As the autumnal closing stanza of Robert Frost’s “Reluctance” suggests, the frame of mind that we commonly style “reluctant” invariably prompts thoughts of mixed feelings and ambivalence:On one hand, to “go with the drift of things” without paying heed to the still, small voice of resistance is to betray that countervailing regret, to act with apparently simple decisiveness when one’s inner state is, on the contrary, muddled and vexed. On the other hand, to acknowledge openly the reluctance that acts like a frictional drag upon our emotional propulsion—our urge, or the urgings of others, that we “yield with grace to a reason” and move on—can equally inspire thoughts of treasonous self-sabotage: the antipathies that rumble mutinously beneath the surface might well destroy the impression that we are “getting with the program,” as the contemporary phrase has it. Precisely because this affective state, reluctance, marries apparent equanimity and roiling emotional countercurrents, I find it a rich point of access to the phenomenon by which certain individuals develop a hyper-visible social persona: celebrity.
Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with grace to a reason
And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season? (29)
This is not to say that the performed celebrity self is necessarily a smooth, compliant surface beneath which antipathetic forces bubble; often, resistances to performing one’s celebrity appear at the surface, either persistently or intermittently. As Richard Dyer says of his three case studies in Heavenly Bodies, Marilyn Monroe, Paul Robeson and Judy Garland , “all in some measure revolted against the lack of control they felt they had,” a revolt that articulates a reaction against the conditions of labour under capitalism (6). What interests me in this book, though, is a slightly different articulation of that reaction: not revolt and resistance, as much as their weak cousin “reluctance”—a tepid disinclination that, I argue, is particularly suited to the neoliberal capitalism that has stepped up the demands upon all social actors to “lean in,” move forward, squash resistance and dissent, and harness their emotional labour to the cause. Still, the reluctance of celebrities to be celebrities does not automatically betoken resistance to the social order, though it might be put to that use—or it might equally shore up hegemonic values. It is, however, in all of its manifestations, a product of privilege: the power to publicly avow one’s mixed feelings, one’s treasonous disinclination to “lean in,” is one that not all subjects can claim.
In the chapters that follow, I examine three celebrities whose public stance has been widely recognized to be reluctant, by which I mean that they persistently depart from a smoothly compliant public performance of the common expectations of public personalities. It is no coincidence that these three reluctant celebrities —John Cusack, Robert De Niro, and Daniel Craig—are white, straight males who inhabit their raced, sexed and gendered privilege with widely varying degrees of self-awareness, for it is that privilege that allows them to fashion their reluctance and to place it so confidently on public display.
In spite of the publication of a number of studies that have engaged with celebrity phenomena from a feminist standpoint, celebrity studies has been somewhat slow to consider the gendered dimensions of celebrity in a systemic fashion. So argue Su Holmes and Diane Negra in introducing their 2011 collection of essays In the Limelight and Under the Microscope, the first volume to focus in a sustained way on the gendering of fame. Holmes and Negra rightly note that “reality TV celebrity is often positioned as ‘feminine’” in its “apparent evacuation of (masculine-defined and active) concepts such as ‘talent’ or work” and because of “its micro-obsession with the ‘private’” (6), but I suggest in this volume that the gendering of celebrity is more pervasive and fundamental. There is, in the very concept of celebrity—of being a visible public subject—an assumed passivity that tends to be gendered female: a being at the mercy of other social agents of production and consumption who interpellate the celebrity in the public sphere. One is—sometimes literally—pursued. Reluctant celebrity can operate as a desired reinstatement of a masculinity that is threatened by a public sphere that, in recent incarnations (not only reality television but, especially, social media ) is seen as devalued, debased—and feminized. This will become most apparent in my study of Daniel Craig and his promotion of a laddish public persona that goes hand in hand with his harsh denunciations of social media and its (in his view) feminized proponents, but it is apparent also, to a degree, in the earnest commitment of John Cusack to global anti-capitalist politics, set in implicit contrast to the realm of the “merely” personal, or the capitalist entrepreneurship of Robert De Niro, as an extension of his role persona as the silent but effective agent who goes after what he wants.
Intertwined with the gendering of those performances of celebrity selves that are deemed to be acceptable or unacceptable is the dynamic of race and its creation of differential access to privilege. Again, though one could certainly point to celebrities of colour who have been identified or identify themselves as reluctant (actors Gong Yoo and Fawad Khan , singer Sade ), in my media searches for publicity on celebrities who express mixed feelings about their success, white celebrities who have been widely identified as reluctant greatly outnumber stars of other racial identities (Ed Norton , Robert Pattinson , Jon Hamm , Owen Wilson , Jonathan Franzen , Zach Galifianakis , and even the late Steve Jobs ). Ellis Cashmore , writing about celebrity and race during Barak Obama’s presidency in the United States, suggests that most African American celebrities “remain silent [on the subject of race ], as if subdued by the overpowering demands of behaving with good grace so as not to incite controversy or resentment” (2). This seems counter-intuitive in the age of Beyonce’s recognition of Black Lives Matter at the 2016 Super Bowl, or the political rap songs of Kendrick Lamar , but one must also remember, for example, the controversies that swirled in the days after Beyonce’s performance, the white conservative backlash against her performance. Cashmore’s chilling phrase, “behaving with good grace,” discloses a factor that powerfully militates against celebrities of colour expressing mixed feelings over their status, never mind issuing explicit political calls to action. In theorizing reluctant celebrity, then, I maintain awareness that the power to display one’s reluctance is one that is, at the very least, a gendered and raced privilege.
Theorizing Reluctant Celebrity: Reluctance vs. Reclusiveness, Modesty
But first, what is reluctant celebrity? And what is it not? Reluctant celebrity is not, first and foremost, a gesture of refusal. Chris Rojek , in his 2001 study Celebrity, examines the various ways celebrities may rebel against “a sense of engulfment by a public face that is regarded as alien to the veridical self” (12). He cites, as one representative example, Johnny Depp’s 1999 outburst against the paparazzi who were waiting outside a London restaurant to capture a photograph of him with his pregnant partner. Depp stepped outside the restaurant to shout at the paparazzi: “I don’t want to be what you want me to be tonight.” Rojek sees this retort as evidence of a larger celebrity malaise that triggers a rejection of the public face and can form a prelude to serious emotional dissociations. But reluctance marks an ambivalence rather than a rejection: a condition of sustaining simultaneously positive and negative reactions while acting in a way that suggests apparent compliance. Faced with Depp’s situation, a reluctant celebrity might suffer the paparazzi while complaining of their intrusiveness. Reluctance, that is, takes place concurrently with the status or situation that incurs it and does not overtly cancel it out; it is not an affective response that accompanies either withdrawal or rejection, though it may precipitate them.
For this reason, reluctance must be distinguished from reclusiveness, though often, in popular discourses of celebrity, the two are taken to be equivalent, and a reluctant celebrity can count on being routinely described as reclusive in the media. But a reclusive celebrity, like the late J.D. Salinger , makes public not only their antipathy for acting in a public sphere, but their (doomed) project to leave that sphere completely: “For the past two decades,” Salinger wrote in 1986 as part of a legal effort to block the publication of Ian Hamilton’s biography, “I have elected, for personal reasons, to leave the public spotlight entirely” (Weber 120). As Salinger critics like Myles Weber and Dipti Pattanaik have argued, however, the reclusive celebrity is merely reinserted into the public sphere more forcefully than ever as an object of interpretation. Pattanaik sees Salinger’s silence, for example, as an extension of “the values he hitherto problematized in art” (114), and Weber shows how Salinger critics and readers satisfy their need for Salinger to remain in the public realm by inserting their interpretations of his silence—like Pattanaik’s aestheticizing of it—to fill that (never-quite-empty) void (123), supplementing Salinger’s silence in the Derridean sense of providing both an addition to and a substitution for it (Of Grammatology 200). As James English reflects on prize-refusniks, “the refusal of a prize can no longer register as a refusal to play” (222), since it can no longer “be counted upon to reinforce one’ s artistic legitimacy” (221) in an autonomous cultural realm. Instead, like Salinger’s silence, refusal becomes cultural capital that is deposited right back into what English calls “the economy of prestige.”
Although the recluse’s renunciations have their complexities and can never be taken solely as evidence of the abandonment of a public sphere, there is generally little doubt as to what the recluse’s project is, whatever its motivations or degree of success: to withdraw. Reluctance, by comparison, registers ambivalence at the very site of celebrity subjectivity—at, but not crossing, the threshold of withdrawal. Gertrude Stein’s epigram, “I do want to get rich but I never want to do what there is to do to get rich” (qtd. Jaffe and Goldman 103), could therefore be considered a classic statement of celebrity reluctance. Still, the states of reluctance and reclusiveness are not necessarily discretely parcelled out to individual celebrities, and a single celebrity may pass in and out of reluctant or reclusive phases several times over the course of a career. For example, a celebrity may eventually be moved by an initial reluctance to reject all the trappings of their fame or to reclusively withdraw from public life to the furthest possible extent. But a celebrity may, equally, never feel any temptation to withdraw from the public eye, and the classically ambivalent reluctance that I study here is precisely of this kind; indeed, it is founded upon precisely this disinclination to withdraw from the public display of self, in spite of powerfully contrary feelings. This is a reluctance that does not lead to rupture but, instead, sustains an ongoing affective spinning of wheels: “vorrei e non vorrei” (I want to and I don’t want to), as Mozart’s Zerlina sings in the duet “Là ci darem la mano” from Don Giovanni.
One consequence of the tendency to conflate, rather than carefully distinguish, manifestations of reluctant and reclusive celebrity, besides the routine misreading of reluctant stars as reclusive, is the blanket reading of reclusive stars as wholly and always reclusive. But the star images of even legendarily reclusive celebrities may encompass elements, or periods of their careers, that are more accurately described as reluctant. Take, for instance, the most legendarily reclusive star of them all, Greta Garbo , whose very name has become synonymous with a celebrity reclusiveness that fuels fan desire: the “Greta Garbo effect.” Although no one would dispute that Garbo was reclusive during the later years of her life, while she was living in East midtown Manhattan and assiduously avoiding public exposure, I argue that there should be a finer distinction between the years of her active film career and the long period after World War 2 until her death in 1990. Commentators and fans, reading that later period of reclusiveness back into the earlier years, have tended to paint the entire career as one long instance of reclusiveness, and, to an extent, her publicists played the same game during the active years of her career, advertising her films with winking references to her well-kno...