In the beginning of his career, Rock Hudson was made out to be an honest, trustworthy, all-American manly man. A strong jaw, good looks, broad chest, and confident charm resonated with audiences of the 1950s who were looking to the media for examples of the ideal masculinity. His wholesome film roles were paralleled with what was portrayed as a happy, healthy, heterosexual home life, transparent to the public and even boring at times. This is why it came as such a surprise when he revealed himself to be gay.

His “coming out of the closet” came as a shock to fans and critics alike. He was accused of being a liar; of hiding his “true self” from the public that audiences had become to feel entitled to. His image was totally incongruent with what people considered a typical gay man to look like: he didn’t have a soft face or feminine features. The revelation of his homosexuality didn’t cause an end to his popularity, rather, his image became a means for Americans to further their understanding of what a gay man could look like and be. Popular publications expressed surprise that even this nice, popular man could have a possibly lewd and what was considered to be a morally questionable private life. Public opinion of Hudson remained overall positive until the AIDS crisis of the 1980s. 

After Hudson’s AIDS diagnosis became public news, his image changed drastically, mainly through coverage of him in gossip and tabloid magazines. Most notable are the repeated side-by-side photos of him as a handsome young man contrasted with the more recent, haggard photos of a sickly and stressed Hudson. Tabloids invited audiences to look at what Hudson had become, and the assumption was that his homosexual lifestyle was what landed him in this position. 

In the beginning, Rock Hudson’s star persona was that of an ideal American masculinity, changed but not erased by his sexual orientation. He wasn’t overly muscular or trying to be something he wasn’t, according to Dyer he carried himself with a simple confidence that came from being comfortable in his position. Unlike James Dean, Hudson didn’t act strained or out-of-place, or like he had something to prove. Unfortunately, the way that the press handled Hudson’s image strengthened the harmful rhetoric that AIDS only affected gay men, and that they were at fault for the spread of the virus because of their promiscuous lifestyle. Rock Hudson deserved better from America and the press, as did the many gay men unfairly targeted and affected by these ideas. 

Beyonce has been a part of my media diet for as long as I can remember. I knew all the words to her song “Irreplaceable” from her 2006 album B’Day by age 8 from singing it over and over in the car with my mom. Beyonce was one of the many artists I listened to growing up that stood as a symbol of female empowerment. I followed her career as I grew up, listening to and loving everything she released, from 4 to Lemonade. Her musical talent, her reputation for being a diva, the public cheating scandal, her controversial 2016 superbowl performance, and rumors about her affiliation with the Illuminati have all kept her in the limelight for at least as long as I’ve been alive. After reading bell hooks’s critique of Beyonce’s version of feminism, I am beginning to doubt my diehard support and borderline worship that I’ve always felt Beyonce deserves. 

After reading Audre Lorde’s “Uses of The Erotic”, I believe that Lorde would support Beyonce’s overall image. Beyonce owns her body and flaunts it, using it as a symbol of power. She also uses money, talent, and fame as symbols of power, and doesn’t shy away from her reputation as an empowered black woman. When she is wronged, Beyonce retaliates, and doesn’t hold back. I think Lorde would also endorse Beyonce’s message of solidarity among black women, as well as her personification of creative power and harmony. bell hooks, on the other hand, takes issue with some of this imagery.

At this point in my train of thought, I return to my case study of Marilyn Monroe. I admired the sly humor and wit she brought to her film roles, like Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, and noted how she moved and presented her body with a sultry grace and confidence. While Monroe was able to gain some agency, her career is ultimately defined by her position as a sex symbol and a commodity of consumption primarily by white men. I hate to say that Beyonce seems to be in a similar position. 

Pop culture has progressed somewhat and Beyonce certainly has much more agency than Monroe did when it comes to her image. However, we have not progressed out of the racist, sexist, capitalist patriarchy that hooks has identified, and we do not exist in a culture where Beyonce’s body is not a commodity. In addition to her physical image, hooks argues that Beyonce’s star image is built on a harmful celebration of enduring pain. Instead, hooks calls for moving beyond pain, and holding both men and women accountable for sustained change to create lives of well-being and joy. 

So, Beyonce’s not perfect. She supports the American Dream, (proven to be a big, fat lie) equates the possession of wealth to internal happiness, (feeding capitalist propaganda) and may be contributing to the cultural tradition of viewing women’s bodies as commodities. However, I don’t think I’ve met a single woman who hasn’t been empowered by one of Beyonce’s powerful ballads. In “Pretty Hurts,” she critiques the pressure on women to look a certain way and calls for internal, rather than external change. In “Irreplaceable,” she tells her man to take his things and leave, and that she can do much better than him. And the entirety of Lemonade gives women who have been wronged a voice; a space to express rightful indignation and anger that concludes with a peaceful, healing forgiveness. While Beyonce’s image may leave a bit to be desired in terms of an empowering feminist agenda, her work has certainly inspired generations of women to speak up and make changes in their life they may not have known were possible. 

Anna Magnani was a unique figure in Italian cinema described to carry herself with “visceral vitality, existential impulsiveness and passionate abandon.” (Mitchell) Time magazine called her the “world’s greatest actress” in 1955. She took on “grittily realistic, unglamorized roles of popolana (woman of the people) and a partisan heroine, two key Italian archetypes that she would both create and reflect. While watching her films, it’s clear that she stands out among other Hollywood starlets–she wears no makeup, her hair isn’t styled, and she carries herself roughly and without grace. This created a sense of authenticity in her image–typical of publicity in the 40’s and 50’s that wanted audiences to believe that stars showed their true selves in their film roles.

Like many other stars, Magnani’s image extended beyond who she was as a person and became a location of debate for the set of problems or contradictions she would come to represent within culture. Her ‘woman of the people’ reputation, although constructed, emerged from a very real set of economic and political conditions in Italy following WWII. In 1945, Germany had just recently left Italian land, film studios were closed, director Rossellini had to buy extra film stock from street photographers, and there were no time or facilities to review rushes. This lent to the realistic feel that films like Roma Citta Aparta had that would captivate American audiences and critics in the 60s.

Magnani was a proud non-professional actor. She expressed a desire to portray authentic characters that audiences can believe, and she chose roles that she felt were real characters with identifiable emotion and “to whom I dedicate myself to with sincerity, enthusiasm, and love.” This is evident when watching her perform: she appears to dedicate her whole body and self to whatever role she’s in. In 1947, The New York Times called her a spectacle and an impulsive “one-woman show.” 

After Magnani was thrust into the spotlight after a scandal involving Ingrid Bergman, it became clear that she was not like other female stars. US critics were obsessed with her “unconventional” attractiveness and “feisty” behavior. Words like tigress, volcano, animalesque, and out of control were used to describe her. Offscreen, she became known for a refusal of artificiality and an insistence on control over her own body. Symbolically, she became a rebellious body, struggling to free itself from the grip of political, masculine, foreign oppression. 

 

Bette Davis was a film star whose image transformed over the course of her career from ‘platinum blonde’ to ‘star actress.’ Similarly to Marlene Dietrich, her stardom was based on and reinforced by her acting skills. This shift in image came after Of Human Bondage (1934) saw commercial success, and studios saw an opportunity to market Davis as a skilled and sought-after performer. Davis’ career became part of a tradition for the star system to market star actresses–talented performers who migrated from acting on the stage to the screen.

Once a person becomes a star, their inner world and personal lives become ‘available’ or ‘knowable’ to fans. Davis’ image in particular raised questions about what stars are “really” like in their private lives. This can be seen in All About Eve, which uses the motif of ‘pulling the curtain back’ to reveal who the young actress really is. This pulling back of the curtain allows the audience a point of entry into stars’ lives, and explores the tension between public and private lives that defines stardom. The audience’s relationship to stars is a paradox of assuming that they have full knowledge of the star’s life, while at the same time understanding that there will always be ‘unknowable’ aspects of stars’ lives that exist beneath the surface. 

Cynthia Brown discusses how Hollywood studio’s methods for publicity shifted with the transition to sound, evident through a concurrent shift in Davis’ career. Brown says that in the 30s and 40s, studio publicity focused the public’s attention on stars’ personalities rather than their craftsmanship. Audiences were told that Hollywood actors were “natural”, whose unique qualities were captured by the camera. With the transition to sound, vocal performances became key. This caused studios to turn to stage actors to cast, beginning a mass migration of actors from live theater to Hollywood. 

Davis has said that she didn’t find the transition from stage to screen all that difficult. Dyer identifies a major change in performance style with the transition to screen acting: it is how actions are done/lines said. It’s also important to note the mannerisms Davis used like facial expression, voice, gestures, body posture and movement. In All About Eve, Davis expertly oscillates from repressed anger to whole-body fury, based on what’s appropriate for the context. A crucial change that came with screen acting is the importance of limiting expressive movement. Since films often show one person up-close, blown up to a huge scale, Davis performed with an emphasis on her eyes and face to communicate repressed anger. Intense micro-movements communicate the actor’s inner emotional world without being flamboyant or dramatic as an actor would on a stage.

For all stars, it’s important to ask the question, “What set of behaviors, topics, or problems does (a figure) represent?” Davis’ legacy as a ‘bitch’ and a ‘queer icon’ leads me to believe that she represented a similar set of problems as Dietrich concerning how women should behave. Especially in All About Eve, Davis’ character shows that there are different contexts in which it’s appropriate to hold back or let it all loose in a dramatic and flamboyant expression of emotion. As a defiant and confident actress, Davis created an image for women to look to that showed them that they could talk back and be bold. 

 

Marlene Dietrich was a German-born, iconic classic film star known for her cool confidence, sultry expressions, and acting talent. She’s also known for her association with long-time collaborator and director Josef von Sternberg, who took ownership over her image and took credit for “discovering” Dietrich. The Blue Angel (1930), made in Germany, was the film that launched Dietrich’s career. After The Blue Angel saw success, Dietrich and von Sternberg came to America, and Dietrich signed a contract with Paramount. This launched Dietrich into the Hollywood star system, and her career would never be the same. 

Unlike the powerful publicity system that had been established in Hollywood by the 50’s, Paramount used strategies like the star vehicle and star/genre association to establish Dietrich’s reputation as a trained and talented actress. The star vehicle is a film made with a star’s image/career in mind, and these films would give space for her to showcase her acting talents. As for genre, Dietrich’s films shared a film noir style and featured musical acts. Before she acted in films, Dietrich was a vaudeville performer– the ‘moment before stardom’ that gave Dietrich’s actor star image a sense of legitimacy. She also played similar characters, which created a sense of familiarity for her roles. 

To promote her films, Paramount released a series of publicity photos of Dietrich that encapsulated her established attributes and communicated the style and tone of her films. The photos were in high contrast black and white, film-noir style. Dietrich herself is centered in these photos, in one of them she is defiantly smoking a cigarette, looking right at the camera, slightly intimidating. Her facial expressions are serious, denoting drama, and parts of her face or body are obscured by either her hat or the dark background. Her cheek and jaw bones are defined and sharp, lending to a beauty without softness.

So, why was Dietrich so popular? What about her image resonated with the discourse of her time? In Stars Part 2, Richard Dyer says that “star images function crucially in relation to contradictions within and between ideologies, which they seek variously to ‘manage’ or resolve.” (38) For Marilyn Monroe, the ideology her image seeked to ‘resolve’ was the question of female sexuality. For Dietrich, I think her image more broadly caused the audience to question how women should behave and present themselves. This is evident in Morocco, as Dietrich’s character Amy performs at a club in drag to the chagrin of the club manager and to the shock and awe of the large audience. 

It could be argued that Dietrich’s image was empowering for women who watched her films and perhaps felt trapped in their limited options of acceptable gender expression. Dietrich showed women, especially in Morocco, that transgression was not only possible, it was glamorous. Even if it caused a commotion, her performance gained the attention of Tom Brown, played by Gary Cooper. This is unfortunately where I feel that any sort of meaningful empowerment stops–Dietrich’s character is performing for men, and her stunt dressing as a man was brief and designed to be shocking, rather than portrayed as a legitimate mode of expression for her. Right after that performance, she emerges in a tight-fitting dress, emphasizing that she is, in fact, a woman who will play the part, even if she steps outside the lines for a moment.

In Heavenly Bodies, Richard Dyer argues that stars matter to audiences because they act out aspects of life that are relevant to the discourse they exist in. In the 1950’s, that subject was sexuality, and the star that acted that subject out was Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was charismatic, which Dyer describes as embodying what discourse designates as “important-for-the-time” features of human existence. With a soft voice, blonde ringlets, and a gaping mouth, Monroe showed America an erotic, guiltless innocence that raised questions about how women should express themselves. Her image, which includes her pin-ups, film roles, interviews, critiques, and more, established her as a sex symbol and articulated how American culture understood and felt about sexuality. 

Like other stars, Monroe’s ‘moment before stardom’ was crucial in establishing her sexual image. Her reputation as a pin-up model both helped to establish her career and later would reinforce ideas about Monroe as a sex object. Dyer identifies 1953 as a crucial year in Monroe’s career. Three things of importance happened: Monroe began to gain popularity, a scientific report was published that raised ‘the question’ of female sexuality, and the first issue of Playboy was published, featuring a scantily-clad Monroe. While a star like Grace Kelly could be described as the ideal mate, Monroe was conceived of as an “ideal playmate.” 

Then came her film roles, which Dyer sums up in two archetypes: either ‘The Girl’ or ‘The Blonde.’ The girl is defined by age, gender, and sex appeal, while the blonde embodies a basic anonymity and whose purpose is to visually please men. This is evident when watching her films: narratively, she assists a male protagonist, and visually, the camera makes sure to accentuate her body, on display. As a divorcee with no biography in The Misfits, the symbolic structure of the film relates her to nature, the antithesis of culture, career, society and history. 

In Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, Monroe’s character Lorelei seems to gain some agency through her acknowledgment that she must behave a certain way in order to be appealing enough to marry a rich man. Monroe often brought more to her roles than was anticipated, sometimes going ‘against the grain’ of the typical dumb blonde she was written to be. Dyer raises the question of whether Monroe was rebellious in these roles or if she simply played the part. Some would argue that her image is empowering for women and invites them to embrace their sexuality. However, I’m not sure if moments of agency were enough to break Monroe free from her role as an object of male sexual gaze. 

Stars’ popularity is reliant on the consistency of their image. As Thomas Harris says in “Building of Popular Images,” stars are accepted on the premise that their personality, traits, and mannerisms permeate all roles to become “the star you know and love.” Publicity from NY to LA perpetuated stereotypes about Monroe, focusing on her breathy voice, half-closed eyes/mouth, and a matter-of-fact, humorous approach to sex, consistent with her screen stereotype. Monroe was considered noteworthy enough to merit a Time cover feature, and I think anyone familiar with American pop culture would agree that her image has been massively influential in representations of women and sexuality.