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127 In an interview in 1985, Lorenzo Tucker, the African American matinee idol of the 1920s and 1930s, commented on Oscar Micheaux’s strategy of billing him as the “colored Valentino,” a promotional label that supposedly occurred to Micheaux while encountering publicity for Rudolph Valentino’s The Son of the Sheik in 1926. Tucker remembers, Yeah, it worked. And I kind of looked like Valentino, too. But I never got any white press at all, and very few people outside the black community ever heard of me. But I want to make one thing straight: these historians today always say that I was called “The Black Valentino.” Well, I never was that because we never used the word “black” like that in those days. Micheaux only called me “The Colored Valentino,” nothing else. In fact, if you really want to know, I was even lighter than Valentino himself. Tucker’s comments suggest that, at least sometimes, “blackness” was primarily a factor of skin color, while being “colored” had more to do with social life and with personal identifications to a racial community. Hence, Tucker’s identity as a colored performer insured the segregation of him and his film work from white audiences. Tucker also implies that, in some important sense, Valentino, while not colored, was already “black,” and that if, indeed, there were to have been a “Black Valentino,” it would more likely have been Rudolph Valentino and not Tucker himself. Writing about the same film that inspired Micheaux to exploit the Valentino name, Richard Dyer notes that the spectator of The Son of the Sheik sees the film’s heroine, Vilma Banky as Yasmin, well before seeing Valentino as Ahmed, 4 Black Valentino Consciousness of the body is solely a negating activity. —franz fanon, Black Skin, White Masks 128 Twilight of the idols the young sheik introduced when Yasmin remembers him in a flashback. As Dyer points out, Ahmed is “already located in her dreams, a spiritual realm of desire.” Dyer concludes his symptomatic reading of the film, however, by suggesting a somewhat naïve and decidedly anti-modern mode of reception by a mass audience presumably bereft of any nuanced notion of an unconscious: The most curious aspect of the film is the relation between the setting and the characters. All act as stock Arab figures, such as sheiks and belly-dancers; they act out a rather stark drama of sexual morality. Yet most of the main characters are not Arabs but Europeans (English and French) who live as Arabs. In this way The Son of the Sheik comes to feel like the “secret life” of contemporary western society, an exploration of the otherwise unspeakable subjects of female desire, rape and father-son conflict. The audience could take it two ways. Shocked by the sexual explicitness, it could dismiss the depicted events “anthropologically” as foreign behavior. Drawn into the characters, however, it could welcome the film as a sunlit dream of sexuality. In a period not yet saturated in Freudian ideas, such dreams were still possible. Dyer demonstrates here, as I have in Chapter 3, that Valentino’s image was strongly associated with memory and with the ideological crossing of sexual desire and an exotic distant past. Yet Dyer’s representation of contemporary film audiences as existing in some sort of state of innocence with respect to the vicissitudes of sexuality assumes a rather rigid and uncomplicated set of binaries at work in the mass reception of Hollywood movies and movie stars: fantasy/ reality, object/subject, other/self, projection/identification. Furthermore, he interprets the understanding of such binaries by a mass audience to be uninformed by any modern theoretical or scientific discourse (this is how I understand the quotation marks around the word anthropologically in the quote above). In this chapter I again take up the stardom of Rudolph Valentino, this time to investigate how contemporaneous representations of the relations between the famous film star and his public both relied on and promulgated modern sociological and ethnographic ideas about racial identity and the ultimate instability of such categories of self and other. Dyer’s suggestion that cinema audiences of the period were either unwilling or incapable of intimately relating “the anthropological” to their own subjective lives and experiences does not necessary follow from The Son of the Sheik’s narrative premise that “Europeans [could] live as Arabs.” In fact, a widespread fascination with ethnic disguise in the popular romantic fiction and in the films of this era would...

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