It's fascinating to witness the machine at work, watch it hum and scream and howl. To see these products, like cereal boxes and fruit chews and action figures and sheets and towels and pillows...I mean, we've entered the arena where Marcel Duchamp and Andy Warhol are Snoopy — dancing in the nude. It's so absurd and so surreal and so irreverent that I love it.
-Johnny Depp, on The Pirates of the Caribbean films
As somebody who has focused somewhat on the movie star as both cinematic and social construct recently, the above quotation fascinates me. So I have decided to do an offshoot of Jason’s original post on the recent Pirates sequel to focus on Johnny Depp as a movie star.
(I know some of you might have Pirate overdose. But this is more a post on movie stardom. So I feel justified guiding the Mabuse ship into these waters. Arghhhhh!)
I ran across the quotation in my guilty pleasure subscription, Entertainment Weekly, and it stuck in my mind. What does such a statement mean in terms of Depp’s place in the history of movie stars? Somehow, I feel the statement might be key in defining him as a post-post Classical model of stardom.
He is a difficult figure to define since his enormous popularity really is unique because he has built his performances through bizarre quirks as opposed to a standard. His handsomeness certainly have something to do with his appeal, but it is his oddity that really defines his popularity. And, against the odds, this has now made him into a mega-star.
John O. Thompson sees cinematic star performance "as a bundle of distinctive features. . . . Each feature functions as a potential distinguisher both within the film itself and in the indefinitely extending space established by viewers’ familiarity with cinema in general." Thompson really just elaborates upon a popular theoretical concept of cinematic stardom as being built on the signs of performance. But Thompson, who comes up with a "communication test" to determine these signs, is lacking here if we are to consider Depp.
I feel Depp really would just completely muck up any "communication test." Thompson, similar to others who study stardom like Naremore and even Dyer (to a degree), seems obsessed with the image of the Classical movie star. For example – Bogart, Hepburn, or Grant would be considered definable personas even though they might play with their distinctive features from film to film. We still have these Classical models today in a Harrison Ford or Denzil Washington, two actors certainly popular because of "distinctive features" even if they sometimes challenge them in certain roles.
But what the hell is Depp? And why is he now anchoring a massive film franchise?
I propose, as the EW quotation certainly indicates, he is a pop artist as actor. He discloses that his best performances are amalgams of pop culture icons -- Capt. Jack Sparrow is Keith Richards and Pepe LePew; Ichabod Crane is Angela Lansbury; Ed Wood is Ronald Reagan. Such strangely appropriative discussions of "process" might be just a way to generate publicity, since these bizarre influences make for great press. But as Dyer fully understands, publicity is key to the star construct. Depp builds his popularity (his distinctiveness) through his peculiarity and appreciation of the "absurd" and "irreverent." He truly is a combination of Duchamp, Warhol, and Snoopy! No wonder he loves the massive reproductions of his likeness. No wonder he loves the machine and the irreverence of it all.
Maybe such a disposition and performance style makes Depp a near perfect post-post Classical model of movie star.
8 comments:
Interesting to see him name-drop Warhol and Duchamp in that way, and I like your read. Depp seems very interested in the image of celebrity, as his descriptions of his most famous performances suggest.
And while I do think that his quirkiness, I wonder how much of his appeal derives from a weird sort of innocence, in that many of the characters he plays (Wonka, Ed Wood, Ichabod Crane, etc) could almost be described as virginal, or at least childlike. He's certainly quirky but it's a safe form of quirkiness.
This suggestion morphed from something I read about Leo DiCaprio's popularity during the Titanic hype--his boyishness in the film made him "safe."
I like where you're going with this.
Don't forget the explicit Buster Keaton thing in Benny and Joon - like maybe that was an more carefully controlled experiment with the performance of a performance.
Besides that, there's also the silent and physical Edward Scissorhands and, now that Chuck mentions DiCaprio, the double dose of inarticulate boyishness in What's Eating Gilbert Grape . . .
I think I mentioned that I recently tried to watch old 21 Jump Street; it was so awful I could not do it, but the premise of the pilot was that the Depp character was too handsome and too baby-faced to be a regular cop . . .
Interesting read Scott. There's one passage which you wrote that compared Depp's best performances to others that made me think of Depp as a postmodern actor. Since he sees to act out intertextual performances, maybe part of the pleasure in viewing him is in recognizing the reference. It's like the pleasure that one derives from watching a Tarantino film and recognizing the various allusions contained within. Thus the Richards/Pepe LePew combination for Sparrow could have lead to the film's success since they would be most recognizable to the common spectator.
I think the idea of innocence is key here, zp. I would never put Depp in the realm of quirkiness of a Crispin Glover or something. Depp is quirky in a safe way -- or, to be more accurate, in the construct of stardom. It is why he manages to become so popular. But it is still very original and unlike other models. If he was totally quirky without any leading man qualities or "safeness/like-ability," he would be just a character actor and this discussion wouldn't exist.
There are instances where other popular actors have followed a Depp-like style in terms of inter-textual performances. Thinking of pirates again, Dustin Hoffman does a William F. Buckley imitation in Hook. Tony Curtis mocks Cary Grant in Some Like It Hot. But this action alone really doesn't define these actors (Curtis being a classical model -- while, I would say, Hoffman is a post-classical). What makes Depp more post-post-classical is how his stardom is being defined by such plays of performance, even though he certainly does less popular "straight" performances as well.
As for the "postmodern" title, Mike, I was hesitant to make that leap since, as zp suggest, Depp is very much within the movie star model and "safe." There is still something modernist about the concept of Hollywood stardom in general to me, even when stars appear in a clearly postmodern film.
But I would certainly open the question up to other better postmodernist theorists here. Could Depp be a "postmodern movie star" and what would such a title even mean?
You've probably seen it, but Fred Jameson has an extended riff on postmodern "stardom" in his classic Postmodernism book (on page 20).
Jameson reads Hurt's performance in Body Heat via his somewhat idiosyncratic concept of the nostalgia film, arguing that Hurt is distinct from a previous generation of stars such as Steve McQueen and Jack Nicholson and Marlon Brando (all FJ's examples) because they "projected their various rolesthrough and by way of their well-known off-screen personalities" while Hurt is characterized by a (virtuoso, according to FJ) distinct absence of personality (later there's a nod to the "death of the subject," in case you were wondering).
To be honest, I don't find FJ terribly convincing here. If Depp is pomo in any significant way, it's probably in the Warholian mode of pastiche implied by Depp's interviews. Interesting questions.
The only other work I know of on postmodernism and the star persona is Gina Marchetti's essay on Jackie Chan, where she makes the argument that Chan's persona is postmodern because he's a sort of free-floating signifier who can appeal to and adapt to several different cultures (East, West, and so forth) but doesn't really originate in either. Apparently, Chan is something of an anomaly to various Asian audiences as much as he is to American and European audiences. I believe Marchetti also references Jameson in the article, as do most postmodernists. The emphasis, though, is more on globalization in the context of postmodernism--though I believe patische also plays a big part here. There's another famous essay on these issues (postmodernism and Hong Kong cinema), but the title and author escapes me (anyway, I don't think it addresses the issue of star persona, though).
The Warhol connection, as Chuck rightly notes, does bear more scrutiny here, and probably would be the most fruitful, if you choose to go further down that aspect (pastiche) of Depp's persona.
js
funny: a friend of mine was taking a class with richard dyer on pastiche and reported that dyer mentioned that his use of the concept of pastiche was in opposition to jameson's use of the concept . . .
dyer's 'stars' seems important to the depp thing, but i always feel that 'stars' applies to classical cinema and (in other ways too) is a theory of the modern rather than postmodern
That's one of the reasons I hesitate to call Depp a "postmodern movie star," zp. I think somebody can be maybe a pop artist actor (a postmodernist artist). But the construct of movie star itself still feels so classical and tied to modernism still. The artist might be postmodern, the construct (the textual/social element known as "star") is a less clear story.
Though these postmodernists' uses of the term "pastiche" interest me. I need to look at Jameson on Hurt and rethink this position.
BTW, Jason, I actually used some Warhol you once forwarded me to retool my thesis, which covers some of cinematic acting -- though, as far as I know, that article still is sitting in the garage.
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