Films on Stars: Inside Daisy Clover (1965)

Inside Daisy Clover starts off as a typical sort of film about the empty promises of fame and the machinery of Hollywood. When we meet Daisy Clover (Natalie Wood) at the start of the film, she’s a raggedy tomboy who lives in a ramshackle trailer with her mother and sells autographed photos of the stars on the boardwalk (many of which she simply signs herself). Oh the glamour of Hollywood, but it seems so out of reach for seventeen year old Daisy Clover!

The whole rags-to-riches theme is common in films about stardom, but Daisy Clover offers something unique. Unlike the Esther Bloggett (both the 1937 Gaynor version or the 1953 Garland version), she’s no plucky heroine or good girl just waiting to be discovered. She has the appropriate hard luck story: father abandoned the family, mother is mentally unstable and basically relies on Daisy to survive. They live in poverty and under threat from the police because of her mother’s gambling. But instead being a typical sort of Pollyanna attitude about her life that typifies melodramatic heroines in these situations, Daisy is explosive and angry. She yells and spits and lashes out physically at those who cross her. Her rather butch appearance is also uncommon for these sorts of films, but is important to what happens later…

Natalie Wood as Daisy Clover

Her Hollywood dreams are somewhat undefined, but she apparently sent a record of her singing to a producer. Interestingly, we don’t actually see her sing, we just find out about it when the producer, Raymond Swan (a suave Christopher Plummer) sends a limo down to the boardwalk to pick her up. It seems like a set up for the the typical moment Hollywood loves to portray where the heroine’s true talent helps her escape from her harsh life and get the fame she truly deserves. But as we already know, Hollywood is a business and fame is really just an empty promise because it forces you to change who you really are in order to achieve it.

This point constantly driven home by Swan, who is a cynical and jaded Hollywood insider. After their first meeting, Swan says to Daisy, “Incredible as it may seem, I’m going to make something out of you…Money.” What Swan sees in Daisy is “a certain mixture of orphan and clown that always packs them in.” He femmes her up with new hair, clothes and, importantly, demure mannerisms in a Pygmalion like transformation. She has something special, but Swan knows she must also conform to the feminine standards of Hollywood. He basically orchestrates her whole life towards this goal. This includes allowing her mother to be insitutionalized and claiming that she is dead so that the tabloids won’t discover the truth and ruin her carefully crafted image as “America’s Little Valentine.”

The “new” Daisy Clover

The constructed image and made up biography is a familiar theme to stardom films, but this being the 1960s, Inside Daisy Clover gets particularly dark in its portrayal of Daisy’s fame. She thinks that fame and money are going to make her happy and solve her problems, but, surprise!, they really only make things worse. Her true self keeps pushing against this constructed facade, demonstrating that fame is a sacrifice or, as Swan puts it “Fame does have its obligations.” The problem is that boardwalk Daisy simply cannot be contained by America’s Little Valentine.

The machinery of fame and Hollywood is revealed at the outset, and though we do see Daisy sing and perform after she signs with Swan, the idea that her talent is not enough is made clear throughout the film. I find the musical numbers alternately boring and weirdly surreal in that 1960s sort of way (also, apparently Wood’s singing was scrapped in favor of an overdub from a session singer). They do fit with the themes of the film…the first is “You’re Gonna Hear From Me” that both demonstrates her talent and promises (threatens?) us that she WILL BE FAMOUS! Also, what’s up with that hat?

The other, “The Circus Is A Wacky World,” tells us “the circus ain’t what it’s supposed to be” and “isn’t real.” Do you see what they did there? Here’s the first appearance of the song as Daisy films a new movie that is apparently about clowns or something.

Tellingly, it is while Daisy is recording audio overdub of this song during post-production that she has a massive mental breakdown…but more on that to come.

To add to the illusion that is Hollywood, Daisy starts a relationship with fellow actor (and fellow Swan protegee) Wade Lewis played by a smoking hot Robert Redford. Seriously. Brad Pitt wishes he was ever this sexy.

This is the best picture I could find, but trust me, Redford kills it in the hotness department

Anyway, Wade, like Daisy, is forced to be something he’s not in order to fit the Hollywood mold and make lots of money for Swan. In her first act of rebellion against Swan, Daisy falls in love with Wade. The two stars get married, and Wade promptly runs off to New York. Swan reveals to Daisy the truth about Wade, which is he “prefers men” and is a lousy drunk. In fact, according to Swan, Wade really only took up with Daisy as part of his ongoing attempts to hide his homosexuality. Swan facilitates an annulment after only one day to keep Daisy’s image from being tarnished more than to protect her feelings. Furthermore, Swan uses this as further proof that he should always be the one in control.

All this leads to Daisy having massive breakdown while recording audio for that wacky circus song. It’s pretty spectacular, but I can’t really find any quality clips of it. Regardless, she freaks out and physically lashes out like the old Daisy. Swan sequesters her in her beach house and calls in doctors so she can recover out of the public eye (“the world holds its breath as you hold yours”). Swan demands that either she be certified as insane (just like her mom!) so he can collect the insurance on her or that she get her ass out of bed and back to work like the commodity that she is. In case we forgot, money is all that matters in Hollywood. Here’s where the movie gets awesome and really distinguishes itself from other stardom/Hollywood Dreams films.

SPOILER ALERT: Daisy gets out of bed all right. Just watch the last scene of the film:

She doesn’t just walk away from her Hollywood life and self. She burns it down and declares war! But that is the end! So this movie pushes up against the control of Hollywood in some pretty intense ways at the end, but stops short. What will she do? I demand a sequel!

In today’s celebrity culture, she’d probably go on a media tirade about Swan, make some crazy YouTube videos or write a page turning tell all. Then she’d be discredited as an addict and end up on Dr. Drew’s show. But Daisy wasn’t an addict or doing drugs in the film. She just couldn’t take the constraint of being America’s Little Valentine and that Hollywood was a wacky place. I could have done with one less musical number and more Hollywood comeuppance at the end, but this is definitely one of the blackest takes on stardom I’ve come across so far.

Can Monkeys Be Celebrities?

My writing energies have definitely been directed elsewhere this summer, but hopefully for good reason. I’m also gearing up for a move halfway across the country, preparing for my new job and trying to find some time to actually enjoy my last summer in New England. But if anything can bring me out of blog hiding for a brief post, it’s the convergence of two of my favorite things: celebrities and monkeys. I fully admit up front that this “analysis” is simplistic and silly and may or may not just be an excuse to post some awesome pictures of monkeys. But when I first heard about this on Tuesday’s Colbert Report, I was way too amused to let this pass me by and couldn’t contain my silliness in Twitter’s 140 characters (you should follow me!)

Monkeys, like celebrities, hate it when they are caught by paparazzi

Okay, so we know that monkeys are no stranger to celebrity culture. Elvis had Scatter. Michael Jackson had Bubbles. Even Paris Hilton had a monkey named Baby Luv, but she was confiscated back in 2005.

Elvis and Scatter

Paris and Baby Luv

Michael and Bubbles

But a new study being conducted at the Yale University Comparative Cognition Lab on the effects of advertising on primates (you heard me) is, I think, tapping into some sort of monkey celebrity culture that may tell us something about our own human celebrity culture.

Researchers are trying to find out if monkeys will prefer one “brand” of jello if they are exposed to a billboard “advertising” that brand. And what will be on this billboard? According to one of the researchers:

“One billboard shows a graphic shot of a female monkey with her genitals exposed, alongside the brand A logo. The other shows the alpha male of the Capuchin troop associated with brand A.”

Let’s consider our own celebrity culture for a moment. Celebrities are used to sell products. That we know. Advertisers take famous faces— images that are well-known to the public not just as actors/actress, but as representations of social norms—and connect them to products so that we will think that by buying this watch, we’ll be just like Brad Pitt!

But why use Brad Pitt? On one hand, Brad Pitt stands in for some of our social norms about masculinity that are then transferred to the watch. Celebrity really needs media attention to have this sort of cultural reach. And not just reach in a “hey, we know who they are” kind of way, but as markers for what it means to be a man or a woman in contemporary society. This is why we think of celebrities as “images.” We know there exists a person called Brad Pitt, but when we talk about him as a celebrity, we are talking about his image or how he is represented across media forms, not the actual person. This makes media crucial to celebrity culture because it is how we know what we know about these images.

Which is the same idea of using the alpha male (a monkey already at the top of monkey social hierarchy, and a monkey known to all the monkeys in that culture/community) to make other monkeys want to “buy” the Brand A jello. The alpha male monkey is already a public figure, so to speak, in the monkey community. But now, with media attention, he becomes a monkey celebrity whose very embodiment of all the right kind of “monkey-ness” defines his celebrity image. And that “monkey-ness,” researchers think, will be transferred to the product and make other monkeys prefer Brand A jello. The other monkeys (I’m guessing only the males? There’s a reason I’m not in the hard sciences, people) want to be like him because he is the most “monkey” of all monkeys, and the billboard helps reinforce him as that top monkey.

I believe there is already some precedence for monkeys wanting to be like someone who they perceive to be top of the heap:

What we’re seeing in this study, I think, is the mediation of those aspirational identities in the form of monkey celebrities on billboards!

But what really cracks me up about this whole thing is that the Brand A jello is also being “sold” to the monkeys with the “graphic shot of a female monkey with her genitals exposed.” Once I stopped snickering at that—because I am a 10-year-old boy—I was struck again by the human celebrity parallel. I could go on and on about the objectification and sexualization of women (in general) and female celebrities (more specifically) in media, but that connection should be pretty obvious. In fact, the idea that “sex sells” is the basis of the whole monkey study anyway.

But what I love about this is that monkey celebrity culture goes straight to the crotch shot or “upskirt” photo that really became a thing in gossip media just a couple of years ago. You couldn’t visit a blog without seeing a photo of Paris or Lindsay or Britney flashing their junk to the world. I’ll spare you the pictures. (Sidebar: who “forgets” to put on underwear? Isn’t that really step one of getting dressed? Or am I just old?). So if we’re thinking about monkeys as celebrities, we’ve bypassed the glamorous side of stardom and jumped (evolved?) directly to the high level of discourse of available on TMZ and Perez Hilton.

A male monkey celebrity is defined by power, authority and monkey-masculinity. Female monkey celebrities are sexual and defined by their junk. This is maybe hitting too close to the truth. Thanks, monkeys, for once again pointing out that humans are ridiculous.

Okay, one more cute monkey photo

Why don't I have a baby monkey!?

Lady Gaga gets real?

I was pretty obsessed with Lady Gaga’s first album, The Fame, when it was released in the summer of 2009. The combination of dance beats and commentary on the nature of stardom provided me a perfect escape that somehow still counted as work during my dissertation writing. (“I’m not dancing! I’m working!”) What drew me to Gaga, in terms of her image, was that in a celebrity culture dominated by the revelation of the ‘private’ and ‘real’ self behind the public persona, epitomized by celebrity reality shows and the nonstop paparazzi surveillance the crash and burn stardom of people like Britney and Lindsay, Gaga was nothing but image. I honestly did not even want to know anything about her private life, as that would somehow ruin the fun.

We only see what Gaga wants us to see

The private self wasn’t completely absent, but it was consciously constructed and a part of the overall “Gaganess” of her image. Though we learned there was a ‘real’ person named Stefani Germonatta, she was never anything other than Gaga (even her mom calls her Gaga, after all). Unlike other stars always tied to the idea that they are ‘themselves,’ I’m thinking here of reality stars like Kim Kardashian, Gaga’s image was rooted in her pop star self. Kim is always tied to her private self, but Gaga is always her public and constructed self. She consciously satirizes fame by both embodying and refusing the contradictions between the private and authentic self and the public and constructed persona that are at the root of stardom. By always being Gaga, it was never clear when the façade ended and the real person began. Or, more accurately, it never did.

This is partly because she never wanted to reveal that real person, and always wanted to be a star. In her memorable 60 Minutes interview, she said:

“As part of my mastering of the art of fame, part of it is getting people to pay attention to what you want them to, and not pay attention to the things you don’t want them to pay attention to.

My philosophy is that if I am open with [my fans] about everything and yet I art direct every moment of my life, I can maintain a sort of privacy in a way,” she continues. “I maintain a certain soulfulness that I have yet to give.”

Take a look at the video for “Paparazzi.: The song and the video play with the notion that being famous means that one’s self is always up for public scrutiny, always being watched, always being built up and then knocked down by the celebrity media. But the ‘real’ self revealed in the video, the ‘behind the scenes’ Gaga is just as constructed as the stage persona. She never takes off the makeup and fashion because that’s who she really is and, more crucially, that self (like all selves) is always already self-consciously constructed. At this moment, I think, we were meant to think of it as a private self, but not necessarily the ‘real’ self. It was still a part of the act.

So in the early days of Gaga’s stardom, she wasn’t really on the blogs or in the magazines (except to mock/adore her fashion, another key part of her persona). You didn’t hear about who she dated, see pictures of her grabbing a latte at Starbucks, or walking her dog in the park. Her image simply could not fit into those established public/private splits the magazines cling to for other stars. They tried though. There was the ‘media scandal’ when she caused a ruckus at a New York Mets game by she showing up in her black bra and studded leather jacket, had to be moved to Jerry Seinfeld’s private box to avoid “distracting” the fans, and flipped the bird to photographers. My reaction was first to just plug my ears and say “lalalala I don’t want to know anything about her ‘real’ self lalalala” and then to laugh at the fact that she was still ‘doing’ Gaga even in this more unguarded moment.

In the lead up to the release of her new album Born This Way, her image has taken an interesting turn in its inflection of private/public . She’s definitely public, as she’s been everywhere lately. And I do mean everywhere. Guest mentor on American Idol. Google Chrome commercial (see it below). The crazy egg thing at the Grammys. Appearances on daytime talk shows from Today to Ellen to Oprah. For the love of overexposure…she was the guest editor of the free newspaper they give you on the subway, The Metro.. What?

I have to admit that even I was getting a little tired of seeing her every time I turned around. Plus, I’ll also admit that I was not immediately sold on her new singles. Since listening to the entire album, I’ve come around and am remembering why I loved her in the first place. Though I still don’t really like the single “Born This Way.” I like the impulse behind it, just don’t really like the song itself. But it does fit in with this new turn where what we once thought was constructed and part of the act of ‘being’ Gaga is actually who she really is. Or at least we are now meant to see it as less constructed (though certainly still conscious) and more ‘real.’

I am in no way surprised that she would shake up her image, as she’s been doing some sort of shape shifting throughout her brief time in the public eye. But what does surprise me is the way her new image hails a ‘real’ self at its core. She’s still the ‘real’ self that is always constructed in her appearance (the fashion, the makeup, the horns), but is now being pulled back to a more ‘authentic’ private self. But it is still one she is actively controlling, rather than a self constructed by the tabloids or other media.

Gaga’s new(ish) Mother Monster self is completely rooted in the idea that she is being herself, even though that self is glamorous, constructed, extreme, over-the-top and all the things that we already associate with her image. Her new songs and the press she’s done surrounding the album foreground the idea that you should, like Gaga, be yourself no matter what. She has become the icon of outsiders by claiming her outlandish identity as not being artifice. What you see is constructed in the sense that it is thought out, but it is not “fake” or an “inauthentic” facade she puts on just to be famous (which is different, I think, from the Gaga of The Fame and The Fame Monster).

Now not only do we see her ‘real’ self, her image also explicitly invites audiences to connect with her and feel she is ‘just like us.” Anyone who has ever been on the outside can look to Gaga as someone who has been through the same ridicule and doubt that all outsiders experience. We see this in her recent Google Chrome ad:

The MTV documentary, Lady Gaga: Inside the Outside that premiered last week, is all about this view of the ‘real’ Gaga who is completely coherent with her public pop star image. Instead of the artifice of fame, her image is all about a highly stylized yet nevertheless authentic self as her claim to fame. Her talent and drive makes her special, but, at the same time, her message is that ultimately anyone who is true to themselves is already as special as she is. It’s a small shift, as she is still controlling what we see of her private self and is explicitly revealing things in her album and in the press surrounding it (in the MTV doc, for example, she discusses her early days as a performer, experiences being bullied in school etc) that showcase this more coherent image.