Rebecca Bell-Metereau - Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering

CONTEMPORARY APPROACHES TO FILM AND MEDIA SERIES

General Editor

Barry Keith Grant, Brock University

Advisory Editors

Robert J. Burgoyne, University of St. Andrews

Caren J. Deming, University of Arizona

Patricia B. Erens, School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Peter X. Feng, University of Delaware

Lucy Fischer, University of Pittsburgh

Frances Gateward, California State University, Northridge

Tom Gunning, University of Chicago

Thomas Leitch, University of Delaware

Walter Metz, Southern Illinois University

A complete listing of the books in this series can be found online at wsupress.wayne.edu

2015 by Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced without formal permission.

Manufactured in the United States of America.

19 18 17 16 155 4 3 2 1

ISBN 978-0-8143-3939-8 (paperback)

ISBN 978-0-8143-3940-4 (ebook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015938561

Published with the assistance of a fund established by Thelma Gray James of Wayne State University for the publication of folklore and English studies.

Designed and typeset by Bryce Schimanski Composed in Adobe Caslon Pro

We dedicate this to Jean-Pierre Metereau, Marisa and Thea Bell-Metereau; the Glenn family, especially Thomas and Blanche; mentors, editors, colleagues and friends; and to the stars who inspire us all.

Rebecca Bell-Metereau and Colleen Glenn

1.Does This Film Make Me Look Fat? Celebrity, Gender, and Im Still Here

Nina K. Martin

2.Beauty to Beast: The Rebirth of Mickey Rourke

Colleen Glenn

3.Hilary Swank and Charlize Theron: Empathy, Veracity, and the Biopic

Megan Carrigy

4.Broken Nose and All: Daniel Day-Lewis and the Performance of Disruption

Dennis Bingham

5.Michael Jackson and the Pain behind the Mirror: A Photo Essay

Todd Gray

6.Adis Margarita Cansino, Hello Rita Hayworth

Linda Rader Overman

7.Baby, Its Cold Out in Hollywood: Rock Hudsons Multiple Masculinities

Rebecca Bell-Metereau

8.Misfittings: The Misfits as Marilyn Monroes Spiritual Autobiography

Peter J. Bailey

9.Hollywoods Proper Stranger: Natalie Woods Knowing Innocence and Uncertain Experience

Cynthia Lucia

10.Its the Years and the Mileage: Harrison Ford Grows Old Onscreen

Virginia Luzn-Aguado

11.Blood, Freckles, and Tears: Sissy Spaceks Surface Subversions and New Hollywoods Abject Feminism

Alison Hoffman-Han

12.Love Hurts, but Not Too Much: Julia Robertss Scenes of Suffering

R. Barton Palmer

13.Re/Inventing Halle Berry: Mixed-Race Stardom and the Melodrama of Female Victimhood

Charles Burnetts

WE WISH TO THANK OUR CONTRIBUTORS FOR THE INSIGHTFUL AND VARIED pieces they contributed to this collection, for their willing and prompt revisions, and for their enthusiasm, energy, and patience. This book originated from a panel entitled Star Bodies and the Erotics of Suffering that we presented at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies conference, held in New Orleans in 2011. A year later, as we moved forward with the project, we explored the intersection of stars and suffering yet again at the SCMS conference (in Boston) in a panel called Private Parts: Shame and Star Identities. These two panels formed the foundation of our anthology, and we are thankful to the panelists as well as attendees who offered feedback and useful questions at those sessions.

Our heartfelt thanks go to Barry Keith Grant and Annie Martin at Wayne State University Press for their interest and steadfast support of this project. Along the long road from proposal to finished manuscript, thoughtful readers suggested useful ideas for trimming, focusing, and improving the depth and parameters of our research for this volume. We owe our thanks to these unknown scholars. James Naremore and Alan Nadel provided early insightful suggestions and continued support for the project, as did Victoria Smith, Elizabeth Skerpan-Wheeler, and Dennis Bingham. Thanks to Sam Girgus, Peter C. Pugsley, Dhamu Pongiyannan, and Ben McCann for their generosity, patience, and intellectual contributions during development of the collection. We also offer thanks to Sally Angelica, Michel Elliott, Matthew Parrott, and Amanda David, who helped in early phases of the editing process. In addition to providing enormous assistance with manuscript preparation and copyediting, Eric Wright helped with images and other technical issues. Murray Pomerance and James Lighthouse also advised and assisted with illustrations and other technical aspects of PDFs and image capture. We owe deep gratitude to Jean-Pierre Metereau, who provided encouragement, ideas, and a keen eye for editing, detail, and accuracy. Special thanks go to Daniel Glenn, John Bruns, Catherine Thomas, and Franklin Ashley for their continued support of this project. Eric Schramm deserves thanks for painstaking copyediting and generous patience through the revision process. We are also grateful to Bryce Schimanski for his creativity and willingness to work through multiple iterations of the cover design until he found exactly the design to convey the collections unifying central focus. Finally, we would like to thank everyone at Wayne State University Press, including Sarah Murphy, Emily Nowak, Kristina Stonehill, and Carrie Teefey, for helping to shepherd us through this process

Once the film is over, the actor becomes an actor again, the character remains a character, but from both their union is born a composite creature who participates in both, envelops them both: the star.

Edward Morin, The Stars (1972)

The cult of love in the West is an aspect of the cult of suffering [and] the sensibility we have inherited identifies spirituality and seriousness with turbulence, suffering, passion.

Susan Sontag, Against Interpretation

WHAT HAPPENS WHEN MOVIE STARS SUFFER IN THEIR PRIVATE LIVES OR when personal dramas and bodily changes eclipse and alter their screen identities? What happens to the actor who wishes to break away from typecasting and take on a challenging role, as Marilyn Monroe did in her tortured portrayal of Roslyn in The Misfits (1961)? To what extent was Mickey Rourkes critically acclaimed performance in The Wrestler (2008) tied to his shocking metamorphosis from sexy bad boy to monstrous hulk? How has Halle Berrys star status been affected by painful struggles with gender and racial boundaries? What star rules did Joaquin Phoenix break with his bizarre behavior and disheveled appearance on The Late Show with David Letterman promoting the hoax movie Im Still Here (2010)? These actors who suffer onscreen and in privateintentionally or unintentionallydisrupt the glamorous, idealized narratives of their star personae. They challenge us to reconsider such issues as typecasting, audience expectations, and the tensions at play among a stars roles as private individual, public disaster site, artistic product, and cultural icon.

Stardom is typically associated with celebrity, wealth, beauty, and youth, and we often equate star status and box office success with an actors ability to maintain a coherent and enduring image over the course of a career. Yet iconic performances often grow out of unglamorous suffering, brought on by such vicissitudes of life as physical abuse, accidents, personal failure, or simple aging. This collection examines the fissures and fractures in a representative range of fourteen stars lives from the last seven decades in order to better understand how sufferingincluding emotional or physical pain and adverse bodily changesshapes stars onscreen and offscreen performances. Each chapter focuses on a star whose career has been marked by suffering, creating in viewers a sense of intimate relationship to the actor whose physical or psychological pain is incorporated into a distinctive star persona and repertoire, at times emerging as intentional display, at other times appearing as desperately hidden secrets or skillfully negotiated tactics. These essays demonstrate the powerful connection between the ethereal star image and the human experience of suffering, exploring how physical or emotional pain and transformation help define star personae. This process, and the intimacy that is established between the star and audience via the stars acts of suffering, we call the erotics of suffering.