April 09, 2006
lucky number slevin
[compare to poster for Slither, below]
Surely we are at least a little taken aback to learn that the parents of the wunderkind in the latest spelling bee epic are played by Angela Bassett and Laurence Fishburne. Through the powerful transitive properties not simply intrinsic to but orchestrated by the film industry with its incessant circulation of the currency of stardom through a formal system of "roles," those with memories can't help but experience, in this case, the oddity of the experience that the pair, last seen with him beating the shit out of her en route to incarceration, and her rising off to heights of independent fame, have seemingly worked things out and achieved a successful, buppified parenthood, as if to say, even the most inconstant and extraordinary figures reconcile with the domestic middle way sooner or later: a tortured, metatextual restatement of what Lukacs and Moretti already knew about the modern social narrative.
It's not that one can get confused between actors and their various roles, but that the film industry actively pursues this confusion; one could theorize the chain of substitutions (and its pleasures) rather subtly, but in short, the strategy allows the marketing of the same film to one audience that actively wishes to see a film about, say, a hit man and a taxi driver in the Los Angeles night, and another (overlapping but distinct) audience that wants to go see a Tom Cruise movie, and another (ditto) that likes Jamie Foxx. Indeed, one way of describing (that is to say, valuing) film actors might be as a ratio between their presence as star and as character, in the audience's experience, as averaged across their careers. At the top of the ratio would be those who are the purest stars (Schwarzenegger, let's say); the smallest fractions would be "anonymous" character actors. It will come as no surprise that the pay scale and this ratio are isomorphic.
This whole complex lends a certain interest to figures like Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman: those who have successfully parlayed their ability to, in the clichéd language, "disappear into their roles," into a star-style career. This capacity is not profoundly mysterious; it requires, however, the parainndustrial structure of critics and awards and, as such, sheds much light on that structure.
One might write a brief monograph on the British variant of this phenomenon, wherein if one parlays well enough, one gets to become a freakin' knight of the realm or whatever. Hugh Grant, a pure star, is unlikely to make it; ditto the horrifically excellent character actor Timothy Spall. But somewhere in the moyen floats Sir Anthony Hopkins, and Dame Judi Dench, and so on — which brings us to Sir Ben Kingsley, and Lucky Number Slevin, about which we have only one thing worth saying: in how many films will Sir Ben Kingsley die with a plastic bag over his head and duct tape around his throat, and is this really something one can do over and over, or once you're a knight, can you pretty much just do whatever you want?
Posted by jane at April 9, 2006 08:51 AM | TrackBack