Notes
175 notes INTRODUCTION 1. Walter Benjamin, “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility : Second Version,” Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 3, 1935–1938. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, eds. (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2002), 114. 2. Ibid., 113. 3. Ibid., 115. This is Benjamin’s phrase for the initial political interest the masses took in motion pictures. 4. See Lea Jacobs, The Decline of Sentiment: American Film in the 1920s (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), particularly Chapter 5. 5. The 2005 Turner Classic Movies documentary, Garbo, directed by Christopher Bird and Kevin Brownlow, continues this normative project by making the actress’ off-screen romance with John Gilbert the most sustained and determining factor in her popular success. The word “lesbian” is not heard on the soundtrack until sixtyeight minutes into the film, when Gore Vidal’s mention of Garbo’s “lesbian nature” initiates a six-minute sequence about her donning of trousers and other genderbending traits. The sequence concludes with Garbo’s great nephew pronouncing as “conjecture” all attributions of lesbianism to his famous aunt, while asserting that we have compelling and ample evidence of her several, deeply passionate romances with famous men. The next segment begins with Garbo’s romance with conductor Leopold Stokowski, and the subjects of non-normative sexuality and gender identity are never broached again. On the visibility of Garbo as part of early 1930s lesbian culture, see Chapter 2 of Andrea Weiss’ Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in Film (New York: Penguin , 1993). 176 notes 6. Richard deCordova, Picture Personalities: The Emergence of the Star System in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1990); and Janet Staiger, “Seeing Stars,” in Stardom: Industry of Desire, ed. Christine Gledhill (London Routledge, 1991), 3–16. 7. deCordova, Picture Personalities, 143. 8. One important exception here is the work of Lary May, who argues that certain stars in the 1910s facilitated the rise of consumerism and a popular acceptance of a corporate labor market. See especially his chapter on Douglas Fairbanks and Mary Pickford in Screening Out the Past: The Birth of Mass Culture and the Motion Picture Industry (Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1983), 97–146. Daisuke Miyao’s recent study of Sessue Hayakawa describes how the Hollywood star system in the 1910s and early 1920s negotiated an orientalist consumer market and an increasing xenophobic culture to normalize Hayakawa’s racial identity by Americanizing it, a negotiation that would ultimately fail by the early 1920s. See Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom (Durham , N.C.: Duke University Press, 2007). 9. Richard Dyer, Stars (London: BFI Publishing, 1979); and Heavenly Bodies: Film Stars and Society (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1986). 10. Edgar Morin, The Stars, trans. Richard Howard (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005). 11. See Dyer, Heavenly Bodies, 19–66. 12. The value of such an approach has been demonstrated most recently by Adrienne L. McLean in Being Rita Hayworth: Labor, Identity, and Hollywood Stardom (New Brunswick , N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 2005). 13. Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London: Routledge, 1993), 126. 14. Joel Pfister, “Glamorizing the Psychological: The Politics of the Performances of Modern Psychological Identities,” in Inventing the Psychological: Toward a Cultural History of Emotional Life in America, ed. Joel Pfister and Nancy Schnog (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1997), 167–213. 15. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, Epistemology of the Closet (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), 85. 16. Here is an example of this view from an otherwise insightful work on the historical reception of films: “Homosexuality or bisexuality, of course, has long been a possible way of understanding one’s self, but I believe that in the United States the notion that heterosexuality is only one of the possible sexual trajectories has just recently penetrated heterosexuals’ self-imaging. It was possible to ignore this when nonheterosexuality was defined in hegemonic discourses as deviance. And many people still hold to that definition.” From Janet Staiger, Interpreting Films: Studies in the Historical Reception of American Cinema (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1992), 75. 17. Alistair Cooke, Douglas Fairbanks: The Making of a Screen Character (New York: Museum of Modern Art, 1940); May, Screening Out the Past, 109–18; and Gaylyn Studlar, This Mad Masquerade: Stardom and Masculinity in the Jazz Age (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 10–89. 18. For an informative discussion of Hollywood’s negotiation of popular criminals in the early 1930s, see Thomas Doherty’s chapter, “Criminal Codes,” in his book Pre...
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