Dyer begins his qualifications for stardom by outlining the
conditions necessary for a star to be established. As he specifically details
the star as a phenomenon of consumption, he lays out Andrew Tudor’s four
categories that are critical the relationship between a star and audience:
emotional affinity, self-identification, imitation, and projection. What stood
out to me is how Tudor’s steps fit in a natural sequential pattern. Each step
is an evolution of the previous one, and was visually portrayed for us through
the relationship between Eve and Margo in All About Eve.
When Eve is first introduced to us, she is presented as an
extreme fan of Margo. She had first seen her in a play in San Francisco, the
start of her emotional affinity. With Eve being an aspiring actress, she felt a
self-identification with Margo, inspired by her great work. So upon her first
appearance on screen, she has reached the imitation and projection stage,
having been so consumed with Margo that she followed her all the way to New
York, just wanting to be around Margo’s presence. Yes, Eve’s story is not
truthful, but the way that every other character blindly accepts her tale is
indicative of how common the fandom would have been for Margo. Her stardom is
so high-profile that someone with Eve’s infatuation and later imitation and
projection is normalized.
The final scene also gives an example of projection for Eve’s
stardom. We see Eve’s young fan put on Eve’s jacket and hold her award as she
looks in the mirror, imagining herself as a star just like Eve. She is
literally placing herself past the point of role-model, as Tudor defines as
imitation. Her perspective is now past the simple external mimicking, her mind
and psyche are now intertwined in Eve’s real-life situations, which Tudor
labels as extreme projection.
No comments:
Post a Comment