Valentino-Star/Man in Transition-Reading Response #1

Throughout The Sheik, I found myself continually wondering why women would find Valentino so appealing when he is more threatening throughout the film than romantic? With his leering gaze and his kidnapping of Lady Diana, he seems more of a frightening brute than an ideal partner. But upon reading Miriam Hansen’s article “Pleasure, Ambivalence, Identification: Valentino and Female Spectatorship,” I began to gain an understanding of Valentino’s desirability and the reasoning behind the construction of his star persona of a lustful brute, idealized by Hollywood in the term “Latin Lover.”Rising to prominence in the years following World War II, Valentino fulfilled the need for an “omnipotent,” masculine male – the he-man that the shell-shocked members of the “Lost Generation” could not hope to emulate.
However, Hansen also describes Valentino in terms of objectification and the use of his body as an object of desire, contradicting his status as he-man. Hansen labels Valentino’s body as “the site of contradictions that had erupted with the First World War” (259). Discussing the tension between his onscreen effeminacy and masochism, she points out that Valentino presented “a powerful challenge to myths of masculinity in American culture between the wars (275)” Furthermore, Hansen also discusses how Valentino’s cult-like status and his position as both gazer and gazee demonstrated a response to a need to define traditional notions of femininity as a result of the increase of female freedom that accompanied female suffrage and the bobbed hair/short skirts of the Jazz Age. Valentino, in a sense, was the new man, embodying the psyche of the post-World War I male, while fulfilling the needs of the newly liberated woman. Thus, while Valentino must be shown as the uber-masculine figure of exoticism, he must also, ultimately, be rendered “safe” for white American women to desire him – as exemplified in the revelation at the end of The Sheik that he is actually not Arab, but of British descent.
Fulfilling a need for the reworking of both masculinity and femininity, Valentino initiated a trend that still continues to help define stars today. While stars and the beginnings of the star system have been discussed as being motivated by self-identification and the fulfillment of “type,” Valentino illustrates the necessity of a star who can reflect a society in transition -- the contradictions of a society undergoing a shift in cultural values and mores. Valentino’s inherent contradictions posited in both his on and off-screen image reveal the difficulty of reconciling the newly sensitized male with the liberated female’s need for a strong man to reassure her of her femininity in the face of such radical change. This suggests that Valentino’s stardom came not essentially from his fitting a “type” or embodying a figure created by the studio for many to identify with, but rather from his representation of a society in contradictory chaos – a society in transition where many were unable to find their bearings or make sense of their lives and thus turned to stars to hope to find a reconciling of these paradoxes. Though Valentino is the first real figure of this contradictory nature, other stars of this mold will arise in similar periods of societal transition/conflict throughout history – as exemplified by the rise of the newly sensitized, emotional post-war male in the personas of Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, and Paul Newman.

Questions for Class:
1)DeCordova highlights that the private life of the star must not contradict their screen image as a component of the early star system. How has this changed with evolving notions of acting(particularly that of the method actor? i.e. Should Al Pacino or even Jimmy Cagney be boorish gangsters offscreen as well?) Additionally how has this shifted today as star's have gained more control over their own images and seek to change them?
2) With our country in recession and many social/cultural issues regularly confronting us many could say our country is in a similar period of upheaval/chaos. What stars do we look to now to reconcile these contradictions and what are the contradictions we most identify with within the star?
3) Can someone that plays against type or continually transforms themselves (for example Meryl Streep) be considered a star in the traditional sense of the word? Or must a "star" or "celebrity" still only adhere to type in the same way that Mary Pickford and Valentino did in the early days of stardom? If an actor is not defined by their same personality in each role, can they be a star or only a consummate actor?