4 from ritual to theater and back: the efficacy ... - AAAARG.ORG

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selective inattention
not merely his skills as a performer. Or Mao in the 1970s appearing
briefly in public, stooped with age, barely able to raise his hand: still he
is an emblem of the Chinese revolution, a pinnacle of its power.
Being a star is to be a person whose very presence transcends whatever
activity s/he may be absorbed in. In the case of the devil dancer,
Hirohito, the pope, and Mao the role transcends the performer. In the
case of movie stars the person transcends the role – so no matter what
movie she is in Marilyn Monroe is Marilyn and Clark Gable is Gable.
The fact that these stars are dead adds to their allure: their performances,
their lives, are finished, as paintings by a dead painter are finished,
and their whole careers can be studied as completed trajectories.
But even while alive their performances converge on their lives, the
two are one, and the mere presence of a star in a film makes that
movie important.
There are two kinds of presence: the kind where an office, as an
emblem or conduit of power, confers on whoever holds it star quality;
and the kind where publicity, manipulation of the public, or some
hard-to-define-but-visible quality in a person vibrates through the
public so that a presence is felt, as in movie stars. These apparently
opposite examples of presence are in fact very closely connected. There
are two roads to power – through work, and through being called
(elevated by accident of birth or some other circumstance). The work
path is progressive, step by step, from priest to bishop, to cardinal, to
pope; from party worker, to cell leader, to commissar, to chairman. The
magic path is to be “discovered” in Schwab’s drugstore. Of course we
know the path to stardom is strewn with difficult and dirty tasks. But
the myth is of apotheosis. In fact, being a movie star means to fulfill the
wishes of the public even as the public is being manipulated into
having the kind of wishes movie stars fulfill. Underneath apparent
differences the two paths to power – pope’s, movie star’s – are linked
by the continuous, conscious manipulation of the public.
This relates to selective inattention in an interesting way. Presence
becomes a kind of absence, a lack of anything complicated to do. In a
certain way the star must practice doing very little, actually falling out
of character in so far as this character interferes with a direct communication
of personality to the spectator. Thus the non-dependence
of the star, the absolute absence from any specific role, is what creates