The movie close-up, now so basic as to go mostly unremarked upon, may have been the beginning of the whole dilemma. It served, first and foremost, as a sort of mirror. In the 19th century, early motion picture technology had finally captured the human face in movement, providing more visual detail than had yet been widespread for close study. It is a camera function which is written into the vernacular of filmmaking; but it is also written into our vocabulary of the self.
It must have been startling and overpowering; new familiarity with pores and teeth and the whites of the eyes. It immediately kickstarted our Sisyphean task of maintaining the face of feminine self-performance; of creating the image with several shades of contoured greasepaint and a well-placed klieg light. And so the close-up - the act of capturing and immortalising the famous and beautiful face - is the defining event of obsession with self and presentation of self; of star identity and our projection onto it; even of cosmetic surgery.
As the decades rolled on and movies as an art form reached maturity, our film stars grew withered with age or gnarled from booze. Whole neighbourhoods of Los Angeles and New York were bulldozed and vanished. Yet in cinema, there is refuge from time - a return of the faces, settings, and bygone milieux to former glory. The result is compelling and not a little bit melancholy. Doom-laden, ultimately, in that there is no reconciliation between the glowing, ageless image of Max Factor-ized beauty - beauty that will never perish - and the ordinary, flabby humanity now shown to us by the endless stream of social media.
Film scholar Andre Bazin wrote that cinema was tied to our need to ‘have the last word in the argument with death by means of the form that endures’. There’s a paradoxical space between slack-jawed desire for the 50-foot-face of a film star is not, in fact, just like us - and the dark satisfaction derived from a jowly paparazzi snap. We both seek a salve for our mortality and wish to see it made apparent. There’s a reason we pine over the tiresome beautiful corpse trope. It causes less cognitive dissonance when the form endures alone, without the pesky physical body melting into waxy irrelevance; the carefully-photographed side profile beginning to droop.
Social media has attempted to build a shaky bridge between the two. We try to bring real life closer to the old-style, geometric sculpture of light and shadow; to tweak jawlines and firm up hip-dips, working to make up for the increasingly painful lag between high-definition iPhone cameras and the long-vanished mystery of a well-photographed star. As tech improves and the panopticon grows more omnipresent, the illusion of perfection grows harder to maintain.
Cinema itself plays its part, of course. It functions as a fanged devourer of youth and beauty, depicting it and casting away those who will only ever have it in finite supply. Film also holds that beauty so capably up to the light as to render all other depictions of the self a downgrade. Through the brutality of its romantic contrast with the heavily-scrutinised everyday, film stars scramble for dermal injections and astronomically-priced skincare, endlessly fighting mortality with an urge for glass skin and plumper lips.
In 1980, Anthony Burgess wrote a foreword to a book entitled ‘Private Pictures’, a selection of unflattering celebrity tabloid snaps. He says: ‘The photographs in this book are cruel, but they are corrective; the images of gracelessness remind us that even myths are mortal.’ Timothee Chalamet and Kylie Jenner may be the Liz Taylor and Richard Burton our generation deserves, but I digress: we relish in images of their messy humanity.
\No one in 1980 may have predicted the rise of AI or Facetune, but a desperate desire to maintain an illusion - to fight back against such messiness or gracelessness - is not new. As Burgess wrote: ‘I wish to cry: no, let me keep my illusions: forbid these embodiments of glamour a private life which paparazzi can sneak in on. ..But our photographers are tough and wish to teach us sharp lessons. They want to remind us that fame and wealth do not transfigure - they debase.’
The trouble comes from the fact that we want transfiguration and debasement, and we want them at once. We are the wolves at the door, the mob toppling statues in the square, the vicious inquisitors of Ozempic-takers and BBL-havers. And we are also the starry-eyed onlooker, the believer; the Club Chalamet twitter account. Locked in this hypocrite’s vicious circle, we are unable to look away, technology padding out our fantasy.
Finally, Burgess concludes: ‘No rise without a fall, and the gods demand punishments not from the mediocre but from the ambitious. The extraordinary are revealed as terribly ordinary, and there is no diviner punishment than that.’ From the poetry of the cinema close-up to the gutter of the Mail on Sunday, our sadism requires satisfaction. And for all our sniffy talk about the prurient sides of our natures, there is something honest about the craving to see a natural fold of human skin, the crinkle of age around the eye. As mainstream cinema leans toward perfection, the star in close-up remains fixed and godlike onscreen. The publicity machine roars into action to yassify them on our timelines. And yet we long to see their sagging, drunken faces in taxicabs more than ever. It’s a contradiction we’ll always live in: it’s right at the heart of the movie star. We want glamour and its opposite; infallibility and decay.
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Thank you for reading Sisters Under the Mink. The ittle piece above emerged from being kindly asked to do a reading on the prompt ‘celebrity’ for an event at Trisha’s Soho last year, celebrating the brilliant Philippa Snow’s slim volume ‘Trophy Lives’. This prefaced her brand new tome on femininity, celebrity, and fame: ‘It’s Terrible the Things I Have To Do to Be Me’, published this month by Virago.