist commentators have recently noted another laid down in these films: women’s success is a threat to men. Reviewing all four versions in the light of the #Me Too movement, this chapter considers this perennial narrative of contested celebrity at a time when the ‘forgotten man’ is attempting a comeback.

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Chapter 9: The disguise is a melodramatic topos, concealing the true personality revealed in the narrative, as the genre reveals hidden moral truths. Beginning with Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s exploitation of melodrama in V for Vendetta, whose emblematic mask was appropriated by the movement known as ‘Anonymous’, this final chapter explores the unmasking of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, US Army whistleblower Chelsea Manning and intelligence contractor Edward Snowden in a series of documentaries and drama documentaries released from 2013 to 2019. This unmasking counterposes Assange’s villainy to the equally melodramatic characterizations of Manning as virtuous victim and Snowden as daring hero. Discussing the moral typology that persistently ignores their revelations to equate their ensuing public prominence with vanity, this study concludes with an Afterword considering the artistic turn to strategic anonymity.

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‘The Drama of a Recognition’: City Lights

Nineteenth-century stage melodrama anticipated a new form of celebrity, one that would become central to the cinema, with narratives in which the virtue of a highly typified victim of injustice is contested and revealed. Written for an ill-educated audience, these plays offered visual clues to the moral status of their characters in costume, physical appearance, and – as the genre became established – the typecasting of leading actors. Unlicensed for dialogue until the Revolution, French popular theatre employed a gestural performance style. Retained by its successors, this style added to the emblematic physicality of colouring, figure, and facial features. Their susceptibility to moral interpretation was available for appropriation by a medium whose emphasis on ‘action rather than acting’ enhanced the attention to embodied performance and intensified the identification of the actor with the role. Made at the height of the sentimental turn in his star persona, refashioned from its previous anarchy into a figure of pathetic virtue (Burnetts 2017: 80), Charlie Chaplin’s 1931 slapstick melodrama City Lights plays upon this identification, with its narrative drive to have the protagonist’s sacrifice recognized and its thematics of ethical and epistemological recognition more generally. A famously auteur work, which Chaplin wrote, directed, starred in, co-scored, and produced – for a studio that he co-owned – the film inevitably provokes the identification of its creator with his perennial character the little tramp, debuted on film some seventeen years earlier. Here, two notions of recognition coincide – that granted the unregarded person, the nameless vagrant, and that granted the person who is anything but unregarded, the most famous film star of the time. In joining these together, City Lights encourages broader reflections on the nature of recognition itself, not least the variant of recognition we call celebrity. Although celebrity recognition may seem impossibly remote from the basic acknowledgement required for the formation of subjectivity, the use of the term for both processes announces a connection frequently explored by cultural

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theorists, in considerations of ‘the illusion of recognition’ with which celebrity status assuages ‘the loneliness of existence’ (Rojek 2001: 66), the ‘star system’ in academia created by ‘name recognition’ (Williams 2006: 382) or – most pertinently for these remarks – the many ‘processes of recognition’ at work in ‘the relationship between stars and spectators’ (Stacey 1994: 174). These examples illustrate the multiple meanings of recognition, the ambiguity that troubles the sequence of achievement first and attention second demanded by those sceptical of celebrity. Like its English synonyms ‘distinction’ or ‘regard’, the term can refer to a cognitive or evaluative process or both, an intermingling characteristic of those forms of recognition predicated on recognisability itself. In City Lights the failure of recognition is initially presented in cognitive terms – as signalled by the blindness of one key character, and by the intoxication of another. The city itself is presented as a series of challenges to recognition, with the tramp continually negotiating its dangerous pleasures and fleeting affections. But if he is not recognized by either recipient of his generosity, he is immediately recognizable to us. To the impetus of our instantaneous identification of a character unknown in his diegetic world is added the generic drive towards his moral recognition, the acknowledgement of sacrifice conventionally sought in melodrama. In his fourth century BCE treatise on tragedy, Poetics, Aristotle (1996:  18) proposed the term anagnorisis (from the Greek agnoia – ignorance – and gnosis – knowledge) for a dramatic change ‘disclosing either a close relationship or enmity’, a narrative device inherited by melodrama. Not untypically City Lights reserves the determinate transformation of a central character’s ignorance to knowledge until its conclusion. But the device of disclosure is employed from the film’s opening, when the tramp is discovered sleeping on a civic monument (Figure 1) unveiled for its dedication. Cradled in the lap of its central figure, an immense woman, he wakes, attempts to descend, and rips his trousers on a sculpted sword. This tearing is a recurrent motif in the film, threatening the exposure of its increasingly ragged protagonist, but also that of the ‘Peace and Prosperity’ celebrated by the monument. In a literal parting of the ideological curtain this pompous display is revealed to be a graphic image of homelessness. The tramp’s poverty is counterposed to the spectacle of this city, Chaplin’s city. Filmed on his street set and some actual streets, its lights are spelt out in a titular marquee illumination and its identifiable boulevards – Wilshire, Grand, Beverly, Rodeo – are those of Los Angeles. Poverty and wealth structure a series of parallel antitheses in City Lights: sight and blindness, sobriety and drunkenness, recognition and misrecognition. Although there is no direct allusion to the film industry, riches, spectacle,

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Figure 1  The homeless tramp (Charlie Chaplin) asleep on a monument to Peace and Prosperity in City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931, United Artists).

luxurious (and prohibited)1 indulgence and public recognisability were long established features of Hollywood stardom by the era of its making. These parallel characteristics can converge, with the ‘eccentric millionaire’ (Harry Myers) – the characters are identified by type rather than name – repeatedly becoming blind drunk. (In a surreal scene of what we might call auto-misrecognition, he replies to the terrified tramp’s plea to drive more carefully by exclaiming, as he takes his hands off the wheel, ‘Am I driving?’) At other points, ostensible parallels collapse, notably at a key moment when sight does not bring the anticipated recognition, and must be supplemented by touch. These antitheses build to the traditional resolution of the melodrama, to demonstrate the moral worth of a poor or abused protagonist, ‘virtue made visible and acknowledged, the drama of a recognition’, in Peter Brooks’s influential description of the genre (1995: 27). But in City Lights this recognition poses a further dilemma, as the following rendition of its melodramatic plotline – devoid of its memorable slapstick routines – should show. Harried from the monument, the tramp walks the city streets, pausing before the arresting sight of a second sculpted woman, a nude in an art dealer’s

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window (Figure 2). With these two statues, the film anticipates the Pygmalion role that the tramp will enact in transforming the life of the next woman he encounters (Virginia Cherrill, billed as ‘a blind girl’),2 who is selling flowers on the sidewalk. Hearing the sound of a car door closing, she takes the tramp for a man of substance, a misrecognition encouraged by his generosity in buying a buttonhole and foregoing his change. Later, as he prepares to sleep on a river embankment, he is interrupted by the drunken millionaire’s attempt to drown himself after parting with his wife. Having rescued him, the tramp is taken to his mansion, where he tries to console his host. Eventually the two drive off for a bibulous night at a cabaret, returning the next morning. When the tramp admires the millionaire’s convertible, he drunkenly gives it to him as well as money to buy up the blind girl’s bouquets. Thus the impersonation continues, with the tramp suavely delivering the girl to her home in the Rolls. But when he returns, his now sober companion fails to recognize him and retrieves his car. Later that day, having imbibed again, the millionaire greets the tramp on the sidewalk outside the cabaret, and takes him home for a riotous party. Next morning the two wake in bed together, only for the tramp to be spurned again by

Figure 2  The tramp (Charlie Chaplin) contemplates a nude sculpture in City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931, United Artists).

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his amnesiac host. He makes his way to the blind girl’s corner, but she is missing: a visit to her home reveals that she is ill with fever. In an attempt to raise money for the girl, the tramp signs on as a street cleaner, but is soon fired for returning late to work after bringing lunch, and an article on a new operation to cure blindness, to the girl. Next he agrees to take part in a prize fight, only to have his opponent replaced by a much stronger contestant. Dazed by a heavy punch in round one, he kisses his corner man, imagining that his ministrations are those of the blind girl. Revived for round two, he’s soon knocked out. The film’s rhythm of recognition and rejection resumes when the tramp again encounters the inebriate millionaire, who takes him home and gives him money for the girl’s operation. When hidden burglars suddenly emerge, the tramp fends them off, but is then stopped by police while carrying the cash. Concussed in the fray, the millionaire forgets both his guest and his gift, implicating the tramp in the burglary; but he escapes with the money and delivers it to the girl before being arrested. Several months later he emerges from prison a dejected figure – ashen-faced, ragged, trudging down the street where the girl sold her flowers. Bending down to retrieve a rose from the gutter, he is tormented by a newsboy who pulls his handkerchief through the now gaping tear in his trousers while a laughing florist watches from her elegant shop. Then he suddenly sees her at its window …

Defining Recognition Both City Lights and its reception raise and extend the definitions of recognition in contemporary considerations of the concept, notably the sequential commentaries in Axel Honneth’s The Struggle for Recognition (1995) and Paul Ricoeur’s The Course of Recognition (2005). I want to consider the kinds of recognition laid out in these studies and those which philosophical considerations tend to ignore, the ‘renown’/‘fame’/‘celebrity’ that Chaplin consolidated with this film, terms which may have different inflections (differences that are somewhat exaggerated) but the same persistent problem with the central issue of melodrama – the recognition of personal worth. What do Honneth and Ricoeur mean by recognition? Neither takes up Aristotle’s dramaturgical terminology to use anagnorisis for a striking disclosure, but their prefatory remarks reach back to his attention to public intersubjectivity (Honneth) and ethical reasoning (Ricoeur). Ricoeur takes a more encyclopaedic approach than Honneth, but Hegel’s writings exert an unsurprising influence on

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both commentaries. Among the terms employed by Hegel for recognition is the older German erkennen, with its reference to identifying someone/something as a particular individual or of a particular type, or to realizing a truth or a mistake. If this process is based on past experience, wiedererkennen (‘to recognize again’) may be used. Both terms refer to a process of individual cognition. Conversely the philosopher uses the later term anerkennen to denote both public recognition – acknowledgement, approval, honour – and the self-consciousness obtained by being acknowledged as an ‘I’ by another (Inwood 1992: 245–7). When Axel Honneth develops Hegel’s early-nineteenth-century terminology in his late-twentieth-century study, his translator warns readers that the English ‘recognition’ – from the Latin recognoscere/to acknowledge or know again – can refer either to ‘re-identification’ (wiedererkennen) or to the ‘practical sense’ with which Honneth is concerned, anerkennen, ‘the granting of a certain status’ (Anderson 1995: viii). In employing the second term, Honneth is more interested in what he calls ‘the moral grammar’ of recognition than its epistemology. He begins with Hegel’s assertion of a recognition fundamental to subjectivity, that which is exchanged between parents and children. Challenging Hobbes’s assumption of a violent state of nature in which subjects must compete for recognition, Hegel’s early theories emphasize the mutual recognition that founds the human subject. In the 1805 System of Ethical Life (1979: 11), he cites the ‘reciprocal action and formative education’ conducted within the parent–child relation, elaborated by Honneth (1995: 18) as their recognition of each other as ‘living, emotionally needy beings’. Honneth’s attention to the reciprocal recognition of ‘mother’3 and child is developed with references to object relations theory, notably the work of D. W. Winnicott. As in Hegel’s challenge to Hobbes, Winnicott’s to Freud stresses the facilitating interactions of parent and infant rather than the conflict between the id’s libidinal drives and the controlling powers of the ego. In order to pass from primary symbiosis to separation, both mother and child must learn their independence from each other. But Winnicott (1965: 102) does not ignore the aggression with which the infant tests the reality of this parental autonomy, in which the mother figure is imaginatively ‘destroyed or damaged’. Here Honneth, citing Jessica Benjamin (1990), admits the later Hegel’s better-known postulation of the struggle for recognition between master and slave. In Winnicott’s account, this aggression can be managed by the mother’s understanding of it as an expression of the child’s independence and by the child’s increasing confidence in her care.4 In Honneth’s this leads to a description of ‘love as a particular relationship of recognition … when one knows oneself to be loved by a person that one experiences as independent and for whom one, in turn, feels affection’ (103–4). The sado-masochistic complicity

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of master and slave is deemed ‘a psychoanalytically explicable deviation from a defensible ideal of interaction’ (106–7). In positing this interactive ideal as a model for social recognition, Honneth establishes the first element of what becomes a threefold schema: the emotional support afforded by our most intimate relations; the respect mandated by the state through a system of legal rights; and the esteem available through participation in civil society. But regarding the last, Honneth must acknowledge the contending forces of equalization and individualization manifest in bourgeois relations, as the subject’s own endeavours within ‘the contested field of social esteem’ increasingly replace the pre-modern hierarchy of inherited social standing. Access to this esteem is competitive, Honneth argues, since ‘Persons can feel themselves to be “valuable” only when they know themselves to be recognized for accomplishments that they precisely do not share in an undifferentiated manner with others’ (125). How can we achieve recognition under these conditions? Responding to Honneth, Paul Ricouer composes an entire lexicon of recognition, starting with the definitions of the French term for it (reconnaissance from re-connaitre) in two encyclopaedic dictionaries, the nineteenth-century Dictionnaire de langue française and the 1985 edition of le Grand Robert de la langue française. Significantly for what follows, the former begins with ‘To bring again to mind the idea of someone or something one knows’ with its ‘temporal sense of repetition’ (Ricouer 2005: 6) and the latter resolves several different definitions into three, two epistemological and one ethical: 1. To grasp (an object) with the mind, through thought … 2. To accept, take to be true … 3. To bear witness through gratitude that one is indebted to someone for (something, an act) (2005: 12). This final definition offers a significant additional perspective on recognition, for reconnaissance, unlike its German or English synonyms, has in gratitude a unique meaning,5 one that Ricoeur will develop into a meditation that illumines City Lights.

Blindness and Vision Made in the sound era with a synchronized score and sound effects but no recorded dialogue, City Lights is performed in pantomime, lending itself to the optical epistemology of celebrity ‘recognition’ as opposed to the aural

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epistemology of ‘renown’ or ‘reputation’. (In a distinction relevant to the commentary on this film, consider the difference between the scientist with a familiar name and the film star with a familiar face.) Christine Gledhill (1991: 210) has called attention to the relation of visual characterization to cinematic celebrity, arguing that melodrama’s emphasis on the emblematic type provides the foundation for the star’s construction as a morally coded sign: Melodramatic characterisation is performed through a process of personification whereby actors – and fictional characters conceived as actors in their diegetic world – embody ethical forces … Star personae are constructed in very similar ways. Stars reach their audiences primarily through their bodies. Photography, and especially the close-up, offers audiences a gaze at the bodies of stars closer and more sustained than the majority of real-life encounters.

Here Gledhill is echoing an earlier discussion of embodied performance by Béla Balázs (1931: 284–5), who describes Chaplin and his star contemporaries Fairbanks, Gish, and Valentino as ‘great lyrical poets whose medium was not the word, but the body, the facial expression and gesture’. Employing these resources, Chaplin’s performance in this film might suggest a moral failing, an imposture, since his fastidious manners and gentlemanly hat and cane, not to mention the millionaire’s car and money, belie his lowly standing. (One of the challenges that the modern city poses to recognition is the uncertainty of its inhabitants’ social status.) The tramp’s pretensions are duly subjected to ridicule, but against the comedy of their exposure runs the countervailing pathos of his unrecognized sacrifice. This contradiction is even more apparent in the film’s treatment of blindness and vision. As a woman who cannot see, the flower girl is the doubly defenceless object of the tramp’s gaze and subsequent deception. His fascination with the nude sculpture in the gallery suggests a scarcely repressed voyeurism, and his attempts to peer through the window of the girl’s home resemble those of a peeping tom. But the tramp’s inferior status prevents him from gazing with impunity. He does not begin to look closely at the girl until he realizes that she is blind and he is nearly caught by a neighbour looking in her window. Moreover, the tramp himself is exposed to unwanted scrutiny from the moment he is discovered asleep on the monument. Throughout the film he repeatedly becomes the spectacle, attacking a dancer he believes is assaulting his woman partner at the cabaret, swallowing a whistle during a song recital at the millionaire’s party, flailing at his opponent in the prize fight. After the blind girl attains vision and returns his gaze, his first impulse is to flee. Lured back by

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her proffered flower, he becomes the object of her scrutiny and ours – framed in tremulous close-up, his hand to his mouth.

Chaplin and the Tramp It is notable that the tramp’s newspaper article on a new cure for blindness attributes it to a ‘Vienna doctor’. The best known Viennese physician of the time, who had analysed psychogenic disturbances of vision since his work on hysteria in the 1890s, was of course Sigmund Freud. In March 1931, shortly after Chaplin had visited Vienna on his tour of City Lights, Freud repaid his compliment with a brief analysis of the star, one which displayed his uncritical acceptance of the actor–character equation. Chaplin’s case, he declares in a letter to the biologist Max Schiller, is ‘exceptionally simple and transparent’: He is, undoubtedly, a great artist; certainly he always portrays one and the same figure, only the weakly, poor, helpless, clumsy youngster for whom, however, things turn out well in the end. Now do you think that for this role he has to forget his own ego? On the contrary, he always plays only himself as he was in his early dismal youth. He cannot get away from these impressions and to this day he obtains for himself the compensation for the frustrations and humiliations of that past period of his life. (Freud 1961: 260)

For Chaplin’s contemporaries this biographical reading of the tramp – so commonly called ‘Charlie’ or ‘Charlot’ – was almost impossible to avoid. As Charles Maland (2007: 59–60) points out, this film makes a number of references to the star’s much-publicized life – his father was a drunkard, his mother disabled by mental illness, he was a multi-millionaire and had just undergone a painful divorce. Moreover, like the imprisoned tramp, Chaplin had been out of the public eye, taking three years to perfect City Lights after his previous film, The Circus. Production on the earlier film had also been prolonged by a double crisis in which the star was billed for over a million dollars in back taxes just as his second wife, Lita Grey, inaugurated divorce proceedings. Grey had met Chaplin as a child and at age twelve played the flirtatious angel who kisses the tramp in the heavenly dream at the end of The Kid (1921). At fifteen, she was cast in The Gold Rush. They began an affair and when Grey became pregnant and refused an abortion Chaplin reluctantly married her in Mexico. The bride was sixteen, the groom thirty-five. Georgia Hale replaced Grey in The Gold Rush and Charles

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Chaplin, Jr. was born a few months later. Despite Chaplin’s neglect of his wife the couple produced a second son, but in January 1927, Grey filed for divorce, citing infidelity, abuse and ‘revolting’ (Maland 2007: 18) sexual demands, as well as the withholding of financial support for their children. The resulting scandal divided the American public, outraging conservatives who supported Prohibition, restrictions on immigration, and the teaching of evolution, as well as women’s clubs protesting Chaplin’s alleged neglect of his children. Bans on his films were proposed across the country, from California to Massachusetts. Given their commercial interests, however, the nation’s theatre owners and the Hollywood Production Code administrator Will Hays refused to rush to judgement, while writers for Moving Picture World, the Baltimore Sun and the New Yorker launched vigorous defences in which the identification of the actor with the lovable tramp figured importantly. The early antisocial incarnations of this figure, the bleary drunk of Mabel’s Strange Predicament, the compulsive camera-hog of Kid Auto Races at Venice, or the cynical lecher of Twenty Minutes of Love (all 1914, Keystone) were forgotten. Despite Chaplin’s penchant for young women, including his previous wife Mildred Harris, an actress he had married at the age of seventeen, his defenders included women, notably the Miami Beach Women’s Club, who urged theatre owners to stage Chaplin festivals, and the New York Herald Tribune film columnist Harriette Underhill. With the rhapsodic praise so characteristic of critical responses to the star during this period, Underhill took the moral epistemology of melodrama to its limit, declaring that ‘the reason everyone has loved Charlie Chaplin’s pictures is because his soul is photographed. Charlie Chaplin is a superior soul … He is a public benefactor and he belongs to his public. Mr. Chaplin should never marry. He probably realizes this himself ’ (Maland 1989: 101). In a more brutal version of this argument Louis Aragon and his fellow Surrealists elided actor and character to celebrate each scandalous detail of Grey’s complaint – the demands for fellatio, the paternal neglect, and especially the infidelity – as the acts of Charlot, ‘the champion of love’: We recall an admirable moment in The Imposter when of an instant, during a social gathering, Charlot sees an extremely beautiful woman go by, as alluring as can be, and immediately abandons what he’s doing to follow her from room to room and out on to the terrace until she disappears from view. At the command of love, he has always been at the command of love, this is what his life and his films constantly proclaim. Instant love, with its great and irresistible appeal. At such times all is abandoned, as for instance, at a minimum, the home. (Surrealist Group 1997: 189–90)

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While the Surrealists’ defence of Charlot as the avatar of free love was unlikely to persuade the American public, the largely positive US press coverage (Maland 1989: 105), as well as his final divorce settlement of over $935,000 (Maland 2007: 20) ended the scandal – until related allegations from McCarthyists in the 1940s eventually drove him from the United States.6 Four years after Chaplin’s divorce from Lita Grey, Siegfried Kracauer reviewed City Lights for the Frankfurter Zeitung and then wrote an additional article on Chaplin’s celebrity for the German literary magazine Die Neue Rundschau. In the latter he goes so far as to compare Chaplin’s recognition with that of Albert Einstein. The comparison is more apposite than it might now seem, since Einstein was photographed with Chaplin at the Los Angeles premiere of City Lights and in Berlin gave him a signed photograph inscribed ‘To Charlie Chaplin, the economist’ (Kracauer 1997a: 116). Kracauer’s comparison of the two luminaries also takes up the question of economics, beginning with a distinction between mere name recognition and that achieved by someone who becomes – here Kracauer echoes Underhill – ‘common property’: More than a few artists, statesmen, inventors and researchers have achieved fame. But while all of them may have achieved recognition [anerkannt], not all are actually recognized [erkannt]. Einstein’s name is perhaps more famous than any other, but his teaching is the secret property of only a few. Here Chaplin parts from the rest. He is understood by the poor and the rich, the great and the small in every country. (Kracauer 1997b: 118)

‘Denomination, nationality, wealth and class affiliations erect barriers between people’, Kracauer continues, ‘and only the outcast, the person on the outside, lives untrammelled by restriction’. Here he refers to Chaplin’s continued preference for films without synchronized dialogue, enabling his character to escape the vocal identification that would confine him to a particular nationality and class: If ‘he has at his disposal a language without words, then his realm is boundless’ (1997b: 118). Chaplin’s retention of pantomime was a deliberate choice after the industry had embraced synchronized sound, not least because of the international reach of his productions. His idiosyncratic physicality, the mechanical movements, and the signature silhouette of his baggy suit, bowler hat, and cane enforce optical identification, if not the understanding that Kracauer identifies with being ‘actually recognized’. The critic emphasizes the effect pantomime has on the Chaplin’s star persona, arguing that the tramp’s silence abstracts his maker, the ‘former street urchin from Kennington [who]

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now puts on a banquet for 200 people in the Carlton Hotel’ (1997b: 119), from any precise social location. The character’s outcast status – and here his homelessness, his literal ‘outsider’ existence, seems crucial – is argued to enable the star’s escape from class, exempting this millionaire from the limitations of wealth: ‘As one who represents nothing, Chaplin rules the world from below’ (1997b: 118).7 Where Freud, Underhill, and Kracauer identify the tramp with his onceimpoverished creator, the English filmmaker Ivor Montagu (1967: 90), who viewed rough-cuts of City Lights in Hollywood as Chaplin edited it, came to a different conclusion: A good director must have something of the sadist in him … Charlie speaking of films in which he himself plays as well as directs, identifies with the director, not the actor. He does not see himself as we see him, that is, as the Little Tramp. The Little Tramp is a third person, whom he, the director, makes receive the buffets of fortune, and so, indeed, he speaks of him.

Despite Montagu’s caveat, the recognition of Chaplin in the tramp persists to this day, and from some unlikely quarters. Tom Gunning (1995: 15) has claimed that the final sequence of City Lights offers the audience insight into Chaplin’s ‘most private moments of romantic longing and disappointment’, while in his filmed discussion of it in The Pervert’s Guide to Cinema (Sophie Fiennes 2006), Slavoj Žižek exclaims ‘It’s not only the tramp … Chaplin, as actor-director, is exposing himself to us, the public: “I’m shameless, I’m offering myself to you, but at the same time I am afraid”.’

Recognition and Misrecognition Cinema is founded on just such illusions, beginning with that created by persistence of vision, the brain’s retention of image registrations that create the effect of movement, a succession of recognitions that create a misrecognition. The spectator’s identification with its stars has been compared to the child’s first identification with the idealized stranger in the mirror: ‘recognition … overlaid with misrecognition: the image recognized is conceived as the reflected body of the self, but its misrecognition as superior projects the body outside itself as an ideal ego’ (Mulvey [1975] 1989: 17). Like comedies generally, City Lights undercuts this idealization, in this case offering us the star as a funny looking vagrant played by an actor known to have once

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been very poor. The film’s final scene vividly conveys this discovery via the flower girl’s disparate recognitions – of an imagined gentleman revealed to be destitute – in a portrait of shocked realization. The eyeline match between the girl and the tramp is withheld until this scene, becoming in that withholding as desired as the traditional signifier of romantic union, the kiss. Prior to it, in a conventional portrayal of blindness, Cherrill’s face is repeatedly posed at an oblique angle to the tramp’s, her eyes not directed at any particular object. Chaplin had advised her to ‘look inwardly and not to see me’ (Robinson 2003). Interestingly, she returns to this pensive pose after she has acquired sight and is able to confirm her newly elegant appearance in the shop’s mirror. Her vision is now apparent, but she reassumes her inward gaze after a top-hatted gentleman arrives to order flowers without giving any sign of recognition. Questioned afterward by her mother, she replies sadly, ‘I thought he [her benefactor] had returned.’ When the flower girl and the tramp finally see each other for the first time, they are separated by the shop window. Magnifying his previous glimpses into her home, this large rectangle displays her as a remote beauty in cinematic style, while a series of reverse shots afford a double perspective, enabling us to go behind the glass. Thus we learn that their exchange of looks, rather than enabling recognition, distances her from him, and she laughs at his rapt expression. Here the role reversal that casts the wealthy Chaplin as a tramp is further developed, positioning him as the enchanted film fan, beholding the flower girl as the star. Seen through the glass, with the filigree of her lace collar matching the delicate petals in her display, she becomes a representation, like the civic monument and the gallery nude (Figure 3). The idealizing nature of the tramp’s gaze at her is emphasized by its contrast with his more blatant stare at the curvaceous statue in the gallery, a look whose ‘low’ fascination is comically suggested by his threatened descent into the shaft that opens behind him when he steps back in feigned artistic appreciation. When the glamorous florist emerges from her shop to give the tramp a coin and a rose, it as though the screen idol had stepped down into the auditorium – or Galatea from her pedestal – and her shy fan starts to steal away. The visual distance critical to the cinema has collapsed, and it must be replaced by a different sensory connection. Responding to the proffered flower, the tramp turns back to the girl, who puts the coin into his hand and grasps it in with both of hers. With this touch a frown of recognition dawns, quickly followed by expressions of shock, dismay, gratitude, and tenderness. The dialogue is conveyed in three eloquent title cards:

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Figure 3  The flower girl (Virginia Cherrill) offers the tramp a rose and a coin in City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931, United Artists).

Flower girl: You? Tramp: You can see now? Flower girl: Yes, I can see now.

But if the flower girl’s ‘sight’ is more haptic than optic, ours becomes acoustic. As the film’s two principals behold each other, its images cease, but not its sound. The fade to black from the close-up of the tramp’s pathetically hopeful face is held for twenty seconds after the ‘End’ title as the music is allowed to conclude its crescendo. Their unseen union, suggests Johan Siebers (2014: 59), would be the ‘limit-moment of recognition’, the unrepresentable sublimity of a true ‘face to face’, a love without illusion. And if Chaplin plays the cinema spectator to Cherrill’s star, it would also achieve the impossible simultaneity of a film’s shooting and its screening. For, as Christian Metz (1982: 95) reminds us, unlike theatre, cinema divides performance from exhibition, and with them the actor from the audience: ‘During the screening of the film, the audience is present, and aware of the actor, but the actor is absent, and unaware of the audience; and during the shooting, when the actor was present, it was the audience which was absent.’

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There are two dimensions of separation in Metz’s description of the audience and the actor, one of space and one of time. The theorist of recognition who addresses these is Paul Ricoeur. Reaching back to Winnicott via Honneth, he first observes how the mother’s recognition of her offspring’s needs enables the child to face her absence with ‘the confidence in the permanence of the invisible bond that develops in the alternation between presence and absence’ (Ricoeur 2005: 189). Often ascribed to the ‘little’ tramp, an emphatic childishness is evident in City Lights’s scenes of him sleeping in the stone lap of a much larger woman, his bullying by the newsboy and his whimsical treatment by the millionaire. Emerging from prison about nine months8 after his incarceration, he concludes the film with his fingers in his mouth. No wonder Steve Neale (1986: 21–2) deems figures like the tramp representatives of the spectator’s infantile frustrations, and our tears an appeal for his and our own rescue. No wonder that Freud and Kracauer identify the character with Chaplin in his impoverished youth, for if his outsider status radically rejects the limiting particularities of class and nationality, it also abjures the prerogatives of adulthood. And if the tramp’s childishness makes him vulnerable to abandonment, his generosity extends the distance between him and his beloved still further, transforming her from a shabby street vendor to a fashionably dressed shopkeeper, while he remains out on the sidewalk. In addition to this spatial distance, Metz reminds us that the star and the spectator perform their cinematic functions at different times, an interval which apparently precludes simultaneous awareness. In contrast Ricoeur affirms a trans-temporal recognition, citing two of the most famous recognition scenes in literature – that of Ulysses when he returns to his kingdom twenty years after his departure for the Trojan Wars, and that of the elderly Parisian socialites who arrive at a reception described by Proust in Time Regained. In a plot device wholeheartedly plagiarized from the Odyssey by melodrama,9 Ulysses comes home disguised as a beggar, but is soon recognized by various members of the royal household including his ancient dog, which feebly wags its tail and expires. In Time Regained, the geriatric company also seem to be wearing disguises – powdered wigs and crooked noses – but these are cruelly revealed to be the disfigurements of age. Where Ulysses casts off his rags to be revealed in heroic splendour, the revelation of the Prince de Guermantes’s guests is more disturbing: ‘Time, the artist, had made all the sitters portraits that were recognizable, yet they were not likenesses, and this was not because he had flattered them but because he had aged them’ (Proust 1993: 360–1). Although the tramp’s incarceration is not for the decades described by Homer and Proust, his frailty and pallor suggest

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the transformation evoked in this description. Ricoeur (151) opens his chapter on mutual recognition with its enigma: The question becomes pressing: Is this still the same person or someone else? … Choice takes the form of an alternative: one or the other?

How do we ‘recognize’ someone over time? The breadth of the term’s meanings, from the cognitive process of identification to the ethical process of acknowledgement, provokes Ricoeur’s observations on two functions central to City Lights: memory and gratitude. The ‘problematic of memory’, he tells us (124), is that it is ‘the present representation of something absent’.10 In its combination of presence and absence, memory is one and the other. Without addressing cinematic representation, Ricoeur summons up the present absence so powerfully conveyed by its photographic ‘trace’ of a previous action, ‘an effect that is a sign of its cause’ (112). In memory the present faces the past, but this multiple temporality is part of a continuum which also links it to the future.11 The token of that link, Ricoeur tells us, is the promise of continued recognition and its pledge, the gift. Recall how central gifts are to this film: the tramp saves the millionaire twice – from drowning and robbery – and the millionaire gives him hospitality, his car (albeit briefly) and money for the blind girl’s flowers and ultimately transformative operation. The tramp gives her a tip at their first encounter and food and solace when she is ill. Later he risks a robbery charge to deliver the funds that secure her sight. At the film’s end she gives him a flower and fifty cents. These gifts are neither reciprocal nor commensurate. The millionaire’s amnesia repeatedly breaks the circuit of giving. When sober he fails to recognize the tramp in any sense of the word. This paradoxical mismatch of cognitive and moral perception is also enacted by the blind girl. It is after she is given sight that she views the giver with condescension. The tramp pays with a prison sentence for the vision that will expose his imposture and stifle the possibility of romance. Yet Ricoeur (219) argues that this is the whole point of the gift: it ‘seems to refute in advance the idea of mutual recognition’ since it ‘neither requires nor expects a gift in return’. In its unilateral character it opposes ‘the kind of autonomous circularity attaching to the logical forms of reciprocity’, particularly those of commercial exchange. Here Ricoeur draws an important distinction between the reciprocity of the marketplace and the mutuality of recognition. ‘Payment ends the mutual obligations between those involved in a commercial exchange. The marketplace, we could say, is reciprocity without mutuality’ (231). The gift, by contrast, begins

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rather than ends mutuality. Citing Marcel Hénaff ’s La Prix de la Vérité, he argues that the gift is thus not a payoff but a pledge, a promise of continued recognition: Presents, whose purchase may cost one dear, do not count at all as commercial goods in the sense of things that one can buy and sell. For they have no value ‘outside their function of being a pledge of and substitute for the relationship of mutual recognition’. (Ricoeur 2005: 237)

But if, as we all know, it’s the thought that counts, how does this mutual recognition escape the burdensome etiquette of giving, receiving, and giving in return and the constant threat of its decline into legal or commercial obligation? Receiving, Ricoeur (243–4) replies, is ‘the pivotal category’. The way we receive gifts determines their consequence. A ‘good receiving’ ignores the measure of a gift’s price and the fitting time of its return. Gratitude bridges the gap of inexactitude. And the gratitude that prompts in the recipient the spontaneous generosity that inaugurated the gift giving in the first place is called in French reconnaissance, recognition. In this description, time seems to circle back on itself, making that which would logically come after, gratitude, provoke the generosity of the original gift. But then as ‘re-connaissance’ or as ‘re-cognition’, this act is always already a repetition, whether the confirmation of a prior identification or a gift to a giver. (Similarly, as Terence Cave (1990: 33) observes of Aristotelian poetics, ‘“ana-gnorisis”, like “re-cognition”, in fact implies a recovery of something once known rather than merely a shift from ignorance to knowledge’.) The virtuous circle thus created is identified with the promise of continued recognition that enables the child’s weaning into secure individuation. Indifferent to calculation, unthreatened by privation, it also comprises the affective bond of friendship, a mutuality of approval that inspires ‘confidence in the permanence of a reciprocal solicitude’ (Ricoeur 190). Kracaeur’s discussion of Chaplin’s fame in Die Neue Rundschau is a striking attempt to both acknowledge and disavow the commercial value of this circuit of recognition. The publicity that accompanied City Lights’s debut stressed the proletarian star’s achievement of popular and financial success: the crowds outside the expensive premieres, the luminaries who attended them and the formal banquets afterwards. In response Kracauer (1997b: 118) describes Chaplin’s wealth not in terms of ticket sales or film rentals, let alone as profit, but as ‘homage’ – homage to a fairy-tale pauper who becomes a kind of anti-king, whose ‘crown is a threadbare hat, his sceptre a walking stick’:12

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Cinema’s Melodramatic Celebrity Does he belong among the rich because of his millions of dollars? It would be more accurate to say that he is rich in spite of them. Rather than letting himself be changed by money, like the majority does, he changes it; money loses its commodity character the moment it encounters Chaplin, becoming instead the homage which is his due.

But Kracauer (1997b: 118) pre-empts any implication of deference by ascribing this homage to friendship, in the process rendering both the star and his spectators children: The children of Paris call him simply ‘Charlot,’ and I have often seen how, in some boulevard movie house, they would greet him as he stepped onscreen, shouting out this term of endearment in rapturous voices. One calls out in that way only to a close playmate, together with whom one laughs and cries.

A Final Revelation Does it matter that Kracauer’s estimate of Chaplin’s popularity was wrong? We know now that the star’s appeal was not universal, either in Germany or beyond. Working from national film and star popularity lists provided by German trade and fan publications, embassy statistics on the reception of American films throughout the country, and interviews with Cologne cinema owners, Joseph Garncarz (2010) has shown that, from the mid-1920s to the release of City Lights in 1931, Chaplin’s films were not liked by Germany’s large and status-conscious middle class. City Lights was not even among the forty-six most popular films of its season, in which 278 were shown in Germany. Charles Maland (2007: 109) calculates its worldwide net earnings at $3 million-plus by the summer of 1934, only twice its expensive production costs if a ‘resounding success’ at the onset of the Depression. And even in the United States the film’s critical reception varied, from the New York Times’s praise for its ‘admirable artistry’ (Hall 1931) to the Nation’s dismissal as ‘decidedly maudlin’ (Bakshy 1931: 260). Aside from The Circus, which cashed in on a national vogue for circus films to gain seventh place in the 1927/8 season, Chaplin’s films were mainly seen in Germany by the urban working class and intellectuals, the left humanist element in the latter writing tributes like Kracauer’s. In 1924 Béla Balázs (2010: 213) had remarked that Chaplin was ‘universally comprehensible’,13 while in the same year Hans Siemsen (1924: 42) maintained that he broke down ‘the separations of class, knowledge, education’, acclaim prefigured by his romantic rendition as a ‘poet-priest’ in the writings of the modernist critics Ricciotto Canudo and

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Jacques Élie Faure. Wrong (or even worse, clichéd) as such observations may be, they tell us something about the role of celebration in celebrity, and again it is examined in The Course of Recognition. Garncarz’s corrective to Kracauer returns me to that study and the ‘dialectic of love and justice’ (223) Ricoeur perceives in recognition. Arguing from friendship, Kracauer offers agape, a love unconditioned by privation whose characteristic discourse is praise. Arguing from justice, Garncarz offers a statistical rebuttal of that praise. ‘Agape declares itself ’, Ricoeur (222) tells us; ‘justice makes arguments’. The dialectic of recognition thus opposes the scholar’s cognition/ quantification/prose to the critic’s moral judgement/generosity/poetry.14 To acknowledge the persistence of this dichotomy, Ricoeur refers to Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thevenot’s survey of ‘economies of standing’, the competing systems by which various social worlds – civic, domestic, commercial, etc. – ascertain individual worth. Although Ricoeur makes no mention of what these authors designate as the world of fame, we might note there that only opinion is taken into account – which would support Kracauer – but that this opinion is typically plural and implicitly quantified – which would support Garncarz.15 In his own homage to Chaplin, Ivor Montagu recalls a Hollywood parlour game distinguished by its cruelty, in which the players drew up a list of virtues – ‘good temper, sense of humour, beauty, intelligence, etc.’ – and asked a chosen victim to go outside and mark her or himself on these criteria while the rest deliberated together. Returning to the room Chaplin was dismayed to discover that his ‘would-be-modest’ seven out of ten for humour had been undercut by a group rating of four. Nonetheless, Montagu (1967: 96) continues, ‘our “9” for “Charm” consoled him’. Evaluating Chaplin himself, Montagu quickly moves from calculation to celebration, from argument to agape: Whatever he may be or do, ever, he has created so much delight for mankind his credit, by any right proportion or standard, must be infinite. One likes people despite their faults. But those one loves have no faults because one cherishes them as they are. (1967: 92)

How do we judge between competing claims for recognition? City Lights ends with two tokens offered to its star – the flower of generosity and the coin of equivalence, symbols of delight and credit, opposites for which no resolution is visible. So the scene fades to black and the end title appears. But the music continues to play …

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Imitations of Celebrity

The field of celebrity studies is powered by debates over the influence of the famous, the agency of fans, and the consequences of the emulation of prominent people. One of the most pervasive anxieties it addresses is that those who admire the famous, particularly young admirers, will imitate their ‘idols’. While Western commentators investigate the connection between ‘celebrity worship’ and cosmetic surgery (Maltby and Day 2011), their Asian counterparts explore the relation of the ‘imitation of celebrity models and materialism’ among Chinese youth (Chan and Prendergast 2008). Psychologists have developed an entire literature on the mimetic impulse in fandom, charting the descent from admiration to empathy to over-identification to obsession (Giles 2000; McCutcheon et al. 2002 and 2003). Their pathologization of this progress is echoed by the Christian motivational writer Kimberly Davidson on what she calls the ‘Celebrity Imitation Complex’: Young people mirror what they see through the media and the Internet. A celebrity fits with their human desire to be approved, applauded and considered special. Many teenagers truly believe emulating the lifestyle of their favorite celebrities is the only way to form an identity … Unfortunately, and unbeknownst to the stargazer, there are far too many awful celebrity role models being emulated with disastrous consequences. (Davidson 2011: 8–10)

But there is, Davidson goes on to claim, an alternative – not the abandonment of imitation, but its purposeful practice. Citing the fifteenth-century Latin devotional text Imitatio Christi,1 a collection of biblical and early Christian teachings by the Augustinian monk Thomas à Kempis, she maintains God did not create us to impersonate or obsess after other flawed human beings. The purpose of life is to live a life of purpose, which is to model to the world a truthful reflection of who Jesus Chris is and what he is like. (Davidson 2011: 11)

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Paradoxically, in order for ‘Teens to Live Authentically in a Celebrity-Obsessed World’ – the subtitle of Davidson’s polemic – they must imitate a very famous figure indeed. The discussion of imitation is ancient in origin, encompassing the spheres of education, politics, and aesthetics, with the two most influential figures, the fifth century BCE Plato and the fourth century BCE Aristotle, disagreeing radically. A key term, mimesis, remains impervious to consensus and almost impossible to gloss. ‘Mimesis and its Greek cognates defy translation’, observes Paul Woodruff (1992: 73), offering ‘imitation’, ‘image-making’, ‘representation’, ‘reproduction’, ‘expression’, ‘fiction’, ‘emulation’, and ‘make-believe’ as popular English renderings. In the works of both philosophers dramatic performance involving the impersonation of a character is a pervasive example of mimesis, perhaps unsurprisingly since the word is derived from the theatrical ‘mime’ (Else 1986: 27). But the two differ on its moral implications, Plato warning – in a work on just government, The Republic – that such a performance can challenge the ability to discriminate between truth and illusion, with Aristotle responding – in a work on drama, Poetics – that imitation facilitates learning, enabling people ‘to understand and work out what each thing is’. Thus, he maintains, human beings learn ‘their earliest lessons through imitation’ and take ‘universal pleasure’ in it (Aristotle 1996: 6–7). The idea that the child forms its individual subjectivity through imitation has survived as a tenet of psychology, although not without complexity. In his influential study Play, Dreams and Imitation in Childhood, Jean Piaget argues that the acquisition of intelligence requires both the infant’s acting upon the external world of objects, which he identifies with play, and its accommodation to that world, which he terms imitation. ‘Since representation involves the image of an object’, he claims, it can itself ‘be seen to be a kind of interiorized imitation’ (Piaget 1991: 5). Where the psychologist moves from the child to representation, the playwright Bertolt Brecht (2001: 152) reasons in reverse, observing that the child learns how to behave ‘in a quite theatrical manner’, as though it is a member of an audience. ‘It joins in when there is laughter, without knowing why; if asked why it is laughing it is wholly confused … The human being copies gestures, miming, tones of voice. And weeping arises from sorrow, but sorrow also arises from weeping.’ The stimulation of emotion, whether by an unconscious identification with an infantile appeal for solace (Neale 1986) or its ‘cueing’ by elements of the mise en scène (Plantinga 2009), is a noted feature of the melodrama, the characteristic genre of the imitation narratives to be considered here. If, in Brecht’s

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dramaturgical characterization, emotions can be experienced through imitating their expression, it is not surprising that the spectator responds similarly to its performers. Reflecting on the recollections of female fans whose film going was conducted in the era of the 1940s–1950s melodrama termed ‘the woman’s weepie’, Jackie Stacey (1994: 161–70) considers their memories of resembling its stars – ‘I could be Bette Davis’ double’ – imitating their speech and gestures – ‘I would tigerishly pace about like Joan Crawford’ – and copying their hairstyles, makeup, and clothes. (The frequency with which Stacey’s correspondents mention Davis and Crawford tells its own story about the genre’s mimetic lure.) Stacey challenges the condemnation of identification in the film theory of Brecht’s descendants, denying that such forms of engagement necessarily ‘fix identities, destroy differences and confirm sameness’ (172). Invoking Jessica Benjamin (1990: 106) on how the love of the child for the same sex parent can be both narcissistic and erotic, she stresses the transformative interplay of desire and identification in subject formation. As I hope to show, the complex ways that imitating others may further differentiation and conformity, truth and falsity, subordination and self-affirmation, comes into view in melodramas that take imitation as their titular theme and celebrity as a recurring narrative. Both the ontological and ethical status of ‘imitation’ vary within and between these texts, putting into question any simple condemnation of the ‘imitation of life’.

Imitation of Life, Fannie Hurst, 1933 This sequence discussed here – itself one of an original text and its mimetic adaptations, remakes, and reinterpretations – begins with a 1933 novel by the American author Fannie Hurst. Originally serialized under the title Sugar House, it chronicles the fortunes of a young widow who supports her infant daughter Jessie and her invalid father by taking over her husband’s maple syrup concession in Atlantic City, New Jersey. To secure access to the male dominated marketplace of early twentieth-century America, the late Benjamin Pullman’s business cards, engraved ‘B. Pullman’, are appropriated by his wife Beatrice. Soon the desperately busy Bea (pun intended – she will later be called ‘Honey Bea’) needs domestic assistance. She hires Delilah Johnson, a widow ‘with a round black moon face that shone above an Alps of bosom’ (Hurst 2004: 75), as a live-in maid. With Delilah comes her own baby Peola, whose ‘amazingly pale-tan’ (78) appearance will strain Hurst’s descriptive powers. The ‘white’ Bea and her child acquire ‘black’ doubles early in a story in which various forms of simulation,

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replication and ‘copy’ become strategies for economic and social advancement as well as the central structuring device of the narrative. In time, Bea enlarges her syrup business to include a flourishing Atlantic City coffee shop, done up in imitation of the railway dining cars traditionally staffed by black attendants – as were ‘Pullman’ luxury sleeping compartments – selling candies and waffles cooked by Delilah. Not only does Delilah provide the recipes for these products, her photograph – ‘in her great fluted white cap, and her great fluted white smile’ (86) – is adopted as their trademark. The company becomes an empire of identical diners named B. Pullman but signified by countless images of ‘the chocolate-and-cream effulgence that was Delilah’ (86–7). The humble mammy is replicated in its ubiquitous logo, ‘Delilah’s face, Delilah’s name, Delilah’s smile … reached from coast to coast’, (144) and the sustenance it offers to a generation wounded by war renders the brand a national ‘institution’ (268) and Delilah a rare black celebrity. Written in the midst of the cultural change that legitimized synthetic materials – patent leather, Bakelite plastics and, most significantly for a later version of this story, costume jewellery – Hurst’s novel can be seen as a rumination on what the Marshall Field department store in Chicago proclaimed to their customers in the 1920s: ‘The imitation is no longer a disgrace’ (Schwartz 1996: 195). The Pullman company mass produces sweet foods and the replica railway cars in which they are consumed, served by buxom black women chosen for their resemblance to Delilah and schooled in the role of the mammy. (Their need to learn this has itself been adduced as evidence of the infinite regress of imitation in this narrative, as well as its recognition that servility is an acquired disposition.) The hive of the Honey Bea is enlarged by identical new cells, advertised across the country by full-page ‘copy’ personally written by the proprietor, who takes great pleasure in composing her ‘hokum’ (Hurst 2004: 145), early twentiethcentury slang for faked feeling, hackneyed sentiment. Meanwhile, this Queen Bea acquires cultural as well as financial capital by further imitation, marked by her changing taste in fashion, interior decoration, and architecture. B. Pullman’s headquarters are established in New York’s Flat Iron Building – a landmark of commercial success in the period – and her household decamps to an apartment overlooking Central Park. But despite wealth and fame, life does not go smoothly in this prototype of the Women Can’t Have It All novel. The sugar house is a fragile edifice. In imitation of the children she overhears in the park, Jessie tries out the word ‘Nigger’ in a row with Peola. The ‘whitish’ girl’s anguished response is to blister her scalp ironing her hair. Steeped in Christian submission, Delilah counsels her daughter that God ‘had some good reason for

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makin’ us black and white’ in terms that Kimberly Davidson would endorse; but the enraged child is all too aware of the metonymic effect of her mother’s appearance. Acutely sensitive to their dissimilarity, she protests ‘You’re so black! That’s what makes me nigger’, (148) before fainting into ‘a pallor that made her whiter than chalk’ (150). The impossibly hard-working Delilah, still caring for Bea’s family while opening diners all over the country, cherishes her own white aspirations, imagining the splendour of her heavenly reward. Spurning the discomforts of their new living room furniture, ‘a replica of a first-class department store window display’ (137), she saves her money for her final rest: ‘Ridin’ up to heaven in a snow-white hearse wid de Lawd leanin’ out when He hears de trumpets blowin’ to see if I’s comin’ in a white satin casket pulled by six white hosses’ (143). Bea discovers her own dissatisfaction when she is befriended by an even more successful counterpart – Virginia Eden, a celebrity cosmetics mogul modelled on Hurst’s real-life friend Elizabeth Arden. Enriched by selling calories labelled with the image of an ‘immense woman’ (79), Bea has begun to worry about her waistline and that of her (white) female employees, installing a staff gym complete with an extensive array of beauty aids courtesy of their publicityconscious manufacturer. When the two entrepreneurs first meet for lunch at the Waldorf Astoria, Eden prefaces a real estate proposal with a declaration of their similarities: Want what you want when you want it. That’s you. That’s me. I want love. I want money. I want success … You and me ought to work together, Pullman. You make women fat and comfortable. My job is to undo all that and make them beautiful. You’re grist to my mill. I want to be grist to yours. (159–60)

Even more than B. Pullman, Virginia Eden is revealed to be a pseudonym, for Sadie Kress of Jersey City. An imitation in ethnic, class, and – in her snappy salesman’s patter – gender terms, she seeks Bea’s backing to transform an East River tenement block into a faux-Georgian fabrication, ‘the London Embankment all over again’. Later her staff will ‘do over’ Bea herself, applying ‘their accouterments of dress and good grooming’ (154) to make her appear to the admiring Jessie ‘so young’ (274). Famed for its theme of racial ‘passing’, the novel identifies many objects of simulation, including the youth promised by the elixirs of the aptly named Eden, whose own face has ‘the look of fine-grained writing paper with careful erasures’ (158). Ironically, it is when this mistress of the masquerade offers to help Bea ‘manufacture some of your own destiny’, that

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she suddenly perceives the falsity of her existence: ‘Love and happiness, as she said them, made what had been going on through years of a petty and mundane routine seem imitation of life’ (161). What is the ‘life’ that Bea believes she lacks? In parallel with the increasing prosperity and social licence sweeping the US in the 1920s, her desires, and the governing metaphors of the novel, move from basic sustenance to romance. Hurst portrays her single heroine as an industrious and generous woman, who supports her paralyzed father, implores Peola to be kind to her mother, encourages Delilah to indulge herself with their earnings, refuses to prosecute an embezzling bookkeeper, breaks with Eden over business ethics, and anticipates contemporary corporate parents by inviting her young daughter to spend a day with her at the office. But she is also shown to maintain the conventional colour line – employing black women in her restaurants and whites in her headquarters, assigning Delilah and Peola to the smaller bedroom in their Manhattan apartment, relying upon her business partner’s devoted ministrations and maternal care of Jessie, and eventually sanctioning the segregation of their children in separate and very unequal boarding schools. Jessie, awed by her mother’s eminence, becomes increasingly distant. Peola escapes as soon as she can to Seattle, where she ‘passes’, becomes a librarian, falls in love with a Bolivia-bound engineer and has herself sterilized to prevent any telltale offspring. Returning to New York, she bids Delilah and Bea goodbye forever with the novel’s litany of desire: ‘I want happiness. I want my man. I want my life’ (247). If the reader hasn’t guessed from the mounting press requests for Bea’s views on the price of a woman’s career, Peola’s forfeit anticipates the symmetry to come. Bea’s fate imitates hers, but in reverse: where Peola loses the prospect of children to romance, Bea loses romance to her child. After many pages of prevarication, she approaches her forties resolved to ignore the eight years between herself and her handsome young business manager – ‘a woman with a sublime need to keep young, can’ (233) – only to discover that he and Jessie have fallen in love. Commentators have described Hurst’s novel as ‘melodrama’, and in this ironic reversal, its focus on the clash between public responsibilities and private desire, and its particular attention to relations between mothers and daughters, it certainly fits the genre. And yet, as Molly Hiro (2010: 95) points out, Hurst creates ‘a distance between that form’ and its narrative. Unlike its two famous film adaptations by John Stahl in 1934 and Douglas Sirk in 1959, her novel does not succumb to the traditional pathos of the ‘tragic mulatta’, the beautiful woman of mixed race whose appearance creates an ethical crisis. In linking Bea’s financial aspirations to Peola’s desire to manufacture her own destiny by escaping

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racial subordination and her oppressively self-sacrificing mother, it is markedly less moralistic. Not only does Peola plead with Delilah for her ‘freedom’ in the language of the desperate slave – ‘Let me go. Let me pass’ (248) – she coolly rebuts her moral condemnation: ‘there’s nothing wrong in passing. The wrong is the world that makes it necessary’ (244). But Peola rejects more than Delilah’s resigned pride in her race of ‘willin’ servers … filled wid de blessin’s of humility’ (246). Only with a ‘veritable nausea of revulsion’ (242) does she submit to her mother’s enormous embrace, an abjection of the flesh, and arguably of one’s physical forebears, experienced by Hurst’s white heroine long before the novel’s black characters are introduced. Dressing for her wedding, the eighteen-year-old Bea nervously surveys her own ‘markedly mature’ figure, her dimpled hand pressing against full breasts ‘which had caused her to bind her quite lovely bosom’ (34) in adolescence. Two pages later this anxiety is apparent in the novel’s description of the clientele of the Jewish hostelry chosen by Bea’s husband for their wedding dinner because ‘Hebrews are so good to their own stomachs they will be good to ours’: Heavy-busted, Oriental-eyed girls in heavy authentic jewellery, dark men with blue jowls, stout children with chins rising barely above enormously piled plates, plump, pretty, clucking mothers … (36–7)

Hurst was herself Jewish, the daughter of an assimilated family from St Louis who disdained the new Jewish immigrants of the period as well as African Americans (Itzkovitz: xxv). Her parents’ conformity to Midwestern prejudice made the assertion of her own origins a painful struggle and her novel vulnerable to interpretations of ethnic allegorizing. Although she wrote about Jewish culture, supported Jewish causes and married a Jewish musician, a clear distaste is evident in her description of the corpulent diners in the Jewish restaurant. It intensifies with Delilah, who has been seen as an African American version of the Yiddish mamas in Hurst’s earlier short stories about immigrant life in New York. With their maternal affection comes an increasingly ample physique, which takes on horrific overtones at the novel’s end, when the appalled Bea discovers that Delilah’s stomach is swollen with a fatal tumour. Here it should be noted that the writer, whose youthful photographs suggests something of the young Bea’s dimpled prettiness, was a lifelong dieter who admitted her ‘concern over my bulk’ in her autobiography (Hurst 1958: 265). Two years after the publication of Imitation of Life, she brought out her own diet book, wonderfully titled No Food with My Meals, popularizing a 600 calorie a day ‘Hollywood’ regime.2 If, as Lauren Berlant argues, this sequence of Imitations

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‘hyper-embodies’ (2008: 125) first the black mammy and then, in Douglas Sirk’s film adaptation, her white employer (133), it may have a surprisingly literal origin in Hurst’s anxious self-imagining. The novel’s identification of obesity with the figure of the mother may also reflect the writer’s acknowledged fear of ‘being overpowered’ (Hurst 1958: 3) by her own mother as well as her admitted lack ‘of the frustration usually attributed to the childless’ (273). All of these anticipate the abjection with which Peola spurns a ‘Mammy’ who has become a trademark for maternal nurturance and her own motherhood, as well as the novel’s claustral rendition of the maternal bond. Much of that ambivalence can be attributed to the novel’s awareness of how people imitate those they admire, an admiration encouraged by the admiring attention of the mass media. As the Pullman company and the emblematic Delilah become, like Eden, ‘household names’, Bea is increasingly asked to give speeches and newspaper interviews. These publicize her products as well as herself, leading her to conclude that this free advertising is far preferable to the purchased kind. The mimetic relationship between celebrity and consumption is announced when Bea herself reads about the fitness regimes of several reallife luminaries, including film stars Mary Pickford and Rudolph Valentino, industrialist John D. Rockefeller, and even President Woodrow Wilson, and then decides to install her office gymnasium. Later, when the Hollywood B. Pullman is about to open, she considers how to secure the endorsements of Pickford, John Gilbert and Marion Davies in order to make it more than ‘a popular snatcha-bite for studio extras’ (Hurst 2004: 208). Preceded by national headlines announcing the death of a ‘FAMOUS BLACK WOMAN’ (Hurst 2004: 268), Delilah’s Harlem funeral, with a vast procession and motorcycle police escort, is itself filmed from the rooftops by newsreel cameras, to the horror of Bea’s financial manager. The New York Times reviewer construed all this as a critique of celebrity, concluding that ‘Miss Hurst wishes to point out that fame does not constitute real living’ (Anon. 1933), but the weeping Bea insists that Delilah ‘would have wanted it this way’ (272). As for Miss Hurst, her autobiography delights in her own arrival as a household word through her bestselling books and hugely popular magazine stories, lecture tours and honorary degrees, friendship with the Roosevelts, conversations with Dreiser and BenGurion and lunch with Queen Wilhelmina. Becoming an object of emulation in her own right, she is chosen by a newspaper columnist as the woman she would most like to be: ‘Fannie Hurst has everything. Youth, personality, talent, human interest, and interest in humans. Success’ (Hurst 1958: 263). But much as Hurst enjoys this acclaim, her autobiography also acknowledges the perpetually

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receding horizon of her own ambition. Fame’s relation to life, like life’s relation to imitation, remains unresolved both for the author and her novel, in which ‘passing’ informs the relations of gender, race, ethnicity, age, and finally death, when the ‘livin’ trademark’ (Hurst 2004: 105) that Delilah has become passes on to the posthumous existence her objectification has always anticipated.

Imitation of Life, John Stahl, 1934 When Hurst’s novel followed Bea’s fictional restaurant to Hollywood, the prospect of its motion picture adaptation presented Universal Pictures with both a problem and an incentive. From 1930 to 1956 the ‘miscegenation’ clause of the industry’s Production Code prohibited any representation of a ‘sex relationship between the white and black races’ (Doherty 1999: 363). Although no such union occurs in the novel, Peola’s ambiguous appearance was interpreted by the Code’s administrators as evidence of a ‘suggested intermingling of blacks and whites’ (Courtney 2005: 145). Moreover, the ability of this ‘black’ character to pass plausibly as ‘white’ raised the issue of her casting. Too close a simulation in this regard might itself suggest an unmentionable form of social intercourse in the ancestry of the designated actress. In both cases the Code’s imperative to draw a clear colour line was contradicted by the narrative of the novel, as indeed the term ‘passing’ contradicts itself – since in asserting her white ancestry its mixed race subject is not passing herself off as anything other than what she is. Yet it was just this cluster of contradictions that had established the ‘tragic mulatta’ as a compelling character of American literature and theatre. Introduced by the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child in her 1842 short story ‘The Quadroons’, this usually female figure was portrayed as the virtuous victim of sentimental literature. In Child’s story she is the fair daughter of a Georgia gentleman who is schooled in the accomplishments of plantation society and courted by her white music teacher. Only after her father’s death does she discover that her ancestors were never freed. Sold to cover his debts, she dies a slave. Combining oppressed innocence, social dislocation, and epistemological undecidability, the tragic mulatta continued to fascinate both sides of the racial divide well into the twentieth century. Commentators stress Hurst’s debt to four novels written by members of the New York black arts movement, the Harlem Renaissance, which engage with passing – Walter White’s 1926 Flight, Jessie Fauset’s Plum Bun and Nella Larsen’s Passing (both 1929) and George Schuyler’s Black No More (1931). A civil rights activist and cultural patron

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who awarded the young Zora Neale Hurston a literary prize in 1926 and then befriended and employed her to fund her college studies, Hurst had an engaged, if arguably ambivalent, relation to this movement and its members to her. Hurston waspishly observed that their contrast in colouring flattered her mentor, making her seem paler and perhaps less Jewish. Yet she also told Hurst that when she was accused of ‘having furnished you with the material of “IMITATION’”, she accepted the accusation as a tribute to ‘the truth of the work’ (Harrison-Kahan 2011: 119). In 1938 the poet and playwright Langston Hughes would stage ‘Limitations of Life’, the first of many parodic imitations of the story, this one reversing the central roles to have a white maid lovingly massage the feet of her big black mistress; but three years earlier Hughes’s own drama of racial ‘mixtries’ (Hughes 1963: 31) in rural Georgia, Mulatto, gave voice to its doomed hero’s insistence on using the front entrance to his father’s mansion, literalizing the desire to ‘pass’: Don’t I look like my father? Ain’t I as light as he is? Ain’t my eyes gray like his eyes are? Ain’t this my own house? (Hughes 1963: 19)

In transforming Hurst’s novel into the maternal melodrama popular in the 1930s, John Stahl’s film takes up the saddened black mother’s viewpoint after her disconsolate daughter looks into the mirror and asks a similar question – ‘Am I not white? Isn’t that a white girl there?’ The Production Code’s miscegenation ban ruled out Peola’s escape into a white marriage, as well as her final refusal of her mother’s moral judgement. Instead, the film’s Peola (Fredi Washington) returns to New York for Delilah’s (Louise Beavers) funeral, overcome with grief and remorse. In the same normative revision, Stahl’s heroine is not Hurst’s ‘social chameleon’ (Itzkovitz 2004: xxiv). Bea’s acquired wealth and status is signalled by a formal party at her Manhattan home, but in Claudette Colbert’s portrayal she remains the unpretentious woman next door even in glamorous evening dress. This enables a ‘cute meet’ in which the now eminent businesswoman is derided as ‘the pancake queen’ by her guest Stephen Archer (Warren William), whose failure to recognize his hostess does not impede their romance. Jessie (Rochelle Hudson) will also fall for Stephen, and to assuage her feelings, Bea will ultimately part from him in her own doubling of Delilah’s more profound sacrifice. Although a possible mother–daughter rivalry is set up, the 37-year-old Stephen is suitably mature – Colbert was then in her early thirties – and remains devoted to Bea. Thus the symbolic cosmetics mogul can be eliminated, along with the novel’s theme of conscious self-fashioning. But if these changes purge

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much of the imitation from Bea’s characterization, it is conversely intensified in the film’s rendering of Delilah as an object of commercial replication. American readers and spectators of the 1930s could not fail to understand that Delilah is herself a copy – of the trademark mammy ‘Aunt Jemima’, a character borrowed from a minstrel show in 1889 to represent an actual readymade pancake mix. Like the fictitious black cooks fronting the contemporaneous convenience foods Uncle Ben’s Rice and Cream of Wheat, this figure was devised to personify the smiling service of instant sustenance. To her credit, Hurst is at pains to show that this image does not come naturally to Delilah any more than to her avatars. When Bea makes her pose for their first candy box in her large cook’s cap, she becomes as ‘irate as a duchess’ and pleads to be photographed in her wedding hat as a remembrance for her daughter. But the employer prevails, and the resulting portrait is said to ‘illuminate and reveal’ (Hurst 2004: 87). What exactly is revealed varies in Hurst’s and Stahl’s versions of the story. In the novel the Delilah captured by ‘the clicking of the camera’ is a comforting grotesque, her ‘shellacked eyes’ and ‘huge upholstery of lips’ (87–8) confirming her function as the furniture of Bea’s new enterprise and thus her suitability to become, in Stahl’s adaptation, a literal sign. Hiro (2010: 105) argues that Hurst’s objectifying descriptions of her black characters, who even when weeping can seem ‘little more than faces, masks, or surfaces’, are directly opposed to the moral physiognomy of melodrama, in which character is revealed by appearance. Where Hurst’s language denies this visual epistemology, Stahl’s filming of the large-eyed Louise Beavers in tight close-ups is clearly designed to convey Delilah’s virtuous suffering, and thus make the spectator feel the pathos of her daughter’s rejection. In Brecht’s apt description, our sorrow comes from the weeping of another – two others, since the film ensures cross-ethnic identification by amplifying Delilah’s tears with Bea’s at her deathbed. But Stahl also reverses melodrama’s poetics of disguise and disclosure to demonstrate how the authentic individual can be made to assume a mask. In so doing, he engineers a far more reflexive meditation on the racial representation of his own medium than Hurst ever attempts, notwithstanding the modernist distancing of her descriptions. Both versions of the story acknowledge the mistress’s determination of the maid’s image, but only the filmmaker shows, in reverse shots, reframings, and temporal duration, how Bea ‘directs’ (Courtney 2005: 159) Delilah to assume a broad, blackface smile for the sign she wants painted and hold it. And hold it. Delilah’s freeze (Figure 4) into this wide-eyed rictus – for thirty seconds as Bea instructs her decorator – introduces an uncharacteristic stillness into the motion picture, anticipating her ultimate loss of life as well as the loss of personhood perpetrated by the painted (Figure 5), printed, and neon-lit caricatures that

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Figure 4  Delilah Johnson (Louise Beavers) poses for the shop sign in Imitation of Life (John Stahl, 1934, Universal Pictures).

Figure 5  The completed sign for ‘Aunt Delilah’s Pancake Shop’ in Imitation of Life (John Stahl, 1934, Universal Pictures).

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follow. When Bea tells the decorator that she wants the sign to read ‘Aunt Delilah’s Homemade Pancakes’, the film acknowledges the emblematic figure that Delilah is instructed to copy. ‘I’m going to make you famous yet’, the laughing Bea promises, in a phrase that suggests both the Hollywood director and that industry’s own contribution to these stereotypes, displaced onto the labels of the pancake mix soon to be speeded along a production line. Stahl’s film provoked a wide variety of responses, pleasing many black spectators with its sympathetic treatment of the victimized Delilah, while infuriating black critics like Sterling Brown. In a 1935 slating of the film, Brown seized on a line from Bea’s business manager (Ned Sparks) when Delilah refuses the offer of a 20 per cent share in the profits of their rapidly expanding company and the personal independence it would bring: My own house? You gonna send me away, Miss Bea? … How am I gonna take care of you and Miss Jessie if I ain’t here? … I’s yo’ cook and I want to stay yo’ cook … You kin have it: I make you a present of it.

‘Once a pancake, always a pancake’, the exasperated manager replies. By the 1930s, ‘pancake’ had become, courtesy of Aunt Jemima, a black epithet for what Hurston’s own ‘Glossary of Harlem Slang’ calls a ‘humble type of negro’.3 In Brown’s excoriating review, Delilah’s self-abnegating goodness is traced back to ‘the old stereotype of the contented Mammy’. Notwithstanding the film’s welcome move from the ridiculed laziness of Stepin Fetchit to the serious portrayal of black labour, Brown perceives no departure from the traditional mammy’s willing sacrifice and accuses both Hurst and Hollywood of replicating racist Southern fiction (Brown 1996: 288–9). But the care taken in the film to remind spectators of the real-life breakfast food in question (unlike Hurst’s waffles) and its appropriation as a term of abuse warrants further consideration. If Delilah – flattened by humility, exhaustion, and her place at the bottom of the social hierarchy – is, as the term suggests, dark on the outside but white in her fundamental loyalties, what do we make of Peola? Her dilemma, as she points out to Bea, is the opposite: ‘to be black and look white’. Courtesy of Stahl’s film, ‘Peola’ would also become black slang, for an African American who in Brown’s description ‘wants to be white in the worst way’ (Brown 1996: 287), but the irony of this ‘whitish’ woman is that there is no contrast between internal desire and external appearance, no attempt at imitation. Peola looks white because, in her ancestry, she is. So too the pale brunette Fredi Washington, whose ambiguous appearance was both sought in her casting and darkened by low lighting and the capacious embrace of Louise Beavers’ Delilah in what may have been an attempt

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to obscure the racial uncertainty feared by the Production Code administrators (Courtney 2005: 166–8). Ironically accused of racism because of her performance of Peola, the young actress refused the studios’ inducements to pass and affirmed her African American identity, founding in 1937 the Negro Actors of America to campaign against prejudice in the entertainment industry. Unable to play the romantic roles proscribed by the Code and too pale to play maids, she worked in theatre, journalism, and as a civil rights campaigner, declaring in 1945 her opposition ‘to the stupid theory of white supremacy and to try to hide the fact that I am a Negro, for economic or any other reasons’.4

Imitation of Life, Douglas Sirk, 1959 Where Hurst cites Hollywood stardom as part of the larger celebrity culture that prompts consumer emulation, and Stahl identifies Hollywood’s racist visual coding with the black branding of quick-service convenience foods, Douglas Sirk moves the white mistress to centre stage, making her the commodified celebrity and the maid’s daughter her apparent double. Here the dramatic focus of public attention is literalized with the transformation of the businesswoman to an aspirant actress played by Lana Turner, who had taken similar roles several times in her film career, e.g. Dramatic School (Robert B. Sinclair, 1938), Two Girls on Broadway (S. Sylvan Simon, 1940), Ziegfeld Girl (Robert Z. Leonard, Busby Berkeley, 1941), and The Bad and the Beautiful (Vincente Minnelli, 1952). In drawing a parallel between commodification and acting, Sirk invokes the historical condemnation of the actor, whose ‘art’, Jean-Jacques Rousseau memorably declared, is ‘of counterfeiting himself … saying what he does not think … and put[ting] his person publicly on sale’ (Rousseau 2004a: 309). Rousseau is even more strident in his condemnation of the female actor, equating her self-sale with prostitution. Sirk amplifies this accusation by casting Turner, with her scandalous personal life and corresponding star persona, in contrast to Stahl’s ‘class product’ (Everon 1976: 19) Claudette Colbert. A ‘glamour girl’ with a brassy tinge, Turner typically conveys erotic impact with a price attached. In her film noir roles, she is the femme fatale, using her sexual wiles in performances whose duplicity is often signalled by a stylized exaggeration. In her later melodramas she exhibits an uneasy sense of sexual repression, a corseted libido that typically erupts into tears at the film’s climax. All of this depends upon what Richard Dyer calls our ‘fascination … with the [star’s] manufacture itself ’ (1991: 410), her soft features and curvaceous body increasingly defined by

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dieting, carefully structured costumes and make-up as she aged, as well as her aspirational assumption of an erect posture, sweeping gestures, and formal facial expressions to punctuate scenes. If the moral authority of melodrama to reveal the truth of character was imperilled by the genre’s waning in the late 1950s, Turner’s reliance on its artifices could aptly convey the authenticity of imitation as a way of life. Critics have long observed that there is no reliable way to distinguish the real Turner from her roles, a result of an intermingling of biography and character exceptional even for classical Hollywood. The actress married eight times and took many lovers, reportedly propositioning handsome stagehands with a masculine insouciance. In her autobiography she pleads her father’s abandonment of his family to explain her penchant for brief relationships with abusive men, but this has simply encouraged speculation about Turner’s manipulation of her publicity in order to pursue pleasure without censure. Unusually, instead of suppressing the scandal, the studios recognized its box office appeal. The resulting confabulation of art and life reached its apogee with her role as the lead in Sirk’s 1959 Imitation, renamed Lora – itself a combination of Lana and Cora, her signature temptress in Tay Garnett’s 1946 The Postman Always Rings Twice. Two years earlier, Turner had won a Best Supporting Actress Oscar for her performance in Peyton Place (Mark Robson, 1957) of a puritanical single mother zealously guarding the virtue of her teenage daughter while fending off the attentions of the attractive high school principal. When her daughter learns that her mother is not the widow she purports to be, but the former mistress of a married man, she angrily leaves town. The two are reunited when the mother is called to testify on behalf of a young female employee accused of murdering her abusive stepfather. Explaining on the witness stand how a mother may be unable to protect her daughter, she collapses in tears. Incredibly, this courtroom drama was then repeated for real, when Turner’s own daughter Cheryl was arrested for the murder of her mother’s violent lover, a minor mobster called Johnny Stompanato. The pretty fourteen-year-old claimed that screams from her mother’s bedroom led her to grab a kitchen knife and run to her door. When Stompanato suddenly emerged with his arm raised above Turner, the girl had plunged the knife in, only to discover that what he held aloft was clothing removed from her closet. A more plausible explanation for the demise of the reckless lothario circulated in Hollywood, but Turner was never accused by the police. Since Cheryl’s trial coincided with the filming of Imitation of Life, her mother initially declined the role. But Universal was unsurprisingly determined

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to sign her, and Sirk obligingly scheduled the scenes of Lora’s tearful reaction to the death of her maid around Turner’s testimony in court. After what was widely described as ‘the performance of her life’, her daughter was acquitted, just like Cheryl’s predecessor in Peyton Place. Sirk’s resort to an extreme reflexivity to exploit this mise en abyme of imitation was not new to the filmic treatment of Hurst’s narrative. As we’ve seen, Stahl had already called attention to the movies’ complicity in the stereotype of the minstrel mammy when Bea directs Delilah’s pose for her sign. Sirk repeatedly mirrors Lora in a screen-like frame to reveal her professional dishonesty (ringing Susie after her debut to promise that she’ll soon be home), ambition (memorizing her lines looking into the glass while Annie tells the children about the star of Bethlehem), and regret (confessing her disappointment with success to Annie in her dressing room). In all three scenes the reflection suggests a self-division and duplicity inherent in performing a role. Vincente Minnelli had anticipated this use of mirrors in his own portrait of Turner as an aspirant actress in The Bad and the Beautiful, prompting Dyer (2004: 419) to marvel at a film ‘giddy with reflection images … How can we, as we watch, pick out the levels of illusion here?’ In a rare excursion into film criticism, Judith Butler directs that question at Sirk’s imitation of these imitations at a time when melodrama’s mimetic credibility is arguably breaking down. She opens with a virtuoso reading of the film’s title sequence, in which scores of diamonds descend in slow motion as crooner Earl Grant – in a notable imitation of Nat King Cole – sings ‘What is life without the living? What is love without the giving?’ and answers ‘A false creation, an imitation of life.’ In 1970, Sirk offered a gloss on this scene, as well as his film’s repeated resort to mirrors and windows, with a citation of St Paul’s observation in his Epistle to the Corinthians: There is a wonderful expression: seeing through a glass darkly. Everything, even life, is inevitably removed from you. You can’t reach, or touch, the real. You just see reflections. If you try to grasp happiness itself your fingers only meet glass. It’s hopeless. (Halliday 1997: 51)

Butler’s account, published in the same year as her highly influential Gender Trouble, draws a parallel between the heaping of the gems and the action of the camera in a film whose use of mirrors and frequently obstructed views refuses to ‘give’ back an undistorted image and instead ‘accumulates the gaze’. Lora’s tropic attraction to that gaze, her constantly turning toward it, is ascribed to a

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compulsion to perform the gestures of a fantasmatic femininity, a repetition that is also hopeless, ‘compelled to fail’ (Butler 1990: 2), because no such ideal can be achieved. While applauding what one might call this post-structuralist Turner, and Butler’s attention to the film’s – and the original novel’s – awareness of the performative constitution of gender as well as race, I want to consider Lora as the projection of a related but different fantasy, the spectator’s imagination of stardom. The title sequence shows us the descent of countless jewels, their brilliant facets set off by the black behind them, conveying many meanings: glamour as an exceptional beauty manifest in light, fakery if these jewels are glass, racial dominance in the hierarchy of light foreground and dark background, and sorrow, for many of the gems are tear shaped. This crystalline weeping heralds the narrative consequences of a false life and this melodrama’s pathos. But copious as they are, the tears don’t begin to fill the space they fall into. Writing about the momentary incandescence of a falling star – which Lora’s neglected daughter Susie (Sandra Dee) will wish on, or perhaps wish for – the poet A. E. Housman observes ‘It rains into the sea / And still the sea is salt.’5 This sense of insignificance is enhanced in the title sequence by the absence of any human figure to provide a representation of individual agency or scale, an effect that is furthered by the edit that ends it. The diamonds dissolve into a seaside scene, beginning with four brief shots of a huge crowd on the beach at Coney Island, a public beach near New York City that in the 1940s sometimes accommodated a million people at a time. (The vast assembly is made even more anomalous by its natural location, and the American idiom still retains the comparison ‘like Coney Island’ for packed outdoor gatherings. If this is Sirk’s version of Hurst’s Atlantic City, it vividly departs from the small town feel of its boardwalk.) Like the gems, the bathers are indistinguishable at this distance (Figure 6). Immortalized in 1940 by the New York photographer Arthur ‘Weegee’ Fellig, who styled himself ‘Weegee the Famous’, this is a crowd you could get lost in, one that immediately invokes metaphoric multitudes, the grains of sand on a beach. A cut to a closer shot reveals another image of the faceless crowd, pedestrians filmed from below waist height walking on the boardwalk above the sand, frame left to right. When a shapely pair of bare legs enters the frame from the opposite side they are conspicuous for their movement against the flow of human traffic. Thus Lora emerges out of anonymity to take the first of many bows. As she bends towards the crowd over the boardwalk’s railings, the camera pulls back to reveal her face and bosom, as well as a large banner announcing the year – 1947 – and

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Figure 6  Summertime crowds at Coney Island in Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959, Universal Pictures).

the place, captioning her image, as it were, but without her name (Figure 7). The crane shot follows her down the steps from the boardwalk to the beach, where she passes a man taking photographs of the bathers – in imitation of Weegee, whose photographs Sirk is imitating – and then asks another man if he’s seen a little girl in a blue sun suit. Without a friendly word the stranger scowls his denial and turns away. This evocation of the uncaring crowd echoes complaints about urban isolation made since the nineteenth century, notably Wordsworth’s (1954: 330) description in The Prelude (Book 7, 665–8) of ‘the feeble salutation from the voice / Of some unhappy woman, now and then / heard as we pass, when no one looks about, / Nothing is listened to.’6 But someone is paying attention to Lora: Steve (John Gavin), the photographer who has already snapped a picture of her, directs her to a helpful policeman and later becomes her friend and eventual fiancé. The image maker is her deliverer from a frightening moment of social disregard, as becoming an image, an object of the gaze, will deliver Lora from the humiliating treatment often meted out to the unseen.7 One such image becomes the vehicle for Lora’s first stage role, as she hopes when she agrees to appear in a magazine advertisement for flea powder: ‘If I can get a job modeling at least I’ll be seen.’ And seen she is, by the playwright David Edwards, who invites her to read for a supporting role in his new Broadway production. Although Lora is accused of a theatrical pretence in her personal relations, the audition is the only time we see her act professionally

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Figure 7  Lora Meredith (Lana Turner) searches for her lost child in Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959, Universal Pictures).

and she performs badly. But instead of losing the part, she criticizes the scene, persuades Edwards to omit it from the play, and is awarded an even larger role by the smitten writer. This instant success and its accomplishment by looks and personality rather than dramatic skill is part of the mythology of the movie star’s discovery, to which Turner made a legendary contribution. Cutting her typing class at Hollywood High to buy a Coke at a malt shop on Sunset Boulevard, the sixteen-year-old was seen by the publisher of The Hollywood Reporter and recommended to the comedian and agent Zeppo Marx. Marx introduced her to the director Mervyn LeRoy and she was immediately cast in They Won’t Forget (1937), where her tight fitting knitwear won her the lifelong sobriquet of ‘the sweater girl’. As ever in this film, Turner’s biography guarantees the veracity of its fiction, complicating our sense of just what is and isn’t an imitation. What we can say is that Lora’s rise to fame corresponds very closely to the fantasy identified by the psychologists who worry about fans imitating the famous, a fantasy in which the ordinary individual is propelled by an arresting personal style rather than painfully developed skills to the pleasures and powers that flow from public attention. Most recently this concern has been articulated about the kind of celebrity made available through social media and reality television, but it is worth pointing out that Sirk’s film opened only two years before the publication of the most famous book on fame in the twentieth century, Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America, with its dismissal of

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the modern celebrity as ‘a person who is well known for his well-knownness’ (2012: 57), the phrase itself resounding like the echo chamber of public opinion. This is how Lora is known, not as an actress but as an accumulator of the gaze, a cynosure, a name in lights, bowing to applauding audiences, accepting their bouquets, and sweeping into rooms in yet another of the thirty-four different costumes she wears in the film. Their absurd glamour, together with the film’s sets, furnishings and cars, are typical of the Universal films produced by Ross Hunter, who declared his intention to gratify his audience’s desire to experience vicariously the life of ‘beautiful women, jewels, gorgeous clothes, melodrama’ (Gussow 1996). This steeply rising extravagance seems to suggest that Lora herself is imitating her social superiors, in the Middle Ages a violation of the sumptuary laws which forbade the adoption of aristocratic luxuries by those of lower rank, in contemporary capitalism a consumer imperative. The entrance is another of Lora’s signature characteristics: many of the film’s scenes begin with her walking into a room. It is as though the action of the narrative, ‘life’, cannot start without her presence, itself a narcissistic fantasy underlying the desire to be seen. But not to see. In a gesture typical of the actress (Dyer 2004: 424), Lora repeatedly turns away from her interlocutor, often towards the camera in formal poses that solicit our attention. Most strikingly, after her remarkably successful debut in his play, she declares her love for Edwards while facing away from him – lips parted, eyebrows raised – towards the darkened buildings of the New York theatre district. Only at the film’s end, when calamity arrives with the loss of those closest to her, is Lora shown as a spectator herself, part of the funeral congregation looking up at a real-life star, the gospel singer Mahalia Jackson, in the choir loft above. Lora’s subordination in this scene concludes the fan’s fantasy of stardom, a mysterious rise that ends in a fall, gratifying the sadism that often follows celebrity idealization. So patent is this narrative and so pervasive, that we could say that Lora’s fame is not her fantasy, or Lana’s, but that of the spectators who behold her. She enacts our wishes and our punishment for their realization. In addition to converting a fast food magnate into an actress, Sirk departed from the Hurst/Stahl story in having her maid’s daughter, now called Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner), also enter show business in what most critics read as her imitation of Lora. But Sarah Jane’s version of Lora is more redolent of the fan than the star and as the film’s most obvious figure for spectatorial identification she is granted the only psychological depth of its characters. In an Oscar-nominated performance by Kohner, she can be seen to enact the variety of mimetic practices recalled by Jackie Stacey’s fan correspondents. With shapely legs and a prominent

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bosom, her teenage figure – much more than the diminutive Susie’s – resembles Lora’s, while her erect posture and histrionic declarations seem to imitate those of the older woman. In becoming a performer she is clearly copying Lora, but the show business in question is nightclub burlesque, first in a New York City dive and then in the Moulin Rouge, an expensive Hollywood establishment. Indicatively, the stage in the latter is only slightly raised above the customers, and their proximity to the suggestive movements of the chorus, as well as these women’s abbreviated costumes, signal a far less idealized exhibitionism than that of the ‘legitimate’ theatre. In the production number we see, Sarah Jane and the other chorines perform a pantomime of champagne-fuelled seduction (Figure 8) in clear anticipation of what they are expected to do with the club’s leering customers afterward, gratifying their fantasies while devastating Sarah Jane’s onlooking mother Annie (Juanita Moore). As Lauren Berlant (2008: 138) points out, the film’s spectators share this maternal point of view, depriving us of the narcissistic pleasure provided by Lora’s stage success. Moreover, Sarah Jane’s motives for taking up this work, even the implicitly sexual service that Lora also renders Edwards, are the opposite of the white woman’s. If Lora employs her eroticism to stand out from the crowd, her young counterpart wants nothing more than to fit into the white society that spurns her, an inclusion signified by sexual contact. After their performance, she and her red-haired roommate have a date with the ‘guys’.

Figure 8  Sarah Jane (Susan Kohner) in the chorus line in Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959, Universal Pictures).

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The daughter of the Czech Jewish producer and later agent (of Sirk and Turner) Paul Kohner and the Mexican actress Lupita Tovar, Kohner might be termed, as Diane Negra (2001) has designated Hollywood stars from Jewish, Irish, Mediterranean and Latin American backgrounds, ‘off-white’. Her costume in the chorus is the same yellow worn on her final rendezvous with her blonde boyfriend Frankie (Troy Donahue). ‘Yellow’ was still a meaningful term in the racist lexicon of the 1950s, used to designate the supposedly intermediate skin tones of the miscegenated subject. Like all the words then pertaining to ethnicities other than white, it is insulting, an insult with which Hurst’s novel complies when it describes Peola as ‘banana colored’ (Hurst 2004: 241). But yellow is close to white, indeed it is the colour of Frankie’s hair. Dressed in a yellow shirtwaist for their date, Sarah Jane is asked by her mother to serve appetizers for Lora, who is entertaining her agent and an Italian colleague in the most formal costume of the film, a white ball gown set off by a regal sapphire sash and the title sequence’s diamonds. (As she rises professionally, both her costumes and her domestic setting are increasingly whitened.) Placing the platter on her head, the indignant Sarah Jane sashays up to the appalled company and explains to ‘Miss Lora’ in Delilah’s patois that she learned to serve from her ‘mammy, and she learned it from old Massa ‘fore she belonged to you’. Like B. Pullman’s waitresses, who are taught to perform the Mammy, Sarah Jane performs her caricature of self-abnegating servitude through imitation, the imitation of a movie slave, while ‘Miss Lora’ – now attended in a country mansion by uniformed black staff – imitates her owner. But here the imitation, far from being an ersatz approximation, is offered as a truer presentation of the relations within the household. Furiously scolded afterward in the strikingly white kitchen, Sarah Jane protests ‘You don’t know what it means to be different’, an interesting accusation to a woman who has sought to differentiate herself by perfecting her performance of idealized white femininity. What difference means to Sarah Jane is illustrated in the next scene, when Frankie savagely beats her for deceiving him about her family as she pleads ‘I’m as white as you’. The musical number at the Moulin Rouge moves its reclining chorines on a conveyor belt in reprisal of Stahl’s boxes of pancake mix on the production line. A few years before the earlier film, Siegfried Kracauer had compared the precision dancing of the Tiller Girls and their synchronized successors to the abstract geometry of industrial assembly: ‘Only as parts of a mass, not as individuals who believe themselves to be formed from within, do people become fractions of a figure’ (Kracauer 1995: 76). In Sirk’s description, Sarah Jane is ‘trying to vanish into the imitation world of vaudeville’ (Halliday 1997: 150), to become a

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component of this smartly drilled floor show and its social milieu. Matching the gestures, costumes, and colour of the chorus line beside her, she gains entry into their world. She is as white as they are, as conformed as the indistinguishable members of the crowd at Coney Island. In the escape from difference with which she performs her imitation she becomes a showgirl, not a star.

More Milk, Yvette, Andy Warhol, 1965 Seven years and a cultural eternity after Sirk’s Imitation, an artist who knew something about the aesthetics of Hollywood stardom and commercial branding filmed a celebration of Lana Turner. During the previous autumn, Andy Warhol had cast the Puerto Rican-born drag queen Mario Montez – wearing white with a blonde wig – as Jean Harlow in his first sound film Harlot. In it, Montez’s Harlow reclines on a couch having various kinds of sex with a banana while an offscreen trio composed of writer Ron Tavel, poet Harry Fainlight and Factory superstar Billy Name engage in a double entendre contest whose only pertinence to the titular subject is its (homo) sexual allusions. What kind of trade do you cater for? Trade is for professionals and I’m an amateur. Well, I think they should get the amateurs off 42nd Street.

Writing about this film shortly after its making, Tavel (1966: 66) anticipated queer theory by a quarter century when he observed that Jean Harlow is a transvestite, as are Mae West and Marilyn Monroe, in the sense that their feminineness is so exaggerated that it becomes a commentary on womanhood rather than the real thing or representation of realness.

Tavel could have added Lana Turner to this gay pantheon of female travesty, affectionately celebrated as she was in 1964 by the poet Frank O’Hara in ‘Lana Turner Has Collapsed’, by Pedro Almodovar in his 1991 High Heels – itself an extravagant remake of the Sirk film – the drag artist Lipsincka in her 2000 performance piece ‘Imitation of Imitation of Life’, and 2012’s ‘Limitation of Life’ by the Chicago troupe Hell in a Handbag. And Warhol soon did add Turner to what became a set of film portraits of troubled divas. As with the platinum blonde Harlow, the dark Montez was again cast as the star, with the same perversity that led Warhol to film the Bostonian socialite Edie Sedgwick as the ‘Mexican temptress’ Lupe Velez. But More Milk, Yvette, as it was finally titled,

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is not an imitation of Imitation of Life. Originally dubbed Mr. Stompanato, the film is a queer restaging of the tempestuous dynamics of the Turner household circa 1958, in musical form – multiple musical forms including operatic sung dialogue, American standards such as Cole Porter’s ‘Night and Day’, and a harmonica accompaniment played by a mock Bob Dylan figure (Paul Caruso) in what may have been Warhol’s revenge for Dylan’s accusations that he had supplied Sedgwick with drugs. The film opens with a harmonica introduction for Montez, in wig, make-up, tight sweater, and high heels, who sings: My name is Lana Turner, And I’m just coming back from my studio, And I’ve never modeled so many sweaters in my whole life, But I’ve had to do it, And my boyfriend named Johnny Stomp [two stomps of her heels] Stompanato is waiting for me at home. And I do have a son named Cheryl who’s waiting for me too.

Meanwhile, the camera begins the first of a series of zooms into Lana’s midriff, reinforced brassiere and hairy arms, repeatedly cutting off her head in a sustained departure from any kind of star portraiture. (To mark scene changes it simply tilts up to the dark ceiling of the loft in an apparent fade to black and then tilts down again.) In the first of many Turneresque costume changes, Lana replaces one sweater with another, aided by her middle-aged maid Yvette, to whom she will issue orders throughout the film.8 To a harmonica accompaniment, Lana then assumes a mock plaintive tone to ask Cheryl, played by Montez’s boyfriend Richard Schmidt, ‘What have you done to Johnny? Did you shoot him? Oh why? I love him so much. Why did you shoot Johnny? Why? Was he trying to seduce you? Was he? I can’t believe that.’ If her concern about her former lover seems less than sincere, this may because Cheryl offers certain erotic compensations, including food sharing in the style of the seductive banquet in the contemporary hit Tom Jones (Tony Richardson, 1963) as well as a major make-out scene halfway through the movie. In what could be seen as a radical disclosure of the repressed incest in the mother–daughter relation, Lana’s snogging with Cheryl out-queers the kiss Mildred Pierce delivers to her daughter in Todd Haynes’s 2011 remake of the 1943 film. As it turns out, Johnny isn’t dead anyway, but later arrives in a Brando style torn T-shirt to kiss Lana and assist her in another sweater change.

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None of this could remotely be called an imitation of Lana Turner, in the sense of a drag artist’s impersonation. Turner was not a musical star, and Warhol’s zooms repeatedly foreground Mario’s masculine, but not at all phallic, body. The costumes, although numerous, are not even pretend glamorous, since they essentially comprise sweaters, skirts and occasional pairs of ‘slacks’, as women’s trousers were then termed. Paul Caruso’s Dylan is a closer approximation of the singer’s harmonica playing. Six years would pass before a conventional drag queen, superstar Candy Darling, would ‘do’ Lana, as well as Kim Novak and Joan Bennett, in Women in Revolt, Warhol collaborator Paul Morrissey’s feminist satire. More Milk could better be described as an enthusiastic fan’s gesture at generic stardom – lots of clothes, more than one handsome boyfriend, a musical soundtrack, and a servant to order about. As Lana sings near the film’s conclusion, ‘It’s delightful, it’s delicious, it’s de-lovely.’ It is also, of course, an inversion of Imitation of Life’s racial dynamics, with a white maid attending a Puerto Rican mistress. But, unlike Langston Hughes’s 1938 stage parody of the Stahl film, ‘Limitations of Life’, the enactment of the dominant role by a Latino fails to become a commentary on ‘white-on-white’ Hollywood or Warhol’s equally monochrome milieu (Nettleton 2009: 77), if only because Mario does himself doing Lana so authentically9 that the whole issue of imitation, as well as the star herself, are rendered irrelevant. This is perhaps the ultimate reply to Lana’s imbrication of her actual person and her star persona – imitating her by just being yourself.10

Imitation of Death, Cheryl Crane, 2012 In a perfect conclusion to this series of imitations, Cheryl Crane has offered us a final meditation on Hollywood, celebrity, racism, and mother–daughter relations. Born in 1943, Turner’s daughter survived childhood abuse by her mother’s fourth husband, Tarzan actor Lex Barker, her trial for Stompanato’s murder, three years in reform school, a drug bust, and an openly lesbian adulthood to become a Palm Springs estate agent and part-time mystery novelist. Her 1988 autobiography Detour accused her mother of Lora Meredith-style neglect. More recently, in what seems an act of equivocal reparation to the long-deceased Turner – as well as a blatant exploitation of her remaining celebrity capital – Crane has published a series of novels about a fictional detective whose mother is a retired but still beloved star of screen melodrama, Victoria Bordeaux, with a ‘million dollar smile … that had taken her from an ordinary teenager on a stool

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in a soda shop on Sunset, to an Oscar nominated actress living in Beverly Hills’ (Crane 2012: 56). Victoria’s daughter, part-time sleuth and ‘real estate agent to the stars’ Nikki Harper, is the heroine of these mysteries, including the 2012 Imitation of Death. Like Hurst’s heroine, whose rise from pancake queen to entrepreneur is capped by building a block of repro-Georgian townhouses in New York, Nikki purveys the mimetic fantasies of architecture, Hollywood-style: mansions in Neoclassical, French Regency, and Mediterranean pastiche, a terrace ‘which resembled a tropical island’, Eine Kleine Nachtmusik on the doorbell. She sells simulations in a town in which fiction is the normative product. Her best friend is a closeted gay action movie hero. Her half-brother is an Elvis impersonator. In Imitation of Death she nearly blows the cover of a cop disguised as a neoNazi. She meets a TV chef who specializes in making sweets look like savouries and avoids a young woman who resembles ‘every other young woman in L.A. – bleached blond, flat-ironed hair, and double-D enhancement’ (Crane 2012: 56). If there’s a standard of value in this Hollywood hall of mirrors, it is celebrity. Crane is no Proust, but she evokes an elaborate order of power and patronage in which Victoria still has the pull to summon contemporary stars to her movie evenings, while gently condescending to the Aaron Spellingesque TV producer next door. Beneath them is a service sector of publicists, personal assistants, trainers, pool boys, drug dealers, and ministers of the Scientology-like Church of the Earth and Beyond. Down their mean streets Nikki drives her Prius, in pursuit of the real killer of the TV producer’s ne’er-do-well son so that she can exonerate her childhood friend, Jorge Delgado, the offspring of her mother’s Latina housekeeper. (In homage to Sirk’s 1956 All That Heaven Allows, Jorge has grown up to become, like so many other Latino Californians, a gardener.) In an attempt to modernize the Sirk film by having the daughter of the white actress rescue the son of her servant, Imitation of Death mounts a polemic against the racist antagonism to Hispanic Americans: ‘People are talking about how this is the case,’ Ashley continued, ‘that will finally force legislation controlling illegal aliens entering the country. Meaning Mexicans,’ she intoned. ‘But Jorge was born here!’ Nikki protested. ‘He’s an American citizen, the same as you or me.’ (Crane 2012: 106–7)

Nikki speaks some Spanish, befriends the black TV chef who looks like Naomi Campbell and finds Will and Jada Pinkett Smith refreshingly natural when they

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attend one of Victoria’s soirees. White people can oppose racism and black people rise to stardom in today’s Hollywood. But some things never change. Although Jorge declares no showbiz ambitions, neither Crane nor her heroine is immune to the celebrity imitation complex. Not only does Nikki revel in the attention bestowed on her mother and the overspill that she receives, she relies upon it to do her job: ‘Celebrity clients liked working with Nikki because their celebrity didn’t faze her; she’d grown up in the limelight of a celebrity among celebrities’ (Crane 2012: 93). And when she discovers – in a blatant projection of the author’s maternal ambivalence – that the killer is the victim’s mother, it is Nikki who makes the cover of People, her image dwarfing the photo of Victoria inset beside it. In the final gratification of the aspiration and antagonism dramatized in all these imitations, the celebrity’s daughter becomes the celebrity herself, appropriating not only her mother’s fame but her famous features: She looked at the photos again. She was told all the time she resembled her mother, but she never saw it. Victoria was gorgeous, and Nikki … while she may not have been the ugly duckling, she never thought of herself as beautiful. But looking at the two photos, she was shocked to see her mother’s beauty in her own face. (Crane 2012: 295)

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‘Both a female public intellectual and a celebrity’, as the editors (Ching and Wagner-Lawlor 2009: 1) of a posthumous study hail her, Susan Sontag became an even greater celebrity when she forswore the modernist austerity of her early fiction to rewrite a Hollywood melodrama. A critical success and a bestseller, to maintain the dubious antithesis, Sontag’s 1992 novel The Volcano Lover was inspired by a film that had fascinated her since childhood. A list in her diary of movies seen by age thirteen (Sontag 2012: 149–51) – among them the melodramas Rebecca, Mildred Pierce, Brief Encounter and Gaslight – includes That Hamilton Woman (Alexander Korda, 1941). A 1960 entry records her abiding curiosity about its heroine, Emma Hamilton, the blacksmith’s daughter who became an artist’s muse, the wife of the British ambassador to Naples, the lover of Admiral Nelson and one of the most famous women in Europe: ‘what did this concealed woman have that these great men loved her’ (Sontag 2008: 240). Sontag’s question identifies the author not with the enigmatic Emma but her admirers. The titular figure of the novel is Emma’s husband Sir William Hamilton, the diplomat, connoisseur and naturalist whose study of volcanoes would lead the writer back to the character first encountered on screen. After the publication of The Volcano Lover, Sontag recalled her discovery in a Bloomsbury print shop of Pietro Fabris’s engravings of Vesuvius, illustrations to Hamilton’s 1776 Observations on the Volcanos of the Two Sicilies: And who was Sir William Hamilton? I couldn’t remember. So they brought out The Dictionary of National Biography, that they had at the back of the shop. They showed me the entry on Hamilton, and I thought, ‘Ohhh, that Hamilton man!’ because I’d seen the famous movie with Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh when I was a child. (Delaney 2000: 401)

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Across several years of research on that movie’s heroine, the author re-imagined a figure best known as a figure, portrayed from the age of sixteen in 1782 in over sixty paintings by George Romney alone, as well as others by Joshua Reynolds, Thomas Lawrence, Alexander Day, Guy Head, Gavin Hamilton, Angelica Kauffman, Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun, Johannes Schmidt, and Wilhelm Tischbein. Often reproduced in engravings and mezzotints printed in multiple editions, these paintings made Emma’s face familiar long before her name. When her adultery with Nelson became a scandal these widely circulated depictions were redrawn in scurrilous caricature by the likes of Thomas Rowlandson and James Gillray. Before her death in 1815 she entered literature à clef in novels loosely based on the affair, including Mary Charlton’s The Wife and the Mistress (1802) and Anna Maria Porter’s A Sailor’s Friendship and a Soldier’s Love (1805). Afterwards, her liaison with Nelson was at the centre of Alexandre Dumas’s 1863–5 novel about a Neapolitan revolutionary executed for complicity with the French, La San Felice. Sontag acknowledges this pedigree in her subtitle, ‘A Romance’ – a love story retaining the older meaning of a knight’s heroic wooing of a lady. Written with the verve of her essays rather than the ‘narcissism and solipsism’ (Chan: 2019) of The Benefactor (1963) and Death Kit (1965), this romance departs experimental fiction for the unlikely genre of the historical novel (romanzo in Italian). ‘Sir Walter Scott would surely have approved of it’, John Banville observed in the New York Times. ‘In fact he would probably have enjoyed it immensely’ (Banville: 1992). At first reading, however, the reference to Scott seems only generically apposite, since The Volcano Lover flouts the conventions that scholars of historical fiction have identified in, most notably, his Waverley novels of 1814–32. Its Neapolitan setting is not transformed, but confirmed in its extravagance, corruption, and cruelty. The British presence headed by Hamilton the ambassador, Emma his consort and Nelson the admiral is anything but a force for progress, securing as it does the continued reign of the Bourbons against the republican uprising of 1799.1 Nor are these famous figures marginalized by the revolutionary masses – Naples’s lazzaroni2 are decided royalists – or by ordinary people witnessing history. Far from it: this is a novel about extraordinary individuals, about glory and its pursuit, about the desire to prove one’s worth in heroic combat, public display, and deathless prose. And yet, as Perry Anderson has described Scott, so perhaps we should see Sontag – ‘as the practitioner of a costume drama whose narrative form stages a binary opposition between good and evil’. This is ‘the mark of melodrama’, Anderson reminds us, and ‘its characteristic artistic experience should be

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operatic rather than novelistic’ (Anderson 2011: 24).3 Sontag sounds this operatic inflection in her epigraph to the novel from Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutti: ‘Nel petto un Vesuvio d’avere mi par’ (I have a Vesuvius in my heart). The composer’s Don Giovanni supplies a telling incident, and the evil Baron Scarpia is transported from the Rome of another opera, Giacomo Puccini’s Tosca, to Naples. (That villain, as Sontag knew well, had originally menaced melodrama’s most eminent diva, Sarah Bernhardt, in the opera’s long forgotten source play by Victorien Sardou, a work from which she borrows a narrative strand.) All of this builds on a period piece filmed in Hollywood to encourage the United States into World War II via some remarkably reflexive star casting: fresh from their 1939 successes in Gone with the Wind and Wuthering Heights, the adulterous lovers Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier play the patriotic adulterers Hamilton and Nelson. Such was the appeal of the principals’ transgression that they pretended not to have married even when they finally managed to before shooting began. But sedition, not sin, was the concern of the isolationists in the US Congress, who had maintained a ban on pro-war propaganda despite Britain’s increasing peril. Here, as in To Be or Not to Be, the Ernst Lubitsch film Korda produced in 1942, his company logo of Big Ben tolling the eleventh hour seems all too fitting. Made at Churchill’s behest, the plea for American intervention in That Hamilton Woman was so blatant that it secured its producer-director a subpoena to testify before a hostile Senate committee, a fate he escaped when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor five days before his scheduled appearance.4 Nevertheless, this follow-up to the anti-Nazi tenure of his 1937 Elizabethan production Fire Over England – with the Spanish Armada cast in the role later taken by Napoleon’s navy, and Leigh and Olivier also playing lovers – is less remembered for its propagandistic daring than for its success as a ‘woman’s picture’, in which its imprisoned heroine describes her rise to fame – a fame represented as being pictured – to an incredulous inmate. With its female protagonist, glamorous setting, and forbidden love affair, That Hamilton Woman offers the gendered attractions attributed by scholars to what is now known as the woman’s film or – in the idiom of classical Hollywood – woman’s picture, a form of melodrama that has provoked feminist commentary since the 1970s. At the time of its release, however, the film’s historical life story led Variety to designate it a ‘biographical drama’ – familiarly known as the ‘biopic’ – albeit one of ‘a vivacious girl who is pictured as a victim of men but whose ingenuity in statecraft saves the Empire’ (Anon. 1940). The reviewer’s use of ‘pictured’ is instructive: Korda’s historical dramas are distinguished by their pictorialism, in which the history ‘brought to life’ is often an historical

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painting, notably Hans Holbein’s 1537 portrait of the king in The Private Lives of Henry VIII (1934). Similar devices are employed in the 1941 film’s recreation of Arthur William Devis’s 1807 tableau of the death of Nelson and two portraits of Emma by George Romney. The ‘confrontation’ between the painterly and the cinematic in such citations has been argued by Antonio Costa to generate a ‘picture effect … an effect, more, or less evident, of suspended time’ (translated by Vidal 2012a: 113). Costa’s observations have in turn prompted Belén Vidal, alluding to one of Korda’s many biopics, the 1936 Rembrandt, to observe how ‘the tableau acknowledges both the absence of the past, its fixity, and at the same time, the possibility of reanimating it’ (Vidal 2012a: 115). An examination of That Hamilton Woman from this standpoint suggests that what is reanimated in this film and Sontag’s novel is celebrity itself.

That Hamilton Woman, Alexander Korda, 1941 Exiled to Calais in debt after the death of Nelson, Emma Hamilton (Vivien Leigh) has a diegetic audience from the outset of the film. When she is arrested there for stealing a bottle of wine, she puts up a fight – assisted by a plucky Englishwoman who has watched her treatment by the gendarmes with concern. From the darkness of the prison to which they’re taken, a close-up of the protagonist fades in to reveal her lined countenance. The scene rapidly establishes the melodramatic reversal of fortune typical of the celebrity biopic, reducing the star to the level of the fan (Fischer 2016: 212). Asked her name by her Cockney companion Mary Smith (Heather Angel), whose amiable ordinariness clearly invites spectatorial identification, the thief grandly replies ‘Emma, Lady Hamilton’, the first of the film’s series of celebrity names and one that is greeted with laughter. Recalling her mother’s description of Lady Hamilton as ‘the most beautiful woman in the world’, Mary reluctantly hands her companion a mirror. Its holder’s estrangement from the image she beholds, a distance that will be repeatedly remarked, is apparent in her reference to ‘that face’: For ten years it has looked back at me from different mirrors. It must be me. But I always wait for the miracle that one time, just once more, when it will be another face that looks at me again.

Here the demonstrative adjective that lends the film’s title its scandalous inflection recurs. ‘That’ is distinguished from ‘this’ by distance, the distance between the speaker and a reflected face that elicits no identification, Freud’s (1955a: 248) definition of the uncanny double. In its distance ‘that’ can also

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suggest disrepute, as does the absence of an appropriate honorific in the film’s American title, altered for its British release to Lady Hamilton. (The overtone of illegitimacy is also sounded in the American title’s echo of Edmund Goulding’s 1937 melodrama That Certain Woman, in which Bette Davis plays a young secretary whose marriage to a wealthy playboy is annulled by his disapproving father, unaware that she’s pregnant.) But whether ‘lady’ or mere ‘woman’, Emma’s allusion to ‘another face’ encourages Mary to request her story – ‘Doesn’t matter if it’s true or not.’ Her invitation translates the protagonist into what has been described as the conventional narrative of the 1940s woman’s film – ‘obscure, forgotten, or in some cases, never-known women seek to make their lives and the significance of them known’ (McKee 2014: 80). With the extended flashback characteristic of these films, Miklós Rósza’s love theme transports the action to the past, as Emma’s voice-over announces her youthful arrival in Naples. The flashback’s reversal of linear time is compounded by the film’s introduction first not of the heroine but of her depiction, George Romney’s 1785 portrait of ‘Emma Hart in a Straw Hat’ repainted with Leigh’s features (Figure 9). As the delighted William Hamilton (Alan Mowbray) admires the portrait he

Figure 9  George Romney’s ‘Lady in a Straw Hat’ repainted in the guise of Vivien Leigh for That Hamilton Woman (Alexander Korda, 1941, Alexander Korda Films).

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has acquired – together with its subject – from her previous lover, his nephew Charles, the French ambassador marvels of Romney: ‘If he could paint reality, he would be a master … no woman ever lived with such colouring, such godlike simplicity.’ Then, from behind the carriage bearing her image, the even more beautiful Emma emerges. With her, the film’s themes also come into view, not only the incommensurability of reality and representation – a perpetual problem for historical dramas – but this woman’s double objectification as both spectacle and commodity. Excused to rest after her journey, the young beauty and her ‘past’ become the topic of the two men’s discussion, their innuendo transforming its reference from time to transgression. ‘It’s the usual past’, Hamilton observes, ‘of a poor little country girl wronged once and then wronged again. The old story – lower and lower, but always up and up.’ Emma’s designation as a melodramatic  victim – blanching both her character and the film’s mise en scène – is illustrated by another of his acquisitions, a classical bust of a crowned woman cleansed of centuries of mud. ‘It is still beautiful, isn’t it?’ asks Hamilton as he drapes his arm familiarly around the statue in anticipation of the Pygmalion role that he will play with his protégée (Figure 10). ‘Despite its past?’

Figure 10  Sir William Hamilton (Alan Mowbray) embraces a new acquisition in That Hamilton Woman (Alexander Korda, 1941, Alexander Korda Films).

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In the elegant black-and-white designs of Korda’s brother Vincent, this bright classicism figures the freedom before the heroine’s decline. For the 1929 version of the story, The Divine Lady, Oscar-winning director Frank Lloyd had concentrated this virtuous white in Emma’s gowns, contrasted with the dark surrounds of its interiors. The 1941 film opens Hamilton’s palazzo to the Bay of Naples, its airy colonnade enclosing a circular pool surrounded by antique sculpture. The sense of spaciousness is enhanced by tracking shots of conversing characters as they promenade along its curved perimeter. When Emma pulls back her bedroom curtains, double-height windows disclose Vesuvius in the distance. The young woman has both made good and become so. Refusing the shame conferred by her unwitting transfer to the uncle of her lover due to his forthcoming marriage, she insists on the appearance and the substance of her virtue – ‘Now I’m different, not only my clothes but inside’ – and eventually weds the elderly collector. But Hamilton is decades older and (quite fictitiously) lame as well – one of several castrating wounds endured by the film’s male principals, including Nelson and his disabled father. And as Emma quickly realizes, the real king of Naples ‘is the Queen’. The new ambassadress to her court sleeps alone in splendour, her immense bed decorated with a monogrammed ‘E’. Although Vesuvius never explodes in this film, the initial arrival of Horatio Nelson (Laurence Olivier) in Naples – and the profound effect it will have on Emma, the court, and British history – is signalled by cannon fire. He, in turn, is made aware of the significance of Lady Hamilton by encountering first one and then another of her Romney depictions, Emma posing as Circe (c. 1782). ‘Yes, that’s me too’, announces its subject, arriving to join Nelson in regarding her image. Her ‘that’ signals a repetition of her distanced gaze in the opening scene, but this time at potent beauty. In Romney’s full length study, the enchantress raises her left hand in farewell to her sailor lover Odysseus while holding her imposing wand with the other (Figure 11). Again, the painting confounds linear time, predicting Nelson’s imminent departure and the many that will follow. Indeed, as a still image in this moving picture, it suspends temporality in the characteristic effect of the melodramatic tableau; ‘a fetish-tableau’ in Belén Vidal’s apt description (2012b: 42), since it halts the action to emphasize the film’s pretensions to aesthetic value as well as Emma’s phallic powers. Not only does her beauty warrant such artistry, but her intervention with her bosom friend, the kingly Queen Maria Carolina (Norma Drury), will secure the reinforcements requested by Nelson to combat the French. The authority exuded in the Circe portrait offers one resolution to a critical problem with the woman’s picture – how to acknowledge its spectacularization of its heroines, its designation of

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Figure 11  Emma Hamilton portrayed as Circe by George Romney, repainted for That Hamilton Woman (Alexander Korda, 1941, Alexander Korda Films).

them as the passive object of the gaze and of victimization more broadly, with the agency they often display as active protagonists (Doane, 1987: 123–54). Emma’s depiction in this classic guise is reminiscent of her real-life ‘Attitudes’, her staging of such tableaux for society gatherings with the dramaturgical assistance of her husband. Dressed in the revealing Empire style of the period, she would compose her classical features in a rapidly evolving series of mythic and allegorical personifications illuminated by taper or lantern light. Cashmere shawls would shroud these changes and double as veils or cloaks. Although the term ‘attitude’ was by then in use for a theatrical pose, a dance position and the arrangement of a figure in a statue or painting (Russell 2016: 140–7), this mode of performance art is attributed to Emma herself, and sometimes seen as the outcome of her observations of the London stage while a servant of the theatrical Linley family, or her rumoured portrayals of a thinly clad Goddess of Health for the society sex therapist James Graham (Gattrell 2016: 33–61). More certain is her training in such poses by years of modelling antique figures for English painters, figures she would model again for the international company of artists who witnessed her Attitudes in Naples. In one twelve-image sequence,

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drawn by the Hanoverian Friedrich Rehberg and published as engravings in 1794, she casts a prophetic glance as a sibyl, clutches herself in contrition as Mary Magdalene, and weeps for her daughter as Niobe, the Greek mother whose children are murdered by the jealous gods. These proto-cinematic vignettes are described rather than seen in That Hamilton Woman, when Emma regales Nelson with her plans for a party at Capri, promising him that she’ll perform the Dance of the Nymphs in ‘a long tunic of pale blue cashmere’ and ‘loose hair, like a Greek goddess’. Although the film sometimes frames her with classical statues, it follows previous treatments of Emma’s life in omitting these performances, with one commentary maintaining that the delicacy of her expressions in her Attitudes anticipated ‘cinematic moments resting on the subtle flicker of a heroine’s eye or mouth in the all-important close-up’ (Williams 2016: 269). In taking over the nuanced style of these performances, have the movies rendered their staging redundant? Or do contemporary spectators require the still image’s duration to identify such changing personae in comparable works by photographers like Cindy Sherman or Hannah Wilke?5 Whatever the explanation, Korda conveys Emma and Nelson’s self-conscious theatricality differently, by fading them in and out of the darkness as though spotlit on the Broadway stage where in 1940 Leigh and Olivier had performed Romeo and Juliet. A central example of this device can be seen in the revelation of Nelson’s wounds when he returns to Naples after ‘five years of war’ between Britain and France. In another allusion to Britain’s peril at the time of the film’s release, Emma’s voice-over gravely narrates: ‘We fought alone with no allies.’ Denied provisions by a kingdom now threatened by the French, Nelson’s crew are low on lamp oil when she boards his flagship. As she complains of the darkness, he steps into the light to reveal first his empty right sleeve and then his blinded eye to the shocked emissary. In a match with the imprisoned Emma’s initial close-up, the scene’s impact relies on the display of the character’s imperfect body, devoid of the star’s glamour. She in turn registers the privations that the mutilated commander –and by extension, his country – have suffered, and delivers the Queen’s mandate for the resupply of his vessels. Again, it is the ambassadress and not her husband who comes to the admiral’s aid and again the couple must part, as Nelson sails away to engage Napoleon’s fleet off the coast of Egypt. His victory – temporarily – banishes the darkness, as Naples blazes with fireworks and a flaming ‘N’ above the royal palace. Here the film abides by the account in the actual Emma’s characteristically ungrammatical letter to Nelson dated 8 September 1798:

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In Rudolph Maté’s luminous white and black photography, the warrior’s name is again written in light, the light of a valour that will be shadowed by his subsequent liaison with Emma. The celebrated admiral arrives to interrupt the celebrations, staggering with illness and warning of Napoleon’s continued threat as the heedless Neapolitans revel in the streets. Refusing the lengthy respite taken by the historical Nelson, Korda’s protests that he cannot rest when ‘no country in Europe is free. They want to get hold of the whole world’. Then he collapses, to wake in Emma’s brocaded bed, the long shadow across it signalling their barred relation. Nelson’s convalescence offers the film an opportunity to segue from this apprehension of intimacy to the lovers’ declaration of feeling, one that significantly occurs after a gala performance of Don Giovanni. Sitting together with the King and Queen – and Hamilton obscured by opera glasses at the far end of their box – they listen to the Don’s seduction of the servant Zerlina from her fiancé. After the performance the couple steal away to a darkened inn, where Nelson responds to Emma’s mimicry of his dour expressions with one of his own: ‘Nelson in love’. The confession is interrupted by a party of naval officers including his stepson Josiah (Ronald Sinclair) cynically toasting the cuckolded Hamilton, a toast in which the embarrassed admiral must join. Next seen aboard ship, Josiah complains in a letter to his mother of ‘that Hamilton woman’ never leaving his father alone, his scorn expressed in his omission of her title and the scandalously allusive ‘that’. When, after a subsequent victory celebration, the ambassador himself reflects on the deceived husband he has become to a wife adorned with Nelson’s jewelled initial, the ‘N’ could stand for notoriety. Together with Nelson’s, Emma’s name is becoming (in)famous. No longer is she only the artistic figure that she bitterly accuses Hamilton of acquiring as ‘an ornament for your house, like that painting, or that statue, or that vase’. The film’s alternation of fame-as-depiction with fame-as-nomination reaches its zenith on New Year’s Eve, 1799. Forced to return to England by Admiralty decree, Nelson stands on the balcony with Emma contemplating his imminent departure. When, to the strains of ‘A Londonderry Air’, the midnight bells begin to ring, he recites a roll call of eighteenth-century political celebrity, a list that carefully includes the nations that will oppose the Nazis 141 years later:

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What a century it’s been! Marlborough rode to war, Washington crossed the Delaware, Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette, the last of the Stuarts, Peter the Great, Voltaire, Clive of India, Bonaparte …

And Emma adds, ‘Nelson’ – her accolade and the move into a close-up heralding their embrace. ‘Now I’ve kissed you over two centuries’, Nelson declares, but the second of these, identified as it is by the film’s allusions to 1941 and the casting of the decade’s reigning stars, is not the nineteenth. Instead, linear time is confounded once more by the principals’ travel from neoclassical Italy to Britain at war. Unlike the spacious scenes that precede it, the film’s final act is mostly staged in confined interiors, hotels and country villas whose decor could have survived into the period of its release. From their windows the lovers sadly gaze. At first the hero’s appearance is greeted by the ecstatic crowd below, but increasingly these windows offer the reverse view, that of a shadowed face looking outward, the actor peering, so to speak, from the wings. The idolization of the public intensifies this confinement, rendering Nelson, as Emma warns, ‘the symbol of all that is most precious to them. And whatever you do will be their guide and example.’ Invoking the morality observed by his parishioners, Nelson’s father (Halliwell Hobbes), a country parson confined to a wheelchair, implores him to save his marriage and abandons him when he refuses. Emma’s increasing notoriety produces a less elevated version of this censure, with spectators in the House of Lords turning from Nelson’s maiden speech to gossip about his mistress. His wronged wife (Gladys Cooper) suffers her own humiliation, bitterly complaining of the ‘coarse joke about me in the taverns’. But if the film foregrounds the perils of celebrity, it is even more self-reflexive in acknowledging its stars’ clandestine affair and its own genre. When the covertly pregnant Emma collapses outside Parliament, Lady Nelson refuses the use of her carriage, furious at her selection of the House of Lords ‘as the appropriate stage for her melodrama’: Everyone says she’s a wonderful actress. She is brilliant to have hidden a sweet secret for so long.

The child of mysterious parentage is a staple of melodrama from its earliest stagings,6 and this one must remain a secret, registered as Horatia Thompson, the daughter of an absent sailor, by a mother seen only as a shadow. Emma’s concern for Nelson’s reputation effectively denies their child and herself a public existence. The vivid beauty of Romney’s studies dwindles into a silhouette, and her famous face into anonymity. This cessation of depiction is underscored by

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the shipwreck of Hamilton’s treasures, leaving the dying collector to instruct his servant to straighten an absent Van Dyck on his denuded wall and arrange dinner with his equally absent wife. With that the film shifts its attention to Nelson, protesting to the Admiralty that the British ‘cannot make peace with dictators’ in a clear reference to the Munich Pact. A further allusion to the political crisis at the film’s release brings Captain Hardy (Henry Wilcox) to Emma, announcing the imminence of invasion and begging her to encourage the indispensable warrior back to sea. Insisting that Nelson has given enough, she sends Hardy away, only to relent in fidelity to the duty that melodrama expects every woman to do. Ultimately it is Nelson, not Emma, who becomes the object of depiction when he is fatally wounded at Trafalgar. As he dies tended by his crew below deck, the camera pulls back to a wide shot approximating Devis’s memorial painting of the white-clad admiral surrounded by his shadowed officers, a chiaroscuro composition reminiscent of a Baroque deposition of the crucified Christ. Told of his death by Hardy, Emma draws the curtains as she opened them in Naples, and the flashback ends. Celebrity’s theatrical performance concludes abruptly, leaving the imprisoned Emma without the beauty of her depictions and scarcely able to claim the name that it has won her. ‘And then? What happened after?’ her companion demands. In a final declaration of the film’s insistent presentness, its protagonist grimly replies ‘There is no then. There is no after’ and fades into the dark. Emma’s concluding statement must be read through the film’s multiple genres. As propaganda, it reasserts the imminent threat of the Nazis at the time of the film’s release. As historical biography, it reminds the spectator that she did indeed die within months of her arrival in Calais. As melodrama, its plaint is that of the melancholic whose life has ended with her lover’s, the grief that Emma performed so fervently in her Attitudes. But, as the twentieth-century appropriation of her name and image for entertainment and political purposes suggests, the converse is also true: celebrities can live on in new contexts and updated configurations. Ellen Draper’s description of the film as a ‘melodrama that insists on the primacy of the present’ (1992: 59) persuasively describes the film’s drive to generate an immediate empathy in its audience, but her attention to how that imperative ‘dislocates’ historical time might also refer to its re-presentation of celebrity as a profoundly anachronistic phenomenon. The spectacle of Georgian political and artistic fame is graphically refigured by two neo-Georgian film stars, who have just sealed their contemporary success in Victorian costume as Scarlett O’Hara and Heathcliff. The celebrity of Emma Hamilton and Horatio Nelson will be revived in further re-imaginings to which the moving image will make no small

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contribution.7 But perhaps the best gloss on this chronological conflation is the novel published half a century after Sontag first watched That Hamilton Woman.

The Volcano Lover, Susan Sontag, 1992 Sontag’s novel, like Korda’s film, opens from the perspective of an observer after the events that it will relate. It is 1992, and its narrator, ‘in my jeans and silk blouse and tennis shoes’, hesitates at the entrance of a Manhattan flea market: ‘Why enter? Only to play. A game of recognitions. To know what, and to know how much it was, how much it ought to be, how much it will be.’ The inaugural issue of the novel is the ascertainment of value, a value that may or may not be adequately represented by price. And among the goods on offer, the cheap jewellery and the rattan chairs, the first to be mentioned is ‘postcards of movie stars’ (Sontag 1993: 4). The scene shifts to a London auction in 1772, where the image on sale is a predecessor of those modern Venuses, a painting of the goddess disarming Cupid. Again the scene shifts, to the monstrous ‘mouth’ of Vesuvius, female and male, concave and fiery tongued, erupting in AD 79, 1794, 1944. Like the star to which they will be compared, these cataclysms ‘come back’ (8). The titular lover, Sir William Hamilton, is also a collector, with an appetite whetted by his expatriate perception of Naples as a spectacle, a ‘kingdom of the immoderate, of excess, of overflow’ (44) – in short, of melodrama. A childhood friend of George III, who later dubs him Knight of the Bath, he is called ‘Il Cavaliere’ by the Neapolitans, but his pleasures are not feudal. A Fellow of the Royal Academy and a connoisseur, he seeks out and acquires objects, scientific and artistic, ‘worth looking at’ (17). Among his acquisitions is his first wife Catherine, a pious heiress with a talent for music and a desire to please. After his asthmatic spouse expires, William returns her ashes to her native Wales, consoling himself with the lucrative sale of an exceptionally fine Roman vase to the Duchess of Portland and purchasing a portrait of his nephew’s charming mistress as a votary of Bacchus – that is, we are warned, a priestess of drunken revelry. A year later he takes delivery of its subject and is surprised to realize that she is even more beautiful than Romney’s painting. Now he understands that his beloved ‘images were not only the record of beauty but its harbinger, its forerunner’ (130).8 If The Volcano Lover is to be saluted for its knowing inversion of copy and original, so, as we have seen, must its cinematic source, preceding Emma with

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her own portrait half a century earlier. But in the sound and vision with which it purveys its real-life movie stars, That Hamilton Woman enjoys an advantage that the writer – even a writer who has directed films herself 9 – does not possess. How to portray the effect of this eighteenth-century luminary in mere words? Sontag wisely stresses the difficulty of description, drawing a comparison between the Cavaliere’s foundering attempts to convey in a letter the beauty of his mistress and an eruption of Vesuvius – fireworks and flesh. Then she moves forward to her own century, invoking the ample form and allure of the cinematic sex goddess, as personified by Jayne Mansfield, Anita Ekberg, and especially Marilyn Monroe: ‘Beauty which strokes itself with parted full lips, inviting the touch of others. Beauty which is generous and leans toward the admirer’ (132). Beauty which expands in the heat of the Mezzogiorno. The increasingly Rubensesque redhead is an entirely different type from Vivien Leigh’s slender brunette, whose relatively discreet physical style reflects the need to portray its protagonist as a martyr to patriotic sacrifice. Rendered in a very cinematic present tense, Sontag’s voluptuous Emma is more of a movie star than Korda’s, and film melodrama emerges in the novel’s periodic tableaux. A key chapter performs this effect with a sentence of that single word, ‘Tableau’. The first is a moonlit scene that could be by Fabris – two travellers pointing to the steaming cone of a volcano, the German writer Johan Wolfgang Goethe and his friend, the artist Wilhelm Tischbein. The second is of Emma Hamilton enacting her Attitudes, as depicted in their respective writing and painting. Here the novel elaborates Goethe’s marvelling in his Italian Journey at how Emma, ‘with a few shawls, gives so much variety to her poses, gestures, expressions, etc. that the spectator can hardly believe his eyes’ (Goethe 1992: 208). The classical beauty’s alternation of stasis and movement, and the desire she provokes in the spouse who directs her, recall the narrative of Rousseau’s self-styled ‘melodrama’ and its titular subject.10 ‘More accurately’, the novel observes, ‘a Pygmalion with a round-trip ticket, for he could change her into a statue and then back into a woman at will’ (Sontag 1993: 144). Emma’s tableaux stop motion and give it solidity, only to dissolve again into action. As pose succeeds pose, she confronts her spectators with a compressed series of the revelations that structure melodrama, revelations of both identity and moral status:11 familiar names (the gods, the great sufferers, the heroes and heroines) representing familiar virtues (constancy, nobility, courage, grace). (148)

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The statue that comes alive for its creator can reassume the status of a representation, of many representations, but in Emma’s Attitudes there is a bias to ‘the forlorn and victimized’, mothers who lose children, lovers abandoned or dishonoured, the sorority of suffering women that melodrama inherits from classical tragedy. Among them is Emma herself, injured in all these ways by the time she meets Goethe at the age of twenty-two, but fortified by the narcissistic delights of her own beautiful success: ‘She did not want to be a victim. She was not a victim’ (147). Instead she elicits admiration by performing victims. ‘Posed as herself posing’ (146), as if for Romney or Lawrence or Reynolds, her tableaux will be painted again by visiting artists including Tischbein, Angelica Kaufman, and Elisabeth Vigée Le Brun. In tracing such transpositions, including its own implicit origin in motion pictures, the novel multiplies the distancing effect of these second- and third-order representations while critically observing the artful rendering of female suffering. Witness Vigée Le Brun’s 1790 painting of Emma as Ariadne, the mythological Cretan princess who saves the Greek hero Theseus from the minotaur, only to be abandoned by him: reclining in a very off-the-shoulder gown, her wine goblet overturned, the discarded princess directs an importunate gaze at the spectator as her lover’s ship disappears over the horizon. While her full figure and empty cup suggest two kinds of appetite, the auburn curls falling over her crotch point to a third. This suggestive depiction prompts a page and a half ekphrasis in the novel, limning the loose dress, the illuminated bosom and the come-hither smile to conclude that this rare female artist has rendered her female subject with a unique cruelty: Never, in all the portraits made of her, was she depicted so patently as a courtesan. Unpleasant depiction by one independent woman surviving out in the great world by her wits and talents, of another woman at the same perilous game. (166)

Multiplied by the era’s proliferation of printed copies and caricatures, the visibility that this cascade of portraits creates will make its subject very famous, but when Goethe meets Emma in Naples he already is one of Europe’s most celebrated writers, a distinguished dramatist and the bestselling author of The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). Emma has read ‘the notorious lachrymose novel about the lovelorn egotist who shoots himself ’ (Sontag 1993: 151) and like many of its readers she inquires if it is based on the author’s own experience. (It is, he says, up to a point.) This encourages one of the novel’s many digressions, on the fame of writers. Despite his enormous condescension to his hostess, Goethe’s celebrity is declared not dissimilar to Emma’s – or indeed, one might note, to that of another

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philosophical purveyor of the popular romance, Rousseau. Like the scraps of his scribbling cherished by his fans, Goethe has become an object for collection. His works have already achieved immortality, rendering the living author ‘an instant antiquity’, a baleful statue in the style of the ghostly Commendatore who drags Don Giovanni down to hell. And if that present assumption of the past suggests Emma’s Attitudes, Goethe’s proclamations as a Sontag-like public intellectual are themselves described as performances, rendering the writer ‘a work of art himself ’ (157). But notwithstanding their resemblances, the self-approving sage is no match for her heroine. It takes a revolution to find a suitable sailor for Ariadne. In an age characterized by exaggeration, including one of Vesuvius’s more exaggerated eruptions, a celebrity consort for Emma arrives: a naval officer marked for what The Volcano Lover describes as stardom. Historical veracity demands another departure from its cinematic source, prompting a digression on idealization in eighteenth-century portraiture and its abandonment (or not) today. (Is it yet possible, the narrator asks, to take pleasure in the couplings of the aged or ugly?) If the ambassadress outweighs the petite Leigh, Nelson, too short to be a matinee idol and already missing some teeth, bears little resemblance to Olivier. Still, the ambitious officer is ‘undoubtedly a star – like the Cavaliere’s wife’ (188). Fired by Henry V – a better link to Olivier – and the piety of his vicar father, he seeks the public signs of personal worth, his name in the history books and his representation in painting and sculpture, ‘even atop a high column in a public square’. The intention is glory via virtue of the military kind, ‘valor, steadfastness, generosity, frankness’ (193). Nelson wants to be a hero, and so Sontag names him. He achieves heroic stature when he destroys Napoleon’s fleet off the coast of Egypt. But in becoming the Bourbons’ executioner, the melodramatic hero will mutate into a villain, ruthless in his reprisals against the republican leadership and the scientists, artists and social reformers who support it. As The Volcano Lover makes this increasingly apparent, it amplifies its critique of the biopic that inspired it, but without losing the feminist import of the woman’s picture. Ellen Draper (1992: 62) writes of the embarrassment she experienced at a 1990 Cambridge screening of That Hamilton Woman watching the ambassador explain to Emma that England must battle Napoleon to defend ‘a Commonwealth in which every little spot has its purpose and value to the balanced line of life’. For Commonwealth, read Empire – the invisible pink bleeding across the black-andwhite globe that Emma consults in this scene. But her interest is tiny England, whose diminutive size is implicitly compared to her own. As in its display of the

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wounded Nelson as a figure of bomb-scarred Britain, the film draws a strong parallel between the plucky young woman and the country for which she will sacrifice her beloved hero. Where its British perspective omits the admiral’s merciless execution of the Neapolitan republicans, alluding only to his rescue of the Bourbons as the support appropriate to the rulers of an allied nation, Sontag portrays them from the critical standpoint that quickly took hold among Europe’s educated classes: Hamilton passive at the massacre of his intellectual milieu; Nelson the self-righteous dupe of his lover; Emma both vulgar and cruel. Appropriating the plot of Sardou’s 1887 play La Tosca, in which Sarah Bernhardt portrayed a celebrated soprano in love with a Bonapartist, Sontag connects the story of Emma – in real life a fine singer offered professional engagements – to that of the fictional diva: ‘The opera star, like the Queen’s friend, is also impetuous, warm, effusive, and knows how to give herself in love’ (Sontag 1993: 310). The two characters are united by melodramatic type, the type in which Bernhardt, as Sontag knew well,12 specialized. Often these passionate women are doomed – Bernhardt’s repertoire invariably concluded with her character’s death. Their erotic power, however vast, cannot withstand men’s violence, may even be blamed as its source. Famous for her performances of anguished victims, Emma, together with her lover, is thus held responsible for the deaths of the Neapolitan republicans, a community of benevolent reformers executed by the English admiral she has reputedly bewitched. Then Sontag looks again, qualifying this received view with a feminist caution: Part of the scandal of their misdeeds was that a woman played so visible a role in them. It became another household drama of the old regime, featuring a powerful woman – that is, a woman exercising inappropriate power. (299)

And then? What happened after? Where Korda’s film ends with the final statement of the defiant Emma, Sontag’s novel offers not one but five such farewells. The first of these is, unsurprisingly, that of the titular protagonist, the volcano lover. Dismissed from his post for excessive loyalty to the Bourbons, he is then despoiled of his collections by a storm at sea, returning to England in debt as well as scandal. His deathbed musings are those of a superannuated classicist, resigned, stoical, pleased to see the end of revolutions in his certainty that humanity can only aspire to gradual improvement. But one thought troubles him: although confident that he will be remembered, he is not certain that it will be for his attempts to discover and share beauty. As the novel both attests and ensures, posthumous reputation defies its subject’s control.

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Hamilton’s ironic ruminations would bring a more symmetrical work to its conclusion, but his reflections yield to further adieux. The last section of the novel comprises brief autobiographies by four women characters: the Cavaliere’s first wife, Emma’s mother, Emma herself, and, finally, a character not met before, Eleonora de Fonseca Pimentel, a republican writer of Portuguese parentage hanged in the reprisals ordered by Nelson. Pimentel’s life story can be read as a self-penned obituary for the novel’s author twelve years before her dying, so strongly does it anticipate that of Sontag – privilege, precocity, an unsuitable marriage, accusations of debauchery at its dissolution,13 politicization in the cause of Liberty, but not – until this apparently apologetic epilogue – feminism. ‘It was easy to forget that I was, at many of our meetings, the only woman’, remembers Pimentel. ‘I wanted to be pure flame’ (Sontag 1993: 417). Extending this first person to not one but four additional afterwords, the novel refuses anything like conventional literary closure; by making their authors female, it embraces the ethos of its source genre – to give speech to the sex so often silenced in history. All these women are granted their voice over scenes from their former lives, with the novel moving from Emma’s protest that she has been abused by her detractors to Pimentel’s damning of ‘those who do not care about more than their own glory or well-being’ (419). The chasm between their respective concerns for personal reputation is characteristic of melodrama’s moral antitheses, but so, in another way, is the attention paid to the injustices meted out to women whose vocation is to propitiate power as well as to those determined to confront it.14

Echoes and Reflections In Sontag’s rendition Emma and Nelson are not forces for progress, but they are figures of the future, representatives of a new culture of public attention created by the mass production of engravings, broadsheets, and souvenirs. As embodiments of a sharply etched moral typology of beauty and heroism they become characters in the melodramas that restage their celebrity. Korda’s film and Sontag’s novel both represent and participate in this making and unmaking of reputations, with The Volcano Lover’s publication clearly anticipating the 200th anniversary of the Neapolitan republic in 1999. This offered its Pygmalion the opportunity to make her cinematic creation really move, and she and her agent investigated the possibility of a film or television sale. Sontag’s own filmmaking had ended with her experimental portrait of Venice, Unguided Tour, for Italian television in 1983, and there is no evidence that she considered directing such

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an adaptation, but her choice of stars suggests the continuing influence of the Hollywood romance she had watched as a child. Her papers from this period reveal a notable adherence to the typecasting that popular cinema inherits from melodrama. Where That Hamilton Woman had personified its lovers’ celebrity with the stage-trained movie-star lovers Leigh and Olivier, Sontag proposed another British star duo whose credits combined film and classical drama, the then married Emma Thompson and Kenneth Branagh – the slender brunette and her fair husband corresponding to Leigh and the grey-tinted Olivier. Her archive includes Thompson’s thank you to Sontag’s agent Andrew Wylie for sending the novel, declaring her one of her favourite contemporary writers and praising Illness as Metaphor.15 A list dated 19 November 1992 names several notable producers and directors who were also approached, including the historical drama specialists Richard Attenborough, Hugh Hudson (‘loves it’), Roland Joffe, Ridley Scott, and the team of Ismail Merchant and James Ivory, as well as Francis Coppola, Martin Scorsese, and Stephen Frears, but the absence of further correspondence suggests that an English language adaptation went nowhere. The archive also includes a 1997 bid from the Italian company Titanus for a two-part television adaptation, but none ensued.16 Five years after the Republic’s anniversary, two Italian historical dramas did address these events. In both, Nelson and Emma Hamilton are minor figures, neither heroic nor even central. A 2004 TV miniseries directed by the Taviani brothers focused on another female revolutionary, Dumas’s heroine Luisa San Felice, and in the same year a biopic on the woman whose epilogue concludes The Volcano Lover debuted on the large screen. Based on a 1986 novel by Enzo Striano, Il resto di niente/The Remains of Nothing (Antonietta De Lillo, 2004) traces the life of Eleonora Pimentel from her childhood arrival in Naples to her hanging. The Volcano Lover is not credited, but Maria De Medeiros, who plays Pimentel, acknowledged its influence in a 2005 interview (Capuani 2005). Moreover, the film is replete with the double-framing devices pioneered by Korda, elaborated by Sontag and intensified by what Vidal (2012a: 22) terms ‘the mannerist aesthetics’ of contemporary historical drama – actual paintings, painted backgrounds, staged presentations ranging from poetry to puppetry, doorways within doorways. To intensify this anti-realism the film’s posing and tracking of the heroine is as rigorously symmetrical as its narration is nonlinear. Opening in the dark to the sound of approaching boots, the first sequence of Il resto di niente takes place in a Baroque chapel of the San Martino cathedral in Naples. The location choice has no precise historic motivation17 but the Treasury Chapel affords a conspicuous display of marble panels and flooring in geometric

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patterns, as well as a thematically significant painting. When a soldier unbars its entrance, a ragged child stands with a porcelain cup before a series of receding doorways. As the camera tilts down to reveal her bare feet on the patterned stone she carries her offering to Pimentel, but at her invitation to sit runs from the room. The scene then cuts to Pimentel as a child also running through a doorway to her family’s carriage as they make ready to leave Rome for Naples. The carriage is filmed in front of a painted background of primitively rendered trees and flowers, later reflected on the windows through which the child views the countryside during the journey. This sequence is interrupted by a voice returning the action to the chapel where, in the pose of a perverse annunciation, a friar stands before the sitting Pimentel and declares that the authorities have decreed her hanging. As the anguished woman protests, the camera closes in to reveal behind her a painting of the dead Christ at the foot of the cross, the 1637 Pietá by Jusepe de Ribera. The painting anticipates what the film will not show, Pimentel’s own death and deposition from the gallows. What it will show is the female martyr displacing the traditional subject of the painting – a literal refiguring as Pimentel’s close-up enlarges to obscure it. Where Arthur Devis’s chiaroscuro composition substitutes the dying Nelson for Christ, De Lillo inserts her heroine. The conspicuous superimposition accords with the moral didacticism of melodrama, while the attention to the emotional and domestic life of its public personage certifies Il resto di niente as a woman’s film: the female protagonist’s youthful reticence, her suffering of marital cruelty and the loss of a child, her developing affection for the servant with whom her husband betrays her, and the constant experience of being outnumbered and unheeded by her male counterparts in the republican movement. At the end of her life it is not death that preoccupies her, nor divine judgement, but the spectacle she will present hanging high from the gibbet without the underclothes taken from her in prison. The radical reorientation offered by this female point of view was recognized by Italian critics as a challenge to the ‘genere storico’, a challenge associated with the film’s folkloric allusions and decorations. In place of authentic Neapolitan exteriors, De Lillo repeatedly introduces painted backdrops, enclosing a film which itself includes scenes of theatrical performance within a larger ‘theatre’. Their primitive style is seen in the commedia dell’arte puppet Pulcinella, a cousin of the English Punch who became the mascot of the Neapolitan people. In the film his animating puppeteers are rare proletarian advocates of the Republic and allies of the film’s protagonist, who will forgo her poetry to join the republicans and edit their newspaper.

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Portrayed as a shy but accomplished writer from her youth, Pimental is seen, like Emma, regarding her image, reflected in the pool of an ancient temple. As with Korda’s heroine, the private woman’s distanced apprehension of her public self is apparent in her echoing recitation: Che fara il mondo al canto di Eleonora? E l’eco mi rispose, ‘Onora … onora’. Coglieri i fruiti di un’eterna fame? E l’eco l’altera mi rispose, ‘Ama … ama … ama’. (How will Eleonora’s verse fare in the world? An echo answers ‘Honours … Honours’. Gathering the fruits of eternal fame? Another answers ‘Love … love … love’.)

Despite the resounding ‘honours’, the quatrain itself stifles female ambition, the first echo muffling the poet’s name and the second transforming fame to love. Where the protagonists of the typical woman’s film renounce personal desire for domestic obligation, the heroines of these historic versions render their sacrifice to the public – and thus become ‘heroines’. Korda’s Emma returns Nelson to a nation threatened with invasion; Pimentel forfeits her art and her life for the love of an ignorant people who reject the Republic, wanting ‘nothing more than to be left alone’. She will be rewarded with less than nothing: the regime will be restored, her poetry will be forgotten, her fame will dissolve like her likeness in the pool. But not forever: the cinema will reanimate her by depiction and nomination. But what of Emma and Nelson? While the imprisoned republican government await their promised exile to France, the iconic couple briefly appear, dressed in menacing black as they survey Naples from the deck of the admiral’s flagship. When Nelson (Simon Edmonds) reads the terms of the armistice that would spare Fonseca and her comrades, Emma (Stefania De Francesco) counters with the Queen’s instruction, that the revolutionaries be punished like their Irish counterparts in the rebellion of the previous year. The pages of the treaty are consigned to the bay and the republicans to their deaths. Viewed from the perspective of the new millennium, and the sea in which mercy is drowned, the famous lovers return as deep-dyed villains. Celebrity persists, and so does melodrama.

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Melotrauma

Commentaries on the art of Tracey Emin characteristically open with discussions of her professional celebrity and the personal suffering represented in her work. These are usually posed in opposition to each other, registering suspicions that reveal pervasive understandings of both trauma and fame. The extent of Emin’s public recognition and financial success is presumed to alleviate her childhood sexual abuse and subsequent depressions, provoking perceptions of a ‘conflict between the artist’s brand and persona’ in which her celebrity is deemed ‘to collide with the message of her art’ (Stallabrass 2006: 43). I have expressed similar suspicions in regard to My Bed, Emin’s 1998 installation of an unmade bed with its abject array of soiled sheets, bloodied underwear, empty vodka bottle, discarded tissues, used condoms and cigarette butts. Although my account of the controversy generated by that work was not intended to denigrate its artistic provocation or achievement, I concurred with the prevailing opposition of celebrity to suffering, arguing that the installation’s lucrative sale to Charles Saatchi, Emin’s ‘A-list status in the fashion world’ and her own claim to no longer ‘be an outsider at all’ suggested that she ‘had miraculously escaped from the suffering required for 1990s subjectivity’ (Merck 2001: 133). Subsequent reflection on Emin’s work and the commentaries it has elicited, which I will discuss together with her 1995 film Why I Never Became a Dancer, has convinced me that the suffering it depicts is not something one can miraculously escape from.

The Suspicion of Celebrity In an early denigration of the 1990s Young British Artists movement of which Emin became a particularly well-known member, Julian Stallabrass reaches for the overworked ‘famous for being famous’ (2006: 17) to complain that despite

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their art’s apparent favouring of ideas over feeling, assemblage over individual creation, ‘the personality of the artist, far from shrinking, has greatly expanded, sometimes overshadowing the work’ (18). With Emin, however, he is forced to abandon that claim and admit that her art’s unusual attention to the artist as person is the cause rather than the consequence of her public attention. ‘Emin’s exclusive subject matter is her life … matched by a style that is concerned above all to impart the idea that the works had been executed in an unconscious outpouring of emotion, perhaps not entirely sober’ (38–9). But if this ostensible spontaneity might at least suggest authenticity, the intensity of its diction is read against its discourse, privileging ‘how she speaks rather than what she says’ about her ‘underage sex, rape, abortion, bouts of serious depression and long periods of drunkenness’ (36). To Stallabrass, as to so many of his coevals, this confessional style appears incompatible with the ‘publicity machine’ that sponsors its creator, requiring spectators to ‘suspend their disbelief ’ (39) in the veracity of her representations. In an even fiercer condemnation of Emin, John Walker opens a polemic against ‘Art Stars’ in his study of Art and Celebrity with a description of her breasts, as revealed by the ‘plunging neckline’ she wore on the BBC panel show Have I Got News for You.1 In his account, the public display afforded by popular television – a comic current events show instead of a ‘serious’ arts programme – is transformed into a scandalous exhibition of the artist’s body in an ‘incident’ of quasi-prostitution. Emin’s appearance on the show is cited to ‘clarify the difference between the majority of successful professional artists and the minority of art stars’ who ‘have shown themselves willing to play the celebrity game’2 (Walker 2003: 193). Again, her fame is counterposed to both meaning and merit in her work, with its biographical references dismissed as the taking of ‘the commodification of the self to a new extreme’ (248). Despite her highly ambiguous portrayal of the lust for money in one of the few works Walker actually discusses – I’ve Got It All (2000), a photograph of the artist gathering cash into her crotch – he charges Emin with ‘mining’ her life story to create a celebrity persona for financial gain.3 The confessional artist’s affluence is contrasted with the exhibited relics of her suffering – a feigned martyrdom, Walker claims, discernible to ‘sceptical viewers’. ‘The subject of her success’, he predicts, ‘will not prove as fecund as her years of struggle’ (254–5). That Emin’s celebrity functions in these commentaries as a category of suspicion is historically unremarkable. From the Roman goddess Fama in Virgil’s Aeneid, who ‘holds fast to falseness and distortion as often as to messages of truth’ (Virgil 1982: 89), to Hobbes’s seventeenth-century aspersions against ‘vainglory’,

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to complaints about the gap between talent and status in the age of reality TV,4 public regard is always problematic as evidence of worth. As a collection of individual opinions, it is pronounced ‘purely relational’ by the sociologists Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot (2006: 178), devoid of intrinsic properties, inevitably contestable, and frequently evanescent. Emin herself has predicted the eclipse of her professional recognition, with the hope that her work might be rediscovered late in her life. But the presumption that celebrity necessarily disqualifies or inhibits artistic achievement implied in Walker’s condemnation is belied by his own project, which traces the increased attention awarded individual artists from the Renaissance to the present day, taking in the very famous Rembrandt, Van Gogh, Picasso, Pollock, Bacon, and inevitably Andy Warhol, credited with the realization that ‘the most important art movement in the twentieth century … was celebrity’ (Walker 2003: 221). Walker hails the artist and biographer Giorgio Vasari’s 1550 Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors and Architects, with its studies of such celebrated figures as Donatello, Leonardo, Michelangelo, and Raphael, as the founding text of this development. Regrettably, Vasari’s writings are not pursued further since they reveal a rather different approach to artists’ celebrity, treating Leonardo’s, for example, not in opposition to the value of his work, but as its affirmation: ‘not only was he held in high esteem in his own times, but his fame increased even more after his death’. And where Emin’s décolletage is said to detract from her professional seriousness, Vasari emphasizes Leonardo’s ‘great physical beauty’ which he claims ‘has never been sufficiently praised’ (1998: 284). Moreover, his biographical sketch offers some surprising correspondences between the two artists: in addition to describing Leonardo as famous and good-looking, Vasari deals at length with the distraction and delay in artistic production also at times ascribed to Emin. Most significant, and suggested by his frequent allusions to the handsome young men loved by Leonardo, is the imputation of a transgressive sexuality, in his case the homosexuality that Freud would consider in his influential discussion of the second category of suspicion in Emin’s work, trauma.

The Suspicion of Trauma The term ‘trauma’ could be said to contain the seeds of its own suspicion. It derives from the Greek words for a piercing wound, suggesting a break in the skin caused by violence, yet is often applied to injuries in which no such breach

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is ascertainable – internal injuries or psychic shocks. The history of psychology is pervaded with what one commentator on post-traumatic stress disorder describes as a ‘sense of suspicion and distrust’ (Bistoen 2016: 44) directed at its victims. Sigmund Freud, who spent much of his career oscillating between the competing explanations for psychical trauma developed in his investigations of hysteria, observed that the physician’s attitude to hysterical patients was ‘quite other than towards sufferers from organic diseases’: He attributes every kind of wickedness to them, accuses them of exaggeration, of deliberate deceit, of malingering. (Freud 1957a: 11)

Freud admitted to such suspicions on his own part. Although he concluded that Leonardo’s homosexuality was caused by what John Fletcher (2013: 175) describes as ‘an excessive, even traumatizing, maternal seduction’, his initial reaction to the artist’s infantile memory of a vulture striking its tail against his lips is to deem it ‘so improbable, so fabulous’ that it must be a ‘phantasy’ (Freud 1957b: 82). The project of his study is to uncover the psychical reality of such implausible scenes. The suspicion of victims whose testimony tries the listener’s credulity is not softened by the gravity of their accounts. Indeed, it arguably reaches its apex in the defensive responses to survivors’ memories of the Holocaust. Discussing the hesitant, fragmented, and occasionally inaccurate recollections of these victims, the psychoanalyst and camp survivor Dori Laub (1992: 57) observes that such shocking treatment precludes its registration: the observing and recording mechanisms of the human mind are temporarily knocked out, malfunction. The victim’s narrative – the very process of bearing witness to massive trauma – does indeed begin with someone who testifies to an absence, to an event that has not yet come into existence, in spite of the overwhelming and compelling nature of the reality of the occurrence.

Yet even though the trauma of the survivor may not have reached full realization, let alone closure, her listener may nonetheless be confronted with an unbearable quantity of affect, often provoking defensive denials, obsessive factfinding, or sheer numbness. Such defensive reactions are not confined to those confronted by trauma of this magnitude. Victims of combat shock, domestic abuse and sexual assault are frequently dismissed as social outsiders or deviants and somehow deserving

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of their suffering (Fassin and Rechtman 2009: 120). Rape complainants in particular, experience the ‘profound scepticism’ documented in numerous criminal justice systems for decades (Jordan 2004: 30). Sharon Wasco (2003: 316) is one of many feminist scholars who have argued that this doubting response, together with the stigmatization of the complainant, ‘may compound the harm of the assault itself ’, intensifying the self-blame often felt by victims. Among the grounds for scepticism cited in US and UK trials are the victim’s initial denial of the rape or its delayed reporting, a reluctance to name the attacker, a lack of emotion, or a return to the scene of the assault. These responses to an attack wrongly assumed to provoke an immediate grief-stricken report to the authorities have led to their diagnosis as a form of post-traumatic stress disorder, or ‘Rape Trauma Syndrome’ often associated with depression, anxiety, or shame. But this diagnostic attempt to quash the suspicion of counter-intuitive reactions to rape can generate further suspicion of ‘traumatized’ victims themselves as psychologically damaged or diseased by their ordeals, with their responses sometimes overestimated to pathological levels. Moreover, the invocation of trauma to explain, for example, the delayed or reluctant reporting of rape risks missing a more obvious explanation – that the victim is herself sceptical about the justice on offer from the judicial system. Reviewing the debate over the legal use of Rape Trauma Syndrome to secure convictions, the American legal scholar Yxta Maya Murray has identified a reversal of the suspicion that beleaguers victims of rape – namely their own ‘suspicions of the state’ (Murray 2012: 1652). Here she cites the fact that the overwhelming majority of rape victims do not ever report their assaults – 80–90 per cent in an American estimate published in 1994 (Stefan 1994: 1297–8). In England and Wales over the years 1990–2005, rape reporting was estimated at between 14 and 18 per cent; two-thirds of those reported went to trial, but only 29 per cent resulted in conviction (Daly and Bouhours 2010: 572, 585) With greater public attention to the crime, rape reporting in both countries has since increased steeply, but the rate of conviction has declined: a Crown Prosecution Service collation of rape reports in England and Wales in the years 2016–7 found that only one in fourteen complaints yielded convictions. Although these statistics offer no comprehensive breakdown of the ethnicity of complainants, poor women and those of colour have historically had even more reason to be suspicious of the state (Fine 1992: 69). As a legal theorist and a novelist, Murray has responded to the debate over the judicial use of Rape Trauma Syndrome with an unusual investigation of how one victim of repeated sexual assaults has resisted both pathologizing dismissals

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and the denial of justice. Tracey Emin is argued to have created a series of ‘artistic litigations’ in which her rape and other sexual assaults are imaginatively tried in a court of her own creation. A working-class child of an English mother and a Turkish Cypriot father married to another woman, Emin was raised in the south coast resort of Margate, where her father established the International Hotel, a cluster of guest houses in which he lived with Emin, her twin brother, and her mother half the week until bankruptcy forced its closure. At the age of ten Emin was sexually abused by a hotel resident involved with her mother. At eleven she was molested by a stranger on the beach. At thirteen, walking home from a local disco called Top Spot on New Year’s Eve, she was accosted by a boy with a reputation for ‘breaking into’ local girls. In her 2005 memoir Strangeland she recalls the attack, already alluded to in a number of her artworks. The initial chapter set in Margate or ‘Motherland’ includes a description of the boy pulling her up skirt, pushing her to the ground and ‘ramming himself into me’: I was crying. His lips were pressed against mine but I was motionless, like a small corpse. He grunted and I knew it was over. He got up, I just lay there on the ground, my tights round my ankles. The clock was striking twelve. (Emin 2005: 24)

The narrative continues with Emin returning home, showing her mother her stained coat and telling her ‘I’m not a virgin any more’: She didn’t call the police or make any fuss. She just washed my coat and everything carried on as ever, as though nothing had happened.

(24) Emin’s rape was never punished, never tried in court, never even reported. But over the years 1994–2005 it recurs in her work, beginning with a multimedia autobiography handwritten on thirty-two sheets of blue notepaper with two accompanying photographs, of Emin and her brother Paul aged about ten. Penned by Emin herself across ten days, Exploration of the Soul (1994) is a coming-of-age story detailing her parents’ illicit lovemaking, the twins’ accidental conception, her profound sense that her arrival in the world was ‘a mistake’, her youthful play and sexual experimentation with her brother, her abuse by her mother’s lover and the ending of her childhood by her rape. Her account of these early years was followed by Tracey Emin CV (1995), a collection of handwritten texts expanding the professional resume format – the Latin ‘curriculum vitae’ literally means ‘the course of life’ – with dated entries

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of personal calamities such as the rape, interspersed with her studies at various art schools, later relationships, pleasurable and anguished, abandonment and revival of art-making, and ultimate professional success. In a video augmenting this combination of public and intimate lifewriting, Tracey Emin CV Cunt Vernacular (1997), Emin reads these events over cinematographer Sebastian Sharples’ eight-minute exploration of her messy apartment – a running bubble bath, scattered clothes and papers, open suitcases, foreign currency, a Turkish flag, one of her monoprints and an article on her work and that of another prominent ‘Young British Artist’, Sarah Lucas. The inventory of these personal and professional signifiers concludes with the naked artist in a foetal crouch at the feet of her mother, head bowed, back curved, limbs drawn into her torso. Her mother wears dark glasses and looks away from her daughter, as she had looked away from the rape. A later representation of that assault is embroidered on a textile work from 2002, Pure Evil. Again words and images are combined, this time in appliqué on a beige blanket, the homely item featuring the unlikely image of two contesting figures, one with a penis. Red thread sewn to resemble crude handwriting spells out ‘You fucked my mouth – smashed my head against the wall / I was 13 – And you were Nothing / BUT PURE EVIL.’ Murray argues that all four works function as depositions for a trial, the authenticity of their testimony underscored by the indexical use of the victim’s own handwriting, photographic image, and recorded voice. Yet, true to the history of rape trials, the complainant is also accused, in respective neon, monoprint and textile works whose titular epithets indict their maker with promiscuity (Fuck Off and Die You Slag, 2002), stupidity (Sexy Stupid Fuckhead, 2005), and alcoholism (Super Drunk Bitch, 2005). These denunciations may be attributed to the self-blaming of so many rape victims, but the cruel quotations (‘IS THAT WHY YOU HAVE NO FRIENDS’; ‘GET HER OUT’) embroidered on the last of these and the graffiti-like inscription in a 1997 monoprint (‘MAD TRACEY / FROM MARGATE / EVERY BODIEZ BEEN THERE’) suggest that this loathing is also external, the voice of a rape-doubting public for whom a woman seeking sexual justice – particularly a poor woman of immigrant parentage – will so often be an object of suspicion.

The Suspicion of Melodrama Arguing that Emin’s work, although ‘initially striking the observer as a noisy farrago of lamentations, may be interpreted instead as the development of an imaginary justice system’, Murray (1638) takes issue with Jennifer Doyle’s claim

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that its lack of ‘emotional discipline … draws us too close’ (Doyle 2006: 111). Here I think Murray misconstrues the tenor of this observation, which is directed at the art’s effect rather than its execution, an effect Doyle describes as ‘both uncomfortable and exhilarating’ (2006: 109). Confessing her own ‘unavoidably personal responses’ to the accessible work of a celebrity, she observes ‘that the critic who writes about Emin faces the same kinds of suspicion that feminist critics have faced when they have taken up popular forms like melodramatic films or sentimental novels – “body genres” denigrated for their appeal to the spectator’s/reader’s body, for their manipulation of their audiences, and for their commercialism’ (Doyle 2006: 111).5 Doyle’s route out of this disregard is via an unlikely text, Michael Fried’s 1967 essay ‘Art and Objecthood’, with its own suspicion of minimalist sculpture’s ‘complicity’ with the spectator, or ‘beholder’, and its demand ‘that the beholder take it into account, that he take it seriously’ (Fried 1998: 155). In its (worryingly feminine) solicitation of the spectator such work is claimed to abandon the self-sufficiency proper to sculpture and descend into theatre. Here Doyle registers the anxiety about an artwork’s pandering to the spectator, the attribution of prostitution also apparent in Walker’s objection to Emin’s selling of herself. Yet, as she also points out, Fried’s later discussion of nineteenth-century realism enacts this very complicity when he imagines Adolf Menzel’s ‘exceptionally arresting’ drawing of – of all things – an Unmade Bed (c. 1845) as ‘grounded in the artist’s bodily memory of what it felt like to lay himself down in the original of that bed, to rest his head in the pillows, to draw the duvet over his reclining body, to fall asleep, to wake, and so on’ (Fried 2002: 41–2) It is as though Fried had read his feminist opponents – most notably Amelia Jones (1999: 39–55), whose challenge to critical fantasies of disembodied transcendence prompts Doyle’s thoughts – and decided to take them seriously. The critical acknowledgement of physical reactions to works of art has been influentially advanced by Linda Williams, whose investigation of cinema’s disreputable ‘body genres’ – pornography, horror, and melodrama – has emphasized their stimulation ‘of a sense of over-involvement in sensation and emotion’ (Williams, 1991: 5). These genres’ excitation of, respectively, sexual arousal, terror, and sympathetic sorrow is often manifested in audible responses – moans, screams, and sobs. Such responses involuntarily echo those of the characters on screen, taking the spectator uncomfortably yet exhilaratingly close to the typically female figures that function as signifiers of pleasure, fear and pain. In this identification, as well as the experience of psychosomatic control, the spectator is threatened with a feminine subordination often fended off by the condemnation of the obscenity, violence, or sentimentality of such films. Emin

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engages with – and at times disconcertingly combines6 – all three genres, but Doyle’s interest in the way ‘the intimacy of her work can only be experienced as unruly, loud, brassy, aggressive, vulgar’ (2006:119) directs her to melodrama and its perhaps best-known heroine, Stella Dallas. King Vidor’s 1937 film, extolling maternal sacrifice as evidence of virtue in a narrative of tear-soaked sentimentality, has historically elicited feminist condemnation. Barbara Stanwyck’s Stella begins and ends as a captivated spectator herself, weeping at the concluding embrace of the movie she attends with the upper-class man she will marry and weeping again as she watches the concluding kiss of their daughter Laurel’s wedding a generation later. The movement from the first ‘happy’ ending to the second requires the workingclass heroine to discover the disdain in which she is held by her betters, persuade her beloved child that she no longer cares for her and effectively withdraw from the familial frame. Challenging the film’s denigration, Williams (1987: 316–20) argues that the female spectator reads this sacrifice dialectically – with emotion but not assent, knowing how this happy ending has been staged. Stella herself has had a significant role in that staging and cannot be consigned to the role of a passive onlooker. Standing in the dark street stifling her tears as she peers through the illuminated window at the very cinematic wedding engineered by her departure, she is at once off and on screen, spectator and star (stella). Her triumphant final turn away from normative sociality – but towards the film’s audience – offers Doyle an ‘emblem for Emin’s own performance of celebrity’ in its identification ‘with the woman who cannot, and will not, mimic the emotionally disciplined performance of bourgeois femininity’ (2006: 119), an identification which is pointedly offered the beholder. But if Emin’s counternormative celebrity accords with the spectatorial dynamics of Stella Dallas, its emphasis on maternal sacrifice is at odds with what Doyle describes as ‘the extremity of her commitment to herself ’ (119). Although the mother–daughter relation is a familiar Emin theme, her characteristic role is that of the child. Her work makes frequent allusions to her own mother, who appears in videos like Tracey Emin CV Cunt Vernacular and the 2001 Conversation with My Mum, but maternity for Emin is a vexed issue, often represented as unwanted (‘I have never wanted children’ – Emin 2005: 162), terminated less or more reluctantly, or thwarted by physical or professional circumstances. Instead, the artist usually portrays herself as a daughter, sometimes happy, more often disdained or abused, acutely aware that her mother only decided not to abort her ‘at the last minute’ (Emin 2005: 5). In Conversation With My Mum Tracey gradually forces this admission from her,

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but her mother returns the challenge by declaring ‘I dread the day when you tell me you’re pregnant – it’d be a catastrophe.’ The foetus is commensurately an object of fascination for Emin. Strangeland ends with a description of a mummified foetus from an ancient Egyptian tomb, so old and yet so young, which she longs to take into her arms. The artist herself assumes a foetal pose in her video Tracey Emin CV Cunt Vernacular (1997), her Super-8 film Homage to Edward Munch and all My Dead Children (1998), and in photographs like The Last Thing I Said Was Don’t Leave Me Here (2000). As Vincent Kaufmann (2016: 171) points out, Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Confessions also opens with the unhappiness of his birth, as the sickly child of a mother who dies soon after. The suffering of both parent and offspring are presented as ‘the condition of possibility for the existence of a self that will be able to tell its own story’. If there is an analogous character for Emin in Stella Dallas it is not the sacrificial mother but her daughter Laurel, whose youthful birthday celebration is ruined when none of her school friends – whose parents disapprove of Stella – attend it. A similar episode of childhood exclusion is recalled in Strangeland, when, after donning her best dress and having her mother wrap some Turkish jewellery as a present, the seven-year-old Emin is turned away from a classmate’s birthday party: The birthday girl arrived with her dad in the car, and as everybody went to get in, the girl said, ‘You can’t come.’ Her father followed her, saying sternly, ‘I’m afraid you’re not invited. You don’t have an invitation.’ I waited outside the school for as long as I could. Then I hid the jewellery. I went home. Mum asked, ‘Did you enjoy the party?’ I said, ‘Yes, it was lovely.’ That night, I lay in bed and cried. I cried myself to sleep. And in the morning, I asked ‘Mummy, what’s an invitation?’ (Emin 2005: 25)

Three things stand out about this recollection: its insertion into Strangeland as a postscript – a consciously related injury – to the rape (although it occurred six years earlier), the intensification of its pathos by the child’s attempt to keep her mother happily unaware of the snub – something Laurel also attempts in one of the film’s most moving scenes – and her equally pathetic ignorance about the meaning of invitation. (Laurel’s lack of knowledge is similarly affecting when just before her wedding she plaintively asks her stepmother why Stella has not even written to congratulate her.) This movement from ignorance to knowledge – anagnorisis in the ancient Greek theatrical term – is central to Emin’s melodramatic rendition

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of her childhood, with her rape’s revelation of ‘the ugly truths of the world’ (Emin 2005: 24) not the last of her painful discoveries.

Why I Never Became a Dancer, 1995 As a compendium of Emin’s autobiographical writing, Strangeland includes a revised version of her voice-over for a short film she has described as her ‘favourite piece of work’ (Wainwright 2002: 199), Why I Never Became a Dancer (1995). Emin’s co-cinematographer and editor, Sebastian Sharples, has also called it ‘the most powerful’ of her audiovisual output (De Cruz: 2008). Yet the film is, eminently we might say, open to suspicion: constructed as a melodrama, anticipating the maker’s celebrity, narrating a trauma. Its context is revealed by the script’s location in Strangeland, in the months of casual sex which followed her rape until the age of fifteen. The film’s narrative, however, opens with her dislike of school, as she drops out and begins to explore an initially idyllic Margate. Shot by Emin on overexposed Super-8 – ‘I think I had my camera on the wrong light setting but it really works’ (Wainwright 2002: 199) – it contrasts dreamlike exteriors of the holiday town in summer with Sharples’s higher definition digital video at its end. Running at just six minutes, forty seconds,7 the film has a soundtrack comprising Emin’s voice-over cross-fading to Sylvester’s 1978 disco hit ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’, but it begins in silence with a pan rightwards across a cliff face and along a sea wall. On it is chalked – in a familiar Emin solecism – a slightly different title than the one by which the work is now identified, WHY I DIDN’T BECOME A DANCER, and TRACEY EMIN 1995. Fade to black and up to: Act I. The sound of footsteps and rapid breathing over handheld shots of a dash towards a school gate initiate the story proper, narrated by Emin’s voice-over: I never liked school. I was always late. In fact, I hated it. So at thirteen I left.

The grey monochrome of the school cuts to the façade of a Margate coffee bar and then to a pan from its promenade to the sea, as Emin recalls exploring the town’s Golden Mile, the clock tower, the cafes, and bars. With the list of these attractions come intermittent touches of colour, most notably the blue skies above the beach: The summer was amazing, nothing to do but dream. It was ideal. And then there was sex.

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At the final sentence a high-angled shot of two women reclining in deckchairs on the beach cuts to a zoom into a pink toy rabbit in the window of an arcade. The sight of this prize is accompanied by the voice-over recalling: ‘And it was for free. Sex was something simple. You’d go to a pub, you’d walk home, have fish and chips.’ As a montage of green spaces around the seafront cuts to street scenes with men in the foreground, the narrative continues: Then sex. On a beach, down an alley, a street, a park, even a hotel.

To a zoom out from a low-angled shot of some pigeons, Emin declares: ‘It didn’t matter that I was young, 13, 14. It didn’t matter that they were men of 19, 20, 26. It never crossed my mind to ask them what the attraction was.’ A tilt to the top of the comically phallic clock tower is accompanied by her statement ‘I knew. Sex was what it was.’ Over shots of an arcade player operating the Big Dipper to seize a furry prize, the narrator continues: And it could be good. Really something. I remember someone asking me to grab their balls. I remember the power it gave me.

But it wasn’t always like that. To a shot of a lone seagull the voice-over describes the men sometimes leaving ‘me there wherever I was’. As two gulls fight over food Emin continues ‘But there were no morals or rules or judgements. I just did what I wanted to do.’ Act II. Another tilt, this time up a lighthouse to an empty blue sky, is accompanied by Emin announcing ‘By the time I was 15 I’d had them all. And for me Margate was too small. And I knew the difference between right and wrong.’ Over a shot of an alley followed by a zoom into the façade of a Burton menswear shop Emin declares: Thereason why these men wanted to fuck me, a girl of 15, was because they weren’t men. They were less, less than human. They were pathetic. Sex for me had been an adventure, a learning. I was the innocent.

A shot of the Kingfisher restaurant offers a third bird reference as Emin recalls her desire for ‘some wild escape, from all this shit surrounding me’. ‘By the time I was fifteen I had stopped shagging’, the voice-over announces with a cut to an ice cream stand: ‘But I was still flesh.’ To a close-up of the glittering pinwheels of an arcade game, Emin continues: ‘And I thought with my body.’

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But now it was different, now it was me and dancing. That’s where I got my real kick, on the dance floor.

The camera pans back and forth above footprints in the sand as the voiceover continues: It felt like I could defy gravity, as though my soul were truly free.

‘Then the big one came, the local finals’, Emin recalls to a cut from the beach to the dark-haired siren above the Mermaid Grill. ‘If I won I’d be up there. London, the Empire Leicester Square Ballroom, dancing for TV.’ The camera tilts up to a celestial vapour trail as she intones ‘Big prizes. The British Disco Dance Championship, 1978.’ A montage of shots of the Lido Leisure Centre, successively reframed to go closer, moves Act II to its climax: And, as I started to dance, people started to clap. I was going to win. And then I’d be out of there. Nothing could stop me.

To a new shot of the Lido buildings, the voiceover continues: ‘And then they started – “Slag, slag, slag!”’ (With each monosyllable the camera zooms closer to the site of the contest.) A gang of blokes, most of whom I’d had sex with at some time or other, were chanting ‘Slag’.

A running shot downstairs past the Echoes Nitespot is accompanied by Emin saying, ‘the chant become louder and louder – “SLAG! SLAG! SLAG!”’. As the camera tilts toward the beach and then pans right across the distant water, she continues ‘And in the end I couldn’t hear the music anymore or the people clapping. My head was spinning and I was crying. I’d lost it. I ran off the dance floor, down the steps to the sea.’ The passage of time is indicated by a sunset shot of the sea eddying in maroon pools: And I thought, I’m leaving this place. I’m getting out of here. I’m better than all of them. I’m free. And I left Margate and I left those boys.

Over a daytime travelling shot of the Golden Mile from a moving car, the instrumental introduction to Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’ is heard while the voiceover signs off with a DJ’s dedication: ‘Shane, Eddie, Tony, Doug, Richard, this one’s for you!’ Act III. As the song’s introduction concludes, the thirty-something Emin, wearing a striped shirt, cut-off jeans, and trainers, her hair neatly bobbed and

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her skin tanned, dances in long shot in a studio empty except for a boom-box. When Sylvester begins to sing, the camera moves into mid-shot as Emin spins, and then into close-up with the lyric: When we’re out there dancing on the floor Darling And I feel like I need some more And I feel your body close to mine And I know my love it’s about that time Make me feel – mighty real Make me feel – mighty real

Emin dances around Sharples’s mobile camera, their pas de deux varying the shot size and angle to the syncopated beat. As the synthesizer’s glissando rises with Sylvester’s falsetto on the refrain ‘You make me feel mighty real’, she turns past the camera towards glass doors opening onto a large balcony with a classical stone balustrade. Treetops, a tower block, and other buildings are visible in the distance. The studio begins to spin with the dancer, the camera, and Sylvester’s singing, continually circling between ‘feel’ and ‘real’. At the fifth repetition of

Figure 12  Tracey Emin triumphant at the end of Why I Never Became a Dancer (Tracey Emin, 1995).

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‘mighty real’ in the final chorus, Emin raises her arms in triumph (Figure 12), smilingly signals thumbs-up to the camera and turns away to the right of frame. A cut on motion takes the scene back to Margate, as a seabird continues rightward across a blue sky. The song fades with Sylvester repeating ‘I feel real. I feel real. I feel real. I feel real.’

Melotrauma Despite its holiday seascapes, home-movie gauge, and contrastingly explicit narration, Why I Never Became a Dancer is remarkably faithful to the conventions of early film melodrama, as catalogued in Linda Williams’s study of D. W. Griffith’s Way Down East (1920), itself adapted from a late Victorian play by Lottie Blair Parker and Joseph Grismer. Both films focus on ‘victim-heroes and the recognition of their virtue’ (Williams 1998: 66). Both attack the double standard of sexual conduct indicted by Griffith in the epigraph that opens his film: Today’s woman brought up from childhood to expect ONE CONSTANT MATE possibly suffers more than at any other moment in the history of mankind, because not yet has the man-animal reached this high standard, except perhaps in theory.

Both follow a young girl’s progress from a nostalgically rendered space of innocence to her public denunciation for sexual immorality, her counteraccusation of her hypocritical accuser(s) and her triumphant restitution to a new space of innocence, a term that Emin invokes explicitly in her voice over. Lorna Healy (2002: 160) has remarked on the artist’s use of ‘this classic equilibrium– disruption–equilibrium structure’ in her moving image narratives, their frequent conclusion with the artist’s professional success, and their relation to popular coming-of-age stories.8 Both heroines are provincial girls who lack sophistication, but unlike Griffith’s reticent Anna (played by Lillian Gish) who reluctantly goes to the city to seek financial help from her relatives, Emin wants to be ‘up there. London, the Empire Leicester Square Ballroom, dancing for TV’. Her appeal for moral vindication is fused with a desire for public prominence, a prominence which melodrama not only narrates but secures through focusing visual and emotional attention on its singular protagonist. Here, as historically, it makes celebrity happen – contributing a much applauded work to the artist’s early CV. In the marked mise en scène traditional to the genre, Emin’s film works through highly symbolic figures – the birds as images of vulnerability and flight; the phallic towers and scrotal pink toy – and equally symbolic oppositions:

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Margate/London; exteriors/interiors; film/video; low angles/high angles; past/ present; voice/body. Employing a less traditional deferral of gratification, the film withholds both the image of its protagonist and, despite its celebration of disco dancing, the music from which the genre takes its name until its final act. To the previous oppositions this strategy adds invisibility/visibility; recitation/ music. All these can be mapped on to the coming-of-age narrative’s poles of childhood/maturity; pain/pleasure; failure/success. The dark-haired mermaid on the elevated sign of a Margate chippie yields to the dark-haired dancer in the upper-storey studio with its view across the treetops. But there are other distinctions in both the film’s image and soundtracks which subtly intensify these oppositions. The Super-8 shot by Emin was projected onto a white wall and re-filmed by Sharples in U-matic video, further reducing the already hazy definition of overexposed celluloid. At first this looks like pure nostalgia. Only gradually does it occur to the spectator that it might be derealization, the blurry vision of those anaesthetized by trauma. Ghostly Margate opens almost in monochrome; then colour is gradually picked out in the pink toy in the arcade, the blue skies above the town and eventually the magenta sea at sunset. Conversely the dance studio is filmed directly on video, offering a denser line structure and more stable hues, as well as auto correction of the brighter exposure when the glass doors come into view. The syncopation of Emin’s movement is intensified by shooting in fast motion and then reducing the speed to video’s 125 frames per second. The consequence of these devices is to emphasize the pulsating vividness of the film’s final act in contrast to the dreamlike narrative that precedes it, a strategy that is intensified by its use of sound. With rare attention to the vocal elements in Emin’s work, Healy (2002: 162) remarks on the particular characteristics of her speech: the use of sexual slang like ‘shaggin’ with its dropped g’s and ‘the way that the rhythm of her voice gains momentum as a story climaxes’. But the street diction and dramatic tempo of her recitation do not preclude its careful composition. As befits an artist whose work has always had a strong textual element, as well as the constraints of a narration timed to specific images, the voice-over of Why I Never Became a Dancer is both substantively and rhetorically constructed – in short sentences whose impact is multiplied by the repetition of words and rhythms: ‘I’m leaving this place / I’m getting out of here / I’m better than all of them.’ If there is, as Murray argues, a juridical intent in much of her work, that would also seem applicable to what is, in effect, an indictment for statutory rape: ‘The reason why these men wanted to fuck me, a girl of 15, was because they weren’t men … I was the innocent.’

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The segue from her excoriating denunciation of Shane, Eddie, Tony, Doug, and Richard to the ecstatic music that follows is thus all the more melodramatic. The EMI World Disco Dancin’ Championship in whose Margate heat Emin competed took place in 1978, inspired by the colossal success of Saturday Night Fever. The same year saw the release of Sylvester’s ‘You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real)’, from his hit album Step II. A veteran of Pentecostal gospel singing in Watts and drag theatrics with San Francisco’s Cockettes, Sylvester’s androgyny, falsetto vocals, and spectacular sequins crowned him Queen of Disco, with ‘You Make Me Feel’ its queer anthem. The singer visited London twice that year, in August and December, filming the single’s video, in which he keeps time with flicks of his fan. Written by James Wirrick as a mid-tempo tune, it was speeded up in Patrick Cowley’s production to a machine rhythmed 132 beats per minute, combining ‘synth licks, mechanized, galloping bassline, computerized handclaps and up tempo drum beats’ (Shapiro 2005: 67) in the first glorious apprehension of Hi-NRG. The electronic instrumentation chases the singer’s falsetto up the scale, with periodic whooshes that sound like the takeoff of a funfair spaceship. ‘Afrofuturism’,9 Reynaldo Anderson (2013) calls it, quoting Ken McLeod (2003: 337) on how music anticipates ‘an ever elusive future’, transporting ‘us outside of our bodies and place while simultaneously reminding us of our location and what it means to live there’. It certainly took African-American music in a new direction, asking ‘what “realness” is supposed to mean to gay black men who, alienated from almost all of society, were forced to hide their true identities for most of their lives’ (Shapiro 2005: 67). But if Sylvester’s hit literally takes Emin out of Margate in the last shot of Act II, it emphatically embodies her in Act III, when we see her at last, jubilantly gyrating to it in the studio. In a discussion of the clichés of testimonial narratives, Lauren Berlant (2001: 53–4) considers how a film or TV character’s feelings are represented by a song recorded prior to and not for her, typically a pop hit played over the visible action. So often in melodrama the latter is the medium by which the character ‘finds herself ’ in a device that Berlant calls ‘canned’ but affecting. Applying this analysis, we can see how Sylvester’s external expression of Emin’s feeling endorses her indictment of sexual injustice with the energy of an entire movement, to which the eventual AIDS activist left his royalties when he died of the disease in 1988. Thus ‘collectivized’, in Berlant’s apt term, the subject escapes suspicion and begins to feel – to herself and the spectator – mighty real. Emin’s alternation of recitation and movement to music has a past as well as a future, in Rousseau’s devising of the theatrical form he called melodrama.

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Reflecting on the sung delivery of ancient Greek poetry, the writer – an occasional opera critic and composer – regrets the differentiation of musical and poetic rhythms in modern languages. Even opera singing, he argues, cannot persuade the listener that it is ‘anything but speech’ (Rousseau 1998: 495): ‘Only the alternative mixture of speech and of instrumental music can express’ the character’s succumbing to violent passions, at which point ‘the silence of the actor then says more than his words’ (Rousseau 1998: 497). To exemplify this strategy, Rousseau composes his own ‘lyrical scene’, Pygmalion, in which the titular character’s unaccompanied declamation alternates with his pantomime to music. Adapting Ovid’s story of the Greek sculptor who falls in love with the beautiful statue he has carved, Rousseau rewrites Pygmalion as a drama of selfrealization, that of creation and creator alike. Paul De Man (1979: 178) describes the sculpture’s ‘transference from the figural to the literal’, from statue to living woman, as a dramatization of ‘the ambivalent relationship between the work as an extension of the self and as a quasi-divine otherness’. In her contemporary melodrama of self-fashioning, Emin becomes both creator and creation. Transposing herself from the subject of a spoken narrative of the past to vivid physicality in the present, from ‘mediate[d]’ to ‘immediate’ (Rooney 2015: 12), she accomplishes the enlivening that Pygmalion seeks for his sculpture and Rousseau for the opera. Why I Never Became a Dancer was made at the beginning of the decade in which the artist repeatedly sought to represent her youthful traumas – childhood abuse, rape, racist denigration, exploitation by the men she had sex with in her early teens and then, just when she was succeeding at last, the most public humiliation imaginable. Her persistent return to this narrative over those years and since has been slated by art critics, with Laura Cumming (2011), for example, complaining that her Hayward retrospective, presenting ‘Emin’s art en masse as the long-running drama of her existence’, is both ‘repetitive’ and ‘consciously manipulative’. Is Emin producing ‘melodrama’ or ‘melotrauma’, the dismissive term for an experience whose victim ‘discusses it over and over again’?10 Dori Laub’s consideration of the ‘ceaseless repetitions’ that grip the trauma survivor offers a reference of exceptional relevance to the repeated ‘real’ in the ‘melo’ of this hybrid film, from Jacques Lacan’s Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis (1981: 49): The real is that which always comes back to the same place.

Lacan is discussing Freud’s frequently cited account in Beyond the Pleasure Principle of the trauma of maternal separation for a young child – his actual

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grandson – and its attempt at consolation by a repetitive game. By continually throwing and retrieving a cotton reel in apparent mimicry of the mother’s departure and return, the child is said to assert its mastery over her comings and goings. Lacan counters this interpretation, claiming that what is represented by the reel – pun very much intended – is not the mother but the child who misses her. Imagining its escape from the confines of its cot, signifying itself, the child enters subjectivity. Through loss of the always elusive reality for which signification substitutes comes self-realization. From this perspective Cumming is not wrong in her ascription of an existential dimension to Emin’s ‘drama’. At play in Why I Never Became a Dancer is the subject’s accession to the state Lacan (1981: 61) calls ‘human being’. In her melodrama of the dancer she never became, the artist enacts the traumatic reality of self-creation.

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In 1955 the New Statesman published an article by the pundit Malcolm Muggeridge with a headline that would become a cliché of British political commentary. Republished in May 2012 for the Queen’s Diamond Jubilee, ‘The Royal Soap Opera’ compared newspaper coverage of Princess Margaret’s romance with Air Force Group Captain Peter Townsend to that bestowed on Rita Hayworth. ‘The application of film-star techniques to representatives of a monarchical institution is liable to have’, it warned, ‘disastrous consequences’: The film star soon passes into oblivion. She has her moment and then it is all over. And even her moment depends on being able to do superlatively well whatever the public expects of her. Members of the royal family are in an entirely different situation. Their role is to symbolize the unity of a nation; to provide an element of continuity in a necessarily changing society. This is history, not The Archers,1 and their affairs ought to be treated as such. (Muggeridge 2012)

Thirty years passed before Judith Williamson challenged Muggeridge by claiming that this celebrity melodrama could actually serve the Crown and the ideology of national unity that it represents. Writing just after the protracted strike that failed to halt the closure of Britain’s coal mines in 1984, Williamson observed that the pitmen’s wives sought the Queen’s support for their cause in the belief that she cared, that the ambiguous ‘concern’ about the strike expressed in a palace press release indicated a royal regard for ordinary Britons’ welfare not shared by the elected government of Conservative Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. That belief, Williamson argued, has been bolstered by the modern British monarchy’s combination of royal authority with the image of a bourgeois family. In ‘incorporating both affection (based on identification) and obedience (based on difference)’, it has employed a canny populism to foster both: ‘There is the intimate and casual private moment on the one hand; the

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spectacle of state occasions, the glamour of wealth and national tradition on the other’ (Williamson 1986: 80). Historians trace the domestication of the British monarchy to George III, an unusual king in his fidelity to his consort Queen Charlotte and concern for their thirteen children, with whom he promenaded in public walkabouts. But if this enabled loyalists to defend George as ‘father of his people’ (Morris 1998: 72), the royal role in a constitutional monarchy was increasingly feminized by its ‘re-positioning … above politics into the realm of philanthropy and national patriotism’ (Campbell Orr 2007: 79). George’s foppish son, the Prince Regent who would become George IV, intensified this feminization with his attention to fashion in dress and architecture rather than affairs of state, as well as his scandalous liaisons with several mistresses. As Clarissa Campbell Orr (2007: 79) observes, the consequence was an increasing ‘alignment of the monarchy with celebrity culture and an intrusive media; and within this commercialized public sphere, the commodification of the monarchy, whereby royal and aristocratic lives became the stuff of newspaper scandal and sentimentalization’. While the domestication of the monarchy furthered its melodramatic representation, it also  – and not coincidentally – positioned it within a celebrity culture increasingly commodified from the eighteenth century. George IV’s death without an heir in 1830, and the brief reign of his brother William IV, was followed by that of Victoria, an ardent wife and mother of nine whose exhibition of her familial attachments consolidated her popularity by combining imperial grandeur with an ‘image of middle-class domesticity’ (Cannadine 2004: 301). Reflecting on the Queen and her successors, David Cannadine (2004: 302–3) has remarked on her long reign’s inauguration of the increasingly matriarchal character of the British monarchy ‘with a succession of dominant and/or charismatic women: Queen Victoria, Queen Mary, the Queen Mother, the present Queen and Princess Diana …’: constitutional monarchy is what results when the sovereign is deprived of those historic male functions of god and governor and general, and this in turn has led – perhaps by default, perhaps by design? – to a greater stress on family, domesticity, maternity and glamour.

Royal privilege and ceremonial display have thus been feminized by publicity focused on the basic materials of melodrama – with considerable political success. When Muggeridge’s ‘orgy of vulgar and sentimental speculation’ about whether Princess Margaret would renounce her title to marry a divorced man was echoed half a century later by similar speculation about whether her nephew

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would marry a divorced woman, both romance and royal status, desire and duty, were upheld. Prince Charles married Camilla Parker Bowles, the former wife of a Commander of the Household Cavalry, in 2005, the year before the release of an actual melodrama with a real-life film star commemorating – and, by many accounts, furthering – the Crown’s survival of a greater crisis. Discussing the melodramatic concentration on ‘family relationships, starcrossed lovers and forced marriages’ in the direct predecessor of the genre, the eighteenth-century bourgeois tragedy, Thomas Elsaesser discerns a strong anti-feudalism in its portrayal of its villains. ‘Often of noble birth’, they ‘demonstrate their superior political and economic power invariably by sexual aggression’ (1987: 45). Although that storyline would serve very well for the 1997 contretemps provoked by the British royal family’s cynical betrothal of the heir to the throne to a naive teenager, The Queen’s restaging of these conflicts in the domestic life of the Windsors makes the monarch the heroine, albeit a monarch portrayed as a beleaguered working woman in the Hollywood melodramatic mode, with even more pathos given her advanced age: the concerned Chief Executive of the royal ‘firm’, torn in the crisis after Diana’s death between her lifelong reserve and her anointed obligations to her symbolically childish subjects. This transfer of spectatorial sympathy represents a political coup de théâtre, and has been acknowledged as such. Not untypically, royal biographer William Shawcross (2007: 106) maintains that The Queen rebutted allegations of the monarch’s ‘uncaring’ attitude to Diana’s death, capturing its subject’s ‘moral courage’ and eliciting many letters from members of the public ‘saying that before the film they had never quite understood what she had been through, others saying how glad they were that the film had finally tried to tell the truth they had always accepted’. As film critic David Thomson (2010: 14) succinctly concludes, the film is ‘the most sophisticated public relations boost HRH had had in 20 years’. Princess Diana would seem the more likely heroine of this melodrama, the beautiful young innocent deceived by a powerful older man. Thwarted in love, spurned by her husband’s family, harried by the press, she became a figure of female suffering and resistance, pointing the finger of accusation à la Lillian Gish in the 1995 BBC Panorama interview viewed by the Queen in the film: ‘There were three of us in this marriage.’ The cinematic character of Diana’s celebrity was redoubled by the sense that this shy young woman had been ‘discovered’2 by her husband, painfully wrenched from private life to mass exposure and early death like the doomed Norma Jean whose ballad was rewritten for her funeral. As journalist Allan Massie argues, Diana, although the daughter of an earl, was ‘unquestionably’ the star of ‘the Royal soap opera’ and the ‘child of her age’:

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Not long after Diana’s death, Tony Blair, as prime minister, called for the release of Deidre Rachid, a fictional character fictionally imprisoned for a fictional offence in Coronation Street.3 Many mocked his intervention, but in this confusion of real life and television, he represented the spirit of the times … When Diana was killed, and Blair pronounced her ‘the People’s Princess’, it was hard to remember that she was actually a member of one of the great Whig aristocratic families. The image, only in part consciously manufactured, had all but obliterated the reality. (Massie: 2008)

But if The Queen is a melodrama attempting to replace this generic heroine with the living monarch, it was initially devised as a docudrama, with that form’s fidelity to actual events and the employment of both television and press quotations. Real and simulated footage from British newscasts is interspersed with a fictional narrative of both the royal family and the Labour government’s response to Diana’s death. Written by Peter Morgan, the subsequent creator of The Crown (Netflix 2016–),The Queen is the centrepiece of his New Labour trilogy in which Michael Sheen plays Tony Blair, and it was also destined for the small screen before continental co-production expanded its budget. The two television productions which bracket it are The Deal (directed by Stephen Frears, 2003) on the power-sharing negotiations between Tony Blair and Gordon Brown prior to their government’s first election, and The Special Relationship (directed by Richard Loncraine, 2009) on Blair’s dealings with US presidents Clinton and Bush. In many ways The Queen follows the formula of The Deal as closely as its two syllable title. Both were directed by Stephen Frears and both focus on real-life political contests in which a frontrunner is defeated by a rival. Real-life Labour spin doctors – Peter Mandelson, played by Paul Rhys in The Deal and Alastair Campbell, played by Mark Bazely in The Queen – take key supportive roles. Footage of an actual funeral appears at the climax of both narratives and both end with an ironic coda. The difference between the two productions is significantly that of their medium, which ‘opens out’ The Queen to the production values of the feature film, while confining The Deal to the cheaper mise en scène of television. In the latter there is consequently little visible difference between the low resolution image of its dramatic sequences and that of the video news archive. Although The Deal does employ scenes of people watching television to bridge the two, it also cuts directly between them with no ostensible breach of image quality or narrative continuity (Paget 2012: 188). Significantly the deceased politician in the archive sequence of the funeral, the Scottish Labour leader John Smith, is portrayed earlier

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by actor Frank Kelly. Conversely, Diana – even in the opening of The Queen when she is still alive – is represented only by actuality footage. Belén Vidal (2012b: 44) has called attention to the ‘different temporalities’ signalled by the film’s textual – and textural – variation, observing both its insertion of Mirren’s enacted Queen into the documentary record and the Crown into a belated engagement with twentieth-century communications. But this division has a further import, one of character, genre, and ontology, since the Queen is entirely portrayed by an actor and seen mostly in the fictional melodrama filmed by Frears, while Diana is confined to the archive of her indexical image. While avoiding what Giselle Bastin has described as the ‘low-quality’ impersonations of the Princess in the many television biopics of the 1980s and 1990s (2009: 42), this strategy makes Diana history, in both the literal and figurative sense, while paradoxically enlivening the very traditional genre which it deploys to vindicate the Queen. Throughout The Queen news broadcasts on television screens and photographic images are counterposed to the paintings in the royal residences and Downing Street. Their thematic purposes are multifold, but they mark a dramatic progress in which Diana – effectively portrayed as pretender to the throne – is supplanted in the televisual frame by the Queen, who is initially identified with the milieu and iconography of fine art. Only when this process has been completed can Diana’s funeral begin and the princess laid to rest, and with her the threat she presents to the Queen’s authority. To make this happen, melodrama, with its pathos, its appeal for moral recognition, and its highly expressive mise en scène, must, in both a political and an aesthetic sense, dominate the docudrama. The DVD cover of The Queen (Figure 13) announces this generic contest with an eloquent image absent from the actual film. In it Helen Mirren – costumed for the title role in funereal black, with discreet pearls at her neck and a white rose brooch – stands frowning in front of a gigantic photograph of the real-life Diana. In a markedly competitive pose, Mirren’s Queen has turned her back to the photograph. It is cropped just below Diana’s eyes, masking her gaze at the spectator, but emphasizing its subject’s smile, as well as her more youthful complexion. Yet the photograph is toned a ghostly grey, while the figure in the foreground is in colour. A caption reads (in conservative blue) QUEEN OF A NATION, (and in radical red) QUEEN OF HEARTS. Stephen Heath’s term ‘narrative image’ (1981: 21) suggests how this illustration anticipates the film’s abiding contrast of photographic publicity with private existence. For much of its running time, the nation’s Queen is out of the public eye, at Balmoral, her Scottish hunting estate. Meanwhile, the Queen of Hearts is montaged in the cascade of images with which her life culminated,

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Figure 13  Helen Mirren on the DVD cover of The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, Pathé Productions and Granada).

watched repeatedly on television, pursued to her death by the paparazzi, and memorialized by her photographs on thousands of mourners’ placards. The medial frame, it is suggested, has been usurped by the Queen’s rival, her former daughter-in-law. In the tradition of Friedrich Schiller’s 1800 play Mary Stuart – whose sympathetic treatment of the cousins Mary of Scotland and Elizabeth I makes it a more obvious precedent for this melodrama than the royal

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villain plays cited by Elsaesser – this is a drama about two ambitious queens, one romantic, one worldly, in a contest for power. Although Diana’s death is announced soon after the film begins, her threat to the Crown cannot be averted until the anointed monarch reoccupies her rightful place within the frame and broadcasts a statement of regret to the nation. And even then the ghostly pretender lingers on, her archive image twice inserted into that of the mourners at her own funeral, the second time in a confrontational turn toward the camera that matches the Queen’s at the film’s opening. Both Vidal and Bastin have rightly stressed this spectrality. Diana’s representations throughout the film are figured as both posthumous – at its 2006 debut she had been dead for nine years and she dies again at its beginning  – and ghostlike, reconfigured in (mostly) silence, slow motion, and the lower resolution and desaturated colours of television news. These enhance the haunting effect of her image in the present absence so often remarked upon by theorists of photography. Throughout the film this documentary footage of the dead princess is watched by the film’s characters, played by actors filmed in the higher resolution, deeper hues, and synchronized sound of the feature film. Thus we are given two realities in two different registrations – that of the fictional world of melodrama and that of the actual world of documentary. But here, enhanced by cinema’s lighting, set design, and sheer scale – in both financial and screen terms – the symbolic world of the melodrama is more vivid, more audible and apparently more alive than the indexical images of the real-life Diana. The Queen of Hearts is dead. Long live the Queen of a Nation – who will become, through the sympathetic agency of the melodrama, the next Queen of Hearts. As well as the images framed by the television screen, gilt-framed paintings adorn the more formal settings of this film. Like the harpsichord passage that introduces the palace in the scene in which the newly elected Blair is confirmed prime minister, these works of art synecdochize the aesthetics of tradition, wealth, and offices of state. The conflict between the two media is introduced in its title scene, when the Queen watches the news as she poses in the ceremonial robes of the chivalric Order of the Garter for an artist in a Buckingham Palace state room.4 It is election day, 1997, and the first shot of the film is a televised one of a contemporary Labour Party supporter, as indicated by the ‘Britain deserves better’ slogan on his red T-shirt. Yet the era of Muggeridge’s article persists, since the Queen’s pose and costume are designed to recall her most famous portrait, painted by Pietro Annigoni in 1954–5, when she was in her late twenties. The grey hair and West Indian accent of the film’s fictional painter, Mr Crawford,

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also recall the bygone heyday of immigration from the Caribbean. Moreover, the character is portrayed by Earl Cameron, best known for the 1950s and 1960s film and television melodramas in which he so often played the virtuous victim of racist violence (Sapphire, Basil Deardon, 1959) or exploitation (Flame in the Streets, Roy Ward Baker, 1961). The name Crawford is itself an allusion to 1950, the year when the former nanny of Elizabeth and Margaret, Marion Crawford or ‘Crawfie’, outraged the royal family by publishing her memoir The Little Princesses. But the ease with which Mr Crawford converses with his sovereign also suggests the ethnic ‘diversity’ championed in the Blair era. Combined with the casting of Mirren – playing the then 71-year-old monarch at the age of sixtyone – the effect is to make the Queen both venerable and youthful – a veteran of ten prime ministers as she will later remind Blair – and yet in her pose for this portrait strikingly elegant, a star. In the narrative device that structures the entire film, the situation of the title scene is announced by the television. As the painter works, the news in the background is of Tony Blair’s arrival, age forty-three, to cast his vote at his constituency’s polling station. This provokes an amiable discussion in which the presumptive hierarchies of race, gender, politics, and portraiture are put into question. Playing on the role of the Queen as the artist’s subject, and the artist as subject of the Queen – Britons are not citizens but ‘subjects’ of the Crown – the scene manoeuvres them into equilibrium. As sovereign, the Queen points out, she has no vote. Conversely, Crawford has risen early to cast his ballot against the Labour leader whose commitment to modernization, we infer, the Queen would also oppose if she could only – like so many of melodrama’s mute characters – say so. Speaking on her behalf, Crawford protests that ‘We’re in danger of losing too much that’s good about this country as it is.’ Their exchange underlines the elderly artist’s traditionalism as a portraitist in paint – counterposed to the electronic images flickering in the background. It also establishes the limited powers of the constitutional monarch – deprived, she complains, ‘of the sheer joy of being partial’. But if this deprivation, as well as the threat pronounced in the word ‘modernizer’, introduces the Queen as the victimized heroine traditional to melodrama – a victim who can confide in the traditionally victimized figure of the Caribbean immigrant – Mirren’s performance of the role in full diva mode adds a contrasting note of humour. Reminded by Crawford that, although she cannot vote, it is her government, she raises a regal eyebrow to observe drily, ‘I suppose that is some consolation.’ A cut to black enables Mirren’s credit to punctuate this ethnic dialogue in contrasting white. Then, with Alexandre

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Desplat’s theme tune swelling to its fanfare, the craning camera rises to conclude the scene – past the stately figure in the white brocade, the golden tassels, the midnight blue mantle and the star shaped emblem of the Order to fix on the face of the film’s star in three-quarters profile. As she slowly turns toward the camera, her left eyebrow still aloft, another white title announces THE QUEEN, joining Mirren to her character in syntactical equivalence. The celebrity culture of the nineteenth century is often credited with turning theatre stars into royalty, as the power of Europe’s ruling families was increasingly curtailed and that of prominent entertainers increased. In the classical tragedies and historical dramas then performed, actors played monarchs, and offstage they socialized and sometimes coupled with them. The epitome of this phenomenon was Sarah Bernhardt, who in 1872 consolidated her own stardom with the role of the victimized Spanish queen in Victor Hugo’s romantic melodrama Ruy Blas and whose noble lovers are thought to include Elizabeth II’s great grandfather, who became Edward VII. One of The Queen’s many ideological masterstrokes is its contemporary identification of the star actor (Mirren) with the world’s most prominent living monarch as ‘celebrities’, in a highly reflexive narrative in which that term and its implications are explicitly discussed. As with successor melodramas casting Colin Firth as George VI (in The King’s Speech, 2010) and Meryl Streep as Margaret Thatcher (in The Iron Lady, 2011), Helen Mirren’s casting as Elizabeth II identifies the political figurehead with a leading actor, rather than a lesser known lookalike in the contemporary biopic tradition that casts Angela Bassett as Tina Turner or the young Cate Blanchett as Elizabeth I. Moreover, Mirren is an aristocrat among film stars, who has played classical queens like Cleopatra and Phèdre on the stage, whose supposed descent from the actual Russian aristocracy was remarked on the film’s debut, and who was dubbed a Dame of the British Empire soon afterward. In 1994, she portrayed Queen Charlotte in The Madness of King George and in the 2005 HBO series, Elizabeth I, she joined a long line of star actresses, including Bernhardt, Bette Davis, Flora Robson, Glenda Jackson, and Judi Dench, in portraying the first Queen Elizabeth. But Mirren’s star persona has also retained the vein of rebellious sexiness embodied in her early stage roles as Shakespeare’s Cressida (1968) and Strindberg’s Miss Julie (1971), as well as an offscreen identification with progressive causes also manifest in her long-running police series Prime Suspect (1991–2006). Her rendition of its ageing, vulnerable, and undoubtedly caring Detective Chief Inspector was clearly appropriated to make the monarch a sympathetic heroine, a female manager struggling to combine authority and virtue.5 The low-key grittiness of Mirren in that role also bolsters

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the televisual realism with which the docudrama elements of The Queen support its melodramatic fiction. With but a few significant exceptions, the analysis of film melodrama now takes its historical cues from Peter Brooks’s canonical study The Melodramatic Imagination. Brooks argues that the theatrical form originated in the aftermath of the revolutionary overthrow of political and religious authority, and by revolution he means the French revolution of 1789–95 (1995: 14–20). But two key scenes in The Queen clearly refer to an earlier revolution, the English Civil War that climaxed with the execution of Charles I in 1649. The emphatic ‘Anglitude’ of this film and its actors is ideological as well as historical, and it prompts a reconsideration of that other revolution and its relation to this dramatic mode. Here it is worth recalling that the intellectual developments signalled by the English revolution – religious heterodoxy, political contractarianism, scientific empiricism, and an interest in what would now be called social psychology – included a sustained philosophical discussion of fame, expressed as ‘honour’, ‘reputation’, and ‘esteem’ by Thomas Hobbes, David Hume, and Adam Smith. Hobbes was an English royalist forced to flee the revolution to the Stuart stronghold in Paris. From exile in 1651, he published his political treatise Leviathan, in which he argues that a naturally quarrelsome humanity does so for three main motives – gain, safety, and reputation. Although a monarchist, Hobbes was also an incipient materialist, and his analyses of both royal power and reputation are historically and analytically pertinent to The Queen. ‘Reputation of power, is power’ (Hobbes 1996: 48), Leviathan declares, in the apparent tautology which critics of the ‘famous for being famous’ formulae of contemporary celebrity culture wrongly imagine to be new. Honour in Hobbes’s view derives not from personal worthiness but from public valuation and it thus requires public acknowledgement: ‘To be conspicuous, that is to say, to be known, for wealth, office, great actions, or any eminent good, is honourable … Obscurity, is dishonourable’ (1996: 53). Similarly, in advocating the restoration of the English monarchy, Hobbes employs an extended theatrical metaphor to justify the sovereign’s power. By his representative function, the monarch is said to ‘personate’ his subjects as the actor his role. In the interest of peace and prosperity, Leviathan urges the English to grant a new sovereign the ‘right to present the person of them all’ (Hobbes 1996: 96). Here Hobbes exploits the ancient trope of the world-as-theatre invoked by his contemporary, the poet Andrew Marvell (1971: 92–3), who stages the execution of the theatre-loving

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Charles I as a play in his ‘Horatian Ode’, probably written in the year that Leviathan was published: That thence the royal actor borne The tragic scaffold might adorn: While round the armed bands Did clap their bloody hands.

The stag scenes in The Queen are suffused with this memory of English history. They combine direct allusions to those events and their contemporary iconography with more recent references to the idealized representation of animals and the countryside painted by the Victorian artist Edwin Henry Landseer and animated by Disney. All of this rests on the ancient symbolism of the stag, from the horned god of the Celts to Christian representations of Jesus as a martyred deer to the animal’s medieval association with the monarchs who monopolized its hunting by royal licence. The most obvious of these iconographic references is to the Roman goddess Diana, about whom Charles Spencer declared in his funeral eulogy to his sister, ‘of all the ironies about Diana, perhaps the greatest was this – a girl given the name of the ancient goddess of hunting was, in the end, the most hunted person of the modern age’. Although the final words of Spencer’s eulogy are included in one of the film’s many insertions of television news footage, they do not include those just quoted. These cannot be spoken in the film, because its project is to secure the spectator’s sympathy by substituting the Queen for Diana as the victim of the hunt. This task is achieved by, first of all, tapping into the longtime association of the British monarchy with the natural world. As in its espousal of ‘ancient’ traditions and ceremonies – often devised in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries – this royal investment in the nation’s ‘rurality and imagined roots’ identifies the Crown with what Tom Nairn calls a ‘contrived timelessness’ (2011: viii), as manifested in the country pastimes of a folkloric public. (A similar invocation of the physical powers of sport ensures a royal attendance at every major competition.) Again, the modern version of this natural association was a Victorian creation, by the monarch herself in notable collaboration with Landseer, from whom she commissioned portraits of royal pets, royal gamekeepers, royal babies with their favourite pets, and a life-size portrait of herself on horseback. Landseer often painted humans and animals in the Highlands, illustrated Walter Scott’s Waverley novels, and most famously painted his widely reproduced study of a Highland stag, Monarch of the Glen, in 1851. The art direction of The Queen borrows

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shamelessly from these Victorian landscapes, toning the Balmoral costumes in their heather shades. Antlers hang from the walls and retrievers join the corgis on holiday from Buckingham Palace. Notably present is the cross-species identification that prompted Landseer to paint an entire series of dogs credited with rescuing people without human assistance, and the French playwright RenéCharles Guilbert de Pixérécourt to pen one of the greatest successes of early stage melodrama about another faithful hound, The Dog of Montargis.6 The Queen herself is emotionally rescued by a deer when she drives her Land Rover up to the moor where Prince Philip has taken her grandsons to escape their grief for their mother’s death by stalking and killing animals. The irony of this inverted consolation begins when her vehicle breaks down fording a picturesque stream and she is forced to telephone her estate staff for help. As the troubled woman waits by the water the first stag scene opens, its intimate tone signalled by a medium close-up of her removing her headscarf with its Gucci bridle design on white silk. Standing bareheaded in atmospheric birdsong, she turns away from the camera and begins to weep. An orchestration of harp and high strings fades in, with the majestic stag’s sudden approach signalled by a poignant woodwind melody. On seeing it the melancholy monarch is transfixed, fervently exclaiming ‘You beauty’. Then, at the sound of the approaching estate workers, she reciprocates the rescue, shooing the stag away to an equally magical disappearance synchronized to a Disney ‘ting’. The second stag scene is announced when Philip informs the Queen that the one she saw has been killed by a ‘commercial guest’ on a neighbouring estate. Despite the increasing urgency of the week’s events, she immediately drives there and is welcomed by the gamekeeper, who takes her to an octagonal stone outbuilding with a tiled floor and shuttered windows. Again birdsong yields to non-diegetic music, but now the woodwind theme is a wistful memory. In a descending shot that reverses the crane past the Queen in the opening scene, the hanging stag is revealed to be decapitated. Its large head, with its vast rack of antlers, rests on a sideboard. With his cap doffed, the gamekeeper identifies it as an ‘imperial … a fourteen pointer’. The unusually long-lived specimen has been shot by a London banker who has failed to achieve a clean kill, subjecting the animal to lengthy suffering before its final dispatch. The now timely allusion to the investment banker who can’t shoot straight, a vacation stalker out of touch with the organic community represented in the gamekeeper’s evident familiarity with the Queen, recalls the supposed antagonism between the new rich and the nobility, one that was also inferred from the reported hostility displayed by Elizabeth Windsor towards

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Margaret Thatcher – the wife of an oil executive – during her premiership. (The ostensible feminism of The Iron Lady rules out the representation of that intra-female conflict, attributing the aristocratic Tory opposition to Thatcher to male privilege.) In the tradition of melodrama this second stag scene is one of recognition, the monarch drawing near to her impressively crowned counterpart to behold it in the kinship and foreboding telegraphed by the film’s opening epigraph from Henry IV, Part II: ‘Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown’ (Figure 14). Her scarf in this scene is blood red and replacing the hunter’s bridle is a motif of game birds similar to those seen hanging behind the stag. These images of prey decorate the head of a queen whose reign has been exceptionally long and whose predecessor Charles I was deprived of his head by the victorious parliamentarians of the English Civil War. The stag’s carcass hangs upside down like a deposed tyrant in a cooling room that resembles a mortuary – or the chapel in which the imprisoned Charles was pictured in the Guillaume Marshall portrait circulated by his supporters in a volume entitled Eikon Basilike: The Pourtraiture of his sacred maiestie in his solitarie suffering. With her mind concentrated wonderfully by the fate of one or both monarchs, and the gamekeeper’s ‘God bless you, Ma’am’ ringing in her ears, another suffering monarch rapidly proceeds to propitiate her unhappy subjects, flying to London, communing with the mourners gathered at the gates of Buckingham Palace and – most importantly – broadcasting a tribute to the deceased princess.

Figure 14  The Queen (Helen Mirren) examines the dead stag in The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, Pathé Productions and Granada).

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In a film whose central issue is the power of mass media in public life, television screens are watched constantly, mostly by groups of people – kitchen staff, civil servants, the crowds in the park during Diana’s funeral – following the news in figures of national attention. This vigilance commences in the title sequence with the Queen’s viewing of the election report and continues with the announcement of Diana’s crash, seen at Balmoral in the early hours of the morning by her, Prince Philip (James Cromwell), the Queen Mother (Sylvia Sims) and Prince Charles (Alex Jennings). Where a 1969 BBC documentary set a PR precedent by permitting the British public to witness the domestic life of the Royal Family,7 including a Highland barbecue gently parodied in The Queen, the film reverses the angle to make the Windsors the spectators (Figure 15). In their dressing gowns and slippers, with the Queen clutching her hot water bottle, the royal family could be the working class Royle Family8 of British sitcom fame, passively gripped by public events, confused and irritable, unable to hear the telly over the conversation. The Victorian social commentator Walter Bagehot observed that the notion of a ‘family on the throne … brings down the pride of sovereignty to the level of petty life’ (1963: 85). Such is the scale of melodrama, Geoffrey Nowell-Smith writes, which typically ‘supposes a world of equals … exercising local power or suffering local powerlessness, within the family or the small town’ (1987: 71). ‘Familyness’, Tom Nairn declares, is ‘crucial for the sort of national-popular

Figure 15  The Queen (Helen Mirren) and Prince Philip (James Cromwell) watch news of Diana’s death in The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, Pathé Productions and Granada).

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identity the Windsors purvey’ (2011: 37). Its varying generations and genders offer the public a contending cast of characters compared by Nairn in a study originally published in 1989 to that of the TV soap Dallas, while the inheritance of the throne through the bloodline represents both the organic continuity of the state and the retention of private property by the kin group. For this double function the virtue of the mother is crucial, and to best her rival the Queen must become a better one. Demonstrably cold to the son whose unhappy marriage she ‘signed off on’, she is distressed when he protests that Diana was loving to her children. Both they and the Queen’s other offspring are never seen with the monarch. Instead, in this markedly matriarchal dynasty,9 she seeks advice from her own elderly ‘Mummy’, who bracingly reminds her of the vow she took to the lifelong service of her country. To retain her crown and become the good mother that the film requires, the Queen must establish a parental relation with her subjects, one that her prime minister is eager to enable.10 The oedipality of Blair’s filial devotion to the monarch is laughingly observed by his wife Cherie (Helen McCrory), portrayed in the film as a convinced republican, while his press secretary hails him as ‘Mr Father of the Country’. And indeed the young prime minister and the older sovereign are the couple created by the film, united in their renewal of the British monarchy. But the Queen achieves a more conventional maternity when, returning at last to London, she halts her car at the gates of Buckingham Palace in order to inspect the tributes brought by Diana’s mourners. As a startled reporter points out that such unscheduled encounters with the public are ‘extremely unusual’, Blair and his Downing Street staff watch its live broadcast on a bank of monitors. ‘It really is’, one TV commentator observes, ‘as if the public and the royal family, the monarchy, have had a bit of a quarrel this week and now it is being healed’. ‘Like a family spat’, another helpfully explains. When Campbell interrupts with his revisions to ‘the old bat’s’ eulogy of Diana, Blair rises in anger. Pointing to the screen, he shouts ‘That woman has given her whole life in service to her people, fifty years doing a job she never wanted, a job she watched kill her father … and now we’re all baying for her blood.’ A cut to the Queen shows her pained perusal of a succession of commemorative images in which Diana is portrayed as a religious martyr, her eyes uplifted and her head veiled, with captions declaring ‘You were too good for them’ and ‘They have your blood on their hands.’ The crowd is silent, with the clicking of cameras and the rustling of paper the only audible sounds. Turning away from the angry placards, the Queen asks a little girl behind the barricade if she would like her to place her bouquet. When the child declines, a close-up

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reveals Mirren’s wounded expression, which is then transformed when the child explains ‘These are for you.’ As the relieved monarch carries her flowers past the mourners, the denunciations disappear and the women in the crowd silently begin to curtsey, one after another genuflecting to the Queen. In a sensation scene traceable to the pioneering melodramas of Pixérécourt,11 her own virtue is belatedly acknowledged, the public acknowledgement that Hobbes declared essential to honour. The scene that follows is clearly designed to match the one which opens the film. Again the Queen is in dark clothing and again she looks directly into the camera, with the crowd visible in the window behind her as she is made up for the camera (Figure 16). Her reprised stillness as she composes herself is that of the tableau traditional to melodrama, halting the action to seal the symbolic import of the scene. But her pose is not for a flattering depiction in oils but live broadcast, and she is dressed in daywear and reading glasses, not the panoply of her Garter robes. Instead of sitting for a ceremonial portrait, the monarch is now the subject of a command performance over which she does not have, as she admits, ‘a choice’. In reluctantly acceding to the popular demand for a televised tribute to Diana, not only does she take up the Princess’s place in the pixelated frame, she also experiences the involuntary intimacy of a much less formal relation of regard, that of celebrity culture. She is, she proclaims, ‘speaking as your Queen’, but in Campbell’s added phrase she continues, ‘and as a grandmother’, asserting her familial communality with the people she ‘personates’.

Figure 16  The Queen (Helen Mirren) is made up for her broadcast in The Queen (Stephen Frears, 2006, Pathé Productions and Granada).

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Mass mediation is unsurprisingly associated with celebrity status in this film, and celebrity with Diana – the most prominent of global celebrities honoured at the film’s end by the real-life Hollywood celebrities Tom Hanks, Steven Spielberg, Nicole Kidman, and Tom Cruise in the footage of her funeral. Half a century after Muggeridge’s warning, it is as though one member of the royal family had indeed become Rita Hayworth, or more grandly, the original ‘Candle in the Wind’, Marilyn Monroe. In a comic scene in The Queen, the c-word is actually spoken by her private secretary (Roger Allam) when he hesitantly reveals that Diana’s funeral has had to be modelled on that planned for the Queen Mother, but with monarchs and heads of state replaced by ‘a sprinkling of actors of stage and screen, fashion designers and other … celebrities’ – at which point Sylvia Sims’s Queen Mother echoes ‘celebrities’ with an expression of incredulous distaste worthy of Edith Evans. Notwithstanding her portrayal of royal disdain, the film is preoccupied by the same vulgar popularity that drives the narrative of its melodramatic ancestor, Mary Stuart. In Schiller’s 1800 play, the first Queen Elizabeth is forced to avert the claim to her throne posed by her rival and relation, Mary of Scotland, by imprisoning her. When her supporters’ plotting continues, she reluctantly signs a warrant for Mary’s execution. The speculation that Diana’s death might have been similarly arranged is acknowledged in The Queen by Campbell’s joking suggestion that Blair ask the Queen ‘if she greased the brakes’. A further parallel between the play and the film is evident in a courtier’s complaint that Mary’s ‘influence upon the human heart is too supreme’ (Schiller 2012: 1.8). After her love-struck supporter attempts to assassinate Elizabeth, the anti-Papist crowd calls for the Scottish queen’s death. In a remarkable anticipation of the events portrayed in the film, Elizabeth is told ‘it is thy people who, round the palace ranged, impatient demand to see their sovereign’ (4.7). As her counsellors debate whether the public mood will turn again in favour of Mary, the beleagured Queen asks: when Shall I once more be free upon this throne? I must respect the people’s voice, and strive To win the favour of the multitude, And please the fancies of a mob, whom naught But jugglers’ tricks delight. (Schiller 2012: 4.10)

The fluctuation of the people’s fancies was not only a pervasive dramatic theme in the post-revolutionary moment in which Schiller wrote Mary Stuart.

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It returns in a coda to The Queen which darkens the final exchange between the prime minister and his monarch when their weekly audiences at Buckingham Palace recommence in the autumn after Diana’s death. As Blair glibly attempts to reassure the sovereign that the republican rumblings of the summer have died away, she listens stonily and suddenly declares that the British public will one day turn against him – an anticipation of the dramatic loss of popularity which Blair had indeed experienced by the time of the film’s production for his complicity in the invasion of Iraq. Like the final intertitle of The Deal, which notes that by its broadcast in 2003 Blair’s promised handover of prime ministerial office to Gordon Brown had still not happened, this coda performs the ironic updating that often concludes the docudrama. But within this final sequence, the film stages a far more revealing acknowledgement of its own devices, an acknowledgement performed by denial. Suggesting that they continue their discussion in the palace gardens, the Queen leads Blair down a corridor. Suddenly she stops, removes her glasses and returns to the traumatic events of the summer. ‘One in four?’ she quietly asks, ‘wanted to get rid of me?’ Again Blair insists that this opposition was only momentary. ‘I’ve never been hated like that before’, the chastened monarch replies. Visible behind her is one of several marble statues in this scene. Presumably chosen to represent the neoclassical decor of Buckingham Palace, they lead to an extensive display of statuary in the formal garden in which the two are seen walking as the film’s credits roll. Given the hitherto sustained opposition of painting and television, this sudden turn to the sculptural seems difficult to ignore. As the Queen anxiously questions Blair she stands before a classical nude who looks modestly downward as she clasps a veil to her nether regions. But the naked intimacy suggested by this figure is soon dispelled as the Queen raises her voice and continues down the hallway: ‘Nowadays’, she declares, ‘people want glamour and tears, the grand performance. I’m not very good at that’. At this point she passes a second statue, of an upright Victorian gentleman with his right hand tucked into his waistcoat and his left steadying a sheaf of papers. ‘I prefer to keep my feelings to myself ’, she continues, ‘and, foolishly, I believed that was what the people wanted from their queen – not to make a fuss, nor wear one’s heart on one’s sleeve. Duty first, self second’. As the Queen concludes her complaint, another classical statue briefly comes into view, of a sexually ambiguous figure whose short tunic is draped over a single shoulder. If the woman averting exposure suggests Diana – the classical goddess furious to be seen bathing, the contemporary princess shielding her face from the paparazzi – does the frock-coated dignitary represent statesmanship, and the

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third statue androgyny? Is this the film’s final word on the dialectics of female rule? Or those of the phallic grandmother? Or does this marble, like the previous allusions to pixels and paint, refer to the varied media of dramatic personation? In the theatre of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, as well as in the private performances of Emma Hamilton discussed in Chapter 4, the striking of ‘attitudes’ or dramatic poses based on those of classical sculpture was a familiar device. The English tragedienne Sarah Siddons and her French successor Rachel were both praised for the statuesque gravity of their posture and expression, while Henry James referred to the ‘solidity’ of Schiller’s Mary when commending Helena Modjeska’s ‘exquisite and pathetic Queen of Scots’ (1949: 161). Mirren’s own performances of stage tragedies readily link the film to this tradition. If these statues invoke the ‘classiness’ of classicism, and the prestige sought from Mirren’s casting, their cold whiteness may likewise suggest an era long before the modernizing moment into which the film opens. Looking back to it the Queen defends her aversion to emotional display by saying ‘that’s how I was brought up’. But the catch in her voice as she recalls her coronation when ‘just a girl’ neatly subverts her protestation, signalling that her modesty about the grand performance is as false as that which veils the figure behind her. Rather than reading this scene as a final reversion to classical decorum and restraint, we should take it at face value, as still more evidence of the very emotional genre this leading lady has affirmed by her negation. For this is a film that truly does wear its melodramatic heart on its docudrama sleeve – its movie star monarch performing, pace Muggeridge, ‘superlatively well whatever the public expects of her’, the glamour and the tears that have brought us to an age of unparalleled royal celebrity.

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The harm that ‘the overvaluation of virility’ (Mulvey [1977] 1989: 40) can wreak on both women and men is an abiding theme in Hollywood melodramas in which a – literal – patriarch’s dominance is wielded to disastrous consequences for his wife and children. In Vincente Minnelli’s Home from the Hill (1960) Captain Wade Hunnicutt (Robert Mitchum) presides over a Texas domain of acres and industry, a power that he exhibits in the phallic decor of his ‘man’s room’. In this blood-red chamber the Captain sits, manspread on a blood-red chair clutching an upright bottle of beer (Figure 17), surrounded by an even more phallic array of hunting dogs, horned trophies, rifles, and fishing rods. From there he instructs his gently reared son in the violent prerogatives of his heritage, a local eminence that ensures he will need no identification ‘because everybody knows who you are’. On its debut Home from the Hill was slated for its ‘overplayed’ performances, ‘rambling plotline’ and the devotion of an entire reel to a couple’s ‘domestic set-up and the birth and christening of their child’ (Crowther 1960), the very characteristics that make it such a notable example of its genre. Much later, after the revelations of John F. Kennedy’s compulsive philandering, scholars began to draw parallels between the fantasy ‘vigour’ invoked by the President’s call to explore a ‘New Frontier’ and the hysterical masculinity of Minnelli’s ill-fated patriarch.1 The oft-noted overstatement of the film’s sporting mise en scène is matched by the Captain’s obsessive pursuit of other quarry, the local townswomen. With the ironic reversal of fortune that characterizes melodrama, this philandering leads to his own shooting by the furious father of a pregnant girl and the inheritance of his patriarchal role not by the legitimate son he has schooled in such behaviour – and who is the girl’s actual lover – but by the illegitimate offspring of a previous liaison. The film’s title is derived – via its 1958 source novel by William Humphrey  – from Robert Louis Stevenson’s 1887 poem ‘Requiem’, which concludes:

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Figure 17  Wade Hunnicutt (Robert Mitchum) in his ‘man’s room’ in Home from the Hill (Vincente Minnelli, 1960, MGM). This be the verse you grave for me: Here he lies where he longed to be; Home is the sailor, home from sea, And the hunter home from the hill. (Stevenson 1998: 122)

This epitaph’s revealing use of the first person, which also proclaims ‘And I laid me down with a will’, anticipates the Captain’s own declaration that ‘what every man hunts out there is himself ’ – a suicidal fate that Hunnicutt seems to court in his careless treatment of other men’s wives and daughters, as well as his own family. Since their honeymoon his wife (Eleanor Parker) has rejected him to raise their boy (George Hamilton) in an educated gentility that the Captain despises. His unacknowledged older son (George Peppard) scrapes a living as a hand on his ranch. The local menfolk manifest a volatile combination of deference and resentment, and he’s warned that ‘Someday some husband’s going to kill you.’ The masculine compulsion to self-destruction has been a theme of popular melodrama from 1827, when Victor Ducange’s searing portrait of the moral descent of a gambler, Thirty Years or A Gambler’s Life, opened in Paris. Staged at its debut in a series of gaming rooms receding in linear perspective, Thirty Years follows an arrogant bourgeois’s destruction of his loyal wife, his ageing father, his family’s fortune and very nearly his own son in the politically charged epoch from the Revolution to the Restoration, 1790 to 1820. In her reconstruction of the initial production of this play from contemporary critical sources, Bettina Knapp (2007: 55–71) stresses its powerful condemnation of the wife’s subordination and the striking performances of the two principals, who would become the greatest

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celebrities of the French stage in this period. The little known Marie Dorval, a former touring actress who had endured her father’s desertion in childhood, her mother’s death of tuberculosis and her own widowhood by the age of twenty, played the wife with the already famous Frédérick Lemaître as the husband. Lemaître was all flamboyance, raging at his beleaguered spouse, bullying her out of her inheritance, triumphantly snorting snuff when he succeeded. In contrast Dorval played the self-effacing young wife very quietly – revealing her feelings in small gestures and sideway glances, stooped and nearly immobile. Her meekness intensified the shock as she finally erupted at the play’s stormy climax, when her husband’s passion for gambling drives him to the vanishing point anticipated in Act One: after his own son is attacked and robbed by his gambling confederate, he repentantly rescues him from a fire and dies in front of his family. Melodrama may seem a contentious label for a darkly comic documentary of a political campaign filmed almost 200 years after the debut of its French predecessor, but Weiner (Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg, 2016) has been readily hailed in these terms, with one reviewer remarking on its ‘exaggerated’ characters including a protagonist described as ‘his own villain’ and the wife who seems his ‘willing victim’ (Schulmann 2016). A detailed examination of the film reveals still more similarities with Ducange’s rendition of masculinity as compulsion. Like the gambler in Thirty Years, the New York politician Anthony Weiner is portrayed with an extraordinary drive to self-destruction – in the sexual exhibitionism that turns his name into a national joke, but also in his exhibitions of rage, including a furious rant in a congressional debate on medical care for 9/11 responders, a near fistfight while campaigning at a Bronx bakery and a televised tantrum when an interviewer asks if he has a psychological problem. Like Lemaître, Weiner performs with flamboyance, while like Dorval his wife – Hillary Clinton’s long-serving aide Huma Abedin – reacts in agonized silence. The updating of this narrative to the present day is further achieved by this film’s disclosure of how contemporary social media, most notably in Weiner’s compulsive ‘sexting’, become the instrument of his downfall. As a documentary of an election campaign, Weiner is the latest in a sequence whose best-known examples are the 1960 Primary (Robert Drew, Richard Leacock, Albert Maysles, and D. A. Pennebaker) and the 1993 The War Room (Chris Hegedus, D. A. Pennebaker), on the presidential campaigns of the Democratic candidates John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton. The Clinton administration of 1992–2000 – and that President’s unhappy emulation of his predecessor’s fabled White House trysts – is a key reference point, since the events it depicts both echoed the scandal of Clinton’s dalliance with a young

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intern and harmed Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential bid. In harking back to the era of the Clinton impeachment, Weiner also recalls that decade’s related attention to the constitution and fragility of masculine identity, a theme that has been much observed in regard to the conduct and social context of his ‘performative presidency’.2 Filmed by Kriegman, a former Weiner Chief of Staff, it has been described as the apex of this trilogy of investigations into the political rise of ‘performative and narcissistic modes of “alpha” masculinity’ (Pramaggiore 2016) that ultimately led to Donald Trump’s election. But, unlike the victories documented by its predecessors, Weiner follows its candidate to disgrace and defeat.

Scandal The downward trajectory of the politician’s fortunes is telegraphed at the film’s opening with an epigraph from Marshall McLuhan, ‘The name of a man is a numbing blow from which he never recovers’ (1964: 32),3 followed by a shot of its subject holding a phone to his ear while muttering, ‘This is the worst … making a documentary about my scandal.’ Weiner’s announcement inaugurates the film’s retrospective structure, in which – intercut with footage of his disastrous campaign in the 2013 Democratic primary for mayor of New York – he intermittently reflects on his career and its destruction. It opens in 2011 as it ends, in disgrace, with the once-popular advocate of the city’s working class forced to resign from the House of Representatives after admitting that he has exchanged sexually explicit images with six women over three years. Well and truly home from ‘the Hill’, as Washington insiders refer to the site of the US Congress, Weiner attempts to revive his career two years later by entering the primary, but the redemption narrative clearly anticipated at the outset of filming is sabotaged by revelations of further sexting. Its makers follow the politician, his staff, and his family from the initial declaration of candidacy to defeat, access so intimate that at one point Kriegman can be heard asking ‘Why are you letting us film this?’ If Weiner’s comeback from the scandal that led to his resignation from Congress was the anticipated arc of the documentary’s narrative, it instead becomes a record of a further scandal, with that phenomenon’s familiar story of ‘infidelity and disloyalty, of lying and evading detection, made scandalous by contrast to the role expectations of the person having the affair’ – although sexting tests the meaning of ‘affair’. As this description by Joshua Gamson (2016a: 77)

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suggests, sexual scandal has a genre, and it is melodrama. The dramaturgy of this form of journalism was established in Britain in 1885, when the Pall Mall Gazette published W. T. Stead’s ‘The Maiden Tribute of Modern Babylon’ in three sensational instalments. Stead’s account of the aristocratic deflowering of trafficked adolescents followed the conventions of Victorian stage melodrama and street literature: ‘sentimental moralism, prurient details, and a focus on passive, innocent female victims and individual evil men’ (Walkowitz 1984: 48). Although Weiner’s sexting initially bore little resemblance to Stead’s revelations, which were themselves highly exaggerated, its transformation to a scandal in this stark tradition, as revealed by a modern British heir to the Gazette, the Daily Mail, is an extraordinary aspect of this film’s aftermath. In what becomes a meta-melodrama, the protagonist’s destructive impulses damage far more than himself and his family, moving beyond the allegory of national conflict across the tumultuous decades traversed by Thirty Years to affect the actual US presidential election of 2016. Introducing its protagonist as a former congressional star married to one of Hillary Clinton’s closest advisers at a ceremony officiated by her husband, Weiner establishes a rhythmic alternation of TV news clips and tabloid headlines with its own footage of street level campaigning and backroom strategy sessions. This conventional election film fodder is spiced with Weiner’s later reflections after his loss in the primary, and scenes of him, Abedin, and their toddler son Jordan in the family apartment. The intimate access granted the filmmakers appears to be part of an initial attempt to represent the candidate as a reformed paterfamilias in a People magazine interview and a TV commercial glimpsed in the documentary. It takes the film into the realm of melodrama, at times acutely combining the generic staging of domestic relations with the conduct of a campaign whose attempt to rehabilitate the candidate requires his reassertion of ‘family values’. In a key staff meeting whose mise en scène recalls the stifling suburban living room in Douglas Sirk’s All That Heaven Allows (1956), Weiner and Abedin gather in their Park Avenue apartment with senior members of his campaign team after news of further sexting has broken. The site of this emergency conference seems to have been chosen for secrecy, but the media have discovered it and are waiting outside. The living room is crowded with family photographs, domestic decor, and devastated staff members sitting in a semicircle facing their errant boss. One voices his ‘frustration at your lack of clarity with me in numerous conversations’. Another demands an apology for her team. The press officer suppresses tears when a colleague reports that journalists are threatening to write that she too is having

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an affair with Weiner. The room is divided by a coffee table, barricading the candidate on the couch. Abedin stands above the group at a doorway, offering only a few terse observations. Jordan is also present, passed from lap to lap, his noisy babble intensifying the sense of crisis that Weiner attempts to calm. The demands of family life are presented in vivid conflict with the imperatives of an electoral campaign predicated on reaffirming the candidate’s commitment to that life. In the standard counterpoint of such documentaries, the differences between such private occasions and public behaviour are marked. Several scenes show the candidate, his wife, or his staff assuming campaign mode, with two of the most bravura performances by the otherwise reserved Abedin. In one she telephones potential campaign contributors with a warmth that disappears as soon as the cheque is promised. In another, after the second scandal erupts, she attempts to mollify reporters by entering a press conference with her husband, composing her features and declaring ‘It took a lot of work, and a whole lot of therapy, to get to a place where I could forgive Anthony … I love him, I have forgiven him, I believe in him, and as we have said from the beginning, we are moving forward.’ A reverse contrast shows Weiner, after his fortissimo indictment of his colleagues’ dishonest invocation of congressional procedure to vote down medical care for 9/11 responders, admitting that he lied about his sexual conduct to the media and his wife. With his interlocutor unseen behind the camera, this admission has the effect of the soliloquy in early stage melodrama, in which the villain confesses to his crimes. Instead of the psychic division revealed in tragic soliloquies, those of nineteenth-century melodrama are described by Peter Brooks (1995:  38) as ‘pure self-expression, the venting of what one is and how it feels to be that way, the saying of self and its emotional integers’. Melodrama’s foundational contribution to modern stardom, its thematic and professional emphasis on the individual, helps to explain how this dramatised self-expression survives in the ‘self-production’ identified by contemporary sociologist David Marshall (2010: 44–5) at ‘the very core of celebrity activity’. In a discussion of that activity’s relation to social media prior to the Weiner scandal, Marshall distinguishes the public self of the celebrity’s official publicity, the public private self of carefully constructed social networking, and the transgressive intimate self conveyed by an ill-considered Twitter post, for example, when the sender is ‘motivated by temporary emotion’: It is also the kind of information/image that passes virally through the internet because of its visceral quality of being closer to the core of being.

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But even this transgressive intimacy remains more or less safely within the asymmetrical relation that psychologists describe as ‘para-social’, unlike Weiner’s calamitous self-exposure in exchanging explicitly sexual texts and images with a series of women claiming to be his admirers. Where the villain’s soliloquy in nineteenth-century plays functions as a dramatic disclosure of his misdoings, Weiner’s notoriety at the film’s opening ensures that we already know them. Indeed, his admission of lying seems, in the famous paradox, to be evidence of his honesty, or at least a psychological irrepressibility that matches that of the errant bulge in his underpants. Moreover, this ‘venting’ is wholly compact with his sexual exhibitionism. Although the film shows him strategizing to keep control of his scandals, it diverges from previous documentaries of political spin to emphasize this continuous saying of self. Weiner’s doomed comeback is entirely about this self, its survival, and its moral measurement. If his seven congressional terms suggest actual policy commitments, these are as little mentioned in the film as they are in the campaign commercial we see, which directs viewers interested in his sixty-four proposals for New York City to consult his website. When at the film’s conclusion he places last in the mayoral race he declares that he has no regrets about the documentary – ‘I wanted to be viewed as the full person that I was.’ The villain’s self-expression in early stage melodrama also involves the sensational revelation of his name, with a birth certificate often produced ‘to establish true or seeming proof of moral identity’ (Brooks 1995: 39). In Home from the Hill the tombstone at the film’s end replaces the birth certificate, memorializing Wade Hunnicutt on marble of the same blood-red as his trophy room. The eponymous title of Weiner operates within this tradition, insisting on the importance of nomination in the protagonist’s life. In the claim of the McLuhan epigraph Weiner is a victim of his name, which features in a montage of punning headlines of the ‘Weiner Exposed’ variety (Figure 18) in the pretitle sequence and then is repeatedly reinscribed as the title flashes up in fifteen different typefaces. The tabloids’ puns on this name offer the film a seemingly endless supply of sadistic humour, with Weiner’s grim acknowledgement that it has become a ‘punch line’ intensifying that expression’s sense of injury. Here another McLuhan observation, that the newspaper ‘headline is a primitive shout of rage, triumph, fear, or warning’ (1951: 7), might also be cited to suggest the emotional force of these puns. Their major source in this film is the Republican New York Post, and in one scene the politician bravely agrees to an interview with a Post reporter who begins by asking him which of the paper’s headlines is his favourite. As he protests that he doesn’t read it, a border of Post front pages

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Figure 18  Headline from the New York Post in Weiner (Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg, 2016, Edgeline Films/Motto Pictures).

runs below him, displaying headlines that include ‘Weiner Roast’, ‘Weiner: I’ll Stick It Out’ and – after the President suggests that he resign – ‘Obama Beats Weiner’. Weiner may not read the Post but the Post reads him. The parade of its front pages suggests the media’s relentless pursuit of the politician – visually framed by his name— through the film’s space and time. When additional sexts from the politician signed ‘Carlos Danger’ are later leaked, TV comic Steven Colbert quips that the pseudonym may be an attempt to avoid ‘a ridiculous name, like Anthony Weiner’. That the leaker, a 23-year-old college student with aspirations to porn stardom, is called Sydney Leathers makes the protagonist’s own name seem even more like a moral personification in a tradition that goes back beyond Victorian melodrama and the sentimental fiction of Dickens to the satires of Richard Brinsley Sheridan and the comedies of Ben Jonson. As this study has argued, fame may be acquired via depiction or nomination. If the illustrious family name can function as a conduit to public approval, the name that indicates immigrant origin can invite disdain or derision. Weiner is the Jewish protagonist’s patronym, which in Yiddish derives from ‘vayner’ or wine merchant. In the more common spelling ‘wiener’, it is also American slang for the penis, through that organ’s resemblance to a Vienna sausage. If this film is suggesting that the name has had a performative effect on the life, how relevant is its ethnicity? Is there an anti-Semitic tinge to this ridicule reminiscent of the Clinton scandal, when Monica Lewinsky’s father bitterly complained that

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his family name – and not Clinton’s – had become synonymous with oral sex (Merck 2001: 199)? Is Weiner assumed to be anxious about his weenie because as a Jew he cannot be virile? Or has his genital self-portraiture combined image and nomination to function like an obscene rebus, a ‘sext’, graphically activating the penile pun? Whatever one’s estimate of the fatalistic determination of this name, it marks a watershed in the history of sexting, with its early innocence ‘when we were not yet versed in the risks and etiquette of naked selfies’ now seen as ‘a preWeiner, pre-hack time’ (Sciortino 2015).

Sexting Conventionally defined as a sexually explicit text or image of oneself sent by mobile phone or another digital device, the ‘sext’ is a product of the camera phone, enhanced by the development of various direct messaging applications. Named in newspapers as early as 2005, sexting is a widely practised form of communication among adults and adolescents, although a variety of surveys have yielded significantly differing rates of prevalence. Despite widespread concern about teen sexting, a 2014 review of published research (Klettke, Hallford and Mellor) tentatively suggests that adults are more likely to send and receive such material and women – perhaps under pressure –more likely to send it than men. Participation has also been found to be higher in particular social groups, with one study (Wysocki and Childers, 2011) focusing on spouses seeking extramarital sexual liaisons. Reflecting the social anxieties provoked by this practice, the emphasis of most research has been on adolescent participation, that of girls and women, and the risks of non-consensual circulation, postbreak-up ‘revenge porn’, paedophiliac grooming and being caught cheating on a partner. For celebrities carefully cultivating their public images, such as film stars whose intimate communications are vulnerable to hacking, professionals guarding their reputations for probity, or politicians courting the electorate, the stakes are even higher. To offset these risks applications such as Snapchat are timed to self-destruct, but this is possible to prevent through photo capturing technology or screenshots taken by another device. By the date of Weiner’s final campaign the consequence of these considerations was that sexting was routinely associated with risk-taking, infidelity, and a feminized self-display. Not a good look for a man running for mayor of New York. Social media networks, it has been argued, trade ‘discretion for attention’ (Almond 2016: 100), attention that can expand in the positive direction of

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public esteem or the negativity of notoriety. While the first seems to be the lure of politics for Weiner, the second is his fate. When he inaugurates his mayoral campaign by cycling around the city, he is filmed being filmed by the media. As he stops at a crosswalk a woman asks – in a wonderful illustration of the quasifame of contemporary notables – ‘Why are they filming you? Are you somebody I’m supposed to know?’ After a pedestrian identifies the former congressman the sceptical woman seeks further confirmation, asking another onlooker ‘Is that Anthony Weiner?’ (Conversely, when the candidate rings a Democratic party member to appeal for her vote, he is comically indignant when she asks him which Anthony Weiner is calling, as though there could be anyone else with that name.) The documentary concludes with a young boy’s delight when he sees Weiner posing for a photographer on the sidewalk across from his school, demands one of his own and phones his mother: ‘Guess who I’m standing in front of? Anthony Weiner!’ The presence of cameras seems to prompt these identifications, with the politician’s name pronounced respectfully rather than with disdain. But the harm his behaviour has done to it is also represented in his rueful advice to the boy that he should not look him up on Wikipedia. Weiner does not suppress his pleasure in this public regard, glad handing supporters, upstaging rival candidates in TV debates, prancing down the New York streets to the applause of onlookers in parades for Gay Pride, Israel and Ecuador – a range of affiliations wholly unexplored in the film, as is his work as a corporate consultant after leaving Congress.4 In his retrospective musings he admits that ‘politicians are probably wired in some way that needs attention’, and asks himself – in a question that seems to echo the therapy mentioned by Abedin – whether ‘the superficial and transactional nature’ of his political relationships are the cause or the effect of his failure to connect with people more personally. Claiming that his online encounters had the ease and inconsequence of a video game, smoothly progressing from the internet equivalent of fan mail to illustrated sex talk, he considers whether ‘the technology that undid me’ enabled a superficiality that he actually sought. A sample passage of flirtatious badinage is typed up on the screen to illustrate a relation he describes as a friendship: So glad you are cool with me stalking you! We have a special secret agency that deals with hot women.

But this innocuous exchange is quickly followed by a more graphic one read aloud on the late night chat show Real Time with Bill Maher by Glee star Jane Lynch and Maher himself:

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I want to bang the future Mayor of New York City! Making me hard …

The media’s comic savouring of this scandal is impossible for Kriegman and Steinberg to resist, but as their film enfolds the press and TV disclosure of Weiner’s sexts into its own text, it risks complicity with the tabloid sensationalism it depicts: ‘The laws of entertainment gravity’, Weiner himself warns, ‘are going to suck the documentary into the same vortex’. This foregrounding of mediation is not new to the election documentary. Both Primary and The War Room have also been hailed for their attention to the media’s influence on American elections, but Weiner goes much further in its portrayal of a candidate who mediates himself by sending sexts later leaked to the public and then offering further comment on this correspondence. This remarkable inclination to self-representation is reminiscent of another documentary of sexual scandal, Capturing the Friedmans (Andrew Jarecki, 2003), which reviews the 1980s investigation of a middle-class computing teacher, Arnold Friedman, and his son Jesse for child molestation. Both men eventually served prison sentences for those crimes, although the evidence against them is questioned in the film. As their Long Island family awaited court proceedings, they made home videos of their conversations discussing the prosecution. These videos, together with earlier Friedman home movies, figure extensively in a film about the photographic media’s importance to this family, from the sound of the projector at its onset, to the cinematic reference in the title song ‘Act Naturally’ (‘They’re going to put me in the movies’), to the constant footage of Friedmans performing for each other, to the trial, which was the first in the county to be broadcast. Moreover, as the film reveals, the only material evidence of Arnold Friedman’s paedophilia were the pornographic magazines that he hid in his office. But the allegations against the Friedmans did not involve image-making, and the consensual exchange of sexual ‘selfies’ between adults is no crime at all. As a New Yorker commentary read aloud in Weiner by its always mediaconscious subject argues, the ‘preening self-promoter who never saw a camera, television or smart phone he didn’t glom onto … did not have any inappropriate contact, or any physical contact, with any person. He and his partners in sin have never been in the same room at the same time’ (Hertzberg 2013). Yet, while the virtuality of his encounters exempted Weiner from accusations of inappropriate physical contact, his sexting eventually became both proof of crime and the crime itself. As a recording which automatically includes the participant, the penis photograph has been aptly described as a ‘gotcha mechanism’, ‘the new “smoking

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gun”’(Gamson 2016a: 78) providing graphic evidence of illicit intimacy. If the recipient is under eighteen the photograph may be described as obscene material transferred to a minor and the illicit deemed illegal. In 2016 new allegations to this effect would suggest a more disturbing commonality between the politician and the Friedmans.

The Clinton Connection Weiner’s final act redirects the spectator from its titular subject to his wife, Huma Abedin, whose long service for Hillary Clinton made her an establishment figure in New York politics at the time of filming, and the apparent lure for many who signed up to work for her husband. When Leathers’s revelations sink the candidate’s polls and the morale of his campaign team, public attention, and that of the documentary, shift to the popular woman whose continued endorsement has been offered as evidence of the candidate’s character. Is she the paradigmatic Good Wife – the CBS series of uxorial loyalty in Chicago politics much cited during the campaign – the melodramatic victim whose suffering proves her innocence? As the film makes clear, the wife functions as the gauge of her husband’s decency only if she is virtuous. What if they are both pursuing power and personal gain? Our moral assessment of Abedin is complicated by her occupation of another role traditional to melodrama, that of the mute, signalling her feelings by facial expression and gesture rather than speech. Although a brief debate with her husband over the contents of rival pasta sauces suggests the couple’s amused affection, Abedin speaks very little, mostly in service to the campaign. This reticence is initially presented as evidence of her wifely support of her spouse, modestly emerging from the background to testify to the couple’s love for New York and each other; but as new scandal breaks, her eye rolls and grimaces take on a more antagonistic import. Hovering at the edge of a crisis meeting to monitor its damage-limitation strategy, or signalling a move off camera with a sharp clap, she seems increasingly desperate to escape the film, if not her marriage. ‘Her fragile, weary dance between belief and doubt, hope and disappointment, evident in her large eyes’, held one commentator on the documentary ‘spellbound’ (Orange 2016: 208), echoing the observations of Marie Dorval’s performance in Thirty Years: ‘Dorval’s eye movements, most frequently cast toward the ground or to the side, disclose suffering, strength and inner resolve’ (Knapp 2007: 58).

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Over ‘the meme of the disgraced politician and the sad-eyed wife’ (Adewunmi) looms its most famous personae, the Clintons. The former President is named at the film’s beginning as the officiator at the couple’s 2009 marriage. At its end he is seen performing a similar function, inaugurating the city’s newly elected mayor, Bill de Blasio. Although these roles suggest an abiding authority, Bill Clinton remains in the background, distantly viewed in a wedding photograph and heard swearing in De Blasio over a final shot of Weiner and his family. More central is Abedin’s employer, then preparing her 2016 presidential bid. As Weiner’s campaign collapses, a TV newscaster reports that despite standing by her own man Hillary Clinton has demanded that her aide chose between her husband and her job. With the mayoral election approaching, Abedin heeds the advice of Clinton’s political strategist Philippe Reins and refuses to appear with her spouse as he casts his ballot. When the publicity-hungry Leathers announces that she will crash the campaign’s election night party, Abedin declares that she will not ‘face the indignity of being accosted by that woman’ and rides to the gathering in frosty silence until Weiner directs the driver to take her home. No longer, if ever, the willing victim, she is last seen as the senior partner in the family. Intercut with the inauguration of the new mayor, a shot of them on a city sidewalk frames the wife in sunglasses taking a call on her phone while the crestfallen husband minds their son in his stroller (Figure 19). Denied the dignity of a final act demise, Weiner is shown in the credit sequence clinging to

Figure 19  The defeated Anthony Weiner with his family in Weiner (Josh Kriegman and Elyse Steinberg, 2016, Edgeline Films/Motto Pictures).

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a negotiable notoriety as a TV panellist. The topic is the future of politics in an age of perpetual media surveillance – one that would become even more urgent in the aftermath of the film. Weiner’s depiction of male sexual transgression and chastisement takes the spectator back to the 1990s, as Hillary Clinton’s campaign would transport the American electorate in the 2016 presidential election. The graphic nature of his online exchanges revives the frisson of the explicit that made the tales from the ‘Oral Office’ so compelling. Ejaculation had not featured extensively in the American press before the 1990s, let alone the idea that the head of state would use a cigar as a dildo. As ever, children became the excuse for extended perorations on these practices, with the news magazines Time and Newsweek instructing their readers on how to respond to the question – interestingly directed in both to the female parent – ‘Mom, what’s oral sex?’ (Merck 2001: 7–8). In the era of Don’t Ask/Don’t Tell5 the sheer delight in talking about all this – verbal exhibitionism not unlike Weiner’s physical display – was also a feature of the new feminist disclosure that had emerged in the Sex Wars of the 1980s. By the 1990s this explicitness had arrived in the academy, together with queer theory’s polemic ‘against proper objects’ in the legitimation of sexual practices, and even more ambitiously, in the definition and disciplining of ‘sex’. Judith Butler’s dissection of the latter as ‘discourses of sensation, acts, and sexual practice as well’ (Butler 1994: 2), anticipated a key issue in the President’s impeachment: what exactly is sex? Or the ‘sexual relationship’ that Clinton denied on the grounds that his encounters with Monica Lewinsky were without genital intercourse, regardless of what other activities may have transpired? (The virtual nature of Weiner’s exchanges would raise similar questions about the relationship of sexting to sex.)6 Newspaper illustrators responded to Clinton’s prevarications by replacing his nose with a Pinocchio penis that got longer the more he lied – a motif that was also revived in the Weiner scandals. In the Guardian, cartoonist Steve Bell drew the man Lewinsky affectionately referred to as ‘fuckface’ addressing the public from his crotch, aligning his mouth with her vagina (Merck 2001: 194–6). If hysteria is a hallmark of the crisis of masculinity, the wandering womb diagnosed by Victorian medics was suitably replaced in these caricatures by the ascending penis or the descending mouth. Here the apposite commentator is Elisabeth Bronfen (1998: 385), with her reflections on how in The Fly (1986) and Dead Ringers (1988) David Cronenberg stages the organic dissolution of his hysterical male scientists in a womb envy conflicted ‘between the desire to have control … and a desire for disempowerment’. Reading the Starr Report as evidence of a

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similar conflict, Brenton Malin (2005: 18) comments on how its ‘infamous cigar story serves as a vignette of Clinton’s paradoxical masculinity. Both a symbol of Clinton’s sexuality and potent hypermasculinity (indeed, the cigar is a staple symbol of manhood), it also serves to demonstrate his impotence – the prosthesis he requires to consummate this sexual act.’ And if Clinton’s sexploits served only to diminish his masculinity, the apparent compulsiveness with which he risked not only a liaison with a White House intern but a career history of what his staff called ‘bimbo eruptions’ opened him to further accusations of a very unmanly lack of self control. Understood as a compulsion, Weiner’s sexting similarly feminizes him. If the organic dissolution in Clinton’s caricatures corresponds to the wandering womb of the female hysteric, Weiner is even more vulnerable to the perception that his wayward penis keeps escaping from his control into the Cloud. In often headless or crotch shots sent to more correspondents than he can precisely recall, then tweeted and taken ‘viral’, they manifest the bizarre proliferation for which Cronenberg’s narratives of mass infection prepare us. And unlike Clinton, Weiner is the author of these caricatures, the exhibitionist who displays his genitals with the intent to impress the spectator. This self-display complicates the cultural – if not the clinical – gendering of the voyeurism/exhibitionism opposition. In these sexts the male is the object as well as the subject of the gaze – a gaze which he has both solicited and initiated via his own ‘selfies’. Where Leathers’s bosomy poses seem wholly conventional, Weiner’s eagerness to exhibit his gym-toned pecs as well as his penis reveals a traditionally feminine narcissism overlaid with a masculine demand for attention.7 As a former congressional representative of ‘the law’ who now ‘throw[s] the system into turmoil’, to quote David Rodowick (1987: 278–9) on the fathers of 1950s melodrama, the compulsive exhibitionist is split, like the genre itself, between ‘madness and authority’. The divided nature of this masculine subjectivity may explain why Weiner seems such a melodramatic figure, as does the sense of doom generated by people with a compulsion to repeat the same experiences.8 In Freud’s (1955b: 21) observation ‘The impression they give is of being pursued by a malignant fate or possessed by some “daemonic” power.’ Eschewing the gothic, psychoanalysis attributes these compulsions to infantile influences. In the case of apparently shameless exhibitionists that influence seems to be their shaming as young children who ‘show an unmistakable satisfaction in exposing their bodies, with especial emphasis on the sexual parts’ (Freud 1953: 192). The castration anxiety that may follow this chastisement is anxiously repressed by the repetition of the initially pleasurable act of physical exposure – shamelessness motivated

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by shame. Or as Eve Sedgwick and Adam Frank (2003: 38) summarize such convergent antinomies, ‘shame and pride, shame and dignity, shame and selfdisplay, shame and exhibitionism are different interlinings of the same glove’. To which we should add shame and fame – abjection assuaged by public attention. When, however, public attention is directed at a private part the consequences may be less consoling, and again the Clinton scandal offers a precedent. Monica Lewinsky’s revelations raised an issue that preoccupied sexual theory at the turn of the millennium, and indeed structured a notable commentary on the impeachment: the fate of ‘the phallus’. In a 2001 discussion of her testimony, Loren Glass reconsiders masculine authority ‘After the Phallus’, citing the Lacanian axiom ‘which dictates that the anatomical referent be hidden behind the transcendental signifier’: Patriarchy to a great degree depends upon concealing the anatomical penis behind the symbolic phallus. The penis – in the end a paltry thing – must be concealed if its fictional equation to the omnipotent phallus is to be sustained. All this attention to the President’s penis reveals that the patriarchy is in trouble, that traditional discourses of masculine symbolic authority are disintegrating. (Glass 2001: 547)

Mobilizing Camille Paglia’s comparison of the President with a melodramatic diva in the style of Judy Garland (too emotional) and Slavoj Zizek’s with Freud’s patriarch of obscene enjoyment in Totem and Taboo (way too libidinal), Glass maintains that Clinton’s transgressions displaced ‘moral authority from the father to the feminist’, in the person of his wife. But in a remarkably prescient observation Glass warns of the female sacrifice necessary to accede to this idealization: ‘To have the phallus is to be impotent, and to live the horrifying secret of one’s own inadequacy to the ideal. Under patriarchy, men had the double standard to hide behind; for women in postOedipal society, the consequence has been more of a double bind’ (Glass 2001: 557). Although the Weiner scandal was met with reminders that the adulterous male politician has been a bipartisan commonplace in US politics – see Alexander Hamilton, Grover Cleveland, Franklin Roosevelt, the Kennedy brothers, Gary Hart, Rudy Giuliani, et al. – the doubling of errant husbands on the Democratic side in the 2016 presidential election arguably amplified the counter accusations that Donald Trump deployed as complaints of his own sexual misbehaviour mounted in the summer before the ballot. But instead of eliciting sympathy for

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these two men’s loyal spouses, their victimization was transformed into villainy by their political prominence and their silence. Hillary Clinton’s ostensible power, and its interdependence with that of her husband, had long prompted speculations of an ‘arrangement’ tolerating or ignoring his relations with other women. With his departure from electoral politics and her entry into it, her phallicization, as Senate hawk, US Secretary of State, and two-time presidential candidate, brought to fruition the imputations of masculinity dating back to her Arkansas law practice, thick spectacles, aversion to baking, and retention of her family name Rodham – which inevitably acquires its own satiric import after the pun fest of this film. The speculation about Abedin is more recent, but the photograph of Bill Clinton conducting her wedding to Weiner reminds the spectator of the complexities of political marriages. If Hillary has long been the Lady Macbeth of the Fox News imaginary, the scheming wife indifferent to anything but her own ambition, the documentary shows her aide dubbed in a New York Post headline ‘Senora Danger’, an appellation that sounds more sinister over the paper’s claim that she not only stood by but colluded with her husband (Callaghan 2013: 6). In the American press, only the New Yorker’s Emily Greenhouse (2013) departed from melodrama’s moralism to ask whether Abedin might be neither villain nor victim, but a partner in ‘gasp – an open marriage?’ Although Weiner concludes without airing this debate, its release two and half years after the events it records gave it a powerful pertinence to the 2016 presidential election. In January of that year, the documentary debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. ‘The film comes at an uncomfortable time for Mrs. Clinton’s presidential campaign’, the New York Times observed, ‘as it grapples with attacks from both the Republican candidate Donald J. Trump and others reminding voters of episodes of her husband’s past’ (Chozick and Barnes 2016). The article continued by noting the centrality of Abedin to the ‘visceral’9 documentary and the questions it provoked about her relationship with her husband before concluding that it was ‘potentially distracting’ to Clinton’s campaign. When the film opened nationally in May, the NBC current affairs programme Inside Edition – a tabloid TV series in which the affairs are often of a sexual nature – asked ‘Is Donald Trump going to use a new documentary to attack Hillary Clinton?’ By then a professional porn performer, Sydney Leathers appeared on the programme declaring that ‘Hillary would know what it’s like to have a husband who’s done something wrong’, while Trump was shown telling a Massachusetts campaign rally, ‘Huma is getting classified secrets. She’s married to Anthony Weiner, who’s a perv.’

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In pursuit of a more professional diagnosis, Vanity Fair convened a psychiatrist, a clinical psychologist, and a psychiatric social worker to comment on the impressions they derived from the film. All remarked on Weiner’s apparent ‘lack of impulse control’ and ‘interpersonal insensitivity’, with one observing that the latter was reflected in Weiner’s ‘original agreement to do the film’, and another asking ‘When you need that kind of attention – who is he without the camera?’ More perplexing to one commentator was the mystery of ‘this powerful, smart, elegant, accomplished, polished woman, very savvy politically, and yet she seems to be doing whatever he’s asking her to do, including having these cameras in their home while she’s having breakfast or with her child. It’s just incredibly intrusive.’ Another saw the Weiner–Abedin relationship as ‘calculated. Throughout the film, they were both, in a sense campaigning’ (Handy 2016). Three months later the marriage finally came apart, when Weiner’s bête noire, the New York Post, reported in August that he had continued sexting after his mayoral defeat, sending a close-up of his midsection, his erection outlined by his briefs, to an unnamed forty-year-old woman. Also visible was four-year-old Jordan, sleeping beside him on the bed. By bringing the final member of the family – the son and heir – into the frame, Weiner moved the melodrama towards its traditional conclusion, in which the endangered principle of futurity must be defended. The next day Abedin announced the couple’s separation. Yet to come was the denouement in what Weiner’s lawyers later described as his ‘operatic self destruction’, triggered by his sexting of a high school sophomore from North Carolina. Less than six weeks before the election, on 21 September, the London Daily Mail revealed Weiner’s online exchanges with the student involving requests for her to disrobe and engage in rape fantasies. At one of these she had disclosed her age, fifteen. Not mentioned, until she appeared on Inside Edition a year later, were her motives for approaching a figure whose notoriety she was well aware of: ‘I knew that Hillary Clinton would be running for President in the year 2016. I wanted to see if Anthony was still up to his old antics.’ The unnamed teen’s revelations not only amplified the destruction that Sydney Leathers had already wreaked on Weiner’s political ambitions, they were orchestrated by Leathers herself when the girl, who ‘talked about potentially messing with Hillary’s campaign’,10 sought her advice. Leathers directed her and her father, an attorney, to the Daily Mail’s online edition, with which she had had previous dealings. Their negotiations concluded with a fee of $30,000 paid to the girl and an undisclosed amount to Leathers for an interview running to 2,200 words illustrated by multiple screen shots of Weiner’s texts and poses (Goodman

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2016). In it the teen’s father claimed that his daughter’s psychological fragility had prevented him from reporting Weiner to the authorities and urged ‘anybody out there that has a similar story’ to come forward. An FBI investigation into the production of child pornography was immediately commenced, subpoenaing all Weiner’s devices. On the hard drive of his laptop agents discovered emails between Abedin and Hillary Clinton which they hoped were those they had failed to locate in their year long troll of the official communications exchanged on Clinton’s personal server while Secretary of State. That investigation had ended in the previous July without prosecution. After hesitating for a month, FBI Director James Comey declared it reopened – eleven days before the election – and Clinton’s polls began to decline. A jubilant Trump TV ad announced ‘Hillary Clinton is under FBI investigation again, after her emails were found on pervert Anthony Weiner’s laptop. Think about that! America’s most sensitive secrets, unlawfully sent, received and exposed by Hillary Clinton, her staff and Anthony Weiner’ (Elkin 2017). On 6 November Comey informed Congress that the reopened investigation had discovered no new evidence. Two days later Clinton was defeated. In September 2017 Anthony Weiner was sentenced to twenty-one months in prison for sending obscene material to a minor. Arguing against the incarceration of an offender already submitted to ‘significant extrajudicial punishment’, his lawyers maintained that ‘Anthony might once have been a punch line, but he is now – to many in this country – something far worse, as a result of Secretary Clinton’s loss’ (Devlin-Brown and Manju 2017), surely the first time that causing the defeat of a presidential candidate was entered in a plea of mitigation of a criminal sentence. Pronouncing its own verdict, a New York Times editorial declared ‘Weiner – smart, often witty, politically deft, at one time plausibly a strong candidate for New York mayor – proved to be a pathetic jerk. But few jerks do as much damage as he did in his recklessness. He may even be responsible for Donald Trump being president’ (New York Times Editorial Board 2017). That his private parts played so public a role in ending what the New Republic called ‘the prospect of Hillary Clinton becoming the first penis-free president’ (Heer 2016) was not the least of the ironies in Weiner’s long running soap opera – a description courtesy of Sydney Leathers.11 The presumptive inheritor of her husband’s office was defeated by a strikingly illegitimate candidate, a political novice opposed by the appalled elders of his own party and assumed to be easily beatable. He did, however, share many characteristics with the protagonists of the films under consideration here. Like Wade Hunnicutt he was a big man given to grabbing wives and daughters, while his TV stardom in The Apprentice and

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Miss World ensured that everybody knew who he was long before he arrived in Washington. Like Anthony Weiner, his name was tumescent with meaning: a high-value playing card, a blast from a brass horn, the audible breaking of wind. Like Weiner he employed social media to communicate directly during his campaign, posting short clips of his shouted diatribes on YouTube and ruthlessly re-edited videos of Clinton on his Facebook page, bypassing the official purveyors of ‘fake news’ to insult his opponents and rally his supporters in his continuing declarations to the Twittersphere. Yet, despite his admissions of sexual molestation and substantial payments to multiple partners in extramarital sex, among them a porn actress with an even better sobriquet and a much longer list of credits than Sydney Leathers,12 Donald Trump escaped the retribution traditionally meted out to the melodramatic villain to become the 35th President of the United States of America. Perhaps, as Weiner predicted, the laws of entertainment gravity had sucked the film of his name into its vortex, followed by the entire country.

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A dissolute star meets a young female aspirant in a chance encounter. Deciding that she has a rare talent, he uses his considerable influence to foster her career. She becomes an overnight success while his popularity wanes. The two marry, but decline furthers his drinking. When she receives the highest award of her profession he ruins her acceptance speech with a drunken interruption. Humiliating confinement in a rehabilitation facility is followed by a lengthy binge. Finally his wife resolves to stop working in order to care for him. Fearing that her decision will destroy her career, he commits suicide. She is devastated, but persuaded to make a promised public appearance, where she honours her beloved mentor. At its 1937 debut A Star Is Born (William Wellman) was already considered a remake – so much so that the producers of an earlier feature contemplated a lawsuit.1 Their film, What Price Hollywood? (George Cukor 1932), adds a jealous husband to the alcoholic mentor in a storyline2 itself indebted to Theodore Dreiser’s 1900 novel Sister Carrie,3 but the ur-text for all these narratives is the ancient myth of the sculptor who, disgusted by the immorality of his countrywomen, falls in love with his carving of an idealized beauty and begs Venus for a mortal equivalent. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses the creator and his enlivened creation marry. In Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s one-act play Pygmalion, their future – indeed the possibility of a future – is more ambiguous. Rousseau declared his 1770 hybrid of music, pantomime and declamation a ‘melodrama’, a term frequently applied to the four films entitled A Star Is Born (1937, 1954, 1976, 2018). Reviews of the latest version, starring Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga, sustain this identification: Melodrama gets a bad rap sometimes. The term is swapped in for cheap storytelling or lazy filmmaking, and this is neither. But it is proudly, openly, resolutely designed to elicit an emotional response. (Holmes 2018)

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The movie works best, above all, as a melodrama about the limits and possibilities of love, and how love can make us into the best and worst version of ourselves in the very same moment. (Wilkinson 2018) In the various versions of “A Star Is Born”, the husband assumes the victim role, a figure that Cooper – who also directed – exalts by turning a romantic melodrama into a male weepie. (Dargis 2018)

Scholars of the melodrama have historically ascribed these characteristics – narrative contrivance, emotional intensity, and a victim–hero – to a popular form descended from more vernacular sources than Rousseau’s neoclassical ‘lyric scene’, whose nomination is often traced to the operatic melodramma seria (Brooks 1995: 217 n14). Nevertheless, as previously noted in this study, elements of eighteenth-century street entertainments, such as the monologue and pantomime performed in fairground plays unlicensed for dialogue, are also employed in Rousseau’s work. Moreover, as Monique Rooney has more recently argued, there is a clear thematic legacy in Pygmalion’s emphasis on plasticity and transformation inherited by twenty-first century melodramas such as Todd Haynes’s television remake of Mildred Pierce (2011). My claim in regard to the four Hollywood productions of A Star Is Born is even more radical: not only do these films sustain the thematic tradition described by Rooney, to a surprising extent they adhere to the narrative, gendered characterization, and – in the final three musical versions – form of Rousseau’s melodrama. In so doing they develop his eighteenth-century theatrical hybrid into a contemporary consideration of the relation of personal worth to public attention. In all four films, the contradiction between initial disregard and later public adulation, in the case of the aspiring woman, and its reverse, in the case of her mentor, follows the dynamic apparent in City Lights (Charlie Chaplin, 1931). As with the Little Tramp, the fact that the initial ‘unknown’ is played by an established star (Janet Gaynor, Judy Garland, Barbra Streisand and Lady Gaga) stimulates an anticipatory move from extradiegetic to diegetic recognition. The star’s achievement of stardom affirms the perceptiveness of romantic love and the perceptibility of ‘talent’. It also underscores the fatedness, the sense of predestination, with which the aspirant ascends. The character’s success is predicted by the star’s biography: Gaynor and Garland will win Oscars in their films because they had already won them in 1929 and 1939 respectively. The same is true for the Grammy awards presented to the characters played by Streisand

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and Gaga when, in the later remakes, cinema stardom is superseded by music. Finally, the remake itself relies upon the established success of its predecessors. In all four films, night-time glamour and performance, when the stars – and metaphorical spotlights, flashbulbs and illuminated vistas – come out, yield to the daytime labour – however cosmetic or magical – necessary to achieve them. This diurnal rhythm establishes the cyclical temporality of the star’s transformation, the move from ‘wannabe’ to ‘has been’ and back again – and again and again and again. At stake in this identification of stardom with states of being is existence itself. With the public’s attention at a premium, Hollywood’s first law of thermodynamics is insistently asserted: ‘For one star to be born, another must flame out’ (Wilkinson 2018). If these characters can’t ‘be somebody’, as Gaynor’s heroine declares her ambition, they become nobodies, ‘nonentities’ in the contemporary usage, a loss of existence literalized in each film. All four films retain Ovid’s designation of the creator as male and the creation female, as well as Rousseau’s addition of an avid subjectivity to the woman and the ‘languidness of an extinguished genius’ (2004c: 231) to the man. All four hold out the prospect of a joyful equilibrium in their relationship, only to show it destroyed by the increasing disparities in their fortunes. Although several real-life parallels for this couple have been suggested, allegorical read-offs of the feminization of success in the ruthlessly misogynistic realms of cinema and popular music seem implausible. The rebirth of the latest Star in the year after the rise of #MeToo has provoked some overdue questions about the warnings against women’s ambition suggested by the continual downfall of the male mentor. As Manohla Dargis (2018) observes, ‘just like the other “Star” films, this one turns on a mythos that has endured across much of the 20th century and into the 21st, one that suggests that female success is a zero sum game that comes at a man’s expense. And not just his expense, his life’.

A Star Is Born, 1937 Among the many shared aspects of the first film to be titled A Star Is Born and What Price Hollywood? is their producer, David O. Selznick. Selznick – who had since moved from the earlier film’s studio, RKO, and founded his own company – also attempted to hire its director, George Cukor, who declined on the grounds of the films’ similarity, only to be lured back for the 1954 version. The eventual director, William Wellman, had brought a first draft of the story, cowritten with Robert Carson, to the producer, who later took much of the credit for it. Challenging the belief that portrayals of the industry could not succeed,

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Selznick defended the idea of presenting ‘true reflections of what happened in Hollywood … in terms of a rising star in order to have the Cinderella element, with her path crossing with a falling star, to get the tragedy … and we created this more or less as we went along’ (Selznick 2000: 104). Dorothy Parker, a literary star acutely aware of her own celebrity and the attractions of alcohol, and her actor–writer husband Alan Campbell were contracted for the dialogue. But after a poor reception at a preview in Pomona, the final scene was rewritten by a junior writer named John Lee Mahin to include the line ‘This is Mrs. Norman Maine’, an idea Selznick also claimed in a memo of January 1937 to Wellman (Selznick 2000: 115–6). Given this attention to the story’s origination, and the broader issues of creation that it raises, it is perhaps less surprising that the film opens with its screenplay. A title sequence over a high angled technicolor shot of Hollywood at night cuts to a typed document headed ‘A Star Is Born’ and stamped: ‘Final Shooting Script’. The page turns to a teasing disclaimer, ‘Any similarity to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental’, and then to: Scene 1 FADE IN: MOONLIGHT. LONG SHOT EXPANSE OF SNOW. In the foreground, a wolf silhouetted in the snow. In the background the isolated farmhouse of the Blodgetts. As we hear the melancholy howling of the wolf, we DISSOLVE TO:

The Blodgett home in North Dakota, where father, aunt and grandmother welcome the return of young Esther (Janet Gaynor) and her young brother from the movies. An anxious discussion about her obsession with the pictures and fan magazines ensues, as Esther turns the pages of one in her lap. Before she even declares her belief that she too could become an actress, the film has acknowledged its clichéd screenplay and its source – the vast industry of Hollywood publicity that had inscribed the narrative of the provincial girl made good in the public’s consciousness. ‘Oh, Miss Blodgett’, her brother simpers, ‘Won’t you tell me the story of your success?’ As in What Price Hollywood?, whose aspiring actress poses with her face next to a picture of Clark Gable in a fan magazine, the morally questionable role of publicity is central to this story of success, and in all these films it is personified. But Esther’s ambition has an ally, for her dream, as her grandmother Lettie (May Robson) points out, is the quintessentially American one. A pioneer who

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has crossed the plains in a prairie schooner ‘to make a new country’, she projects the conquest of Hollywood as Esther’s manifest destiny: ‘Maybe Hollywood will be your wilderness now.’ In What Price Hollywood? the nationalization of the star is name checked, with a nod to Mary Pickford, in its heroine’s sobriquet – ‘America’s Pal’. But the screenwriters of this film have read Dreiser’s An American Tragedy – or viewed its 1931 Paramount adaptation4 – as well as Sister Carrie. Bestowing her savings on Esther, Granny Lettie warns her of another destiny, it too already inscribed: ‘For every dream of yours that may come true, you’ll pay the price in heartbreak.’ And so Esther departs the darkness of wintry North Dakota on the night train. Her arrival in sunny Hollywood only intensifies the sense of a muchtold tale in a highly familiar location – blue skies and a giant swimming pool superimposed by a caption ridiculing the story’s own fantasy: ‘Hollywood! … the beckoning El Dorado … Metropolis of Make-Believe in the California hills …’. Outside Grauman’s Chinese Theatre Esther surveys the footprints of Jean Harlow, Harold Lloyd, and Eddie Cantor, fitting her Cinderella feet into the impressions signed by her favourite actor, Norman Maine (Fredric March), ‘America’s Prince Charming’. At the Hollywood Bowl she sees him in person, drunkenly smashing an intrusive photographer’s camera. When they meet again at a party she’s been serving canapés with terrible take-offs of Garbo, Hepburn, and Mae West to the indifferent guests. Still drunk, Norman spies her, turns his back on his glamorous date and follows Esther into the kitchen where she’s stacking plates. Not for the first time,5 he decides that this pretty waitress has ‘got something’ and demands that his weary studio chief Oliver Niles (Adolph Menjou) give her a screen test – a ‘break’ with a visible pun in Norman’s joyful smashing of the plates at the end of the scene (Ames 1997: 29). The citationality of the narrative, and of celebrity itself, reaches its height when Esther is also given Joan Crawford’s lipline and – in a film preoccupied by nomination – the perennial new name: Vicki Lester – the amalgam of Lettie and Esther slyly suggesting how much this career owes to Granny’s ambition. Selznick had diluted Wellman and Carson’s unsentimental approach to this story, described by Ronald Haver (1980: 107) as ‘satiric to the point of caricature’, but its knowing tone is still most pronounced in the 1937 Star. Although the first in a series with intervals of seventeen, then twenty-two, then forty-two years, it could be the last. Knowing too is the film’s emphasis on the visual ‘discovery’ of the aspirant. Norman is captivated by his first sight of Esther. At the end of that evening, he asks her to turn back from her doorway so he can look at her again, a request lifted from What Price Hollywood? repeated twice more in this film and then

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in all its successors. Apart from the impersonations and her practice of the single line of her initial role, Esther is shown acting in only one brief scene from the film in which she soon co-stars with Norman, and much of this is their embrace, the first that we see. Lora Meredith’s acting will also be omitted from Imitation of Life (Douglas Sirk, 1959), raising similar questions about her ability, but her offstage posturing is so performative that it plausibly takes her to the top – a rise signified by a montage of marquees featuring her name, a device also debuted in What Price Hollywood? (Hogan 2019: 12). Here Laura Mulvey’s (1994: 131) suggestion that Lora’s ‘production of herself as a star’ signifies ‘the invisibility of labour as such, erased by the visibility of the commodity it produces’ also applies to Esther. Unlike the theatrical Lora – who begins on stage – Esther’s consistent naturalness fits her for the cinema. When the audience emerges from the preview of The Enchanted Hour, they are enchanted by Vicki Lester for reasons they can’t quite express. Like Norman, who comes up with ‘sincerity and honestness’, they praise her moral attributes: ‘a good girl’, ‘sweet’, stock qualities of the melodramatic ingénue. The parallel between their inchoate enthusiasm and Norman’s underlines the suggestion that fandom is like falling in love. More incisive is Niles’s bald description of Esther as ‘a little mild for present day tastes’, a ruthlessly accurate description of Gaynor’s very low key performance two years before she took early retirement. Esther might as well be made of marble. As with Rousseau’s Pygmalion and Ovid’s before it, the interest of this film is in her mentor, drinking away the favour of audiences, colleagues, and critics. After the preview the couple gaze at the Hollywood skyline as it glitters in the dark. Its latest star is thrilled by her success, while Norman is melancholy at his belated discovery of what he has always wanted. It’s not too late, Esther insists, and after his proposal during a glaringly symbolic prize fight she accepts his promise to reform. The enchantment holds through elopement under their real names: his is Albert Henkel, too ethnic, the script’s relentless wordplay suggests, for normal Main Street. But when the honeymooners return for the star’s presentation of the traditional Hollywood mansion with its traditional swimming pool to his new wife, Niles arrives with bad news. Again timing is the issue as the actor asks if he’s ‘slipping’. ‘The tense is wrong’, the chief declares sadly. ‘You’re not slipping, you’ve slipped.’ In consolation he offers Norman a role on a film without Esther, who is to be paired with a promising newcomer. ‘Let’s hope it’s not too late’, the rapidly dimming star replies. On a billboard for The Enchanted Hour Vicki Lester is smoothly pasted over Norman Maine. When his fan mail continues to decline he agrees to be released from his contract. He

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stays home, waits for the phone to ring and gamely teaches himself to make sandwiches. Then Esther receives an Academy Award nomination for a film called Dream Without End, whose title ironizes all the fantasies in this film, including its melodramatic drive to ‘get back to the time before it was too late’ (Williams 1998: 74). At the opening of Rousseau’s Pygmalion, the hero has also reached an end point. He too lives in an ‘opulent and superb city’ (Rousseau 2004c: 230–1) whose arts and inhabitants have lost their attraction. ‘It’s over, it’s over’, he laments. ‘I have lost my genius … Still so young, and I outlive my talent.’ Spurning the artists of his native Tyre, the company of friends and the ‘charming models’ who have attracted and inspired him, he consoles himself with the contemplation of his masterpiece, a sculpture of the nymph Galatea. Like Norman Maine, the sculptor insists that he must ‘see it again, examine it anew’. Unveiling the statue, he too is ‘intoxicated’, with ‘amour-propre’: ‘I adore myself in what I have made’ (232). This identification of the creator with his creation becomes the problem of the play. So great is the artist’s desire for the beautiful work in which he sees his genius that he contemplates animating it with his own soul. Horrified, he draws back, reasoning that he cannot see, love, and be loved by that which he is; but when the statue comes to life she too recognizes their unity, declaring as she touches her maker ‘Ah, still me’. The play concludes with Pygmalion holding Galatea’s hand to his heart, ecstatically acknowledging her enlivenment as his extinction: ‘It is you, it is you alone: I have given you all my being; I no longer live except through you’ (235–6). There is also a statue in A Star Is Born: not of a beautiful nymph whose living embodiment will be awarded to her male depicter, but of a muscular man whose award to a woman will prove fatal. Designed by MGM art director Cedric Gibbons, the gold-plated sculpture models a nude warrior with an enormous sword, standing on a reel of film whose spokes represent the five divisions of the Academy of Motion Pictures – actors, directors, producers, technicians, and writers. The phallic masculinity of this industrial incarnation – memorably described by 1994 Awards host Whoopi Goldberg as ‘the only 74-year-old man in Hollywood who doesn’t need Viagra to last three hours’6 – highlights the gender trespass of its female winners, the first of whom was the diminutive Janet Gaynor in 1929.7 Opening with a close-up of Esther’s Oscar-bedecked tickets, the Academy Awards scene foregrounds these figurines throughout the ceremony. When Norman drunkenly interrupts her acceptance speech, he reminds the audience of his own past award and demands three more for the worst performances of the year. Gesticulating wildly, he accidentally strikes

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Esther in the face, fulfilling the terrible portent of the prize fight. Taken home in disgrace to their Malibu beach house, he slumps unconscious on a chair, the upturned statue lying on the floor. Rehabilitation is followed by relapse, prompted by a vicious denunciation from the film’s comic villain Matt Libby (Lionel Stander), the studio publicist whose professional falsifications have been sorely tested by Norman’s antic honesty. Sent back to the Scotch by Libby’s jeer that ‘Mr. America of yesteryear … can live off your wife now’, Norman ends up in night court for drunk driving. At Esther’s pleading he is remanded in her custody and returned to Malibu. There she informs Niles that she must retire to take him away, where ‘it may not be too late’. When the chief protests that she’s giving up her life, she replies with the moral acknowledgement of their symbiosis: ‘so that I can try to give Norman back his’. ‘Goodbye, Vicki Lester’, the resigned Niles declares as he leaves, ‘you were a grand girl. Good luck, Mrs. Norman Maine.’ Sorrowfully contemplating the end of her existence as ‘somebody’, Esther looks up at the bookcase above her, sees her Oscar and bursts into tears. But Norman has overheard this conversation and emerges from the bedroom, robed and unshaven, to comfort her. Declaring his determination to regain his health, he announces a swim. After a final look at Esther, he walks out to the beach, shedding his robe and slippers before striding into the sea at sunset, his bared shoulders and tapering torso recalling the golden statue on the shelf. In Norman’s drowning, stardom’s temporal limitation finds its geographical equivalent: the westward progress of the conquering celebrity has arrived at its inevitable end. The mutual identification of creator and creation with which Rousseau concluded his Pygmalion cannot reach equilibrium. In the zero sum game of public attention, one must replace another, as this film’s 1930s audience well knew. If this ruthless succession seems contrary to the melodramatic moralizing of an older era, Granny Lettie arrives – just in time – to sanctify it. As the grief-stricken Esther finalizes her departure from Hollywood, Lettie reminds her that ‘if you get what you want you have to give your heart in exchange’, and presents her own bill for that bargain: ‘I was proud to be the grandmother of Vicki Lester. It gave me something to live for. Now I have nothing.’ When Esther continues her leave-taking, her grandmother recalls Norman to the present, asking how he can be happy ‘wherever he is … knowing that his death broke the spirit of the little girl he praised me so highly for raising’. Finally Esther is forced to understand that the lives of those dearest to her have been sacrificed for the stardom of Vicki Lester. And so, after an implied absence from the screen, her name lights up the marquee of Grauman’s Chinese

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Theatre as grandmother and granddaughter arrive resplendent in furs for the premiere of her new film. Then, just as she’s approaching the cinema, Esther sees Norman’s ghostly signature in the pavement and nearly collapses. Supported by Niles, she advances to a radio microphone and introduces herself, not as Vicki Lester and certainly not as Esther Blodgett but as the nominee of her true creator, the screenplay. The scene dissolves to the film’s final image, the last page of its script: ESTHER AT MICROPHONE Hello, everybody … this is Mrs. Norman Maine. The ovation is tremendous. CAMERA MOVES IN TO BIG CLOSEUP OF ESTHER. Tears are starting down her cheeks. She looks out past all this crowd, this confusion, this uproar, to some distant point of her own. The music swells up. FADE OUT. THE END

A Star Is Born, 1954 If David O. Selznick could claim to be the creator of the first Star, Judy Garland might equally take the honours for the second version as its co-producer, leading actress, and autobiographical inspiration – notwithstanding Moss Hart’s ‘insider’s’ (McGilligan 1991: 221) screenplay and George Cukor’s painstaking  – and painsgiving – direction.8 The star’s illnesses, absences, and personal tribulations prolonged the film’s production and drove up its cost, making it the second most expensive Hollywood film of its time, but they also underwrote its legendary authenticity. All four Stars rely on a sacrificial male victim, but in Garland the 1954 film had Hollywood’s most famous female victim, for whom it was a custombuilt comeback vehicle. A child vaudeville performer who became a film star in her teens, Garland suffered years of enforced dieting, addiction to prescription drugs, alcoholism, and depression while making over thirty films for MGM. By 1950, at the age of twenty-six, increasing health crises led to the cancellation of her studio contract and departure from Hollywood. Two years later, with her career revived by highly successful concert tours, she and her manager-husband Sid Luft negotiated an independent production contract with Warner Brothers.

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Its first – and ultimately only – film dealt with two stars in conflict with the same exploitative system, helmed by the director of What Price Hollywood? The remake retains the central characters and some dialogue from the original, but where the 1937 Star satirizes the manufacture of talent, if not its sad fading, the later film triumphantly reveals it as ‘solid, ungainsayable achievement’ (Inglis 2016: 27). This intensifies the melodramatic affect, confining the cynical commentary to James Mason’s waspish Norman Maine while defining Esther Blodgett’s talent as, in Inglis’s terms, ‘morally admirable’ in its genuineness and its pain. Read by Rick Altman (1987: 266) as ‘the Pygmalion/Galatea myth … Hollywood style’, the 1954 film follows the plotting of its predecessor, but the emphasis on stardom as the creation of a female ideal by a male mentor is transformed by its metamorphosis into a musical. The framing of the spoken text by a written one is replaced by the alternation of dialogue scenes with song and dance, hearkening back to the movement between recitation and pantomime that Rousseau devised for his mélodrame. In the eighteenth-century play this is designed to counterpose the actor’s impassioned declamations with silent gestures, permitting separate engagements with different modes of expression. The formal hybridity of this ‘lyrical scene’ offers parallels to its rhetorical oppositions of creator and creation, male and female, self and other. But where both speech and gesture to music represent the thoughts and feelings of Pygmalion until Galatea’s final enlivening, here musical expression is assigned to the aspirant, a singer, and verbal eloquence to the mentor, an actor. Since the singer is played by the mistress of the American torch song and the actor by an Englishman with classical stage diction, a vivid opposition is established between two very different vocalizations of feeling – the emotional directness of singing versus markedly theatrical speech. Seven musical numbers – ‘You Gotta Have Me’, ‘The Man That Got Away’, ‘Born in a Trunk’, ‘What Am I Here For?’, ‘It’s a New World’, ‘Somewhere There’s a Someone’, and ‘Lose That Long Face’ – set the tone and the theme of each section of the narrative then developed in the dialogue. (The exception is the ‘Born in a Trunk’ medley in Esther’s first film, a post-Cukor addition by the producers offering a fantasy of Esther’s early travails after she has recounted them to Norman.) As with the film titles in both Stars, the lyrics of these songs often announce developments in the story, with Esther singing ‘As a team we’d be a stand out’ before she pulls the drunken Norman into her act, and later ‘Lose That Long Face’ before she confesses her misery and frustration with him to Niles (Charles Bickford). There are also clear thematic allusions, notably in her first hit, ‘It’s a New World’, which orchestrates the pioneer theme of the earlier

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film. Both Esther and Norman employ their voices in professional performance, but singing’s emotional resonance gives Garland’s Esther the ‘sincerity and honestness’ attributed to Gaynor’s in the earlier version. And here it is the performance, not just the performer, that provides the evidence of this. In the 1954 Star, as well as in subsequent versions, musical performance is the object of discovery. In it the movement from ignorance to knowledge – anagnorisis in Aristotelian poetics – is doubly melodramatic, a dramatic revelation of music itself. Incorporated as such into the realist conventions of the ‘show musical’, the melody and rhythm of singing, as well as its usual siting on a stage or screen, distinguishes its specificity as performance, performance of an exceptional skill – in tonal beauty, vocal range and dramatic expression – in a place designated for such a display. Where, in the 1937 film, Gaynor’s Esther is not seen acting until after meeting Norman Maine, her successors are first beheld by the male star in the act of singing: Garland as a vocalist in the ‘Night of the Stars’ benefit and later in an after-hours jam session; Barbra Streisand singing ‘Queen Bee’ in a hippie bar; and Lady Gaga doing ‘La Vie en Rose’ at a drag club. Talent as a visual appeal to a capricious observer – the optical stimulus associated with lust – is replaced by talent as a set of identifiable skills expressed in sound; the three singers’ real voices – unlike the dubbed singing of Debbie Reynolds, ironically playing a dubbing artist in Singing in the Rain two years earlier – intensify the verisimilitude with which these films portray the artistry as well as the agony of show business. Here Garland’s biography, comprising as it did exceptional success and failure, became both the occasion and the warrant for this project. Garland’s professional anxieties have been in part attributed to her discomfort with her own appearance, a theme which is developed in all the musical Stars. In this respect their mandatory makeovers take on a new salience. In a preview of this process at the 1954 film’s beginning, Esther bends towards a mirror leaning against a backstage wall to reapply her lipstick after rescuing the drunken Norman from his unscheduled entrance into her number at the benefit gala. As she exclaims ‘It’s a wonder to me that Norman Maine is still in pictures’, she herself is proleptically pictured in the mirror’s frame. Then, in the background of her reflection, a pair of dark trousers appears, as Norman replies ‘It is indeed. I ask it myself every morning when I’m shaving.’ A cut to a higher angle follows him out of the reflection as he continues ‘Mirror, mirror on the wall … who’s the greatest star of them all?’ Beyond the camp allusion to the jealous queen in Snow White looms the competition for ‘reputation, honours and preferences’ that Rousseau (1992b: 63) lamented in The Discourse on Inequality and which is eventually forsworn by his creatively exhausted Pygmalion. But this Pygmalion

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has yet to work his artistry on Galatea. His first step is to seize her lipstick and draw a heart enclosing their initials. As the film’s next song will proclaim, ‘The writing’s on the wall.’ Soon afterward Esther is submitted to hours of cosmetic disguise for her screen test, reducing her to asking ‘What difference does it make how well I sing if my face is just awful?’ Norman’s reply is to strip off the wig, the nose putty and the pancake, enacting the subtractive impulse of the sculptor purporting to discover the form immanent in the material. Later Stars will both repeat this gesture and reverse it to foreground the gendered subordination in this enforced masquerade, but some version of the make-up scene is always retained (Figures 20, 21, 22, 23), both to signify the falsifications of show business and to acknowledge that – unlike Gaynor’s – these singers’ faces are, in their shape and features, outside the ideals of their periods. In the final two films the male leads conform far more to the northern European standards of Hollywood beauty than their Jewish and Italian counterparts, while Garland’s large eyes, soft face, and small chin, together with her diminutive stature, suggest a Disney pet in vivid contrast to James Mason’s matinee idol.

Figure 20  Esther Blodgett (Janet Gaynor) is made up for her screen test in A Star Is Born (William Wellman, 1937, Selznick International).

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Figure 21  Norman Maine (James Mason) removes the make-up from Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland) in A Star Is Born (George Cukor, 1954, Transcona Enterprises).

Figure 22  John Norman Howard (Kris Kristofferson) is made up in A Star Is Born (Frank Pierson, 1976, Barwood Films/First Artists).

Significantly, Richard Dyer’s analysis of the authenticity attributed to Garland in this film is itself indebted to Rousseau, via a commentary on the philosopher in Richard Sennett’s The Fall of Public Man, a work influenced by and influencing Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination.9 In his ‘Letter to D’Alembert’ opposing the establishment of a theatre in his native Geneva, Rousseau denounces acting as a wilful form of self-alienation, the abandonment of one’s own person to imitate another in the pursuit of fame and recompense. This selling of the self is not only compared to prostitution (for women), but to a kind of suicide (for

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Figure 23  Ally (Lady Gaga) has her make-up removed in Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper, 2016, Warner Bros).

men): the actor ‘annihilates himself … is lost in his hero’ (Rousseau 2004a: 310). Against its dishonest impersonations, Rousseau (2004a: 294–5) advocates ‘true genius’, indifferent to praise, money or comparison with others: ‘all its resources are within itself ’. Citing Sennett, Dyer (1991: 133) charts the survival of this concern in contemporary evaluations of both social and artistic performance, ‘with the referent of truthfulness not being falsifiable statements but the person’s “person”’. Although A Star Is Born exposes the falsifications of Hollywood, it counterposes this acknowledgement with the revelation of Esther’s ‘true genius’ in her second song, which begins twenty-eight minutes into the film. After escaping Norman’s attentions at the benefit, Esther is rehearsing late that night with her band at the Bleu Bleu Club when the remarkably revived actor walks in unseen. His aim is to woo this young performer, but what he hears changes his appraisal of her talent. In place of the peppy production number that she had worked him into, a trombone signals the opening of a slow ballad announcing, with a pointed reference to the fading of fame, ‘The nights get bitter. The stars have lost their glitter.’ Shot, until Cukor deemed it right, over forty times in three different costumes on two sets, in technicolor and CinemaScope, between October 1953 and February 1954, ‘The Man That Got Away’ was composed for the film by Harold Arlen with words by Johnny Mercer rewritten by Ira Gershwin. It nevertheless achieves an intense aura, in the Benjaminian sense, of first-timeness. In part this is due to the darkened club, upturned chairs and ‘Take it from the top’ rehearsal chat. More important is the badge of authenticity conferred by filming the entire number in a single take. And then there is the performance. Dyer points out its garlanding with the singer’s tics of hair tousling and nervous laughter, but it’s also important to

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observe how her lament for romantic defeat ultimately exults in its mastery – rising from a sitting position to begin tentatively, then laying aside the sheet music, extending her arms to implore and exclaim, conducting the horns with downward chops, throwing an affectionate arm over her pianist friend Danny (Tommy Noonan), moving forward and finally finishing in a new sitting position – with a wink. As Garland’s contralto ascends an octave and a half from middle C, the song remembers and anticipates the lost loves in the lives of both the singer and the character, but from a performance whose authenticity never undermines its sense of achievement. This is significant, because this scene can blur into the film’s other emotive long take when, in a break during the filming of ‘Lose That Long Face’, Esther weeps over her failure to stop Norman drinking, an episode whose autobiographical implications are also overwhelming. The much-remarked convergence of Norman and Garland recalls the exchange of identification between artist and creation dramatized in Rousseau’s Pygmalion. There too the man offers his life to the woman, and she in turn touches him and declares, ‘Me’. In the 1954 Star this convergence is anticipated when Norman steps into Esther’s reflection. Later it is more fully dramatized during a recording session when his marriage proposal and her initial refusal are surreptitiously taped and played back to the entire crew over her rendition of ‘Somewhere There’s a Someone’. As the embarrassed couple listen on either side of an indicatively labelled speaker, the realms of speech and song unite to the words ‘with my someone I’ll be someone at last’. Relocating the proposal’s earlier staging at a boxing match, the second Star holds out the possibility of a harmonious resolution to the conflict of egos in marriage and stardom, making the former the instrument of the latter. Instead this Norman will also upstage his wife’s acceptance speech at the Oscars, not to award himself an accolade for worst performance, but to beg his former colleagues for a job. Raising his arms in a cruciform pose of desperation, he inadvertently strikes the face he had tenderly prepared for its screen test, confirming the violence of a contest in which there can be only one winner. The 1954 Norman will also swim into the sunset, to the contemptuous recitation of ‘This is the way the world ends, not with a bang but a whimper’ by the surprisingly erudite studio publicist (Jack Carson). The quotation from T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Hollow Men’ (1963: 82) is a Hart addition, part of his elegaic portrayal of the studio system then in its own death throes.10 The poem’s address from ‘death’s dream kingdom’ acknowledges the exhaustion from which it speaks, but also the beauty of voices

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In the wind’s singing More distant and more solemn Than a fading star. (1963: 80)

But the world of stardom cannot be allowed to fade in a high-budget technicolor celebration of the inimitable pleasures of the film musical. When Esther resolves to retire, Niles insists to her that ‘No one can give anyone a career – you made your own.’ When, after fighting off intrusive fans at Norman’s funeral, she too refuses to emerge from mourning, her friend Danny takes up Granny Lettie’s plea that she maintain her public life to honour Norman’s: as all that ‘remains’ (sic) of her Pygmalion she must be a ‘monument’ to his memory. Is Esther creator or creation? Is the price of creativity an unbearable identification with the other? Or an equally unbearable recognition of yourself? Either way this film’s star returns to the stage on which it opened, hesitating when she sees the heart drawn on the wall, then striding forward to announce herself in someone else’s name.

A Star Is Born, 1976 The third version of A Star Is Born (Frank Pierson, 1976) is the most denigrated of the series, although it came third in the 1976 US box office rankings and fourth worldwide. Much of this disapproval is aimed at its creator, Barbra Streisand, the film’s leading actress and very active producer, and her then partner and co-producer, the notorious hairdresser-soon-to-turn-Sony-mogul Jon Peters. Streisand’s dislike of remakes initially moved her to reject the updated script by Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, until Peters, who had never heard of the previous versions, expressed enthusiasm for its rock industry (re)setting.11 As a member of the First Artists group and the film’s Executive Producer, its star had six million dollars to spend on the production (distributed by Warner Bros) and final editing approval. She engaged cinematographer Robert Surtees, an early adopter of the telephoto lens in The Graduate (Mike Nichols, 1967), and director Frank Pierson, best known for the screenplays of Dog Day Afternoon (Sidney Lumet, 1975) and Cool Hand Luke (Stuart Rosenberg, 1967), who also contributed to the script. When Elvis Presley’s management opposed his casting as a star on the skids, the role went to singer–songwriter (‘Me and Bobby McGee’) Kris Kristofferson, stylistically diverse choices, to say the least, but both maintaining the 1937 Star’s country/city opposition. With clashes between Peters

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and the male lead, then in the throes of his own alcoholism, a budget so low that Streisand supplied her costumes, scenes requiring huge stadium audiences, and the star’s control of both filming and editing, the production was so fraught that Pierson published an article recounting its horrors a week before its opening.12 Aptly described as ‘an ideal 1970s time capsule’ (Stanfield 2016), the third Star employs live music recording and long lenses to create the ambience of rockumentaries like Woodstock (Michael Wadleigh, 1970) and Gimme Shelter (Albert and David Maysles, 1970), with overlapping dialogue in the style of the fictional concert film Nashville (Robert Altman, 1975).13 The Grammy awards replace the Oscars, with ponchos, turquoise jewellery, and a black-tiled bathroom offering a near-parodic evocation of the period. But this is also the high point of Second Wave feminism, and here both the songs and the speech take significant departures from the gender politics of its predecessors. As Streisand explains in commentary recorded for the 2018 re-release of the DVD, in many respects she sought to reverse the roles of the central couple: ‘It was the women’s lib moment and I was involved.’ Like the two earlier Stars, the film opens at night, with spotlights picking out the Frisbees flying above an impatiently waiting crowd. Drunk to the point of forgetting his lyrics in front of the resentful audience, Kristofferson (now John Norman Howard) attempts two songs before angrily concluding the gig. Rejecting drugs and the groupie that offers them he seeks solace at a bar where Streisand (now Esther Hoffman) is performing with two black backing singers (Vanetta Fields and Clydie King) as The Oreos. (The film’s unthinking racism has much in common with its predecessor, in which Garland blacks up for her rendition of ‘Swanee’ in the ‘Born in a Trunk’ sequence.) Esther is dressed as the feminist gamine of the day: corkscrew curls above a collarless man’s shirt, braces, and red trousers. What Garrett Stewart (1977: 179) describes as the ‘kinkyhaired Jewish radical’ of The Way We Were (Sydney Pollack, 1973) comes into its own here. Her hymn to female predators, ‘Queen Bee’ (written for the film by Rupert Holmes) has the exhortatory uplift of the glee-club anthem it became: So, in conclusion, it’s an optical illusion if you think that we’re the weaker race. Men got the muscle, but the ladies got the hustle, and the truth is starin’ in your face.

Struggling not to surrender his bottle for herbal tea, John interrupts the number and an irate Esther tells him off him off for ‘blowing’ her act. When he finally settles down to watch the set, he warms to the slow ballad that follows, smiling appreciatively as she sings, in the self-penned ‘Everything’:

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I want to learn what life is for. I don’t want much, I just want more. I want everything.

Her listener, however, is denied his wishes when a fan’s attention becomes violent and a fight breaks out. Esther leads him out the back to his limo, wryly noting that he ‘can really be invisible in this thing’. They escape, but he is already caught, comparing his excitement at what he’s just heard to ‘hooking into a really big marlin’. Making both the principals in this story musicians offers the harmony unrealized in previous versions – literally so when, in very soft focus, Esther plays the piano line of ‘Lost Inside of You’ (a melody written by Streisand) and John improvises ‘Time has come again. Love is in the wind’ before the two couple for the first time. Afterward, as they bathe together in candlelight, Esther glues a glitter strip to John’s eyebrow and rouges his bearded cheeks, the film’s sole make-up scene. (In her DVD commentary Streisand compares men to peacocks, recalling ‘a Mick Jagger film’ of the period – Performance, directed by Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg, 1970 – which also features the singer in make-up and a shared bath.) The other scene of proclaimed gender amity takes place, like that in the 1954 version, during a recording session – in this case one that John has smuggled his discovery into. As Esther sings the film’s theme ‘Evergreen’ (its melody also composed by Streisand), the camera circles to reveal him joining her to duet on ‘One love that is shared by two’, the microphone establishing both the boundary between them and their means of crossing it. This feminist updating is developed programmatically; as the opening song demands, ‘Write me a sequel, give me an equal.’ Esther proposes to John, dons unisex suits and a Superman T-shirt, refuses to say ‘obey’ in their wedding, smashes his liquor bottles with a pool cue and never calls herself Mrs Anything. After the couple’s final reconciliation, she declares herself ‘Esther Hoffman Howard’ and makes plans to take John with her on her next tour. All of this accords with a star persona long established by 1976 – urban, working class, assertive, emotional, and very vocal in both speech and song. The nose, the Brooklyn vowels, and the exoticisms of Streisand’s own vintage wardrobe convey an exultant Jewishness with a West Coast tan and a hippie twist. By contrast, Kristofferson’s rock star fades into the background, an amiable presence occasionally erupting into fits of violent rebellion – riding a motorcycle off the stage into the audience; shooting at a helicopter carrying the film’s publicist figure, a hated DJ – adding spectacle to the otherwise static rendition of a series of songs. Insofar as it is explained, his

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anomie is attributed to the ambivalence of performance – requiring the public attention that so often darkens into aggression or the voyeurism suggested by the long lenses peering backstage. Streisand’s DVD commentary acknowledges her own implication in this ambivalence, lamenting fans’ belief ‘that they know you’ while admitting that as a neglected child ‘I did have this dream to be seen, to be heard’. This admission describes the 1976 Star, with its immense close-ups of the singer delivering a series of what Stewart describes as operatic arias – their ‘hyperbolic intimacy’ (1977: 177) expanding these songs’ affective function into the film’s method of dramatic composition. Discussing Streisand’s three-dimensional mastery of phrasing, volume, and tone, he refers to it as ‘almost geometric’, while Stacy Wolf (2003: 252) calls it ‘sculptural’ – an invitation to consider this star not as Galatea but as an androgynous Pygmalion, modelling a figure of externalized amour propre. The exceptional prominence that Streisand, as de facto director, gives to her own singing in this film reaches its height at its conclusion with an extended performance of song as monologue, albeit by a dynamically divided woman, creator and creation. After John expires in a suicidal car crash, the disconsolate Esther sings a seven-minute tribute to him at a memorial concert. Filmed in close-up, accompanied by a full orchestra before an audience holding up candles, this is her own single-take liebestod. In lieu of camera movements or cuts, the lighting modulates in colour and intensity as the tempo changes from the slow refrain ‘With One More Look at You’ to an upbeat reprise of John’s ‘Are You Watching Me Now?’ In his absence Esther is the object of that look, solidified into sculpture by the sustained freeze on her upturned face as the credits run.

A Star Is Born, 2018 Despite the forty-two years between them, the fourth version of A Star Is Born (Bradley Cooper, 2018) most closely resembles its predecessor. In its burnt-out rocker and barroom balladeer, her pugnacity and his grizzled tenderness, the outdoor concerts and the Arizona landscapes, this is a strikingly unoriginal return to the story – to an extent that provokes questions about whether anything has changed in the ensuing years. Yet this fourth version has received far greater plaudits than the Streisand film, reversing the criticism of her dominance of that production to celebrate Cooper’s very similar contributions as lead actor, producer, director, co-writer of the screenplay and some of the songs in a story whose central object of attention is the doomed hero. At its autumn opening during

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annual Oscar speculation, these multiple credits were saluted as a key feature of a film about the waning of male creativity, as though offered in compensation for the fall of its fictional star. From the crowd cheers over the Warners’ logo to the spotlit entrance of Jackson Maine (Cooper) to sing ‘There’s no room for lies. Everyone’s waiting for you’, the fourth film proceeds much as the third, with a quick cut to the boozy rocker being chauffeured from the venue along a backstreet – ominously illuminated with a sign displaying hangman’s nooses. Another cut reveals Ally14 (Lady Gaga, aka Stefani Germanotta), dressed in a black waiter’s suit, refusing an excessively persistent admirer by telephone from a restaurant toilet. Her angry bellow of ‘Fucking men’ echoes Streisand’s feminism in the 1976 film, while her singing of a ‘rainbow highway’ as she then leaves work acknowledges Garland’s gay following. Their contemporary successor meets Jack when he tells his driver to stop for a drink at this film’s Bleu Bleu club, now a drag bar rather than a jazz venue. As a former club waiter and honorary sister, Ally dons a black dress and darkened chignon to do Edith Piaf singing ‘La Vie en Rose’. Reassured by her gay best friend Ramon (Anthony Ramos) that this isn’t karaoke, Jack is transfixed even before she lies down on the bar in front of him to belt out ‘C’est lui pour moi, moi pour lui, dans la vie’. When Ramon invites him backstage, the rock star signs autographs and scrutinizes Ally through her 1930s make-up, gingerly removing a false eyebrow and promising to wait while she washes the tint out of her hair. His future is announced when he delivers his own after-hours performance, singing ‘Maybe it’s time to let the old ways die’ before the two leave together for another bar. In its even lower light, Jack quizzes Ally about her songwriting ambitions, which she claims have been quashed by record company dislike of her appearance. Their particular worry is her nose, the Streisand trademark which Kristofferson’s John touches gently before his final goodbye at the end of the 1976 Star. Jack – whose nose conspicuously resembles Ally’s – pronounces hers beautiful, tenderly tracing her profile before offering his definition of talent: ‘having something to say and the way to say it so people listen to it’. When the incredulous young woman replies by asking what she’s doing in a late-night saloon with Jackson Maine, her companion follows his first definition with a second: ‘That’s the thing about when you get famous, people start saying your full name.’ Having rapidly established the series’ first three issues – stardom’s narrow standard of female beauty, the nature of star talent, and its branding in a recognized name – the film proceeds to the fourth, the constant harassment of aggressive fans. A drunk insists on a photo with Jack, rejecting Ally’s offer to assist with a violent shove

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that sprains her fingers. A visit to an all-night supermarket yields some frozen peas to prevent swelling, and a songwriting session in the market’s car park. After Jack tells her about the early deaths of his parents, Ally improvises a verse for ‘Shallow’, the Oscar-winning power ballad they will triumphantly perform together at a concert on the following night: ‘Tell me something, boy. Aren’t you tired, trying to fill that void?’ Jack’s back story, and its repeated thematizing in the film’s songbook, is its very significant addition to the Star series. If this reflects Cooper’s multiple contributions to the film, it should be remembered that Streisand’s similar authorial efforts were in the service of a much more schematic fable, prompting its comparison with a pop opera. Although the scenes described above attest to the 2018 version’s equally fantastical storyline, this is offset by the psychological realism of its central characterizations. Of these only Rez Gavron’s record executive, an updating of the cynical publicist, comes across as a cartoon figure. The realist effect in Gaga’s performance emerges from the canny cross-casting of contemporary pop’s ultimate glam rocker as a waitress still living with her limo-driving dad, as well as the characteristic strain in her reach for the upper register when singing. (Here, as elsewhere, Gaga’s resort to falsetto arguably enhances the emotional power of her delivery.) As for Cooper’s character, his whisky hoarseness, hearing loss, rheumy eyes, and sun-aged skin – not to mention the constant drinking and revelations of an early suicide attempt  – delineate a doomed Pygmalion, labouring to launch his creation before his inevitable extinction. Where March’s drunk is amusing, Mason’s aggressive, and Kristofferson’s largely absent, Cooper’s is on the critical list. The consequence of this portrayal is a predictable pathos – the sympathetic suffering recognized by those who describe this film as a ‘male melodrama’. But in the naturalism of its performances this film employs a verisimilitude often deemed at odds with the genre’s broadly drawn characterizations. Although its publicity sought to portray Gaga’s acting as an inexperienced equivalent of Ally’s singing – thereby equating the role with the performer in the standard Hollywood fashion – she is the veteran of several years training at the Actor’s Studio as well as roles in TV (in the 2015–16 seasons of American Horror Story) and in film (notably Robert Rodriguez’s 2013 Machete Kills and 2014 Sin City: A Dame to Kill For). Thus her unplugged Ally accedes gradually to Gaga’s glittering costumes and choreographed performances, while Cooper’s Jack – descending to abject incontinence at the Grammys – demonstrates his considerable facility as a character actor. Here Linda Williams’s description of how film melodrama has allied its strong moralism with contemporary style and social commentary

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comes into play. As she points out, American popular culture has historically combined ‘realism, sentiment, spectacle, and action in effecting the recognition of a hidden or misunderstood virtue’ (Williams 1998: 54). Twenty-first century Hollywood melodramas like Brokeback Mountain (Ang Lee, 2005) and Precious (Lee Daniels, 2009) continue this tradition with their intensely ‘moral, wishfulfilling impulse towards the achievement of justice’ (Williams 1998: 48). In the Stars’ narrative of the empowerment of a talented young woman by an older established man, the virtue of both the protegée and her rakish impresario is revealed in mutual sacrifice. His giving way to her is represented as justice, the shift of attention merited by her talent, while her attempt to save him shows rightful gratitude for his support. Although the pairing of an older man with a younger woman is hardly unusual in Hollywood cinema, the greater age of the leading actors in these four films – averaging nine years – is effectively increased by their apparent debility. While the rise of the youthful unknowns accord with the democratic impulse in this tradition, their mentors’ demise is naturalized as a generational transfer, parents succeeded by children. Pygmalion’s fashioning of the human form is itself an act of male reproduction, a god-like parthenogenesis enabled (and sanctified) by Venus’s intervention.15 His cinematic successors not only use their patriarchal power to lead their protégés into the limelight, they take up the maternal duties of moral encouragement, personal grooming, and – in the final film – first aid. They have to since, aside from Granny Lettie in the first film, and Marta Heflin’s brief appearance as a rock journalist in the third, there are NO other significant women characters in these films – no female relatives, other actresses, or chorus girls, not even women make-up artists. (Although Streisand’s DVD commentary mentions women friends she cast, few are given any lines. Ally’s drag sisters have scarcely more dialogue.) Whether cinema or music, the show business portrayed across the series is a man’s world whose means of reproduction is romantic mentorship, in which an older male star ‘creates’ a new female one. In the age of #MeToo an egalitarian impulse might be perceived in this repeated replacement of the man with the woman, but if this recasting ostensibly responds to contemporary feminist demands, it has not been received this way by two critics reviewing the 2018 Star. Instead they interpret the film as yet another warning of the threat to men posed by women’s success. Noting Jackson’s jealousy of Ally for winning a Grammy ‘with a frothy pop song’, Alisha Harris hears ‘echoes [of] the conversation currently playing out around (mostly white) male resentment about lost jobs and a feeling that as women make gains in society, men are losing much’ (2018). Also writing in the New York Times,

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Manohla Dargis (2018) historicizes this observation by pointing out that What Price Hollywood? opened in 1932, ‘the year that the Depression figure of “the forgotten man” became an emblem of that crisis’ while the 2018 Star was released in the month that Donald Trump apologized to his Supreme Court nominee Brett Kavanagh for his victimization by women. Most remarkably, in December 2019, Harvey Weinstein responded to over eighty women’s allegations of sexual assault and harassment by citing his production of films with female characters and directors: ‘I feel like the forgotten man’ (Haas 2019). In the light of such claims, the romanticizing of the Star mentor’s interest in the female aspirant begins to look like the slipcover on the casting couch. The feminist refusal of a redemptive reading of this film series reflects more critical assessments of melodrama’s politics, from Thomas Elsaesser’s (1987: 47) claim that it has ‘resolutely refused to understand social change in other than private contexts and emotional terms’ to Christine Gledhill (1991: 210) on the unchanging nature of that ‘internalisation of the social’. Here it is notable that Gledhill’s comments occur in a reflection on the film star. As she observes, both melodramatic characterization and movie stardom are founded on the individual actor’s embodiment of ethical forces. If the Star films dare to suggest that this is a creation – of scripting, mentorship, make-up or nomination before performance is even considered – the casting of four established stars in the role of the deserving unknown says otherwise. And where the discovery of their talent is tautologous, their discoverers’ demise in the ruthless competition for public attention is fatalistically re-enacted. The ending of existence that these films narrate, like the gender oppression that they fancifully invert, are not beyond this melodrama’s complaint, but it can imagine no alternative beyond the brief alignment of rising and falling stars, the montage of romantic memories intercut with the concluding song by the self-declared ‘Ally Maine’ in her husband’s honour. As a remake of a series that began with a remake, the 2018 film looks more directly at the damage dealt by stardom, but without questioning the way its possessive individualism has become ‘the centre of political and social arrangements’ (Gledhill 1991: 208). If this latest version can make any claim for originality, it is in the resignation with which it acknowledges its own redundancy. As Jack’s brother (Sam Elliott) pronounces in valediction to the film as much as its sacrificial victim: ‘Twelve notes and the octave repeats. It’s the same story told over and over. Forever.’

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Unmasked: Hacktivism, Anonymity, and Celebrity

‘Isn’t it strange’, asks the hero of V for Vendetta, ‘how life turns into melodrama?’ (Moore and Lloyd 2005: 31). Writer Alan Moore and illustrator David Lloyd’s comic strip evocation of a fascist England withered by nuclear winter is best known for the Guy Fawkes mask worn by its protagonist, identified only as ‘V’. Originally published in the Thatcherite 1980s, it has increased in political salience across the ensuing years. After the 2006 film adaptation (directed by James McTeigne) concluded with a crowd wearing the V mask marching on Parliament, the Lloyd design was adopted by a loose association of internet activists originally identified by the tag assigned visitors to the message board 4chan – ‘Anon’, and soon after ‘Anonymous’. ‘“On an anonymous forum”, the site’s moderator hoped, “logic will overrule vanity”’ (Olson 2013: 28). V for Vendetta asserts the logic of anonymity against that of certain contemporary political narratives, those whose moral polarization, blatant character typing, and emotional intensity are reminiscent of popular melodrama. In foregrounding this genre, the strip warns of its appeal and its pitfalls for political resistance. Melodrama structures a recent spate of film documentaries and docudramas about three celebrities who have emerged from the anonymous realm of internet activism – Julian Assange, Edward Snowden, and Chelsea Manning. Made in the aftermath of the American-led invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, these films participate in what Elisabeth Anker (2014: 203) calls ‘left melodrama’: ‘the heightened moral drama of good and evil in which US empire, oppressive state power, and the forces of administered capitalism are arrayed as villainy’. She traces its rhetoric to Rousseau, as the initiator of neoclassical melodrama and the inspiration for revolutionary consciousness in France, and subsequently to the popular stage form’s ‘spectacle-laden unmasking of class privilege and absolutist power that had, until that point, structured social relations’ (69, emphasis mine). But, unlike that form’s local and familial settings, those of these films are global

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and institutional. Their protagonists work in journalism, intelligence, and the military, discovering and disclosing state and corporate secrets. Their antagonists are politicians and intelligence officials, but significantly they are not the villains of these pieces. Instead, the roles of villain, victim, and hero are assigned within the activist cohort. Despite their actual cooperation and apparently shared objectives, Assange becomes the villain, Manning the virtuous victim, and Snowden the hero. Initially all three protagonists conduct their whistle-blowing anonymously. Yet insofar as they seek to rally support for their opposition to military violence, state surveillance, political malfeasance, or corporate corruption, they meet a countervailing demand to give such initiatives a ‘face’, a personification open to public scrutiny. Thus identified they become instant objects of mass attention, ‘celebrities’, with the consequent ability to attract media coverage and affect the political agenda, but also a vulnerability to state and media retribution. This process becomes a notable part of the narratives of these documentaries, which follow their protagonists into years of incarceration in military and civilian prisons (Manning), asylum in a small London embassy before arrest and imprisonment (Assange), and exile to a proclaimed enemy of their country (Snowden). Meanwhile, all three have been denounced by government officials and the media for ‘narcissistically’ seeking the status of celebrity in the moral evaluation typically meted out to those who acquire public prominence.

V for Vendetta: Melodrama and the Mask V for Vendetta freely displays its debts to nineteenth-century stage melodrama and other sensational media, the ‘penny dreadful’ – Victorian crime fiction serialized in cheap weekly instalments – and the ‘tuppenny rush’ – 1940s adventure films screened at Saturday matinees at two pence per child. V enters the strip in a mask, a cloak, and a cloud of teargas. In the tradition of melodrama’s gradual revelation of moral truth, the hero, who at first appears to be a villain, rescues an equally traditional victim, Evey Hammond, a teenager contemplating prostitution in order to survive. ‘Everybody is special’, V tells Evey, welcoming her into the genre’s highly formalized dramatis personae. ‘Everybody is a hero, a lover, a fool, a villain. Everybody’ (Moore and Lloyd 2005: 26). V, we learn, stands for Villain and Victim, for Violence and Vindication, but also for Vaudeville and Variety in a dark narrative danced to the strains of ‘Jerusalem’. Fittingly, given

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the etymology of the term ‘melodrama’, an entire chapter of the strip is set to music, a Brechtian lament entitled ‘This Vicious Cabaret’: They say that there’s a broken heart for every light on Broadway. They say that life’s a game and then they take the board away. They give you masks and costumes and an outline of the story. Then leave you all to improvise their vicious cabaret. (89)

The disguise is a melodramatic topos, concealing the true personality revealed in the narrative, as the genre reveals hidden moral realities. In the recurring enigma of its narratives, good and evil are immanent in the world, but no longer identifiable by the discredited epistemologies of religious revelation and hereditary status. Instead ‘character’, in the moral and psychological sense, is disclosed by physical appearance, gesture, costume, and symbolic properties. Christine Gledhill (1991) has argued that melodrama’s emphasis on outward signs anticipates the physical typology of cinema’s star system, much as its grounding of ethics in the person anticipates the individualist ideology of capitalism. The film star must look the part. She or he is identified with the role in the way that the liberal subject is identified with a sovereign ‘self ’, impervious to the influences of society, economy, unconscious desire. And just as the star emerges from the epistemology of melodrama, so does contemporary celebrity culture. Where melodrama tests the moral worth of its fictional protagonists, the concentrated gaze of celebrity scrutinizes the probity of public figures. V for Vendetta commemorates the movie culture closed down in Britain by the fascist Norsefire, whose victims include a young film actress tortured in a cell next to V’s. Yet the individualist ideology of stardom is the one inheritance of melodrama that Moore’s strip rejects, using its reflexive awareness of the genre to demonstrate instead the transferability of the type, the way roles can be assumed by anyone. In its final frames, the hero is apparently killed, only for Evey to don the mask and fight on, dispatching V to Valhalla in an explosion that immolates Downing Street. ‘There’s no flesh and blood in this cloak to kill’, V explains. ‘There’s only an idea’ (236). The mask V wears was designed by Lloyd in allusion to Guy Fawkes, a leading member of the English Catholic plot to assassinate the Protestant King James and his government by blowing up the House of Lords on 5 November 1605. Yet its whiteface smile and curved moustaches (Figure 24) bear no resemblance to the bearded Fawkes in a contemporary engraving. The mask’s pallor, contrasting eyebrows, and eerie grin are more reminiscent of the Joker, the arch-villain in the

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Figure 24  The ‘V’ mask in V for Vendetta (James McTeigue, 2005, Warner Bros).

Batman comics whose original appearance was based on Conrad Veidt’s character in the film melodrama The Man Who Laughs (Paul Leni, 1928).1 But the most compelling reference is to the idea of the mask itself, particularly the masks worn by ‘guys’, effigies burned in annual fireworks commemorating the discovery of the conspirators and their gunpowder in the cellars of Parliament. In the overture to what the strip terms Act One, V succeeds where Fawkes failed, toppling Big Ben in a blaze of pyrotechnics. Later V blows up ‘the Ear’, the fascist regime’s surveillance centre, forcing it to award ‘the rights of secrecy and privacy’ to its subjects: ‘Your movements will not be watched. Your conversations will not be listened to’ (187). If V for Vendetta foresaw ‘the importance of anonymity and privacy in an era when both are rapidly eroding for citizens, and when government secrecy and systematic surveillance are on the rise’, it also anticipated that era’s most characteristic subversives. Acting as a decentralized, often internally dissident, ‘protest ensemble’ (Coleman 2013a: 2), self-identified members of Anonymous hacked the websites of those vigilant copyright guards the Scientologists and the Motion Picture Association of America, and pro-censorship initiatives such as the Australian government’s internet filters against pornography. (Conversely, they also attacked child pornography sites such as ‘Lolita City’, releasing its usernames online.) Their successes included disabling the software that the dictatorial Tunisian government used to spy on its citizens. Further assistance was offered to local activists in several countries throughout the ‘Arab Spring’ of 2011 (Coleman 2013a: 13). Anonymous also supported the Occupy movement against economic inequality, offering online publicity and technological assistance. It became an ally of the internet disclosure organization WikiLeaks, briefly – if provocatively – jamming website access to leading online payment systems when they refused to transmit donations for the legal fees of its founder

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Julian Assange. On 15  October  2011, these organizations publicly converged when Assange addressed London Occupy, including several demonstrators wearing V masks, in a visit to their St Paul’s Cathedral encampment. At his final press conference before seeking asylum in the Ecuadorian Embassy in London the following year, Assange himself donned a darkened V mask, as though to signal his own incipient withdrawal from public visibility. Two feature films on WikiLeaks were subsequently released, We Steal Secrets (directed by Alex Gibney, 2013) and The Fifth Estate (directed by Bill Condon, 2013). Although the first film is a documentary by the maker of the 2007 documentary on US torture in Iraq, Taxi to the Dark Side, and the second a docudrama based on the participant observations of Guardian journalist David Leigh and former WikiLeaks activist Daniel Domscheit-Berg, both employ the conventions of melodrama, including the literal and metaphorical use of the mask.

We Steal Secrets: The Villain and the Victim We Steal Secrets opens in the dark, bridged by the sound of radio static to a shot from space of a communications satellite circling the earth. As the static sharpens into an intelligible news report, the satellite dissolves into the broadcasts it is ostensibly transmitting, the protests against the 1989 launch of an American space probe due to the environmental hazards of its plutonium-powered delivery system. A former National Aeronautics and Space Association administrator recalls the discovery just prior to the launch of an invasive programme or ‘worm’ in the NASA computer system, deleting files, changing passwords, and signing itself ‘WANK – WORMS AGAINST NUCLEAR KILLERS’. ‘Someone is watching you’, the programme proclaims. The spread of the worm to 300,000 terminals sets off an investigation tracing it to Australia, where the trail goes cold. In retrospect, the administrator observes, the hackers left a vital clue in their message, a line from an Aussie alt-rock song still quoted by ‘the country’s most infamous hacker’. Cut to Julian Assange twenty years later reciting ‘You talk of times of peace for all, and then prepare for war.’ To the beat of the political punk group Midnight Oil, the film’s opening titles roll, interspersing images of the Iraq War with the band playing and a news reporter asking ‘Julian Assange – Is he a hero to freedom or is he a terrorist?’ A chorus of contradictory replies is heard over an animated graphic of intersecting lines that resolves into an X-ray image of its subject’s skull, with writer director Alex Gibney the credited

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Figure 25  The title shot of We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (Alex Gibney, 2013, Jigsaw/Global Produce).

radiologist. The sequence ends with the face divided, its left features those of US Army Private Chelsea Manning, its right those of Assange. Over this Janus figure is printed the title We Steal Secrets: The Story of WikiLeaks (Figure 25). The melodramatic imagination, in Peter Brooks’s (1995: 5) claim, sees ‘the social world as the scene of dramatic choice between heightened moral alternatives, where every gesture, however frivolous or insignificant it may seem, is charged with the conflict between light and darkness, salvation and damnation’. The project of We Steal Secrets is to personify this polarity. In both this film and The Fifth Estate the social world is repeatedly seen from space, the outer space from which satellites transmit their signals and the cyber space that becomes equated with it in the WikiLeaks logo of an hourglass from whose dark upper globe information leaks into the light. ‘The internet is not a safe place for secrets’, Alex Gibney’s film warns. Within it the titular admission of their theft is made not by WikiLeaks, but by the former director of both the US National Security and Central Intelligence Agencies, General Michael Hayden. Hayden has defended the warrantless surveillance of American telephone calls and the ‘enhanced interrogation’ of terrorist suspects. Yet the film ignores his biography and motives to focus instead on those of two people who became famous for their attempts to expose such practices. It is Manning and Assange who are unmasked in this melodrama. ‘Julian Assange was obsessed with secrets’, Gibney informs us in his voiceover narration, ‘keeping his own and unlocking those of governments and

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corporations’. The primacy of the personal that this statement manifests is maintained in the film’s introductory interview, in which Assange is asked what drives him. Suspicions of hypocrisy are immediately incited by the representation of this secretive publisher of secrets as a performer, filmed by one camera crew while being interviewed by another, a framing that will be repeated in the film. Although We Steal Secrets offers a cursory list of the early successes of WikiLeaks – exposing tax evasion, government corruption, the dumping of toxic waste – it is the founder of the organization that is its subject. With the increasing coverage that flows from the organization’s 2009 revelations about the Icelandic banking scandal comes fame, a fame that will eventually prompt one commentator in the film to compare Assange to ‘the new Mick Jagger’. The activist’s celebrity status is initially suggested to grant him power. If, in David Marshall’s influential formulation, such celebrity power is always ambiguous, the film’s stress on Assange’s public appearances, filmed interviews, and news coverage emphasize the ‘greater presence and … wider scope of activity and agency’ attributed to those who ‘move on the public stage while the rest of us watch’ (Marshall 1997: ix). In contrast with Assange’s increasing fame, an anonymous communication is shown emerging from the WikiLeaks Dropbox in 2010. Throughout the film the messages from this source appear in white type on a black background, as featureless as they are untraceable. Like classical cinema’s typewritten inscriptions – most relevantly those featured in All The President’s Men2 – their letter-by-letter production creates suspense, made even greater by the unverifiable origin of the digital message, the uncertainty of its authorship or authenticity. In brief phrases the source identifies as ‘an army intelligence analyst deployed to East Baghdad’ offering information that ‘might actually change something’. Although the analyst is later named and pictured, no voice is ever heard. In the dramaturgy of popular melodrama, this mute role occupies a special place, that of the victim unable to speak his suffering. In its first major stage success, Pixérécourt’s 1800 Coelina, or The Child of Mystery, an old beggar, his tongue mutilated by an avaricious squire, cannot voice his claim to his family or his own identity as a gentleman – and yet is instinctively loved by the young woman who later discovers that he is her father. In a paradigmatic scene of revelation, he dramatically describes his travails in scribbled phrases read aloud by another character, as this film’s spectators read that of the intelligence analyst in the internet communications sent to WikiLeaks:

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I just … couldnt let these things stay inside of the system and inside of my head Im just weird I guess I … care?

Protected by WikiLeaks’ untraceable submission system, this source remains anonymous, notwithstanding the furore that breaks out in April 2010 when Assange and his collaborators release ‘Collateral Murder’, video footage taken by an American helicopter crew machine gunning down a group of Baghdad civilians and Reuters journalists. In one of the several fame claims that punctuate the film, Australian political historian Robert Manne observes that this is the moment when Assange moves ‘from relative obscurity into an absolutely central world figure. And he knew what he was doing. He did it deliberately. He decides to take on the American state in public’. From this point in its narrative, We Steal Secrets separates its double-headed title figure in the stereotypical dichotomy of melodrama. Although both take on the American state, Julian Assange becomes the villain – dominating, duplicitous, unfeeling, masculine. Chelsea Manning becomes the victim – vulnerable, honest, emotional, feminine. Assange seeks publicity. Manning is exposed by betrayal. They are no longer anonymous. Instead, they personify the split in the celebrity sign perceived by Marshall, its ‘tension between authentic and false cultural value’ (Marshall 1997: xi). Manning’s unmasking begins when, using the handle bradass47, she contacts cyber journalist Adrian Lamo, famed for hacking the New York Times, after Lamo tweets a call for donations to WikiLeaks. Again the film narrates Manning’s contribution to this correspondence with phrases from her emails, intercut with interviews with a personal friend, some army colleagues, and Lamo himself. Again Manning’s voice is unheard as she talks in text. Aware of Lamo’s bisexuality, the young soldier gradually discloses her crisis of sexual identity, access to classified information and lonely existence on an army base in Baghdad: ‘im isolated as fuck … my life is coming apart.’ The professedly indifferent Lamo soon becomes interested. After seeking advice from a former counterintelligence agent, he offers his correspondent confidential support – ‘not for publication’ – and asks her to describe herself. In emails illustrated by the montaged Americana of yearbook photographs and the stars and stripes set to a nostalgic melody, Manning evokes her background with a queer take on what Linda Williams (1998: 65) has described as melodrama’s traditional ‘space of innocence’ – a pint-sized computer geek grows up in Oklahoma’s Bible Belt, wins prizes in science fairs and tries to avoid getting ‘beat up and called gay’:

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questioned my gender for several years. orientation was easy to figure out.

‘We knew right away he was gay, it was so obvious’, proclaims a veteran of the unit to which Manning is sent when her suitability for the army is questioned. But the ‘small’ and ‘effeminate’ volunteer, an adept computer technician who has enlisted to pay for college, is not discharged. Instead in 2009 she finds herself in Forward Operating Base Hammer, east of Baghdad, tasked to track Shia groups. When Manning discovers the abuse of innocent Iraqi detainees, her report is returned by her superiors with the instruction to find even more to detain. As she confesses to Lamo: I was actively involved in something I was completely against.

In January 2010, Manning returns to the United States on leave, with 488,000 classified documents on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. She anonymously offers the ‘war logs’ she will later send to WikiLeaks to the New York Times and the Washington Post. Both newspapers turn her down. While on leave, Manning later tells Lamo, she travels from Washington, DC to Boston by train, dressed as a woman. Manning’s cross-dressing on the journey is itself an ostensible masking later revealed to be an unmasking in the transition to Chelsea. The soldier’s increasing female identification is a powerful restraint on any public disclosure of her contribution to WikiLeaks. As she explains, I wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life, or being executed … if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me plastered all over the world press as a boy.

Confiding both her sexual and security transgressions, Manning places her trust in Lamo. In reply the journalist submits a copy of their correspondence to federal agents and an article about it to Wired. In May 2010 bradass47 is identified and arrested. In August 2013, the soldier is sentenced to thirty-five years’ military imprisonment for espionage, theft, and computer fraud. The film will end with former WikiLeaker Daniel Domscheit-Berg pronouncing Manning the true whistle-blower, ‘the courageous guy who took all the risks and now has the suffering’. In the most traditional of melodramatic proofs, suffering confirms virtue. If Manning is this melodrama’s virtuous victim, Julian Assange is its suave villain. To create this characterization the documentary first sketches his peripatetic childhood in Australia, ‘with no lasting relationships’, and a

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rebellious adolescence among Melbourne’s hacking community. Although brief acknowledgement is made of these young men’s opposition to state surveillance, much more emphasis is placed on the fantasies of omnipotence said to drive them to break into the US military security network and ‘walk around like God Almighty’ until they are finally identified and arrested two years later. The claim that Assange is ‘ego driven’ dominates the denouement of We Steal Secrets. Lamo’s betrayal of bradass47 is dwarfed by the film’s allegations that the WikiLeaks editor knowingly jeopardized the welfare of his indicted informant and that of coalition personnel and allied civilians by releasing the unedited entirety of many thousands of military and diplomatic communications collected by Manning. As Guardian journalist Nick Davies declares in the film, ‘Julian had no harm minimisation process’. To this allegation of culpable indifference Gibney’s documentary adds further evidence for Assange’s egotism – his relationship to his increasing celebrity. On 25 July 2010 the Guardian, the New York Times, and Der Spiegel publish front page coverage of the simultaneously released WikiLeaks files from the Afghan War, detailing unacknowledged civilian casualties, the Pakistani government support for the Taliban, and the operations of a secret US assassination squad. Assange is about to become, in the description of contributing filmmaker Mark Davis, ‘one of the most famous guys on the planet’. In a telling scene, Davis interviews him while being made up for a TV appearance by a young woman who asks his name. Questioned about the wave of publicity poised to engulf him, Assange replies Actually I would prefer that [WikiLeaks] didn’t have a face. We tried to do that for a while, but the demands of so many people were so great that people started inventing faces.

Whatever Davis’s intent in filming Assange in these circumstances, or the honesty of his reply, the conventional meaning of make-up comes through – that in agreeing to have his appearance altered in this way, Assange reveals both his narcissism and his falsity. His public face is a mask. Gibney cuts this scene into a montage of the TV news interviews that mark the release of the Afghan files, in which their subject is introduced over and over again by his now highly recognizable name – ‘Julian Assange’, ‘Julian Assange’, ‘Julian Assange’. The montage is followed by his arrival that evening in the Guardian offices, where he is shown several British newspapers, featuring front-page spreads on the Afghan leaks with photos of Assange. Told that he’s got his ‘own banner at the top here, for three pages, in the Times’, a relieved Assange concludes ‘I’m untouchable

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now in this country’. The publicity that jails Manning is perceived by Assange to protect him from prosecution. Warned that this is hubris, Assange is soon barraged by allegations of endangering Americans and their allies, paranoid fears of betrayal, and the sexual assault of two Swedish women. WikiLeaks’ exposure of civilian casualties, the torture and murder of prisoners of war, and the embarrassing contents of countless US diplomatic cables are marginalized by the film’s central revelation, summarized on screen by Guardian reporter Nick Davies: ‘There’s a side to this guy which is great. And there’s this hidden side, which has been so destructive.’ Granted asylum in London’s Ecuadorian Embassy to forestall extradition for questioning in Sweden – and an Interpol arrest warrant from the United States – Assange denies Gibney’s request for an interview unless he pays a million dollars towards his legal fees or provides information about suspected WikiLeaks disloyalists. The director refuses, concluding that ‘All Julian had left was his celebrity’.

The Fifth Estate: The Villain Goes Viral Written by Josh Singer and directed by biopic specialist3 Bill Condon with considerable debts to the visual style of Gibney’s documentary, The Fifth Estate opens with a title montage of the history of communications – beginning with cave paintings and hieroglyphs and ending with another satellite linked via an earth zoom4 to the London offices of the Guardian, Der Spiegel in Berlin, and the New York Times. As in the documentary, these papers’ simultaneous revelations of the war crimes and civilian casualties recorded in WikiLeaks’ Afghan and Iraq files are quickly swept aside by the media’s questions about Julian Assange. Like the cryptic signifiers that head the film, he requires decoding. Watching his press conference online from Berlin is internet technician Daniel [Domscheit-] Berg (played by Daniel Bruhl). A caption flashes back to his first encounter with Assange at a 2007 hacker’s convention, at which the latter delivers a stirring speech on how WikiLeaks’ security programme can enable whistle-blowers to publish material without fear of retaliation, concluding with an Oscar Wilde aphorism adopted by Anonymous: Give a man a mask and he will tell you the truth.

Again, the masked man in this film will prove to be Assange, as watched by the fascinated Berg, the real-life author of one of the two memoirs on which it is based5 and from whose perspective it is narrated.

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The enigma of Assange’s identity and motives is intensified by the fictional qualities of the biopic, whose key attraction is impersonation. In this case it is a highly touted impersonation – in appearance, gesture, accent and intonation – by Benedict Cumberbatch, famed for his portrayal of another unconventional savant, Sherlock Holmes, as well as the computer pioneer Alan Turing. The film maintains the enigmatic quality of ‘Assange’ by initially withholding the image of Cumberbatch in the role and then filming him from behind while a news report references ‘piercing the veil’ of state secrecy. As in Gibney’s documentary, state secrets are equated with and then largely displaced by those of individual biography and psychology. Moreover, the film’s chief representative of the American state is a conscientious woman diplomat (Laura Linney) desperate to protect an anti-Gaddafi Libyan from the exposure created by WikiLeaks’ publication of US diplomatic cables – a fictional storyline created to support the film’s indictment of Assange for failing to redact information about identifiable individuals before publication. The cables’ embarrassing revelations of American diplomacy in action are rapidly superseded by the egotism, dishonesty, and instrumentality attributed to Julian Assange. Assange and Berg are initially compared in the film to the ‘young Woodward and Bernstein’, but theirs is no Watergate-style collaboration. If Cumberbatch is the modern Sherlock Holmes, Bruhl’s Daniel Berg is at first his Watson – assistant, interlocutor, ‘son’, with the same name, Assange tells him, as his own son – then the victim of his deceptions and finally his opponent. In place of Manning, briefly mentioned as a ‘22-year-old private with a history of mental illness’, Berg becomes the virtuous victim in this film, but the appearance of the actual individuals on which its characters are modelled presents a problem. Assange is fair and smooth skinned – matching melodrama’s enduring characterization of oppressed virtue as pale and feminine – and Berg is dark and bearded in the tradition of its swarthy villains. So aware is the film of this reallife deviation from its generic coding that it provides Assange with increasingly dubious explanations of his hair colour, and a final claim by Berg that he dyes it. (Piercing the veil of secrecy reveals that Assange has … dark roots.) In focusing so tightly on its villain, rather than the titular ‘fifth estate’ of citizen journalism, the film reverses the strategy of Anonymous’s masked multitude.6 Where the latter don the V mask as a group to prevent reprisals against individuals, Josh Singer’s script and Condon’s direction emphasize Assange’s efforts to multiply himself. In a key scene set after the successful exposure of a Swiss bank’s tax evasions in 2008, Berg proposes that he and Assange celebrate with two of their online allies via Skype. Failing to dissuade him, Assange finally

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confesses that the two are in reality his aliases. When the shocked Berg asks how many volunteers WikiLeaks actually has, Assange assures him that there are hundreds, citing the evidence of the many leaks the organization had received by that date. Berg stares into his laptop screen and the film cuts to what he sees: Assange and only Assange. A surreal pullback discloses rows of identical Assanges eerily smiling from their computer terminals (Figure 26). This fantasy of Assange’s viral replication is ramified by Cumberbatch’s uncanny doubling of his real-life referent; it also illustrates the film’s explanation of how WikiLeaks is able to preserve the anonymity of its whistle-blowers. To encrypt the information that arrives in its Dropbox, the site surrounds it with a multitude of bogus messages. Encryption of the real message is effected by multiplication of the false ones. But where the anonymous source becomes camouflaged by this plethora of messages, the singular Assange proliferates into an overwhelming presence in the film, comically turning up anywhere Berg happens to be, including his Berlin bedroom at night. (Watching Assange throw shapes on a dance floor, an admiring woman remarks, ‘He’s everywhere at the same time.’) As the impact of WikiLeaks’ revelations intensifies, Assange’s constant presence becomes equated with the constant visibility of his very willing celebrity. His disillusioned apprentice will eventually resign, complaining to the sorcerer, ‘There’s just you and your ego’. The day before filming on The Fifth Estate began, Benedict Cumberbatch received a ten-page email from Assange urging him not to make the film. ‘He characterized himself as a political refugee’, Cumberbatch later explained, ‘with Manning awaiting trial, and other supporters of WikiLeaks who have

Figure 26  Julian Assange (Benedict Cumberbatch) goes viral in The Fifth Estate (Bill Condon, 2013, Dreamworks).

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been detained or might be awaiting detention, and the organization itself – all of that being under threat if I took part in this film’. Promising that the film would not politically damage him, Cumberbatch defended the individualist perspective informing its melodrama and intensified by celebrity culture: ‘Your life’, he replied to Assange, ‘your private life, your persona, is fatefully intertwined with your mission – it cannot not be now’ (quoted in Aitkenhead 2013: 39).

Citizenfour: The Sacrificial Hero Laura Poitras’s Citizenfour (2014), a documentary of an anonymous whistleblower emerging into self-chosen media exposure, is the next film in this sequence. Awarded a 2015 Academy Award for Best Documentary, it is the third of Poitras’s post-9/11 feature-length documentaries, following two on the consequences of American occupation and detention, My Country, My Country (2006) and The Oath (2010). ‘Citizenfour’ is the handle originally employed by Edward Snowden, the National Security Agency contractor who contacted Poitras to disclose the US intelligence services’ surveillance programmes. Assuming secret and unprecedented powers, co-opting the world’s biggest communications corporations, they are shown to engage in a massive programme of interception, tapping ‘Internet servers, satellites, underwater fiber-optic cables, local and foreign telephone systems, and personal computers’ (Greenwald 2014: 92). Although Snowden considered publishing these revelations with WikiLeaks before Assange took refuge in the Ecuadorian Embassy, and although Assange and his associates negotiated Snowden’s asylum in Russia, the American became hailed as the anti-Assange. In a typical comparison, biographer Luke Harding (2014: 221) stresses that ‘Snowden was nothing like Assange. He was shy, allergic to cameras, and reluctant to become the focus of media attention. He never sought celebrity.’ Snowden contacted Poitras because he was aware of her engagement in a project about whistle-blowing. She had already made a short film, The Program (2012) about William Binney, a former NSA technical director who had publicly protested the Agency’s surveillance of American citizens. She had also filmed Assange, American WikiLeaks activist Jacob Appelbaum, and journalist Glenn Greenwald, who had moved from his practice as a civil liberties lawyer to write about internet surveillance for the Guardian. As Snowden explains in one of his initial emails:

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You asked why I chose you. I didn’t. You chose yourself.

Poitras, in her turn, chose Snowden, reorganizing her film to cast him as its central figure in a particularly melodramatic role. But her own implication in this whistle-blowing, and the dangers it presents to her as well as to him, are signalled from the film’s first frame, a caption revealing that her work had already elicited lengthy questioning from the American authorities. The narration of Citizenfour is spoken by her, the standpoint from which the enigma of Snowden is surveyed. Departing from the email texts with which Gibbs introduces Manning, Poitras reads Snowden’s initial overtures to her aloud, voicing her unknown source in an effective act of identification. In these emails ‘Citizenfour’ warns her that the US security services have devised ‘the greatest weapon for oppression in the history of man’ and that to expose it without implicating others will require his identification and likely punishment: My personal desire is that you paint the target on my back … nailing me to the cross.

These messages are bracketed by an enigmatic device reminiscent of the openings of We Steal Secrets and The Fifth Estate. In place of the cryptic signifiers of radio static and hieroglyphs, Citizenfour begins with a puzzling series of illuminated dashes, eventually revealed as lights in a motorway tunnel. They conclude the preface to the film’s central section, spanning Citizenfour’s first communication with Poitras in December 2012 to his initial meeting with her and Greenwald on 3 June 2013, their first discovery of his name, appearance, age, and occupation. Before he is unmasked, the burden of Snowden’s warning has been disclosed. The film’s attention now turns from the message to the messenger, as he is filmed over eight days briefing Poitras, Greenwald, and Guardian defence correspondent Ewen MacAskill at the place to which the tunnel takes us, the Mira Hotel in Hong Kong. Citizenfour has been publicized and reviewed as a spy thriller, in which a fugitive intelligence agent races against time to communicate a fateful message before being captured or killed by his former employers. Echoes of the Bourne series are particularly resonant, and long before Poitras’s film opened Edward Snowden was being compared to Robert Ludlum’s rogue CIA assassin.7 His real-life disclosures amplify the fictional surveillance of the third film in the series, The Bourne Ultimatum, which ‘outlines the American national security state, including its capacity to intercept telephone messages, hack into bank accounts, and electronically track suspects’ (Dodds 2011: 100). To these generic coordinates, Poitras’s documentary adds the alternation of compassion and

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exhilaration central to the film melodrama from the 1903 Uncle Tom’s Cabin onwards (Williams 1998: 74), combining its portrayal of the virtuous sacrifice of its protagonist with the suspense of his attempt to convey the extent of US surveillance operations before his excuse of medical leave is exposed. The central section of the film is structured by daily dating, opening with the caption ‘June 3, 2013’, and then a brief image of Poitras setting up her equipment, reflected together with Greenwald in a mirror in Snowden’s hotel room. The shot that follows is the first of their interviewee, a pale and bespectacled 29-year-old in a white shirt. The film’s interrogation of his motivation and feeling, as well as the intimate confines of the room, dictate tight close-ups and occasional miked heartbeats. Lamenting the media’s ‘big focus on personality’, Snowden declares his wish that it shouldn’t become ‘a distraction’ from his revelations. ‘I’m not the story’, he insists, ‘but anything I can do to help get this out …’. That help is deemed to require an explanation of his motives, and he issues a clearly considered reply: ‘I am more willing to risk imprisonment or any other negative outcome personally, than I am willing to risk the curtailment of my intellectual freedom and that of those around me, whom I care for equally as I do for myself.’ A fade to black yields to the date of the following day, on which senior Guardian reporter Ewen MacAskill joins Greenwald in questioning Snowden. Perched on his hotel bed in the small room, Snowden is explaining how every digital, radio, and analogue communication that the NSA has sensors to detect is ‘automatically ingested’ and retrospectively searched when MacAskill points out that he doesn’t know anything about him. He obliges with his employment at private intelligence consultants Booz Allen Hamilton and his upbringing in a military family,8 and then observes that they are not aware of his choice to make these disclosures: ‘I don’t think I’ll be able to keep the family ties.’ Although the film then returns to his description of the surveillance programmes operated by the NSA and the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ),9 Citizenfour’s willingness to risk liberty, family, and perhaps his life for his political convictions becomes the film’s central theme. His suspenseful exposé of the security state rests upon another generic foundation, the melodramatic examination and moral vindication of a self-sacrificing hero. Snowden’s apprehension of these risks becomes clear on 5  June, when he tenses as room service rings and the fire alarm goes off. The interruptions prove routine, but he uses them to explain how security services can remotely access hotel telephones as well as the passwords he enters on his laptop. Jokingly donning his ‘mantle of secrecy’, he drapes his head and arms with a tablecloth to hide the password to another data mining programme, while teasing Greenwald

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about his failure to take similar precautions. (The possibility that there is another camera filming Poitras filming Snowden is explicit and abiding.) There are suggestions here not only of the cape worn by the stage magician, but of the hooded camera of the Victorian photographer – and of a shroud. Snowden appears an appealing self-deprecating individual, but one who must re-mask himself to carry out his revelations, an alternation between personal disguise and disclosure that structures the entire film. Later this same day Citizenfour’s revelations begin to go public, as the Guardian releases the first of Greenwald’s stories and the journalist appears on CNN with the Hong Kong skyline behind him to announce the NSA’s collection of the ‘phone records of every single customer’ of the US business network Verizon. On 6  June Snowden reads his partner Lindsay Mills’s email reporting her questioning by the American authorities at their home in Hawaii. As the Guardian and the Washington Post publish further revelations about the US suborning of user data from Google, Facebook, and YouTube, he allows Poitras to film him in a twelve-minute interview for eventual online release. In it he discloses his identity, high-security classification, concerns about government surveillance, and intentions in revealing it. On the following day Snowden decides that the film should be streamed as soon as possible. Greenwald is impressed by his defiance, but worries about the consequences. ‘I didn’t try to hide the footprint’, Snowden insists. ‘I intended to come forward.’ On Sunday 9 June, the film within the film is posted on the Guardian website, becoming the most viewed story in the paper’s history (Harding 2014: 152). By Monday, the final day of Citizenfour’s central section, a giant image of Snowden looms from a video screen over a Hong Kong shopping street (Figure 27). The cinematic magnitude and elevation of this image convey an intense reflexivity, as the documentary demonstrates the real-time transformation of an anonymous whistle-blower into a global celebrity. But the circularity of that process is a rapidly tightening noose, confronting the spectator with the realization of Snowden’s irrevocable – and potentially fatal – fame. After a call from the Wall Street Journal reveals that his hotel and room number have been discovered, he quickly moves to Poitras’s. In a Sirkean scene of subject division, he scrutinizes his unfamiliar image in her bathroom mirror, his stubble shaved and his hair gelled in preparation for a disguised departure. Suddenly a Hong Kong lawyer aiding his application to the UN High Commission for Refugees arrives to escort him from the Mira, and Citizenfour disappears. If the narrative at the film’s central core is the melodramatic unmasking of its hero, its final section restates the necessity of its opposite. As the public

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Figure 27  Edward Snowden on the Hong Kong news in Citizenfour (Laura Poitras, 2014, Praxis Films).

absorbs Snowden’s revelations, politicians from Brazilia to Brussels debate the ‘consequences of eliminating privacy’. UK security officers arrive at the Guardian to destroy suspect hard discs. Returning from a visit to Poitras in Germany, Greenwald’s partner David Miranda is questioned for ten hours at Heathrow Airport. Eventually granted asylum in Russia, Snowden renews online contact with the filmmaker, who warns him of a possible set-up. After he is joined by Lindsay Mills in July, the two are seen making dinner together in their Moscow apartment, filmed by Poitras through their kitchen window in mute demonstration of their own continuing vulnerability to surveillance. When it is revealed that the NSA has bugged Angela Merkel’s mobile, William Binney declares that to avoid interception now, ‘The way you have to do it is like Deep Throat did in the Nixon years, meet in the basement of a parking garage – physically.’ And thus the film concludes, with Glenn Greenwald meeting Edward Snowden physically at an unidentified location in Russia. Writing on scraps of paper Greenwald scribbles information identifying potential new whistleblowers and hands them over to a clearly impressed Snowden. We glimpse a diagrammed chain of command rising to the President, but neither the substance of this story nor its sources can be spoken. The film ends with the two men tearing the scraps into smaller and smaller pieces and carefully clearing them away …

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New Yorker writer George Packer has complained that viewers must take this final scene at face value. Snowden’s enthusiastic reaction is made to stand surety for the importance of the unseen revelations that Greenwald shows him. Packer’s complaint is that by the time of the film’s release the chain linking Obama to what he infers are drone attacks is old news. My own complaint is that this scene relies literally on the value of Snowden’s face, the signifier of the individual as the guarantor of truth and virtue. The issue is not the news but the genre, the melodrama in which these narratives of heroes, villains, and victims are filmed. Asked by Greenwald (2014: 221–2) about his ethical influences in an exchange that does not appear in Citizenfour, Snowden mentioned, ‘with a hint of embarrassment’, the video game – whose lesson he said, is ‘that just one person, even the most powerless, can confront great injustice’. Poitras has echoed his claim, describing her film as an illustration of ‘how one person can change history’ (Newfakh 2014). The multitude of activists, including Assange himself whose role is cut back to a brief description of WikiLeaks’ assistance in arranging Snowden’s asylum, are pushed to the edge of the story. The Hong Kong network that sheltered him for several days is minimally acknowledged. And yet, as the film’s final scene demonstrates, each successive confrontation with the security state emerges from that anonymous plurality. Poitras has said that when her mysterious informant first told her that he intended to identify himself she urged him to be filmed. Echoing Cumberbatch’s letter to Assange, she recalls saying ‘“Like it or not, you’re going to be the story. So you might as well get your voice in”’ (Packer 2014). In eventually agreeing, Snowden could count on the persuasive effect of his professional expertise, his risk of his own safety, and his concern that the public be consulted about their surveillance.10 But this only furthered the media’s desire ‘to personalize every story’,11 with the consequent swerve of attention from institutional malfeasance to the leaker’s character. While he was still underground in Hong Kong, the New Yorker published three successive articles12 debating his moral status as a hero or a traitor, an interpretive framing of his revelations so widely adopted that it has become the subject of journalism studies.13 Commenting on Snowden’s Guardian interview, others offered the, by then, familiar diagnosis of ‘fameseeking narcissism’ on CBS news and in the Washington Post.14 If Snowden has since had more success than Manning and Assange at fending off what Greenwald (2014: 31) calls ‘the two most favoured lines of whistle blower demonisation – “he’s unstable” and “he’s naïve”’ – he has nevertheless joined them in confinement, to a country whose own human rights record is far from exemplary and at whose mercy he remains.15

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Snowden’s stated reasons for identifying himself were the assertion of the citizen’s right to reveal government malfeasance, protecting his colleagues from suspicion and his assumption that the NSA’s technological capacities would ensure his eventual detection.16 An alternative strategy was retrospectively mooted by Washington Post journalist, and co-author of All the President’s Men, Bob Woodward: Snowden should have brought his information to Woodward and had his anonymity preserved as a legally protected journalistic source, becoming in effect the latest Deep Throat. Setting aside the consideration that Manning attempted precisely that and was turned away, and that Woodward has long functioned as an apologist for the DC establishment, the proposal returns me to the two kinds of political power that alternate in these films – masked and unmasked. Woodward’s Watergate informant, who identified himself in 2005 as former FBI second in command Mark Felt, was himself a melodramatic figure, using coded arrangements of pot plants to arrange late-night meetings with the journalist in underground car parks, but he succeeded in disclosing the Nixon administration’s wiretapping of its political opponents without becoming the object of moral, psychological, or forensic scrutiny. Instead, the focus of public attention was – as he, Woodward, and Bernstein directed it – on Nixon’s ‘dirty tricks’. If Snowden’s identification was inevitable, given how few NSA staff or consultants shared his expertise, need he have been named prior to his arrival at a safer haven than Moscow? Was the identification of an individual source required to exculpate his colleagues or to give his revelations journalistic credibility? Can the public conceive of a resistance which is not personified?

Snowden: Sex and Surveillance Hailed in Variety as ‘the ultimate true-life hacker thriller’, Oliver Stone’s Snowden (2016) parasites Citizenfour in the style of The Fifth Estate’s fictionalization of We Steal Secrets. But if Snowden has been justly described by critic Ava Kofman (2017) as a ‘clumsy reboot’ of its documentary predecessor, Stone nevertheless adds his inimitable authorial stamp. Returning to a narrative of government secrecy and its exposure, the director stays true to the preoccupation with political conspiracy that led him to film JFK. And, as in JFK, the paranoia in this thriller is of a sexual nature. Stone’s 1991 film attributes Kennedy’s assassination to a sinister homosexual conspiracy, employing the Zapruder film of the shooting and a grisly re-enactment of the subsequent autopsy to dramatize the violation of what Michael Rogin (1992: 504) has designated ‘the vulnerable male body’.

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Encouraged, perhaps, by the sheer physical intimacy of Poitras’s portrayal of her imperilled hero in his tiny hotel room, and labouring to demonstrate the extent of the snooping he reveals, the director represents the object of government surveillance in Snowden as sex. As Kofman (2017) observes, this familiar framing of ‘state surveillance as a threat to individual privacy’ emphasizes the state’s intrusion into the domestic sphere, the traditional terrain of melodrama. The film opens in Hong Kong as Snowden first encounters Poitras and Greenwald. Their questions about his intelligence work and political motivations structure a series of flashbacks to his attempt to join the Special Forces after 9/11, the injury that forces him out of the military, and his later work for the intelligence services. Throughout these flashbacks the camera is presented an agent of sexual contact, enabling Lindsay Mills (Shailene Woodley) to flirt with the young CIA trainee she’s met on Geeknet.com as she photographs him on their first date. Initially Snowden – Joseph Gordon-Levitt in an impersonation rivalling Cumberbatch’s Assange – is far from camera shy, even agreeing to do a camp catwalk at Mill’s instruction. As though his hip-swinging promenade signals his feminization as the object of the gaze, the camera is soon reconceived as a threat. At first this threat is to others, enabling Snowden and a colleague to compromise the father of a young Pakistani woman by collecting Facebook photos revealing her clandestine romance. Later, they peer at her through her own computer camera as she undresses in her bedroom. Soon Snowden begins to fear that he and Lindsay are also being watched through his laptop, and he anxiously interrupts their lovemaking to tape over its camera eye. By the time he reaches Hong Kong he is so phobic that he can barely tolerate being filmed by Poitras (Melissa Leo) and must be calmed by her maternal reassurance, an antierotic requirement that led Stone to cast – very unusually – an actress looking older and less glamorous than her real-life model. Unlike Poitras’s gaze, that of American intelligence is presented as crudely sexual. At his first day of CIA training, Snowden is asked about his interests. When he replies ‘computers’, an amiable instructor (Nicolas Cage) informs him that he’s ‘come to the right little whorehouse’. Later, Snowden explains how the NSA can track every cell phone in the world: ‘No matter who you are, every day of your life you’re sitting in a database that is ready to be looked at.’ The specifically sexual threat this presents to the unwitting citizen is immediately illustrated in a flashback in which Mills is seen editing her nude self-portraits on a computer screen. When Snowden begs her to delete them, an angry row erupts about who might be watching, with Mills demanding to know if her ‘boobs … are issues of national security’. Her suspicions are later verified when

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Snowden’s sinister CIA mentor (Rhys Ifans) – named O’Brien after the Thought Policeman in 1984 – informs him, via his web screen enlargement to Big Brother proportions, that the Agency is monitoring Mills’ intimate relationships. In foregrounding the state’s power to violate its citizens’ privacy, Stone may simply be offering an explanation of how every subject has – in a phrase emphasized in the film’s dialogue – ‘something to hide’. But Snowden’s physical frailty, depicted in the stress fractures he incurs in the army, the epilepsy with which he is later diagnosed, and Gordon-Levitt’s bespectacled pallor, takes on the suggestion of sexual impotence when Mills complains ‘You don’t even fucking touch me anymore!’ In Rogin’s reading of JFK, the homosexual threat to the President’s body, and ‘psycho-political order’ more broadly, is represented by the film’s adoption of a fetishistically fragmented style that matches staccato and disorienting shot sequences to its ‘political demonology’ (Rogin 1992: 504). Snowden also deploys a fetish, but in symbol rather than style. The problemsolving ability that will enable its protagonist to smuggle the intelligence agencies’ surveillance software out of the NSA’s Hawaiian headquarters is represented by the puzzle in which a micro memory card is literally embedded, a Rubik’s Cube. Following Peter Brooks, Caroline Dunant (1994: 83) has commented on melodrama’s aim to show the world’s ‘façade and the hidden forces behind it’: Thus visuality carries the full weight of meaning, and by necessity becomes an exaggeration of the natural.

In its hyper-visualization as the film’s key figure of surface and interior, problem (moral and intellectual) and resolution, the Rubik’s Cube reappears several times. At the opening it is carried by Snowden to enable his recognition by Greenwald and Poitras in Hong Kong. Shot from behind, a close-up of his right hand reveals him nervously twirling the clicking cube as he approaches them. The flashback to his enrolment in the CIA shows him bonding with his cryptography instructor over their mutual interest in the Enigma decoding machine of World War 2, but the machines he borrows from his workshop are increasingly challenging versions of the small plastic puzzle with its rotatable square tiles. At the film’s suspenseful conclusion Snowden saves key surveillance programmes onto a memory card, narrowly avoids discovery by his manager, and then inserts the tiny card beneath a tile on his cube (Figure 28). Before passing through the security detector, he hands it over to the guards who take a few inquisitive twists before tossing it back as he departs the NSA for the final time. In an elaboration of Freud on the fetish, Christian Metz (1985: 86) observes that in its everyday incarnation as ‘the object which brings luck … the fetish

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Figure 28  The memory card inserted into the Rubik’s Cube in Snowden (Oliver Stone, 2016, KrautPack/Vendian/Endgame Entertainment).

combines a double and contradictory function: on the side of metaphor, an inciting and encouraging one (it is a pocket phallus); and on the side of metonymy, an apotropaic one, that is, the averting of danger’. As both the reminder and the instrument of his own problem-solving acumen, Snowden’s pocket phallus clearly functions in this way, reasserting his intelligence and ensuring his survival. And thus, despite its mobile facets, bold outlines and the ‘enameled, hard surface’ of its colours17, this cube is emphatically not cubist. Nor is Snowden, despite its portrayal of paranoia-inducing surveillance, a paranoid thriller in the generic sense of a conspiracy narrative that resists epistemological closure. Where JFK employs quick cuts and reframings, lightning flashbacks and disorienting close-ups in its scattershot portrayal of a failed attempt to expose an inchoate conspiracy claimed to involve the CIA, Cuban exiles and the Dallas gay scene, Snowden ignores the continuation of American surveillance after the events it portrays to celebrate ‘self-reliant heroism’ (Kofman 2017). In its final scenes this docudrama attempts to dispel any lingering doubts about its own authority by imperceptibly segueing into a documentary: as the pre-presidential Donald Trump calls for Snowden’s execution, actual news footage shows the fugitive emerging from the Moscow airport while activists – one wearing the V mask – march in his support. A year later, after he receives a three-year residence permit from the Russian government, Gordon-Levitt’s Snowden appears on a web screen before a fictional audience, interviewed by the then real-life Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger. ‘Without the information to start a public debate we’re lost’, declares the fictional whistle-blower. ‘The people being able to question our government and hold it accountable – that’s the principle that the United States of America was founded on.’ When Rusbridger says that

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living in exile must be hard, a pan past the rear of the screen he is addressing cuts to a larger image of the actual Edward Snowden, unmasking the docudrama to exhibit its real-life referent. Speaking from Russia, Snowden counts the personal costs of losing love, family and future against the freedom of ‘no longer having to worry about what is happening tomorrow, because I’m happy about what I’ve done today’. As the audience responds with a standing ovation, Rusbridger rises with them to the final notes of the film’s score. Edward Snowden smiles, closes his laptop, and assumes a contemplative profile, a tableau of virtue with which the film concludes.

Risk: Return of the Villain While Oliver Stone was remaking Citizenfour, Laura Poitras resumed the project she had abandoned, ostensibly on WikiLeaks but effectively focusing on its founder and editor-in-chief Julian Assange. In May 2016 she debuted this new documentary, Risk, in the Directors’ Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival. Soon afterwards she withdrew it for re-editing, releasing a much more critical version a year later. Between the two versions came WikiLeaks’ publication of hacked emails from the Democratic National Committee and Hillary Clinton campaign chair John Podesta, and the November election of Donald Trump. Poitras includes these developments in the new cut, but claims that the incident which led her to re-edit her film was the ‘intense pressure’ (Zeitchik 2017) Assange applied on the eve of the Cannes screening, when he telephoned her to protest the inclusion of his disparaging discussion of the two Swedish women who accused him of sexual assault. Whatever the cause, the final version of Risk was restructured to include a commentary by the filmmaker, in which Poitras reads entries from her production journal registering her ambivalence while filming Assange. The personal reframing also enables Poitras to acknowledge a potential conflict of interest, her brief affair with WikiLeaks activist Jacob Appelbaum, later accused of sexual abuse in allegations aired in the revised film, allegations which he and others dispute. Risk opens with a caption reviewing WikiLeaks’ creation of its anonymous online submission system and the 2010 reception of over 700,000 US military and State Department documents. The caption concludes with Poitras’s dating of her film’s inauguration to ‘the aftermath of this leak’. The first image is of windowpanes reflected in a glass of liquid, the second of Assange pulling a cork with his teeth (Figure 29). ‘Most people who have very strong principled stances’,

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Figure 29  Julian Assange uncorks a bottle in Risk (Laura Poitras, 2016, Praxis Films).

he announces, ‘don’t survive’. As his WikiLeaks associate and then girlfriend Sarah Harrison looks on, he expounds on the need to retain one’s principles, while balancing ‘one for another in order to survive’. This scene is a night-time drinking session in 2011 at the Norfolk country house of a WikiLeaks supporter, where Assange was remanded on bail while appealing against his extradition to Sweden for questioning. The emptied glasses and distorted reflection suggest an intimacy lubricated by alcohol. Opening and closing the re-edited film, this interview becomes crucial to its portrayal of the WikiLeaks founder and the choice of the film’s title. The introductory interview is soon followed by a shot of Assange dining with other activists from a perspective also employed in Citizenfour – seen through a window from outside the house. As in the previous film, the external viewpoint may suggest his vulnerability to official surveillance, but Poitras’s distanced appraisal of her subject is also made clear in her reading from her production journal over this shot: I had a strange dream about Julian. I was moving between two spaces – one doing an insider expose, the other at a hidden location … The anxiety must be a fear of betrayal and my worry about how Julian will react. With this film the lines have become very blurred.

As LA Times critic Steven Zeitchik (2017) observes, the addition of these increasingly critical readings changes the initial film’s portrait of Assange as ‘a

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maverick hero’ into a much more sceptical depiction. But the existence of the production journal raises a further issue – why had Poitras suppressed her longheld doubts in the original version? The eighty-eight-minute final film loosely follows Assange in the period after Gibney’s documentary ends – awaiting the decision on his extradition, entering the Ecuadorian Embassy as a political refugee when it is upheld, helping Edward Snowden travel from Hong Kong to Russia, learning of Chelsea Manning’s thirty-five-year sentence for espionage, publishing emails detailing Hillary Clinton’s lucrative speeches at Goldman Sachs and the Democratic National Committee’s attempt to hinder the candidacy of Bernie Sanders, and denying that they were received from Russian agents. Among the revelations which it names are the cooperation of Egyptian telecommunications corporations with Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak’s attempt to suppress the uprising of 2011, the ‘Collateral Murder’ video released by Manning, and emails revealing the complicity of foreign governments and businesses with the Syrian regime. Daniel Ellsberg, famed for leaking the Pentagon Papers on the Vietnam War, is shown ridiculing the claim that since Al Qaeda downloads WikiLeaks ‘it’s providing information to the enemy’, but no political consequence of these publications is pursued at any length. Although the transformative practice of publishing such material on the internet was, Poitras has claimed, her initial subject, neither these leaks nor WikiLeaks as an institution is systematically examined, and certainly not whether, as Zeitchik asks, the internet publication of vast caches of secret material can be described as ‘journalism’? The subject, he concludes, is instead whether ‘the man doing the publication [is] a good or bad human being?’ With more intimate access than Gibney had to Assange – in part because his house arrest pending appeal and subsequent refuge in the Embassy prevented travel – Poitras represents him as an increasingly anxious, if not downright paranoid, figure. Rendezvousing with associates in the bushes at the Norfolk estate, suddenly communicating in written notes or – in this film’s key moment of masking – dying his hair, inserting dark contacts, and donning motorcycle leathers to ride a dispatch bike to the Embassy, his spy craft becomes parodic, matching the comical self-importance with which he delivers his political pronouncements. Receiving celebrity visitors at his new abode, Assange has a hilarious encounter with Lady Gaga, who demands that he substitute a more proletarian T-shirt for his suit in her attempt to film an informal interview. When she asks about his favourite food, he begins to answer with a reference to Malaysia, suddenly catches himself out and replies solemnly ‘Let’s not pretend that I’m a normal person. I’m obsessed with political struggle.’ But if, like

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Snowden, Assange realizes that an emphasis on his person may deter from that struggle, his consent to Poitras’s observational filming – not to mention Lady Gaga’s – leaves him far more vulnerable to criticism than the American. In the scenes he later demanded be omitted from the film, Assange tells the legal team aiding his appeal against extradition – including the clearly appalled feminist lawyer Helena Kennedy – that he is the victim of a conspiracy between the Swedish state and a cabal of radical feminists: one of his accusers, he explains, even founded ‘the lesbian nightclub in Gothenburg’. Kennedy’s repeated plea that he stop denigrating these women is ignored, making Assange seem dismissive of her as well as his accusers. This dismissal is compounded when he later jokes to the dismayed Harrison that a ‘sex case’ every six months would make him ‘a household name’. The effect is to shift the documentary’s attention from his fear of extradition via Sweden to the United States, and the sentence for espionage meted out to Manning, to his misogyny, or even possible guilt of sexual assault. The scene is an unmistakable coup in the exposure of a flawed public figure, but in pursuing this objective the film simply amplifies the moral investigation of We Steal Secrets and The Fifth Estate. It overwhelms Assange’s discussion, in the interview continued from the film’s introduction, of the risks – physical and, with the benefit of hindsight, perhaps also ethical and political – he is prepared to take: I don’t believe in martyrs … I think people should certainly take risks, understand carefully what the risks are and what the opportunities in the situation are and make sure they are in balance. Sometimes the risks can be very high … but the opportunities can also be extremely high. By opportunity I mean the things you care about. The risk of inaction can also be extremely high. Every day of your life you lose another day of life.

Cut into the film shortly after a newscaster announces that Manning is facing life imprisonment, this meditation on the hazards and possibilities of disclosing the abuses of powerful institutions and individuals might have structured a riskier film, one in which the political consequences of such disclosures are pursued beyond their danger to the whistle-blowers. Instead, the risk of the title increasingly seems to be that undertaken by the filmmaker, whose dealings with her unsavoury subject present pitfalls for her. Three factors may have lead Poitras to re-edit her film: Assange’s insistence just before Cannes in May 2016 that she omit his discussions of the Swedish investigation; the allegations of Appelbaum’s sexual abuse made two weeks later; and the July and October WikiLeaks releases of emails that revealed the

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Democratic National Committee’s preference for Clinton rather than Bernie Sanders and her lucrative speaking engagements with Goldman Sachs. In interviews about the final cut, Poitras has emphasized the irony of the leaker-inchief ’s attempt to censor her film, including his lawyers’ issuing of a ‘cease and desist’ order to prospective American distributors. She has offered no further comment on Appelbaum, but justifies the Clinton publications with Assange’s own declaration of his willingness to publish Trump material of equivalent newsworthiness, material that somehow never arrived. Poitras’s post-release statements, like her murmured voice-over the film, draw attention to her own character in this character study, in which she admits to possible naivety and fear of betraying her subjects. Cutting from Assange’s announcement that WikiLeaks evacuated Snowden from Hong Kong, she reads out a journal entry on her refusal nonetheless to share with him the NSA documents Snowden has turned over to her: ‘I tell him I can’t be his source. I don’t tell him that I don’t trust him.’ The reading is succeeded by footage of the 2016 Hackers on Planet Earth conference in which a woman asks to remain off camera as she describes Appelbaum’s sexual notoriety, and another openly laments the ‘degree of sickness within the community that allows these things to happen’. Poitras’s acknowledgement of her own brief involvement with the activist follows, together with her accusation of his abuse of a friend of hers after their affair. Appelbaum is quoted challenging these allegations, but his refusal of an on-camera interview on the grounds that he wants her film ‘to have a different ending’ is readily accepted: ‘So do I’, says its maker, tersely concluding this section. The film’s ending traverses the FBI’s claim that Russian intelligence masterminded a ‘break into the Democratic Party’s headquarters using cyber means’, uncannily repeating Nixon’s original bugging of the Democrats’ offices in the Watergate Hotel, albeit on a huge scale, that of the thousands of communications released by WikiLeaks in June and October 2016. Replying to suggestions that Russian agents forwarded this material to WikiLeaks, Assange denies reception from a ‘state actor’ and Risk returns to the 2011 interview with which it began. In light of Trump’s 2016 election and the evidence for Assange’s role in enabling it, the realpolitik he proposes five years earlier takes on a new salience. Refilling his glass in extreme close-up, the Assange of 2011 declares that any perception of the global nature of contemporary politics makes ‘acting locally completely inconsequential’. When Poitras dismisses this as a tactical point, he protests that ‘the area I care about is the whole world’, an argument that is pursued no further. Assange’s declaration may simply be an alibi for what

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appears to be his increasing loss of concern for colleagues, informants, financial supporters and those named in the unredacted files released by WikiLeaks, or an early warning that he was never the leftist he was assumed to be; but it may also be an arguable insistence on a post-national perspective on information flows and their global consequences, the original theme of Poitras’s inquiry but one that is decidedly overtaken by events. The contrast between the film’s ultimate focus on the attributable morality of individuals rather than the unattributable information flows of the digital age is a vivid demonstration of this character study’s descent into the study of character, both that of Assange and the director who films him.

XY Chelsea: Transitions With the enigmatic opening of all the films under consideration here, XY Chelsea (Tim Travers Hawkins 2019) begins with an obscured shot of its subject, who is then revealed in a pixie haircut, light make-up, and pastel dress. ‘I don’t know’, her voice-over declares, ‘I just like coming-of-age-stories.’ Later Chelsea Manning will compare this becoming to gender transition in a film about different kinds of transitions, from soldier to civilian, prisoner to free woman. At its end the transition that made the film possible is reversed and Manning is jailed and rendered invisible once more, but not before she has observed that months of solitary confinement in conditions amounting to torture have already condemned her to a posthumous existence: ‘I was alive but I was dead. And I’ve been dead ever since.’ As recent studies have argued, melodrama’s formal hybridity of music and speech opens it to the liminal (Rooney 2015) and the irresolute (Goldberg 2016) even as its popular manifestations have sought to stabilize the dichotomies of virtue and villainy. Combining the conventionally male chromosomal type ‘XY’ with the conventionally female name ‘Chelsea’, Manning’s Twitter hashtag extends this hybridity into the realm of gender identity, whose idealized norms are a perennial source of conflict in the melodrama as well as the coming-of-age film. Where many transition stories uphold these norms in narratives of dying and subsequent rebirth into a stable identity, this film’s protagonist claims both life and death. ‘We live in a state of uncertainty’, she declares, a description she amplifies with repeated warnings of ‘I don’t know.’ This refusal of resolution, both narrative and visual, has unsurprisingly antagonized the reviewers of XY Chelsea, who complain about its ‘hazy’

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focus (Catsoulis 2019), ‘frustrating’ absence of detail (Callahan 2019) and ‘disjointed’ exposition (Rose 2019). Where We Steal Secrets emphasizes the betrayal of Manning by Adrian Lamo, the hacker who turned her in to the FBI, her emails to him are a brief component of this later film, which intersperses the commutation of her thirty-five-year sentence for publicizing documents detailing the Iraq war’s ‘endless stream of violence and death and destruction’, her fight to be permitted the rights of transition in prison, and her emergence from it into political activism, with her troubled childhood as the gay son of alcoholic parents in small-town Oklahoma. Yet this mandatory biography barely conveys a film that is really about what Manning describes, on arriving in a safe house in an unspecified location, as ‘learning how to be again’. A film about transition might be expected to narrate that learning in gendered terms, and Manning is shown practising the arts of make-up as well as the selection and wearing of feminine fashion: ‘I don’t know’, she muses, ‘if my body movements are trained for this kind of thing.’ Challenging as this transition may be, it takes second place in this film to that from seven years of incarceration and what is presented as a closely related institution, the military, to civilian life. When Manning is first seen savouring the pleasures of walking in the woods or choosing how to dress, she could be considering their absence from an army base in East Baghdad as much as the maximum security prison at Fort Leavenworth. There are a disproportionate number of transwomen in the army, she observes, young people fleeing from their desires to the uniform she was also made to wear in the all-male military prison. Manning’s escape from this enforced uniformity is this film’s unmasking, chosen rather than inflicted by the media. The uncovering of her body from its institutional khakis, her tentative movements and self-exploration, her emergence from stasis into mobility, from prison censorship to speaking subjectivity, cannot fail to recall Rousseau’s Galatea, but a Galatea who will replace ‘It is me’ with ‘I’m not the person people think I am.’ Throughout XY Chelsea, its subject eludes moral characterization. She is not a hero, she insists, or even a virtuous victim in the role allocated to her by We Steal Secrets. She struggles with the possibility that her release of classified documents might have caused unintended harm to herself, if hopefully not to others. Asked whether it was worth it, she replies: ‘I don’t have an answer.’ Her suicide attempts in prison, and its further consideration when her entry into electoral politics is sabotaged by her exploration of an Alt-Right event, suggest a vulnerability which is ominously intensified by the ever-threatening state. By the film’s end Manning is imprisoned once more, for refusing to testify in a grand jury investigation

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of Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks disclosures of 2010.18 Two years after her filmed release from Fort Leavenworth she is returned to invisibility. Where Manning presents herself as a figure resistant to simple summation, this effect is heightened by Travers Hawkins’s adoption of an unsettling visual style, one that relinquishes any claim of transparent access to its subject. As the director has pointed out (Associated Press 2019), his first sight of Manning was through a camera, and its mediation is always apparent. Employing tight closeups in unusual combination with a widescreen aspect, and frequently refocusing on its subject, the film seems to be struggling to keep her from disappearing – a struggle which is doomed to fail. The grooming scene so recurrent in these hacktivist films features Chelsea having her hair styled, but filmed from behind (Figure 30). Cinema’s ontology of ‘stirrings and diminutions … flickering from dark to image to dark, death to life to death’ has been compared by Eliza Steinbock (2019: 15) to the presentation of transsexual embodiment in a number of experimental films. Citing Susan Stryker (2013) on how trans bodily practices ‘shimmer’ on the boundary of fantasy and actualization, Steinbock posits their resistance to ‘being fully graspable’ (17). In XY Chelsea that challenge to secure knowledge extends beyond its presentation of gender transition to all the ways Manning must ‘learn to be’, via the film’s own aesthetic. A key scene offers a parallel to its formal ambiguity in an editorial meeting at the New York Times. Discussing which photograph of Manning to use in a magazine profile, staff debate whether to show her in an emotionally ‘powerful’ close-up or seated in a chair: ‘for the first time, sitting down and telling her story’. Whatever the Times staff go on to chose, both framings, with their

Figure 30  Styling Chelsea Manning in XY Chelsea (Tim Travers Hawkins, 2019, BFI/Pulse Films).

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different interpretive implications, are employed in XY Chelsea. Its narration of becoming precludes the moral conclusiveness for which melodrama strives and the commensurate anxiety about whether, as Mandeville argues in his eighteenth-century Fable of the Bees, all good deeds are performed out of vanity. The film shows Manning looking up at her giant image on a Times Square advertisement for the TV news show ‘Nightline’, and an interview filmed for the New Yorker, but neither are adduced to a descent into celebrity narcissism. Although she defiantly replies to a demand that she be ‘shot for treason’ with ‘Instead I got shot for Vogue’, media attention is not proposed as her motive for whistle-blowing or her subsequent political activism. Conversely, what others praise as self-sacrificing heroism Manning dismisses as a simple readiness ‘to jump in and do something’, prompted in the film by the white supremacist demonstration at Charlottesburg, Virginia, just three months after her release. In an eerie echo of Moore’s masked ‘V’, whose cloak conceals no flesh or blood to kill, she contemplates her options: What are they going to do? Throw me in prison? Or kill me? They’re going to do that anyway if they take over the reins of our society.

Reflecting on an operatic anticipation of this film’s irresolution, Jonathan Goldberg (2016: 10) considers the ‘shiver motif ’ of the tremolos in the brief duet in Fidelio (1814) that Beethoven labelled ‘Melodram’ – ostensibly for its exceptional interaction of speech with musical phrases. Fidelio is a woman disguised as a man, attempting to free her husband, a political prisoner, by wooing the jailer’s daughter and assisting him in digging what she fears may be her husband’s grave. As Fidelio and the jailer descend into the dungeon, he explains her trembling by its freezing depths, his speech accompanied by an ‘unresolved musical descent down the scale and by a tremolo chord’ (2016: 4), the first of several as the two approach the sleeping prisoner. The brief scene, its dialogue punctuated by dissonant musical phrases, is described by Goldberg as a formal manifestation of the unresolved issues of the narrative. Soon the identities of the prisoner and his wife will be disclosed and normatively reestablished, but this will not resolve the injustices of tyranny, or indeed those of gender and sexuality. Only in disguise ‘as male and marriageable (rather than as female and married)’ has this wife ‘been able to act’. As Goldberg (2016: 8–9) declares: To suppose a seamless connection between the dilemma of unjust punishment and the revelation of identity is to imagine that the lifting of the veil empowers action, indeed explains why and how action is possible.

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While commentators such as Graeme Turner (2010: 13) have acknowledged that contemporary celebrity can vary from ‘a form of enfranchisement and empowerment’ to ‘something close to abjection’, there has been little corresponding attention to anonymity. Might the mask offer activists an empowering alternative to the melodrama of celebrity? Assange, Manning, and Snowden’s anonymous exposures of war crimes, mass surveillance, and institutional corruption suggest that every attempt to extend technological control offers ample opportunities for its subversion. The interactive culture that produces today’s instant celebrity also promotes the agency and expressiveness of subjects who refuse identification, assume an alias, or identify under a collective rather than individual aegis like Anonymous, ‘the quintessential antibrand brand’, as Gabriella Coleman (2014: 16) has dubbed it. This also requires sacrifice, but not that of the heroic individual faced with exile or prison. What is sacrificed, she argues, is individualism itself, the self-saying that melodrama and its cultural heirs effectively underwrite. Unencumbered by this public self, the anonymous continue to make history, deploying ‘the power of the mask as a potential force to unmask corruption, hypocrisy, and state and corporate secrecy’ (Coleman 2013a: 20). What does this say to celebrity studies? After all, scholars in the field have not been slow to point out the individualist modelling of subjectivity that has ushered the phenomenon to its media centrality. Nor have they ignored the ‘ordinariness’ of those who now receive public attention. Moreover, the diegetic and extra-diegetic charge of ‘fame-seeking’ levelled at the whistle-blowers in these films underlines the media’s own stake in celebrity’s motivating power, as well as its pervasiveness as a narrative of both self-aggrandizement and social achievement. But much as we may claim that we are all celebrities now, what these films cannot help but demonstrate is the emergence of a political resistance whose anonymity necessarily matches that of the secret state it opposes. Perhaps the ubiquity of contemporary celebrity is itself a disguise, masking the increasingly unnamed exercise of political power.

An Afterword on Art and Anonymity The two foundational works of stage melodrama – the neoclassical Pygmalion and the popular Coelina – can be read as parables of thwarted artistry. In Rousseau’s 1770 staging of Ovid’s tale, a sculptor despairs at his lack of inspiration. In Pixérécourt’s 1800 play a painter is brutally attacked after setting

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up his easel on a mountainside. Employing devices of literal and figurative unveiling, the ensuing narratives take over the work of visualization to reveal the sculptor’s debt to the creative powers of others and the painter’s claim to familial relation. The ‘melodramatic imagination’ that links these very different works is compelled by the impulse to depict a reality which commentators repeatedly describe as ‘masked’ by the world of appearances. The Latin term for the mask, a false face worn by a dramatic actor, is ‘persona’, which gives us the words for both the assumed character and the real person. Their convergence in the way we think about subjectivity engineers the epistemological drive of melodrama, in which the character’s appearance is examined for clues to her ‘character’, her moral disposition. In melodramas of celebrity this determination of character is effectively emplotted as a public measurement of personal worth. Telling such stories the films in this study foreground their own generic operation as melodrama. Attempting to visualize this ‘virtue’ – explicitly defined in the 1937 A Star Is Born as ‘sincerity and honesty’ – these films consider the operations of regard in both its cognitive and evaluative senses. In the 1931 City Lights, a ragged vagrant saves the sight of a woman who then fails to recognize him. In That Hamilton Woman (1940), a petty thief is laughed at by her cellmate when she proclaims herself ‘Lady Hamilton’. In the 1959 Imitation of Life, a desperate mother is rebuffed by a stranger when she asks after her missing child. The anonymity of these protagonists renders them powerless against wrongful accusation, ridicule, and sheer indifference – against not being seen. Conversely, in the twenty-first century ‘hacktivist’ films of this book’s final chapter, anonymity enables their protagonists to disclose corruption, war crimes, and state surveillance on a mammoth scale. But when the identity of these whistle-blowers is unmasked, the resulting publicity initiates their trial by celebrity, in which their revelations are displaced by relentless personal scrutiny. Whatever value their disclosures might contribute to political deliberation comes a distant second to the question of their moral character, an index of which is – ironically enough – a desire for the celebrity visited upon them. Analysing the power of anonymity, Gabriella Coleman (2011: 511) has distinguished WikiLeaks’s association with the high-profile celebrity of Julian Assange – ‘whose personality is as much the subject of news as is the exclusive organization he helped to build’ – from the ‘robust antileader, anticelebrity ethic’ of Anonymous. Noting the growing prominence of leaderless movements like Anonymous and Occupy, she complains that the mainstream media ‘can’t – or won’t – write a story that does not normalize the conversion of an individual

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into a celebrity or leader, complete with individual heroism or tragic moral failing’ (Coleman 2014: 50) – the melodramatic characterization with which eco campaigner Greta Thunberg is now threatened in the wake of Assange, Snowden, and Manning. But as she (Coleman 2013b: 207) also observes, even Time magazine has attempted to acknowledge the collective users of social media by naming them – addressed as ‘you’ – their 2006 ‘person of the year’. Considering the relation of contemporary celebrity to the public attention created by social media, David Marshall (2016: 2) defines ‘celebrities’ as ‘entities that have been allowed to move into the highest echelons of the political, economic and cultural elite’. But some approximation of their ‘visibility, reputation, impression management and impact’ (6) is now available to all those who create, project and update an individual online persona in what Marshall calls the ‘mediatisation of the self ’ (3). True to form, the typology inherited by the Hollywood star system from popular stage melodrama, in which actors become identified with a series of similar roles foregrounding their physical appearance, also informs our online characterizations: ‘To establish a public profile, social media users establish an identity with some consistency over time’ (62). In the style of studio publicity, glamourized images are posted by their subjects in carefully curated archives: Our Facebook homepage becomes a mirror of our public identity, and we use our sites to preen, to adjust, and to edit ourselves. (72)

Marshall proposes the identities thus created as ‘strategic and pragmatic’ – ‘a mask that should be seen not as a negation of a truer self but rather as a technique to move through a transformed public world’ (71, my italics). The paradigm of this mobile updating of our public personae is the rearticulated internet image, an evolving unit of cultural imitation dubbed the ‘meme’ by Richard Dawkins (1989: 192, 329) in comparison to the organic reproduction of the gene. Although Marshall stresses the individualized nature of this reputational economy, he notes how its aggregated articulation by social media friends and followers ‘internetworks’ online identities beyond their subject’s control, a fate painfully illustrated in the 2015 documentary Weiner – itself subsequently internetworked with metatextual political consequences. Marco Deseriis (2016: 176) makes a stronger claim, arguing that memes are ‘improper in character’, often acquiring meaning ‘only in relation to one another’. This interaction may reciprocally affect the information environment, developing new forms of individuation, with his example the collective appropriation of ‘Anonymous’ as an authorial pseudonym. Thus, where the tag originally marked

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unsigned comments on the ‘4chan’ internet forum, its adoption for political purposes resulted in its upper case designation as a specified ‘assemblage of enunciation’ entailing ‘coordination, collaboration and intentionality’ (165). The resulting prominence of Anonymous bears out Kamilla Elliott’s observation (2016: 530), that in their etymologies – ‘without a name’ and ‘drawing a crowd’ – anonymity and celebrity are not antonyms. As Coleman and Deseriis acknowledge, the anonymous communication afforded by social media and the internet can have harmful as well as beneficial consequences. Anonymity can enable and protect progressive initiatives, but it also abets abusive trolling, the intimidation of activists, journalists and politicians, drug and weapons dealing on the ‘dark web’. The result has been demands for tech companies to accept the legal responsibilities of publishers, particularly in regard to criminal commerce, incitements to violence, accurate reporting, and campaign communications. A further issue is the protection – or not – of intellectual property. Both WikiLeaks and Anonymous have espoused liberal commitments to freedom of speech and inquiry traditionally articulated as the rights of the individual, but the possessive individualism associated with such claims is contradicted by their opposition to intellectual property rights. While they defend the privacy of those surveilled by intelligence agencies and internet advertisers, they have energetically protested – and at times successfully ‘cracked’ – the digital management of corporate copyright and state repression. Anonymous data dumps like the Democratic Party correspondence published by WikiLeaks have subsequently been claimed to expose political corruption and to facilitate Russian efforts on behalf of Donald Trump in the 2016 US presidential election. Both allegations may prove to be true, but these contradictions have stifled support for the organization and its founder. A prescient study published before these developments, Peggy Phelan’s indicatively titled Unmarked, traces something of their prehistory, noting the convergence of the player as the supposed agent of the narrative and the spectator as its supposed observer in Waiting for Godot. Although Phelan doesn’t mention it, the salience of Samuel Beckett’s 1953 play was restated forty years later when the bombarded citizens of Sarajevo performed it while awaiting a rescue from Serbian shelling that took years to come. The pathos of its performance in these conditions, under the direction of Susan Sontag, contributed to the eventual cessation of hostilities. Invoking the theories of quantum mechanics (Phelan 2000: 115), Phelan aptly observes: ‘The watcher influences what is seen as much as the characters whom the watcher watches.’

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Another work illustrates this convergence of actor and spectator, while supplying the epigraph for this volume. Dora García’s Instant Narrative (2006) is a performance piece in which visitors to a gallery space are observed by a performer who rapidly types recognizable descriptions of their appearance and behaviour which are projected on to a large screen. An intertitle in a video recording of its performance in a Turin gallery declares that ‘when taking a closer look, the viewer discovers the text is talking about him, how he looks, what he does, even his hypothetical nationality, taste, social status’19 – the elements of melodrama’s typology. In the notations of another performance six people are described standing in an exhibition space, none looking at the screen. Gradually the performer records a tall man in a black jacket holding hands with a woman in an orange sweater as they look at bulletin boards in the gallery; a blonde girl in a turquoise hoody listening to the girl in orange; then another blonde girl. When her ‘mom points to her presence on screen’, the performer types this out and follows it with ‘Fame is an interesting thing’ (Friehling 2016: 256). In Instant Narrative the unnamed and unpictured subjects of these unsigned notations become the stars as well as the authors of their own screenplay. Turning to cinema, Phelan offers several examples of strategic self-masking employed by artists as well as activists. In her Film Stills from the late 1970s, Cindy Sherman inverts the self-portrait, photographing herself in a varied series of costumes, sets, lighting, and poses to show how these can create the ‘familiar, predictable “type”’ (Phelan 2000: 62) of Hollywood characterization. But while this typage has historically been used in pursuit of moral legibility, these photographs evoke the feminine masquerade as analysed in the 1920s by Joan Rivière: ‘female subjectivity resides in disguise and displacement’ (Phelan 2000: 60). In a variation of this strategy, Todd Haynes later addresses the multiple personae of a single star by casting six actors of differing gender, age, and ethnicity to perform the many lives and musical styles of Bob Dylan in I’m Not There (2007) – a development of his portrayal of Karen Carpenter’s ‘inner relationship with herself ’ using Barbie dolls in his 1987 Superstar (Rooney 2015: 130; Goldberg 2016: 34, 134). Where Sherman engages with the condensation of the celebrity image into recognizable pre-figurations, the African-American and Latinx drag artists in Jennie Livingston’s 1991 documentary Paris Is Burning add the star name, adopting parodic pseudonyms like ‘Willi Ninja’ and ‘Venus Xtravaganza’ for their catwalk performances. Struggling with the implications of her own academic citations – ‘the authoritative names of others’ – Phelan reads these self-nominations as rejections of ‘the literal signs of appropriative knowledge.

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As metaphors of identity, these renamings serve to make present the absence of the “proper” name – for subjects and for objects’ (Phelan 2000: 108). From descendants of enslaved people, this refusal of naming’s propriety – in particular its ability to designate ownership – adds a further dimension to their defiance of its gender performativity. To different ends, a collective pseudonym and disguise have been adopted by another of Phelan’s examples, the feminist artists and theorists protesting sexism and racism in the art world under the alias of the Guerrilla Girls. After a member reportedly mis-spelled their name ‘Gorilla’, they began to don ape masks for public appearances, forestalling institutional retaliation and ensuring a focus ‘on the issues, not on our personalities or our own work’ (Guerrilla Girls 1995: 13). Two years after the publication of Unmarked, in 2002, the group extended their interventions into the film industry with a Sunset Boulevard billboard announcing ‘The Anatomically Correct Oscar’ – the totemic phallus of A Star Is Born revealed as a hairy-chested guy modestly covering his groin. In works like these, masked practitioners unmask the formulae of star appearance, nomination, allure, and accolade. Rather than suppressing the image, they employ it in pursuit of different revelations. Rather than denying identity, they embrace its evolving aggregations. Rather than asserting their authorship, they focus on the issues. The signs of public attention with which the melodrama of celebrity visualizes personal worth are re-imagined to disrupt its predication of the individual as the source and guarantee of value, moral and material. In reply to the widespread complaint that contemporary fame marks the decline of the rational measurement of distinction, they disclose its irrational devaluation of entire populations – and the possibility of their resistance.

Notes Chapter 1   1 Throughout this volume, archaic spellings and punctuation have been modernized by the author. I have retained the use of italics for emphasis in the original texts.   2 See Horton and Wohl 1956.   3 See Bonner 2003.   4 Turner’s argument develops P. David Marshall’s discussion of crowd theorists such as Le Bon, Gabriel Tarde and Sighele on the emotional suggestibility of social collectivities. See Marshall 1997: 27–37. Here Marshall acknowledges not just the French Revolution but its English precursor, with Oliver Cromwell’s supreme power that of ‘the individual beyond title and tradition, even though his authority maintained the most traditional forms of power and succession to follow’ (28).   5 My account of this play is based on Marcoux’s translation (Marcoux 1992).   6 Linda Williams (2018) makes a detailed argument for melodrama’s modal relation to other aesthetic modes, with which this study broadly agrees. Unlike Williams, however, my use of ‘neoclassical’ to designate the era and aesthetic of Rousseau’s Pygmalion refers to its eighteenth-century origins, not to the ‘classicism’ which she argues is opposed to melodrama.   7 Applying the conventionalism – but not the pseudo-scientific social hierarchies – of eighteenth-century physiognomy, Eisenstein sought ‘typicality’ in ‘a face that expresses everything on the basis of social experience … the sum of their physiological features disposes us toward them in a particular way’. See Eisenstein 1996: 9.   8 Throughout this volume, I will retain masculine pronouns when used by sources I am quoting or paraphrasing without scare-quotes or ‘sics’. Where appropriate I will discuss the indicative use of gender in cited texts.   9 For this account I am indebted to the discussion of Leviathan in Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 98–103. 10 See Brito Vieira 2009. 11 See Boltanski and Thévenot 2006: 295. 12 See Braudy 1986: 338. 13 For a detailed analysis of this argument see Martin 2006. 14 In a parable attributed to Blaise Pascal, a shipwrecked man is mistaken for the lost king whom he resembles. Pascal commends the wisdom of this fortunate

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Notes being, who accepts the homage rendered to him while never forgetting his true condition – thus maintaining ‘two sets of thought’ about honour, public, and personal. Discussing the parable Boltanski and Thévenot (2006: 105–6) remind us that the dual belief in ‘a market of esteem’ and ‘worth in itself ’ persisted long beyond the seventeenth century, leaving us in two minds about fame. In Victor Benjamin’s The History of the Theatres of London & Dublin, Garrick is described as ‘that Luminary [who] became a Star of the first Magnitude’ (Benjamin 1761: 72). For an entertaining discussion of the press coverage of this evening, see Edmonds and Eidinow 2006: 122–6. For a detailed account of Rousseau’s qualification of this initial critique of attentionseeking in Emile and The Social Contract, see Neuhouser 2008. More briefly, see Brock 2006: 21: ‘Rousseau did not reject “love of reputation”, but instead suggested that his reasons for success were due to an ingenious mix of virtue and desire for recognition. If one toppled the other in his affection, however, destruction would ensue, so maintaining an equilibrium was essential.’ Jonathan Goldberg’s discussion of the scene in Beethoven’s opera Fidelio (1812) headed ‘Melodram’, in which the utterances of two characters are ‘punctuated by musical phrases’ (3), illustrates the overlapping of this device with opera proper, while specifying the scene’s unsettling irresolution. See Goldberg 2016: 3–17 and the final chapter of this book. Coignet’s struggle to be acknowledged as the composer of Pygmalion ironically illustrates its narrative’s contest of creative control. As Jacqueline Waeber (1997: xx) points out, ‘Rousseau tried to get away as the “global” creator of Pygmalion (text and music) … [Coignet’s insistence on recognition left him as] Pygmalion faced with Galathée: would this not be the bitter reality where Jean-Jacques is faced with being the creator dispossessed of his work?’ ‘Galatea can be understood as the commodity form herself: she preserves the possibility of withdrawing from the co-opting and homogenizing system that seeks to harness her energy’ (Rooney 2015: 121). In a reading of the French text, Mireille Michel (2017: 62–3) makes a strong case for ‘Pygmalion’s incomplete recognition of [Galatea’s] radical alterity’, momentarily addressing her in the second person singular – ‘ravissante illusion qui passes á mes oreilles’ – rather than ‘as another desiring subject (which would be addressed as “tu” or “toi quoi”) … Both Ovid’s unspeaking wife bearing Pygmalion’s child and Rousseau’s self-reflective but only partly heard Galatea are the archetypal living dolls in a man’s world, in which women are not addressed as individual subjects.’ Michel’s published version of this dissertation, The Ventriloquizing Woman in Film, is forthcoming.

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Chapter 2   1 The millionaire’s drinking, and the generosity it provokes, are clear challenges to the legal prohibition of alcohol sales in the United States at the time.   2 Since this character attains sight at the end of the film, I will later refer to her as ‘the flower girl’.   3 Honneth does not limit this role to the biological mother, as his generalization of its function to all love relations demonstrates.   4 For a Winnicottian reading of Chaplin’s The Kid (1921), see Seidman 2008.   5 The closest English equivalent to this use of reconnaissance also derives from French, ‘gratuity’ as a tip, a non-obligatory gift for services rendered, from the fourteenth-century gratuité, from the medieval Latin gratuitas, ‘free gift’. But although voluntary, ‘gratuity’ implies recompense rather than unilateral generosity.   6 With the advent of #MeToo, Harvey Weinstein’s co-hosting of a 2012 dinner honouring Chaplin’s services to film reignited criticism of the star’s treatment of his women colleagues, provoking political historian Richard Carr (2017) to distinguish the ‘state-sanctioned red baiting’ of Chaplin after World War II from his ‘questionable sexual ethics across the board’.   7 In a related observation in the 1927 article, ‘Mr. Chaplin, kommen Sie nich Europa!’, Béla Balázs refers to Chaplin’s ‘love capital’. See Hake 1990: 87.   8 The conventional montage of daily calendar pages measures the beginning of his sentence, from 1 to 30 January, followed by an intertitle reading ‘Autumn’.   9 In the first great success of popular French melodrama, Pixérécourt’s 1800 Coelina or The Child of Mystery, a gentleman arrives at his lost daughter’s home disguised as a beggar. 10 Here Ricoeur restates the indexicality of the trace as argued by Roland Barthes in respect of photography in Camera Lucida (1981) and elaborated in regard to the cinema by John Ellis in Visible Fictions (1982): 58–9. 11 Judith Butler makes a related observation, arguing that to solicit the other’s recognition is not to confirm an already established identity but rather to transform oneself within that interaction, ‘to petition the future always in relation to the Other’ (2004: 44). 12 Consciously or not, Kracauer seems to be echoing Yvan Goll’s 1920 ‘film poem’ Die Chapliniade, in which Charlot steps down from a poster on which he is pictured as the King of Hearts, and drops his crown, sceptre, and orb into a garbage can. See Townsend forthcoming. 13 In regard to Garncarz’s arguments against Chaplin’s popularity in Germany, it is worth noting that Balázs here worries that ‘When German art aspires to popularity, it is described as making “concessions”’ and asks if Chaplin becomes ‘trite whenever he is universally comprehensible’.

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14 Ricouer (2005: 222) argues that agape’s ‘discourse of praise’ approaches that of ‘the hymn and the benediction’. 15 In the world of fame, ‘the worth of each being depends on the opinion of others … Persons are relevant insomuch as they form a public whose “opinion prevails”’ (Boltanski and Thevenot: 2006: 179, italics in original).

Chapter 3   1 See Kempis 1999. The first chapter of this text admonishes the reader that ‘It is vanity, too, to covet honors, and to lift ourselves on high.’   2 See Ehrhardt 2009: ‘My research [at the Harry Ransom Center] in Hurst’s date books and diaries indicated that she was a die hard devotee of a popular 1920s fad diet known as the Hollywood Eighteen Day Diet, and I also found a fascinating folder of letters about Hurst’s concern about the cover image her publisher had selected for the hardcover version of “No Food With My Meals”.’   3 See Hurston n. d.   4 Quoted in Conrad 1945.   5 ‘Stars, I have seen them fall, / But when they drop and die / No star is lost at all / From all the star-sown sky. / The toil that all that be / Helps not the primal fault; / It rains into the sea / And still the sea is salt.’ Housman 1956: 167.   6 For a discussion of this passage see Ferry 2002, especially 200–3. In Anatomy of Me (1958: 226), Fannie Hurst similarly observes the ‘bluish dead-faced murals of people with the unseeing stares, sitting in rows’ in the New York subways.   7 In Death 24x a Second (2006: 156–8) Laura Mulvey has demonstrated how digital imaging makes it possible to stop this scene and reveal a black woman hidden by its movement and the multitude of white bathers. At normal speed the crowd is presented at first as a monochrome immensity, one that frightens and fascinates Lora. Here again Book 7, lines 722–8 of Wordsworth’s The Prelude (331–2) anticipates this in its description of ‘blank confusion! true epitome / Of what the mighty City is herself / To thousands upon thousands of her sons / Living amid the same perpetual whirl / Of trivial objects, melted and reduced / To one identity, by differences / That have no law, no meaning, and no end –’.   8 No explanation is given for Yvette’s naming, but Warhol and his collaborators may have been thinking of Yvette Vickers, starlet of 1950s creature features like Attack of the Fifty Foot Woman, who was rumoured to be tested for a role in Sirk’s film.   9 Mario Montez’s performance exhibits all the markers described by Richard Dyer (1991: 138–9), including lack of control; improvisation; privacy of setting – the lighting and close grouping picking him and the other cast members out in the darkness of the loft – and extended takes without cutting.

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10 The theme of imitation is even more difficult to fathom in Warhol’s 1967 film Imitation of Christ, a comical family melodrama about an eccentric couple (Brigid Berlin and Ondine) and their frustration with their hippie son, called Son, played by the former child actor and Screen Test subject, Patrick Tilden-Close, a friend of Bob Dylan. Rarely leaving his bedroom, the druggy Son is unable to respond to the sexual provocations offered by various members of the film’s cast, including the family maid (played by Nico), who reads him excerpts from the medieval text. If celebrity or its imitation is at issue here, its portrayal is antagonistic rather than aspirational – ruthlessly parodying the drugged impotence of the mystical hippiedom that Warhol identified with Dylan. (See Murphy 2012: 206–9)

Chapter 4   1 ‘Women’s historical novels … very rarely work with a notion of history as “progress”. They have been much more likely to be histories of defeat that explore the ways in which women have been violently excluded from both “history” (the events of the past) and from “History” (written accounts of the past).’ Wallace 2011.   2 The Neapolitan poor traditionally sought shelter and sustenance at the Hospital of St Lazarus.   3 Anderson cites Fredric Jameson for this characterization of the historical novel. For a fuller account of his views on the genre, see Jameson, 2015: Chapter 3.   4 A Jewish exile from Horthy’s right-wing Hungarian government of 1919, Alexander Korda had directed films in Europe and Hollywood before establishing London Film Productions. He permitted his New York office in Rockefeller Center to be used as a headquarters for MI5 agents investigating both German activities in the United States and those of the US government prior to its entry into the War. Following That Hamilton Woman, he contributed to the production of Ernst Lubitsch’s 1942 To Be or Not to Be – credited as ‘presenter’ – a comedy in which a Polish theatre company outwits the country’s Nazi occupiers. See Korda 1979: 146.   5 Hannah Wilke’s 1974 photo series, ‘Super-T Art’, offers perhaps the closest photographic approximation of the Attitudes in style if not in virtuous femininity. In these twenty images Wilke performs a series of gestures – of greeting, tenderness, exclamation – in a robe which she gradually reties into a loincloth, exposing her bare breasts in increasing abandon.   6 See, for example, Guilbert de Pixérécourt’s 1800 play, Coelina, or the Child of Mystery.   7 Among the films that dealt with the couple after That Hamilton Woman, the most notable is the British adaptation of the 1970 Terence Rattigan play A Bequest to the Nation (James Cellan Jones, 1973) starring Glenda Jackson and Peter Finch.

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  8 Claiming The Volcano Lover as a postmodern work, Stacey Olster (1994: 118–19) reminds us that Sontag had anticipated Baudrillard on the precession of similacra as early as 1977, quoting his source, Ludwig Feuerbach’s 1843 The Essence of Christianity, on the preference of ‘the image to the real thing, the copy to the original, the representation to the reality, appearance to being’ in an essay later collected in On Photography (Sontag 2008: 153). This understanding is allied with her complaints of the pervasive equation of a plurality of images with political freedom and the ‘exhaustion’ of aesthetic forms, observations that anticipate Fredric Jameson’s influential characterization of postmodernity.   9 Sontag directed two feature films, Duet for Cannibals (Sweden, 1963) and Brother Carl (Sweden, 1971), a documentary about Israel-Palestine after the Yom Kippur War, Promised Lands (France, 1974), and an experimental television portrait of Venice based on her own story Unguided Tour (Italy, 1983). 10 As Gillian Russell (2016: 142) observes, Emma’s Attitudes recapitulate not only Rousseau’s 1770 play, but the period’s fascination with the companionate capacity of sculpture stimulated by antique figures’ endurance, three-dimensionality, and tactility. See Chapter 1 of this volume. 11 In an intriguing allusion to Sontag’s own sitting for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests – three-minute ‘stillies’ slowed down to four – Hamilton tells Emma to hold her pose, as Warhol was filmed instructing the writer in a BBC arts programme in 1965: ‘Just do what you’re doing. Yeah, you can move, but not too much.’ Merck 2013: 99–100. 12 Sontag included Bernhardt’s silent melodramas in her ‘Notes on Camp’ (1994: 285) and later performed the voice-over narrative of Edgardo Cozarinsky’s documentary Sarah (1988). 13 Sontag had to sue her husband Philip Rieff, the University of Chicago sociologist whom she married as a seventeen-year-old student, for custody of their son when she divorced him after a lengthy separation during which she had relationships with women. 14 Asked by Samuel Delaney whether Pimental’s damning of Emma is ‘a risky thing to conclude your performance with’, Sontag replied, ‘“Yes, I know. But I don’t want people to think, “That’s the judgment of the book.” I think a lot in cinematic terms, and it’s rather like pulling back…I think Eleonora’s is the most distant view.”’ Delany 2000: 407. 15 The correspondence can be found in Box 20, Folio 13, of the Susan Sontag papers, UCLA. 16 See the correspondence in Box 20, Folio 16, of the Susan Sontag papers, UCLA. 17 Located at the height of the historic city, the San Martino monastery is one of the most celebrated complexes of Baroque art and architecture in Naples. It became a national monument at the time of Italy’s unification and the site of the city’s National Museum. A possible motivation for filming in the Treasury Chapel is offered by its

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ceiling decorations. These feature images of notable women of the Old Testament, including Judith of Bethulia, the Jewish heroine who seduced and murdered a general of the Assyrian army besieging her city, a story filmed at feature length by D. W. Griffith in 1914. However, the ceiling is not visible in Il resto di niente.

Chapter 5   1 Remarks on Emin’s physical appearance have characterized critical commentary on the artist throughout her career. For some particularly egregious examples, see Merck and Townsend 2002: 6.   2 In British slang since the seventeenth century, prostitution is described as being ‘on the game’.   3 See in comparison Murray 2012: 1679: ‘She is busy at work either scooping up a mound of pound coins and bills into her vagina or catching them as they spill out, jackpot style: the effect is to communicate either that her sex is a commodity, or that she has goods and values flowing freely from her body, or both.’ See also Osborne 2001.   4 See Chapter 1 of this volume.   5 Nevertheless, critics have echoed Doyle’s observation. See, for example, Gargett 2001: ‘Emin manages to show us some of the same emotions we recognize in ourselves. Even when she approaches melodrama the rawness of the feeling is controlled by the skill of her execution. She makes tactile contact with the emotion of her audience rather than a purely intellectual one.’   6 See, for example, her 1998 neon – in soft pink – My Cunt is Wet With Fear.   7 Why I Never Became a Dancer is not available on DVD. As of June 2019 it could be viewed online at www.youtube.com/watch?v=MhCa_71Whg. Given the uncertainty of its continued availability on this network, I have included a detailed description of the work.   8 In her 2005 film Top Spot, Emin enlarges this home movie to feature length, dividing the travails of her youth between four protagonists, with the stated intention of inspiring young women to strike out for success. Where the seabird flies away at the conclusion of Why I Never Became a Dancer, Emin herself ascends from Margate in a helicopter at the end of the indicatively named Top Spot.   9 The term ‘afrofuturism’ was coined in the early 1990s by Mark Dery, Kodwo Eshun, and Mark Sinker. See Eshun 2003. 10 ‘Melotraumatic: Whenever an individual has an awful experience/injury and either discusses it again and again or blames all of his or her faults upon it for months after it happened.’ Urban Dictionary, www.urbandictionary.com/define. php?term=Melotraumatic (accessed 18 June 2019).

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Chapter 6   1 The Archers is a radio soap opera about rural British life broadcast on BBC Radio 4 since 1950. With the cancellation of the US Guiding Light in 2009, it has become the world’s longest running soap opera in any medium.   2 See Turner 2006a: 96.   3 First broadcast in 1960, Coronation Street is a British television soap opera set in a fictional suburb of Manchester. In 1998, a character in it called Deidre Rachid was wrongfully imprisoned after a relationship with a conman. A national media campaign to free her ended the storyline with her ‘release’ three weeks later. In 2000, the Prince of Wales appeared on the show playing himself in a fictional news bulletin.   4 For a reading of this scene and its relation to other heritage films’ use of portraiture, see Vidal 2012b: 42–3.   5 The public identification of Mirren with the role of Elizabeth II was arguably furthered by her toast to the monarch when accepting the 2007 Best Actress Oscar for the role: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, I give you the Queen.’ In 2013, she again ‘gave’ theatregoers the Queen at London’s Gielgud Theatre in Peter Morgan’s The Audience, portraying the monarch’s weekly private discussions with prime ministers ranging from Churchill to Cameron. Remarking on the play’s ‘two-hour exercise in propaganda for Elizabeth Windsor’, Guardian journalist Jonathan Freedland observed, ‘These days, in which our own favoured celebrities are those who have triumphed over adversity, it’s not enough that we admire the monarch, we must feel sympathy too … Partly down to Mirren’s ability to convey a sense of inner longings repressed, we believe this Queen when she sighs at “the unlived lives within us all”’ (Freedland 2013).   6 First staged in 1814, The Dog of Montargis, by Guilbert de Pixérécourt, was based on a fourteenth-century legend in which the faithful dog of a murdered knight finds the sash of the murderer and later keeps him from escaping.   7 Made by the BBC to publicize the Investiture of the Prince of Wales at Caernarvon in 1969, Royal Family was directed by Richard Cawston. Although its behind-thescenes informality was controversial at the time, the programme’s success prompted the Palace to ask Cawston to take over the production of the Queen’s Christmas television broadcast from 1970 to 1985.   8 Produced by Granada Television for the BBC, The Royle Family is a situation comedy portraying a working-class family living in Manchester. It ran for three series between 1998 and 2000, with further special episodes in 2006, 2008, 2009, and 2010. The series reunited actors Ricky Tomlinson and Sue Johnston, the stars of the 1980s Channel 4 soap opera Brookside.   9 See Cannadine 2004: 303.

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10 Confirming his own view of this maternal theme, director Stephen Frears has observed, ‘Making a movie about the Queen is almost like making a movie about your mother and in England, the Queen really does serve as a kind of symbolic, emotional mother of the country.’ Quoted in Levy 2006. 11 Brooks argues that melodrama ‘is about virtue made visible and acknowledged, the drama of recognition’ (1995: 27). His example is Pixérécourt’s 1819 La Fille de l’exilé, in which a band of fierce Tartars fall to their knees before a young woman who has heroically forgiven the persecutor of her father.

Chapter 7   1 The New Frontier, Christopher Sharrett avers, promised ‘the vicarious thrills offered by the space and arms race’ to the ‘organization man’ of postwar America, the corporate drone in his grey flannel suit (Sharrett 2007: 57). The malaise of this species had become a subject of American social commentary at mid-century, detailed by sociologist David Riesman’s diagnosis of the anxious emptiness of the bureaucratic executive in The Lonely Crowd: A Study of the Changing American Character (Riesman 1950) and followed by Fortune journalist William H. Whyte’s denunciation of The Organization Man (Whyte 1956) – conservative and conformist in his suburban habitat. In 1958 the historian Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr, who would later serve as a special adviser to the Kennedy administration, broadened this purview to lament the unmanning of the American male, changing diapers and cooking meals while homosexuality flourished and his female counterpart conquered the professions (Schlesinger 1958).   2 See Mast 2013; also Malin 2005 (which cites The Crying Game, Kindergarten Cop, the Lethal Weapon series, Mrs. Doubtfire and Titanic as evidence of the conflicted masculinity of the 1990s).   3 McLuhan is elaborating a Latin proverb – ‘Nomen est omen’ – attributed to the Roman playwright Plautus.   4 See Gamson 2016b for a discussion of how the film ignored Weiner’s political programme to join the wider media in focusing on his management of the scandal: ‘Politics: it’s all narratives and themes and playbooks’ (67).   5 Instituted by the Clinton administration in 1994, this official military policy prohibited discrimination against homosexual service members so long as they did not disclose their sexual orientation. It was not repealed until 2011.   6 See Hesse 2011.   7 ‘Actually’, argues Monica Hesse, ‘this is the story of a man with two compulsions. One is the compulsion to sext, which the Center for Internet Addiction cites as the most common online addiction, with the proliferation of “pocket porn” tied to the

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rise in mobile devices. The other is the compulsion to run for office … One assumes they might be related: Both combine an intense neediness for attention with an intense narcissism’ (Hesse 2011).   8 Reflecting on the compulsion of a protagonist ‘to appear to be on an arc of comic triumph over life’ only to be revealed as ‘suffering life as a complete disaster’, Lauren Berlant refers to the gallows humour of the ‘situation tragedy’, a generic designation with more than a little pertinence to this melodrama (Berlant 2017: 314).   9 The use of the term ‘visceral’ in regard to Weiner calls up Tanya Horeck’s description of the ‘tactile and visceral’ experience of fans touching the images of celebrities whose features are ‘smaller and physically reduced’ on their portable devices, but ‘also easily magnified and expanded as [they] tap, pinch and spread’ them for inspection – perhaps, in the case of sexting, while registering physical arousal and touching their own bodies (Horeck 2015: 261). 10 For this account of the investigation of Weiner’s communications I am indebted to Elkin 2017. 11 On Inside Edition 11 September 2017, Sydney Leathers described Weiner as ‘a soap opera character coming back from the dead’. 12 See Daniels with Carr O’Leary 2018.

Chapter 8   1 Samuel Briskin, the new president of RKO, considered suing for infringement of copyright. See Haver 1980: 206.   2 In What Price Hollywood? Constance Bennett plays an aspirant actress who attracts the attention of a drunken director (played by Lowell Sherman, director of Mae West’s She Done Him Wrong) while working as a waitress. Offered a bit part in his new film, she battles against nerves and inexperience to become a star, dubbed ‘America’s Pal’. Her older mentor keeps his distance and she marries a wealthy playboy who becomes jealous of her success. When her husband leaves her the star attempts to restart the director’s failing career, but he shoots himself in her home. With her own career destroyed by the ensuing scandal, she flees to Paris with her child, where they are reunited with her contrite husband, bringing with him the offer of a new film contract.   3 Selznick acknowledged the similarities with the Dreiser novel in a letter to William Wyler, then directing the 1952 film adaptation of Sister Carrie. See Selznick 2000: 430.   4 Among the uncredited contributors to the 1937 script was Budd Schulberg, son of B. P. Schulberg, the Paramount producer whose mistress, Sylvia Sydney, was cast as the female lead in Josef von Sternberg’s 1931 film of An American Tragedy. See Merck, Hollywood’s American Tragedies, esp. 103.

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  5 The heroine of What Price Hollywood? is also working as a waitress when she’s ‘discovered’, and Norman’s boss points out to him that several of Esther’s predecessors were supposed to have had ‘something’.   6 Quoted in Hogan 2019: 12.   7 Gaynor received the only Academy Award for multiple performances, in 7th Heaven (Frank Borzage, 1927), Sunrise (F. W. Murnau, 1927) and Street Angel (Frank Borzage, 1928). Gaynor was also nominated for her role in A Star Is Born, a seemingly inevitable echo of the film’s theme of predestined success.   8 ‘The director seemed almost to revel in taking Garland to the brink for scenes in which she had to bare her emotions … He would work her into a fevered state. Then they would do the scene … again and again’ (McGilligan 1991: 227–8).   9 Brooks’s study was published in 1976 and Sennett’s in 1977: each cites the other. 10 Niles tells Maine that he cannot renew his contract as he watches a prize fight on TV, and the financial competition from that medium is briefly mentioned. 11 This account is indebted to Streisand’s own commentary on the 2018 DVD of the film. 12 See Pierson 1976. 13 Streisand’s commentary on the 2018 DVD discusses the film’s style. 14 Significantly, Ally has no last name until she takes her husband’s. 15 Dyer 2018 refers to how these films convey the ‘fantasy of male parturition’.

Chapter 9   1 Based on Victor Hugo’s novel of the same name, The Man Who Laughs is a romantic melodrama with horror overtones in the Phantom of the Opera mode. Alan Moore contributed to the Batman series with his 1988 graphic novel for DC Comics, Batman: The Killing Joke. Its 1988 publication date corresponds to the period in which Moore was also writing V for Vendetta for DC Comics.   2 All the President’s Men (Alan J. Pakula, 1976) opens its title sequence with a hugely enlarged close-up of the granular surface of a piece of paper as the letters June 1, 1972, are typed with an enhanced impact created by the sound of whips and gunshots. Throughout the film Bob Woodward (Robert Redford) is shown repeatedly typing his reports, and in one scene he warns his collaborator Carl Bernstein (Dustin Hoffman) by typing out rather than saying ‘Deep Throat says our lives may be in danger.’   3 As well as the final two Twilight films, Condon directed the 1998 film about horror director James Whale, Gods and Monsters, and Kinsey (2004).   4 The ‘earth zoom’ is created by animating satellite photographs from different altitudes into a single shot.

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  5 See Domscheit-Berg 2011 and Leigh and Harding 2011.   6 This concept can be traced back to Spinoza’s Tractatus Theologico-Politicus. I use it in the sense advanced in Negri 2002 of ‘unrepresentable singularities rather than individual proprietors’. As the slogan goes, ‘Anonymous is not unanimous.’   7 ‘The Jason Bourne-like aspects of his story – the cinematic international manhunt for the hero who says he only wants the truth to be known – alone are enthralling’ (Andrews, Burrough and Ellison 2014).   8 Snowden’s grandfather was a rear admiral in the US Coastguard and many of his close relatives have served in the US military or the government.   9 Unhindered by the constitutional protection of US citizens from unlawful search and seizure, Britain’s ‘GCHQ has probably the most invasive network intercept programme anywhere in the world’, Snowden declares in Citizenfour. 10 His explanation of the technical issues mandating this decision and his hope to escape to Ecuador is offered in Snowden (2019), 262–3 and 300–1. 11 This includes Poitras, whose previous two documentaries are character studies: My Country, My Country follows a Sunni doctor who attempts to run for public office in the aftermath of the American invasion of Iraq. The Oath is filmed inside the Yemeni taxi of a former Bin Laden bodyguard as he talks to his passengers. 12 Cassidy 2013a and 2013b and Toobin 2013. 13 See Zhang 2013 and Qin 2015. 14 Greenwald 2014: 221–2. 15 Snowden faces three charges – of theft, unauthorized communications of US defence information and of classified intelligence information. Under the US Espionage Act he would be tried by a judge without a jury and could be sentenced to thirty years in prison. There is no ‘public interest’ defence. See Finn and Horwitz 2013. 16 See Harding 2014: 147. 17 In Savage Theory (2000: 82–3), Rachel Moore quotes Douglas Sirk on his use of deep focus to create this harshness in his colour schemes, arguing that they ‘share the visual materiality of the fetish object’. 18 For a detailed account of the charges against Assange, including conspiring with Manning to gain access to the Pentagon network, violating the US Espionage Act by publishing classified documents including national defence information and information that could endanger journalists and human rights activists as well as soldiers, see United States of America v Julian Assange, document filed 23 May 2019 in the United States District Court for the Eastern Division of Virginia, https.//apps.npr.org/documents.html?id=6024868-Assange-SupersedingIndictments (accessed 16 June 2019). 19 Instant Narrative, a performance work by Dora García, recorded in Artissima 13, Turin, 2006 by Mad Vision, Vimeo.com/66664221 (accessed 7 January 2020).

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Index Note: page numbers in italic refer to illustrations. Titles of films, plays and publications are in italic. Abedin, Huma and Hillary Clinton 163 marriage of 161, 162 in Weiner 147, 149–50, 156, 157, 157 Academy Awards 171, 172, 226 activism, films about Citizenfour (Poitras, 2014) 202–8, 206 Fifth Estate, The (Condon, 2013) 199–202, 201 Risk (Poitras, 2016/17) 212–17, 213 Snowden (Stone, 2016) 208–12, 211 We Steal Secrets (Gibney, 2013) 193–9, 194 XY Chelsea (Hawkins, 2019) 217–21, 219 actor-character equation 11, 191 Barbra Streisand 182 Chaplin and the tramp 43–6 Helen Mirren and Elizabeth II 132–4 Judy Garland 175, 179 Julian Assange and Daniel Berg 200 Lady Gaga 185 Lana Turner 68–9, 73, 74 in A Star is Born 166–7, 170, 187 Vivien Leigh and Laurence Olivier 85, 93 actors and audiences 48–9 condemnation of 25, 68 multiple casting 225 stardom of 133 typecasting 11, 101, 223 visual characterization 11–12, 42, 191 agape 53 Almodovar, Pedro, High Heels 77 Altman, Rick 174 amour de soi 25 amour-propre 25, 26, 28, 29–30, 171, 183 anagnorisis 29, 36, 39, 114–15, 175 Anderson, Perry 84–5

Anderson, Reynaldo 121 Anker, Elisabeth 189 anonymity 189–90, 221, 222, 224 Anonymous (internet activists) 189, 192, 200, 221, 223–4 anti-Semitism 152 antitheses, in City Lights 36–7 appearance, see physical appearance Appelbaum, Jacob 212, 216 Aragon, Louis 44 Aristotle, Poetics 36, 39, 56 ‘Art Stars’ 106 Assange, Julian anonymity of 190, 192–3, 222 celebrity of 195, 196, 198, 199, 202, 222–3 charges against 238 n.18 in The Fifth Estate 199–202, 201 in Risk 212–17, 213 in We Steal Secrets 193–5, 196, 197–9 Attitudes of Emma Hamilton 90–1, 96–7 audiences and actors 48–9 Bad and the Beautiful, The (Minnelli, 1952) 68, 69, 70 Bagehot, Walter 138 Balázs, Béla 42, 52 Banville, John 84 Barker, Lex 79 Barthes, Roland 229 n.10 Bassett, Angela 133 Bastin, Giselle 129 beauty 96, 176, 182, 184 Beavers, Louise 65, 66, 67 Beckett, Samuel, Waiting for Godot 224 Beer, David 12 Beethoven, Ludwig van, Fidelio 220 Benjamin, Jessica 40, 57 Bennett, Joan 79 Berg, Daniel 199, 200–1

Index Berlant, Lauren 61–2, 75, 121, 236 n.8 Bernhardt, Sarah 99, 133 biographical readings, see actor-character equation biopics 85–6 see also activism, films about; Queen, The; That Hamilton Woman Blair, Tony 128, 139, 142 Blanchett, Cate 133 blindness and vision 37, 41–3, 47 ‘body politic’ 15 Boltanski, Luc 53, 107, 227–8 n.14 Boorstin, Daniel 2, 73–4 Braudy, Leo 5 Brecht, Bertolt 10, 56–7 Briskin, Samuel 236 n.1 Brokeback Mountain (Lee, 2005) 186 Bronfen, Elisabeth 158 Brooks, Peter influence of 177 on melodrama 10–11, 13, 134, 150, 194, 235 n.11 on Pygmalion 9, 27 Brown, Sterling 67 Buckley, Matthew 9–10 Burbage, Richard 12 Butler, Judith 70–1, 158, 229 n.11 Cameron, Earl 132 Campbell, Naomi 80 Campbell Orr, Clarissa 126 Cannadine, David 126 Capturing the Friedmans (Jarecki, 2003) 155 Carr, Richard 229 n.6 Cashmore, Ellis 5, 6 casting 63, 225 see also actor-character equation; typecasting Cave, Terence 51 Cawston, Richard 234 n.7 celebrity anonymous 189–90 of artists 105–7 definitions of 2, 73–4, 223 imitations of 55–7 introduction to 1–7 recognition of 41–2 ‘celebrity culture’ 3–6, 140 celebrity power 195 Chaplin, Charlie, see City Lights

259

character types 5, 7–8, 11 characterization of Chelsea Manning 218–19 visual 11–12, 42, 191 Charles I, King 16, 17, 134–5, 137 Chaucer, Geoffrey, The House of Fame 2 Cherrill, Virginia 47, 48 Child, Lydia Maria 63 children artists as 113–14 of celebrities 79, 81 imitation by 56 maternal separation from 122–3 of mysterious parentage 7–8, 93 recognition by 40, 46, 49 cinema and melodrama 10–11 Citizenfour (Poitras, 2014) 202–8, 206 City Lights (Chaplin, 1931) 35–53 blindness and vision 37, 41–3, 47 Chaplin and the tramp 43–6 plotline 37–9 popularity of Chaplin 52–3 recognition, defining of 39–41 recognition and misrecognition 36, 46–52 Clérambault, Gaetan de 3 Clinton, Bill 147–8, 157, 158–9, 160 Clinton, Hillary 156, 157, 161, 162, 163 Coignet, Horace 27 Colbert, Claudette 64, 68 Cole, Nat King 70 Coleman, Gabriella 221, 222–3 compulsions 159 Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, Treatise on the Sensations 26 Condon, Bill, The Fifth Estate 199–202, 201 Coney Island, New York 71, 72 Conservative politicians, views of 4–5 contractual absolutism 15, 16–17 Cool Hand Luke (Rosenberg, 1967) 180 Cooper, Bradley, A Star is Born (2018) 165–6, 167, 178, 183–7 Costa, Antonio 86 Crane, Cheryl Imitation of Death 79–81 personal life 69–70, 78, 79 Crawford, Joan 57 creators and creations Pygmalion 28–30, 122 in A Star is Born 167, 171, 172, 174, 179

260

Index

Cronenberg, David 158 crowds 6, 71–2 Cruise, Tom 141 Cukor, George A Star is Born (1954) 173–80, 177 What Price Hollywood? 165, 167, 169, 170 Cumberbatch, Benedict 200, 201–2, 201 Cumming, Laura 122 Cyrus, Miley 12 dance 76, 117–19, 118 Dargis, Manohla 167, 187 Darling, Candy 79 Davidson, Kimberly 55 Davies, Marion 62 Davies, Nick 198, 199 Davis, Bette 87, 133 Davis, Mark 198 Dawkins, Richard 223 De Lillo, Antonietta de, Il resto di niente/ The Remains of Nothing (film) 101–3 De Man, Paul 30, 122 Deal, The (Frears, 2003) 128 Delaney, Samuel 232 n.14 demotic culture 6 Dench, Judi 133 Deseriis, Marco 223 Devis, Arthur William, The Death of Nelson, 21 October 1805 86, 94, 102 Diana, Princess of Wales 127–8, 129–30, 130, 131, 135, 141 Dickens, Charles 5 Didion, Joan 180 dieting 61 disclosure, device of in City Lights 36, 37 in More Milk, Yvette 78 in A Star is Born (1954) 175 used by Tracey Emin 114–15 disco music 121 discovery of aspirant stars 73, 169–70, 175, 181, 184 ‘disenchantment,’ (Weber) 9 disguise, topos of 191 see also masks/masking docudrama, see Fifth Estate, The; Queen, The; Snowden documentaries 138, 147–8, 155 see also activism, films about

Dog Day Afternoon (Lumet, 1975) 180 Domscheit-Berg, Daniel 199, 200–1 Dorval, Marie 12, 147, 156 double-framing devices 86, 97, 101, 175 Doyle, Jennifer 111–12, 113 drag 77, 79 drag artists 225–6 dramatic revelations, see anagnorisis Draper, Ellen 94, 98 Driessens, Olivier 12 Ducange, Victor, Thirty Years or A Gambler’s Life 146–7 Dunant, Caroline 210 Duncan Smith, Iain 4 Dunne, John Gregory 180 Dyer, Richard 68, 70, 177, 178, 230 n.9, 237 n.15 Dylan, Bob 78, 79, 225, 231 n.10 Einstein, Albert 45 Eisenstein, Sergei 11, 227 n.7 election campaigns 147–8 of Andrew Weiner 149, 154, 155 of Donald Trump 164 of Hillary Clinton 161, 162–3 Eliot, T. S., ‘The Hollow Men’ 179–80 Elizabeth II, Queen 127, 129, 130, 131–3, 135–40, 142 Elliott, Kamilla 224 Ellis, John 229 n.10 Ellsberg, Daniel 214 Elsaesser, Thomas 10, 11, 127, 187 embodied performance 42 Emin, Tracey 105–23 celebrity, suspicion of 105–7 melodrama, suspicion of 111–15 rape of 110–11 trauma, suspicion of 107–10 WORKS Conversation With My Mum 113–14 Exploration of the Soul 110 I’ve Got It All 106 My Bed 105 Pure Evil 111 Strangeland 114, 115 Tracey Emin CV 110–11 Tracey Emin CV Cunt Vernacular 111 Why I Never Became a Dancer 115–23, 118 emotion, stimulation of 56–7

Index English Civil War (1642–51) 13, 15, 134 esteem and civil society 41 idea of 13, 14, 19, 20, 24 exhibitionism 159 ‘expressive subjects’ 12 Fabris, Pietro 83 Fainlight, Harry 77 fairground shows of Paris 6, 9, 27 fame acquisition of 152 as depiction 85, 94 of Fannie Hurst 62–3 and fantasy 73 idea of 13, 18–22 literary fame 18–19, 23, 97–8 as nomination 92–3 fans, fantasies of 2–3, 73, 74 Fawkes, Guy 191–2 Fellig, Arthur ‘Weegee’ 71, 72 feminism 158, 181, 182 fetishes 210–11 Feuerbach, Ludwig 232 n.8 Fifth Estate, The (Condon, 2013) 199–202, 201 Firth, Colin 133 Fletcher, John 108 Foster, Jodie 3 Frank, Adam 160 Frears, Stephen The Deal 128–9 The Queen, see Queen, The Freedland, Jonathan 234 n.5 Freud, Sigmund 43, 86, 108, 159 Fried, Michael 112 Friedman, Arnold 155 Gamson, Joshua 12, 148–9 García, Dora, Instant Narrative 225 Gargett, A. 233 n.5 Garland, Judy 166, 173, 175, 176, 177, 179 Garncarz, Joseph 52, 53 Gavron, Rez 185 Gaynor, Janet 166, 170, 171, 176, 176 gender transitions 218, 219 George III, King 126 George IV, King 126 Gibney, Alex, We Steal Secrets 193–9, 194 gifts and giving, in City Lights 50–1

261

Gilbert, John 62 Gimme Shelter (Maysles Brothers, 1970) 181 Gladstone, William Ewart 4 Glass, Loren 160 Gledhill, Christine 1, 11, 13, 42, 187, 191 Goethe, J. W. 96, 97–8 Goldberg, Jonathan 220, 228 n.18 Goll, Yvan, Die Chapliniade 229 n.12 Goody, Jade 5 Gove, Michael 4–5 Graduate, The (Nichols, 1967) 180 Grant, Earl 70 Greenhouse, Emily 161 Greenwald, Glenn 202, 205, 206, 207 Grey, Lita 43–4 Griffith, D. W., Way Down East 119 grooming scenes 205, 214, 219, 219 see also make-up scenes Guerrilla Girls 226 Gunning, Tom 46 Gunpowder Plot 191–2 Hamilton, Emma biographical details 83, 84, 90–1 portrayal in fiction 96–7, 98–9 portrayal in film 86–9, 87, 90, 91–4, 103 Hamilton, Sir William biographical details 83 portrayal in fiction 95, 99 portrayal in film 87–8, 88, 89, 92 Hanks, Tom 141 Harding, Luke 202 Harlem Renaissance 63 Harlot (Warhol, 1964) 77 Harlow, Jean 77 Harris, Alisha 186 Hart, Moss 173, 179 Haver, Ronald 169 Hawkins, Tim Travers, XY Chelsea 217–21, 219 Haynes, Todd I’m Not There 225 Superstar 225 Hayworth, Rita 141 Healy, Lorna 119, 120 Heath, Stephen 129 Hegel, G. W. F. 39–40 Herder, Johann Gottfried 26 Hermes, Joke 12

262

Index

Hesse, Monica 235–6 n.7 High Heels (Almodovar, 1991) 77 Hinckley, John, Jr 3 Hiro, Molly 60, 65 Hispanic Americans 80 historical fiction 84 Hobbes, Thomas 13–14, 14–15, 16–17, 18, 134 Holbein, Hans 86 Holcroft, Thomas, A Tale of Mystery 7–8 Holocaust victims 108 homage 51–2 Home from the Hill (Minnelli, 1960) 145–6, 146, 151 homelessness in City Lights 36 Homer, Odyssey 8, 49 Honneth, Axel 39, 40, 41 honour, ideal of 13–14, 134 Horeck, Tanya 236 n.9 Housman, A. E. 71 Hughes, Langston 64, 79 Hume, David 18–19, 19–20, 20–1, 22 Hunter, Ross 74 hunting, in The Queen 135–7, 137 Hurst, Fannie Anatomy of Me: An Autobiography (1958) 62–3, 230 n.6 and the Harlem Renaissance 63–4 Imitation of Life (1933) 57–62 No Food with My Meals (1935) 61 Hurston, Zora Neale 64, 67 hybridity in melodrama 27, 174, 217 hysteria 108, 158 I’m Not There (Haynes, 2007) 225 image, Rousseau and 28–30 Imitation of Death (Crane, 2012) 79–81 Imitation of Life (Hurst, 1933) 57–63 Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959) 68–77, 72–3, 75, 170 Imitation of Life (Stahl, 1934) 63–5, 66, 67–8 imitations of celebrity 55–7 inequality, idea of 24 Inglis, Fred 2 Instant Narrative (García, 2006) 225 intellectual property rights 224 internetworking 223 Jackson, Glenda 133 Jackson, Mahalia 74

James, Henry 143 Jameson, Frederic 231 n.1 Jarecki, Andrew, Capturing the Friedmans 155 Jews 61, 152, 182 JFK (Stone, 1991) 208, 210, 211 John, Juliet 4 Jones, Amelia 112 Kaufman, Angelica 97 Kaufmann, Vincent 114 Kavanagh, Brett 187 Kempis, Thomas à 55 Kennedy, John F. 145, 208 Kidman, Nicole 141 King of Comedy, The (Scorsese, 1982) 3 Knapp, Bettina 146–7 Kofman, Ava 208, 209 Kohner, Susan 74–6, 75 Korda, Alexander pictorialism of films 85–6 propaganda films 85 That Hamilton Woman 85, 86–95, 87–8, 90 Kracauer, Siegfried 45, 51, 53, 76 Kriegman, Josh, Weiner 147–64 Kristofferson, Kris 177, 180–1, 182 Lacan, Jacques 122–3 Lady Gaga 178, 184, 185, 214 Lamo, Adrian 196, 197 Landseer, Edwin Henry 135–6 Laub, Dori 108, 122 Le Bon, Gustave 6 Leathers, Sydney 152, 157, 161, 162, 236 n.11 ‘left melodrama’ 189 Leigh, Vivien 85 Lemaître, Frédérick 12, 147 Leonardo da Vinci 107, 108 Lewinsky, Monica 152–3, 158, 160 living dolls 228 n.21 Lloyd, David, V for Vendetta (graphic novel) 189, 190–1 Machiavelli, Nicolo 14 magazines 12 make-up scenes 59, 175–8, 176, 177, 178, 182, 184, 198 see also grooming scenes Maland, Charles 43, 52

Index Malin, Brenton 158–9 mammy, images of 58, 62, 65, 67, 76 Mandeville, Bernard 21, 220 Manning, Chelsea 190, 196–7, 217–21, 219 Margate, Kent 115–17, 120 Marshall, David 150, 195, 196, 223, 227 n.4 Marshall, Guillaume 137 Marvell, Andrew 16, 17, 134 masculinity, crisis of 158 masculinity, demonstration of 147, 148, 159 masks/masking Chelsea Manning 197 Guerrilla Girls 226 Julian Assange 198, 199, 214 and persona 222 self-masking 225 of social media 223 V for Vendetta 191–2, 192 Massie, Allan 127–8 Maté, Rudolph 92 McLeod, Ken 121 McLuhan, Marshall 148, 151 McTeigne, James, V for Vendetta (film) 189, 192 ‘mediatisation of the self ’ 223 melodrama character types 5, 7–8, 11 moral evaluation of 1 origins of 6–10, 13, 27 melodramatic imagination 9, 10–12, 194, 222 melotrauma, definition of 122 ‘memes’ 223 memory, in City Lights 50 men, threatened by women 186–7 mentors, male 186 Menzel, Adolf, Unmade Bed 112 #MeToo 186, 229 n.6 Metz, Christian 48, 49, 210–11 Michel, Mireille 228 n.21 mimesis 56 Minnelli, Vincente The Bad and the Beautiful 70 Home from the Hill 145–6, 146, 151 Mirren, Helen 129, 130, 132–4, 137–8, 140 mirrors, use of 70, 86, 175 mixed race characters 63, 64 monarchy, British domestication of 126–7, 138–9, 138 populism of 125–6

263

Monbiot, George 1, 2 Monroe, Marilyn 141 Montagu, Ivor 46, 53 Montez, Mario 77, 78, 79 Moore, Alan, V for Vendetta (graphic novel) 189, 190–1, 237 n.1 Moore, Rachel 238 n.17 More Milk, Yvette (Warhol, 1965) 77–9 Morgan, Peter 128 Morrissey, Paul, Women in Revolt 79 mother figures 139–40 mother-daughter relations Imitation of Death (Crane, 2012) 80 Imitation of Life (Hurst, 1933) 58–9, 60, 61, 62 Imitation of Life (Stahl, 1934) 64 in work of Tracey Emin 113–14 motherhood, rejection of 60, 62, 113–14 Muggeridge, Malcolm 125 Mulvey, Laura 46, 170, 230 n.7 Murray, Yxta Maya 109, 111–12, 233 n.3 music, use of in historical theatre 9, 10 in A Star is Born (1954) 174–5, 178–9 in A Star is Born (1976) 181–2 in A Star is Born (2018) 184, 185 in work of Tracey Emin 118, 121 see also opera mute, role of 7, 8, 132, 156, 195 Nairn, Tom 135, 138–9 Name, Billy 77 names change of 169, 172, 173, 182, 184 of drag artists 225–6 establishment of 151–3, 152 mysterious 7 Naples, Italy 84, 85, 89, 91–2, 95 ‘narrative image’ 129–30 Nashville (Altman, 1975) 181 Neale, Steve 49 Negra, Diane 76 Nelson, Horatio 89, 91–3, 94, 98–9, 103 Novak, Kim 79 Nowell-Smith, Geoffrey 6, 138 obesity, fear of 61–2 objectification of women 88 Occupy movement 192–3 Olivier, Laurence 85, 89, 98

264 Olster, Stacey 232 n.8 opera Cosi Fan Tutti (Mozart) 85 Don Giovanni (Mozart) 85, 92 Le devin du village (Rousseau) 8–9 Tosca (Puccini) 85 Korda and 92 Rousseau and 8–9, 26–7, 122 Sontag and 85 Streisand and 183 Oscars 171, 172, 226 Ovid, Metamorphoses 26, 28, 165 Packer, George 207 paintings in The Queen (Frears) 131–2, 135–6 Il resto di niente/The Remains of Nothing (de Lillo) 101–2 That Hamilton Woman (Korda) 86, 87, 89, 90, 94, 95 The Volcano Lover (Sontag) 96–7 Why I Never Became a Dancer (Emin) 107 pantomime 6, 9, 27, 41, 45 Paris, France 6–7, 8–9, 25 Paris Is Burning (Livingston, 1991) 225 Pascal, Blaise 227–8 n.14 passing, see racial ‘passing’ patriarchal dominance 145, 160 Penfold-Mounce, Ruth 12 Performance (Cammell and Roeg, 1970) 182 person, idea of 15–17 personal worth and public attention case studies, outline of 30–4 celebrity, introduction to 1–7 esteem and power in the 17th century 12–18 fame in the 18th century 18–22 melodrama, origins of 6–10 melodramatic imagination 10–12 Rousseau and amour-propre 22–30 Peters, Jon 180 Peyton Place (Robson, 1957) 69 phalluses 160, 211 Phelan, Peggy 224, 225, 226 physical appearance of artists 106, 107, 175–6, 176–8 of celebrities 12 of characters 7–8, 11, 35, 96

Index physical reactions to art 112 physical rejection 61–2 Piaget, Jean 56 Pickford, Mary 62 pictorialism of melodrama 8, 85–6 Pierson, Frank, A Star is Born (1976) 177, 180–3 Pimentel, Eleonora de Fonseca 100, 101, 102, 103 Pinkett Smith, Jada 80 Pixérécourt, René-Charles Guilbert de Coelina, ou l’Enfant du mystère 7, 195, 221–2 The Dog of Montargis 136 La Fille de l’exilé 235 n.11 Victor, ou l’Enfant de la forêt 27 Plato, The Republic 56 Poitras, Laura Citizenfour 202–8, 206 Risk 212–17, 213 politicians, downfall of 147–8 see also Weiner, Anthony politics of melodrama 187 Postman Always Rings Twice, The (Garnett, 1946) 69 power and esteem in the 17th century 12–18, 134 power of celebrities 195 praise, idea of 21 Precious (Daniels, 2009) 186 Production Code, Motion Picture 63, 64 propaganda 85, 94 Proust, Marcel, Time Regained 49 publicity, role of 12, 126, 168, 223 Pygmalion (Rousseau, 1762) derivation of 26 description of 27–30, 171 the future, in 165 influence of 166, 174 masking in 221–2 self-realization in 122 Queen, The (Frears, 2006) 125–43 celebrity culture 140–1 as docudrama 128–9, 131 domestication of the monarchy 126–7, 138–9, 138 Helen Mirren and Elizabeth II 130, 132–4 Mary Stuart (Schiller), parallels with 130, 141, 143

Index melodrama in 127–8 mother figures in 139–40 republicanism in 142 revolution and 134–5 sculpture, use of 142–3 stag scenes in 135–7, 137 television screens and paintings, use of 129–32, 138, 140 racial ‘passing’ 59, 60, 61, 63, 75–6, 77 racial representation in film 65, 67 racism 80 rape complainants 109–11, 120 reality television 3–4 recognition of celebrity 41–2 of Chaplin and Einstein 45 by children 40, 46, 49 in City Lights 36, 46–52, 48 definitions of 35–6, 39–41 love and 53 and misrecognition 46–52 over time 49–50 reciprocity of giving 50–1 of Tracey Emin 105, 107 see also actor-character equation reconnaissance 41, 51, 229 n.5 Rehberg, Friedrich 90–1 ‘representation’ 16–17 Resto di niente, Il/The Remains of Nothing (De Lillo, 2004, film) 101–3 revelations, dramatic, see anagnorisis Ribera, Jusepe di 102 Ricoeur, Paul 39, 41, 49, 50–1, 53 Riesman, David 235 n.1 Risk (Poitras, 2016/17) 212–17, 213 Robson, Flora 133 Rockefeller, John D. 62 Rodowick, David 159 Rogin, Michael 208, 210 Rojek, Chris 4 role models 55 Romney, George 84, 86, 87, 89–90 Rooney, Monique 12, 27, 28 Rósza, Miklós 87 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques on acting 68, 177 birth of 114 on competition 175 on Hume 22

265

and image 28–30 on inequality 24 literary fame of 22–3 and melodrama 8–9, 27, 96 and opera 8–9, 26–7, 122 and sympathy 13 on theatre 25–6 on vanity 23, 25 on virtue 24 see also Pygmalion Rubik’s Cube 210, 211 Russell, Gillian 232 n.10 sacrifice of individualism 221 by mothers 61, 64, 113 by patriots 99, 103 for stardom 172, 173, 186 unrecognized 42 by whistle-blowers 204 Sardou, Victorien, La Tosca 99 scandals 148–53 Schickel, Richard 2–3 Schiller, Friedrich, Mary Stuart 130, 141, 143 Schlesinger, Arthur M. 235 n.1 Schulberg, Budd 236 n.4 Scorsese, Martin 3 Scott, Sir Walter 84 sculpture in City Lights (Chaplin) 36, 37–8, 37–8 Pygmalion (Rousseau) 26, 27–9, 122, 166, 171 The Queen (Frears) 142–3 A Star is Born (Cukor) 176 A Star is Born (Streisand) 183 A Star is Born (Wellman) 171, 172 That Hamilton Woman (Korda) 88, 89, 91 The Volcano Lover (Sontag) 96 Why I Never Became a Dancer (Emin) 112, 122 Sedgwick, Edie 77 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 160 self-destruction 146–7 self-discovery 26 self-display 159–60 self-evaluation 53 self-expression 150, 151 self-nomination of Galatea 29–30

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Index

Selznick, David O. 167–8, 236 n.3 Sennett, Richard 177, 178 sex, in work of Tracey Emin 116 sex and surveillance 208–12 sexting 149, 153–6, 159 sexual assault case against Assange 215 sexual practices 158 sexual scandals 148–50 shame 159–60 Sharples, Sebastian 111, 115, 120 Sharrett, Christopher 235 n.1 Shawcross, William 127 Sherman, Cindy, Film Stills 91, 225 Shetty, Shilpa 5 Siebers, Johan 48 Siemsen, Hans 52 Sirk, Douglas, Imitation of Life (1959) 68–77, 72–3, 75, 170 slang 67, 76, 152 Smith, Adam, on vanity, praise and esteem 21–2 Smith, Will 80 Snowden (Stone, 2016) 208–12, 211 Snowden, Edward 190, 202–8, 206 soap opera 125 social media 150, 153–4, 223–4 social recognition 41 soliloquies 150, 151 songs 174–5, 178–9, 181–2, 184, 185 Sontag, Susan celebrity of 83–4, 98 typecasting by 101 The Volcano Lover 95–100 Waiting for Godot, direction of 224 Spelling, Aaron 80 Spielberg, Steven 141 Stacey, Jackie 57 stag scenes in The Queen 135–7, 137 Stahl, John, Imitation of Life (1934) 63–5, 66, 67–8 Stallabrass, Julian 105–6 Star is Born, A (Cooper, 2018) 165–6, 167, 178, 183–7 Star is Born, A (Cukor, 1954) 173–80, 177 Star is Born, A (Pierson, 1976) 177, 180–3 Star is Born, A (Wellman, 1937) 167–73, 176 stardom of actors 133

cinematic and theatrical 11–12, 31 features of 36–7, 79, 167 sacrifices for 170–1, 172, 173 in A Star is Born 166, 174, 184 Stead, W. T. 149 Steinberg, Elyse, Weiner 147–64 Steinbock, Eliza 219 Stella Dallas (Vidor, 1937) 113, 114 stereotypes, racial 67 see also mammy, images of Stevenson, Robert Louis 145–6 Stewart, Garrett 181, 183 Stompanato, Johnny 69, 78 Stone, Oliver JFK 208, 210, 211 Snowden 208–12, 211 Streisand, Barbra 180–1, 182, 183 Striano, Enzo, Il resto di niente (novel) 101 Stryker, Susan 219 suicides in A Star is Born 172, 177–8, 179, 183 Surrealists 44 Surtees, Robert 180 surveillance and sex 208–12 suspicion of melodrama 105–15 Sylvester, You Make Me Feel (Mighty Real) 118, 121 sympathy, idea of 13, 19, 21 talent, nature of 170, 175, 184 Tavel, Ron 77 Taxi Driver (Scorsese, 1976) 3 television screens, use of in The Queen 129–32, 138, 140 That Certain Woman (Goulding, 1937) 180 That Hamilton Woman (Korda, 1941) 85 theatre, Rousseau on 25–6 Thévenot, Laurent 53, 107, 227–8 n.14 Thomson, David 127 Thunberg, Greta 223 Tilden-Close, Patrick 231 n.10 Tiller Girls 76 Tischbein, Wilhelm 96, 97 To Be or Not to Be (Lubitsch, 1941) 85 Tom Jones (Richardson, 1963) 78 ‘tragic mulatta’ role 60, 63 transitions 217, 218 transsexual embodiment 219

Index transvestites 77 trauma, suspicion of 107–11 Trump, Donald 160, 161, 163–4, 187 Turner, Graeme 6, 221 Turner, Lana The Bad and the Beautiful 70 depiction of by Warhol 77, 78, 79 Imitation of Life (Sirk, 1959) 70–4, 73 personal life 68–70 Peyton Place 69 typecasting 11, 101, 223 see also actor-character equation Underhill, Harriette 44 urban isolation 72 V for Vendetta (McTeigne, 2006, film) 189, 192 V for Vendetta (Moore and Lloyd, 2005, graphic novel) 189, 190–1 Valentino, Rudolph 62 vanity, idea of 21, 23, 25, 26, 28, 220 Vasari, Giorgio 107 Velez, Lupe 77 Vickers, Yvette 230 n.8 victims 5 see also mute, role of; rape complainants; ‘tragic mulatta’ role Victoria, Queen 126, 135 Victorian culture 4–5 Vidal, Belén 86, 89, 101, 129 Vidor, King, Stella Dallas 113, 114 Vigée Le Brun, Elisabeth 97 villains 7, 11 Virgil, Aeneid 2, 106 virility, overvaluation of 145 virtue, acknowledgement of and epic quest 2 in film melodrama 185–6 of mothers 113, 139, 140 Rousseau on 24 vision and blindness 37, 41–3, 47 visual characterization 11–12, 42, 191 voyeurism 42, 159 Waeber, Jacqueline 228 n.19 Walker, John 106, 107, 112 Waller, Edmund 16

267

Warhol, Andy Harlot 77 Imitation of Christ 231 n.10 More Milk, Yvette 77–9 Wasco, Sharon 109 Washington, Fredi 64, 67–8 Way Down East (Griffith, 1920) 119 Way We Were, The (Pollock, 1973) 181 We Steal Secrets (Gibney, 2013) 193–9, 194 Weber, Max 9 Weiner (Kriegman and Steinberg, 2016) 147–64 Clinton, connection with 157 Clintons, connection with 156–64 introduction to 147–8 scandals 148–53, 152 sexting 153–6 Weiner, Anthony campaign of 148, 157–8, 157 impact on Hillary Clinton 162–3 scandals 149–50, 151–2 self-destruction of 147 sentencing of 163 sexting by 154–6, 159 Weinstein, Harvey 187 Wellman, William, A Star is Born (1937) 167–73 What Price Hollywood? (Cukor, 1932) 165, 167, 169, 170 whistle-blowers 202, 203, 207 Why I Never Became a Dancer (Emin, 1995) 115–23 Whyte, William H. 235 n.1 WikiLeaks 193, 195–6, 224 Wilke, Hannah 91 Williams, Linda 112, 113, 119, 185–6, 196, 227 n.6 Williamson, Judith 125 Wilson, Woodrow 62 Winnicott, D. W. 40 Wolf, Stacy 183 Women in Revolt (Morrissey, 1971) 79 women’s pictures 83–103 Woodruff, Paul 56 Woodstock (Wadleigh, 1970) 181 Woodward, Bob 208 Wordsworth, William 72 working class people 4

268 World War II 85 world-as-theatre, trope of 16 worth idea of 5–6, 13, 14–15, 20, 21, 22 and public regard 106–7 XY Chelsea (Hawkins, 2019) 217–21, 219

Index yellow, racist use of the term 76 Young British Artists 105–6 Zeitchik, Steven 213–14 Žižek, Slavoj 46

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