#but that means i would have to rework how clark comes back 2 life in death of su.perman

[supurman]

[dottie-wan-kenobi]

Hey! A bit ago I saw that you were wondering if anyone was interested in a tutorial on dialogue?? And I just wanted to say that I would totally love to learn how to write dialogue/banter like you do, if you’re still interested in creating that tutorial of course

Hi yes of course I’m still interested!! But before I jump in, let me say that this is by no means a be-all-end-all, and this is just what works for me. If it works for other people, that’s great! If it doesn’t, that’s totally valid! Maybe this could be a jumping off point for other pieces of advice, idk. But anyway, let’s gooooo

Okay so I’m gonna be pulling out a bad example of my own writing, and a good example for each point, which is extra but will hopefully show the differences, & I’ll be doing it without putting anyone else down so yeet!

SAY IT OUT LOUD, MAKE SURE IT FLOWS, MAKE SURE IT MAKES SENSE

Another point to this one is, can you imagine real life people saying it? If the answer is no, then you gotta rework it. If the answer is yes, then yay!

Otherwise I’m not really sure how to explain this. Making sure it makes sense is easy enough, and saying it out loud is too, but making sure it flows is different. What I do for this is maybe not the best advice, but I use less periods. Commas, dashes, and ellipses keep it from being choppy. Also, adding words/phrases such as ‘well’, ‘like’, ‘I mean’, ‘uh/um/er/etc’ can help connect sentences/thoughts together in a realistic way.

BAD EXAMPLE:

“Bruce shrugged. “I knew, but didn’t realize, I guess. I’ve known he was young since I first learned about him.”

Clint, who was blanching, said, “he looks like a kid. Or an underage father. Think about what he had to go through as a kid, though."” - posted on July 1st, 2014

Why it’s bad: (Ignoring the horrible blocking dskljflksdf)

It doesn’t flow! Bruce’s line here feels just a little off, probably bc I was trying to put information where it shouldn’t have been (more on that later), but even without the second sentence, it’s still off. Time to reword, then; I’d change it to “I learned about it when I was studying him, but I kinda…forgot.” Idk about yall, but I can see Mark Ruffalo saying this, shrugging sheepishly. This flows a lot better and in my experience, it’s more likely someone would say this instead of “I didn’t realize, I guess”.

Clint’s lines should be combined, and there should be some diction added in. “He looks almost like a kid, or like, an underage father. God, think about what he had to go through!” Way less choppy & has some rhythm to it, instead of sounding like a robot is saying it.

GOOD EXAMPLE:

““Stop texting me weird stuff so late at night.”

“It’s not weird,” Sam denies immediately, “You just don’t appreciate it.”

“Why would I appreciate—” Steve reads carefully off his screen, “—Buzzfeed’s ‘Which Possible Illuminati Member Are You?’ quiz?”

“Because everyone thinks you’re in the Illuminati anyway, so why not see if you get yourself, you know?”

“Okay, but at four am? What were you even doing up that early?”” - posted on March 2nd, 2019

Why it’s good:

This is one of those I suggest reading out loud to understand the flow. Banter, at least in this case, is like slapstick comedy, and it’s gotta go back and forth without going way off course (unless that’s the desired effect!). Steve says something, Sam picks something specific to react to & adds a comment that makes it seem like they’ve maybe had this conversation before, and from there, they pass the rhythm to each other. Going from the second-to-last to the last lines is part of the flow; Sam makes a point that Steve doesn’t want to refute, so he continues it in another way. “Okay, but” is like the hinge connecting one flow to another. I’m just talking in circles now but anYWAY THIS IS BACK AND FORTH.

TRY TO FIT THE CHARACTER

Think specifically about the character, and if it sounds like something they would say or not. That’s kinda hard at times, so just make sure you aren’t having them say things you can definitely NOT imagine them saying. I’m gonna go with Batman because we all know him enough to know what he absolutely would never ever say.

BAD EXAMPLE:

Batman says, “And I was like, ‘oh my god, is this serious? You’re just turning yourself in?’ And he said ‘hell yeah I am!’ and I almost died from the shock!”

Why it’s bad: 

Batman is a character who doesn’t ramble and wouldn’t retell an event like this (by paraphrasing it & recounting exact exchanges). He’s a very stoic person, and this whole thing is more emotionally open and telling than he would be comfortable with. And while this flows, I can’t picture him saying it unless it’s a heavily AU’d version, which is generally not what you want.

GOOD EXAMPLE:

Batman says, “The Joker turned himself in last night. I assume he’s planning something, something big if he’s willing to go to Arkham for it.”

Why it’s good: 

This is a lot more subtle with the emotions, and a lot more monotonous, which is what Batman would probably want to sound like when recounting an event like this. He WANTS to sound like a textbook or police report, which are serious and straight to the point. But he can still add his thoughts into the mix, e.g. “something big…”, which shows how he’s kind of surprised and is thinking about what it means.

YA CAN’T ALWAYS INPUT INFORMATION INTO THE DIALOGUE

Sometimes you really want or need to share some information with the readers, and an easy way to do that is with dialogue, right? Sometimes! This, like everything else, hinges on flow & the realisticness of the words. Some pieces of info need to be conveyed through thoughts or actions, and some of it just shouldn’t be shared, no matter how much you might want to include it.

BAD EXAMPLE:

“Bonnie asked, “so…Original vampire? What does that mean, exactly? If you don’t mind my asking, I mean.”

“It means that my siblings and I were turned into the very first vampires after the death of my youngest brother. Also turned were my father, sister-in-law, and nephew. All vampires in existence come from us.”” - posted on March 6th, 2017

Why it’s bad: 

The OG vampire in question here is Elijah, and while it makes sense for the character to quickly summarize it, it doesn’t flow. He would probably react firstly to Bonnie’s last sentence, then answer more concisely, “It means that my family and I are the first vampires in existence.” Maybe with an additional comment about them being the source of all other vampires, but not much more. Being so specific chops up the rhythm and makes it harder to understand, almost, ‘cause that’s a lot of people to keep in consideration.

GOOD EXAMPLE:

““What are you talking about, Kev?” Cheryl sets her phone down, the picture of fully-invested. “Schools don’t just shut down in one day.”

Kevin flops into the other chair, breathing calmed for the most part. “Apparently they do. Dad told me they arrested a teacher there for selling Jingle Jangle to students, and when they were going through his office they found meth. The basement was being used as a meth lab. The whole thing’s being quarantined and shut down until further notice.”” - posted on August 2nd, 2018

Why it’s good: 

It flows!!! For being secondhand information, it’s clear enough to understand without bombarding readers with extremely specific details. It reads almost like an online article, with enough feeling to make it interesting, while still explaining exactly what’s happened.

DIFFERENT MOODS/DYNAMICS

Something to think about when writing dialogue is what mood your characters are in, and what kind of relationship they have with the character(s) they’re talking to. If person A is in a bad mood and talking to someone they like, they might try to tamp down on the mood in order to be nice. If person B is in a great mood and talking to a stranger, they might be pretty exuberant and friendly. Etc etc. Gonna use Superman as an example (this is extremely cheesy but it shows the difference).

BAD EXAMPLE: (Mood)

Extremely annoyed, Superman tells Lex Luthor, “Lex, you’re crazy! Trying to take over Metropolis with a hair growing scheme is just stupid! I’m leaving!”

He goes on to his date with Lois, now as Clark Kent, and says with a smile, “Sorry I’m fifty-seven minutes late, Lex kept me at work! Anyway, how was your day?”

Why it’s bad: 

Okay I know this is cheesy I’m sorry I wrote this at 2 am last night lkdjflksjdfhskjdfhjashf ANYWAY. Superman goes from talking to Lex, who he doesn’t like and is quite annoyed with, to talking to Lois, who he does like and presumably isn’t annoyed with at all. The problem here is that you usually can’t turn moods off like a switch. Even though Superman likes Lois, he wouldn’t walk into the date perfectly happy. The annoyance from dealing with Lex would stay with him (though it would probably fade the longer the date went on). I think instead of smiling, he would be rolling his eyes a little and complaining like, “I swear, he’s so inconsiderate….”, instead of immediately jumping into “how was your day?”

GOOD EXAMPLE: (Dynamic)

Superman laughs as Robin does a flip off his shoulder. “Good job! Maybe next time we could try it from a little higher up,” he winks.

Robin cheers, “Yes! Thanks, Uncle Clark!”

Superman nods and leaves, finding Batman in the hallway. Seriously, he says, “Batman.”

“Superman.”

“Did you get your report done? They’re due by this afternoon.”

Why it’s good: 

Again with the cheese that’s my bad lmao. This is mostly to show that characters are gonna sound different when speaking to different people. When talking to Robin, who is a child and quite a friendly one at that, Superman is teasing and joking around. Then, when he talks to Batman, who’s a grown man and also his coworker, he’s more serious and to the point. Both situations fit his character but show he’s got different relationships with different people.

IN CONCLUSION, uhhhhh yeah follow these points and hopefully dialogue will come a little easier. Experiment and have fun with it (these aren’t rules, but guidelines!), and if there are any questions I’m happy to clear them up/answer them/whatever lol.

[blueraith]

Some folks still need to learn how to constructively comment

Wish I could say that I’ve been writing Chapter... 12(? Legit, I don’t often remember the chapter numbers outside of the Google doc) since posting Chapter 11 (we’re just gonna assume I know where the fuck I’m at in my own story, okay? Give me this).

But that would be a bald faced lie.

(Mostly because of my sister’s graduation and all the family visiting and the concurrent back injury I was suffering. Really kills the writing mood when you can’t sit up properly to type.)

This is going under a read more, because this incident Vexed Me To The Max(TM) and triggered a Rant of Epic Proportions(TM).

But graduation has been over, and my back has been feeling great. What really kept me a bit down since all that was over and done with is that very morning I’m feeling better, I see that I have two comments on the 100 fic I’ve put on indefinite hiatus. Yeah, it’s not an active story, but I still care about it, and I’ve been thinking about it recently. So, in short. I still care about it a hell of a lot. Hell, I care about everything that I write. I’ve written fanfiction at what’s nearing 10 years now, but nothing has erased the fact that putting yourself out there in the public eye takes a hell of a lot of effort and, sure, a smidgen of courage and confidence.

Well, this lovely commenter told me that my word count was way too high, that I was slowing my story down, and that they skipped to the last chapter (from Chapter 2, they skipped 6 chapters of ongoing character development, an ensemble cast, Ark politics, and canon fix-its) “40k words and [Clarke’s] still not on the ground yet??”

This is me paraphrasing both comments. I deleted them with extreme prejudice from the fic because I wasn’t leaving that kind of useless bullshit on my work after it effectively ruined my mood for, like, four days.

Why was it bullshit? Well, for one thing taking the average word count per chapter, it’s only a little over 5k words per chapter. Look. I balance out my word counts very carefully for each story that I write. This fic has a longer than average word count compared to my more recent stuff (which is around 4k per chapter) because of all the fuckin shit I was pulling off in this particular fic. Reworking canon to better explain why the Arkers were resistent to the radiation on the ground while having the superior blood that the Mountain Men wanted without putting them up in their shitty space station for thousand of years that evolution would have actually required them to have gone through to be remotely realistic.

Jake’s alive in this fic because I don’t like dead characters shaping character development on a pre-canon basis. Personally, I dislike orphan/parental loss storylines before the specific original work has even started. I get that orphans exist in real life. But YA media has a disproportionate amount of dead parents. Eh. I wanted to do something different. So, this means there’s an entire extra character in the story that I have to write and develop.

Diana Allers actually matters in day to day Ark life instead of just showing up and nearly murdering everyone because she’s a selfish bitch for little to no reason other than to make Abby’s already pretty damn full storyline even more packed than it already was. (Seriously, why didn’t they develop Allers more? She’s lazily implemented in canon, and I hate it. Lord only knows I enjoyed Abby and Raven’s plotlines far more in several places of Season 1 rather than Bellamy’s Manpain Adventures Lite Before He Turns Into A Complete And Utter Psychopath Later On In The Series).

Jaha is far more competent and slimey than he is in the show, rather than being a foolish man who is barely toddering along in the plot towards something useful.

Abby and Jake are at odds because Jake technically betrays Clarke and allows her to get arrested in the beginning of the story. They adopt Raven in the interim and they’re all awkwardly trying to free Clarke while pretending that Jake and Abby aren’t having marital problems. Well, Jake and Abby are pretending, Raven is as blunt as she usually is and just calls shit like she sees it.

Ensemble cast. There’s literally a tag on this story that tells you all that “This Story Is Literally About Everyone.”

So.

Yeah.

Clarke’s not on the fucking ground yet. But you wouldn’t know that, would you? Having skipped past 6 chapters.

Is 5k really that long? I wouldn’t know, personally when I read a longfic, I go into it knowing that the chapters might be long as fuck because I know that I’m reading a fic that could literally take me through several days and I read pretty damn fast. Not that 40k words is really all that much when you’re rewriting a TV show using all the characters who already exist in canon and then getting into their thoughts and motivations because that is literally what books do, this isn’t a screenplay, I wouldn’t be caught dead writing one because I despise them. Sorry, but you’re getting the full range of thoughts and emotions of everyone involved. I know, that’s just awful, getting hours and hours of content for free, but god forbid the plot doesn’t run on your timetable.

But that’s really the crux of this rant, isn’t it? NEVER complain about word counts, people. Too short? Who the fuck cares? The author could be just beginning their writing careers, so to speak. Word counts of any significance takes practice, first of all. So, not only could they might or might not have the required experience to write longer chapters, they may not even want to. And that’s fine. Because they do this FOR FREE.

Same thing with longer chapters. Are you really going to come at me, nearly a year after I’ve written and posted this work, complaining about word count, as though there’s even a remote chance that I’m going to go back and edit down all of that time and effort I put into that work to satisfy your fragile reading stamina?

Pfffffffffft.

I mean, this is funny to me in some regard because I’m over here wondering just what would be a good length for this person. Part of the reason my chapters tend to be at least 4k words long is because that’s generally where I can get a comfortable amount of character interaction, introspective thought, and plot moving forward. All three of those things matter to me when writing chapters. I hate reading too short works (and no, I don’t tell these authors this. I read what they give me and just deal with it because they’re entertaining me for free) and it’s little more than characters just trading dialogue with each other. I want to know what they are thinking about as well. I want a bit of narration. I’m reading something from a specific character’s point of view, and I want that chapter to ooze the personality of that character.

These are all the things I keep in mind when I write to my word count goals, personally. Doing it in less than 3k words might be possible, but it would sure as hell be annoying.

But most of all, it just irritated the fuck out of me. Like I’ve said multiple times in this rant. I do this for free. I don’t expect you guys to know this, but in order to get these substantial updates when I can manage to actually feel well enough to write and get them published, it takes me EIGHT TO TWELVE HOURS of sitting in front of a computer screen to have a chapter finished. On a good day. Yes. Most of the chapters I put out are done in one day, in one block, and I’m often up until 5 AM finishing something up. I have severe ADHD. Sometimes it is a chore to get shit put on a page because I can’t sit down and focus my thoughts enough to sound even coherent. Sometimes I have issues keeping up with what the beginning of a long sentence was about and I have to constantly keep up with what the fuck I’m even talking about in any given thought.

So, you have an author with a severe executive function disorder attempting to concentrate hard enough to get her own thoughts in character for each and every character that is featured in any given story while attempting to resist even the most mundane distractions while desperately hoping she’s going to hit a period of hyperfocus long enough to get substantial work down, but if that happens she’ll probably forget to eat because she’s on a writing binge that goes on with actual significant work for a period of several hours.

I love writing, despite the challenges I have to deal with in order just to get it done. I love most of the comments that I receive. I’m coming off a period of extreme depression from some family issues I was dealing with. My skin is rather thin at the moment and that irritated the fuck out of me, but those two comments knocked more wind out of my sails that I really wanted them to, and that bugs me even more.

But I am more experienced in fic writing than probably your average person. This commenter pissed me the fuck off, but I’ve moved past this, it’s hardly shattered my motivation to write forever.

But a careless commenter could easily do that to someone just getting into fanfiction. And it makes me wonder just how often this happens everyday, every hour, when entitled, spoiled people who think their needs are more important than the author doing this FOR FREE decide to voice their terrible opinions on their works. I love my readers, I don’t hold myself beholden to them, but they are extraordinarily important to me. Plot, pacing, and character development are all my own when I write because first and foremost, I write for myself. It’s a hobby that I clearly have to work very hard at to even be remotely successful at, and taking anyone else’s standards into account is never going to happen when I have to live up to my own already very high expectations. But I do keep y’all in mind when I’m devoting my time, energy, and effort in. The chapter lengths I have partly exist to make up for the wait times I inevitably have between each release. I very much know that I am sporadic and inconsistent when updating. So, when I do, I want to have something that isn’t just a whisper in the wind when it finally cycles to the top of the AO3 listing.

I know there are inevitably readers who didn’t like my content, or do think my stuff is too long. That’s fine. But don’t come into my space and give me two comments that were effectively “TL;DR” and expect that not to be a slap in the face. Because it is. I have wonder if the fandom kids today even know the kind of slap backs this sort of thing would have gotten in LiveJournal.

But, never mind that. I’m a big girl, I took some petty revenge in deleting that bullshit from my boards and then setting the fic to moderated mode, but what I would like anyone who decides to read through what is actually a long winded post (all my rants are, admittedly) to learn is that you are not reading professional work. You are not reading work that has been paid for. You are not reading work that has been professionally edited. I’m not saying that you can’t have standards for fic, lord knows I have many, but I don’t go into an author’s work and leave shitty comments. Never. Constructive criticism on fanfiction keeps the author’s time in mind, their skill level over what they’re actually capable of, and whether or not they’re even open to criticism. Some authors don’t even want your advice. They just want to know that you liked it. And if you don’t, just don’t say anything. I’m not quite that fragile personally, when someone is giving me useful criticism that can be used to actually improve my quality of writing, but I will freely admit that clearly I have a sore spot about comments addressing word counts.

Get out of here with that shit.

In short. If you can’t say something nice, don’t say anything at all.

[visionnepal3-blog]

Between Parturition and Manufacture

NOVEMBER 5, 2018

STEFANI GERMANOTTA is a hero of inauthenticity — a star of both invention, giving herself a stage name, Lady Gaga, that would never pass for a birth name, and reinvention, working her way through pop music genres and a succession of outlandish looks that refuse a fixed point of identity. She seems in line of succession to Cindy Sherman, David Bowie, and Madonna, with no doubt Joan Riviere and Judith Butler already mobilized in her name in many an academic quarter. Yet A Star Is Born is a property that wants to affirm authenticity.

There are more versions of it than the four films called A Star Is Born (from 1937, 1954, 1976, and 2018) and a radio version of the same name. The main elements are already in play in What Price Hollywood? (1932): the older alcoholic man whose career is on the skids, the younger female star, the fall of one against the rise of the other, ending in the man’s suicide. The only major change in the transition from What Price Hollywood? to A Star Is Born is the addition of sexual relationship or marriage between the two. What Price Hollywood? is itself a reworking of elements from the novel The Skyrocket (1925), made into a (now lost) film the following year: the rise and fall motif, the ingénue, the enabling man of power, the conflict (for the woman) between career and marriage. Between the 1976 and 2018 Hollywood versions, there were two Indian films to hit each of these plot points: 2013’s Aashiqui 2 (Romance 2) in Hindi and 2014’s Nee Jathaga Nenundali (I Want To Be Your Companion) in Telugu. The gay porn film The Light from the Second Story Window (1973) is sometimes referred to as a version, and there are very many films called things like A Porn Star is Born.

All versions in various ways worry away at the ambiguity in the most familiar title. What does it mean to say a star is “born”? The only time any of the films use the phrase is in the 1937 version, when Norman, the man who has discovered and championed Esther, says it to her after the premiere of her first film (where she now has her star name, Vicki). This is a straightforward colloquial usage, suggesting the way something may seem to suddenly appear. However, it leaves open the question of whether a star is someone indeed born with an innate star quality or whether stardom is something manufactured, a manipulation, an illusion. All versions want to hold on to some sense of the former, but they differ in the degree to which they see it as something that breaks through industrial cultural production uncontaminated and authentic. The Skyrocket unequivocally acknowledges that Sharon, a nothing special young woman outside the spotlight, comes to fascinating life before the camera, but it also emphasizes the role of the man, the director William Dvorak, in molding this creation: she may have no talent as an actress but “he could always trick her before the camera for the things he needed.” In the following versions, the idea of manipulation is played down. While there are scenes of the man Max (again a director) coaching the woman Mary in What Price Hollywood?, there is also a sequence in which, after a disastrous first shoot, she practices by herself all night so that the next day she delivers a mesmerizing performance in a tiny role. Certainly, when it comes to the rushes, it is clear that Mary is aided by editing and lighting, but still, it is she who glows.

Mary’s overnight labor on her performance suggests that her stardom is not (like Sharon’s) just a happy accident of presence before the camera. However, like Sharon and Esther in the 1937 Star, there is also a sense that all she wants to be is “a star.” None of them talk about acting. What Price Hollywood? has Mary dressing herself from the fan magazines and putting her own face in place of Garbo’s in a double spread with Clark Gable, and 1937 Star opens with Esther coming home dreamily after seeing a Norman Maine movie and avidly reading the fan magazines; they all just want to be “in pictures.” There’s none of this in the 1954 and subsequent versions. Of course Esther (1954, 1976), Aarohi (Aashiqui 2), and Lady Gaga’s Ally (2018) want success, but there is also a sense of their sheer love of performing — they’re longtime professionals who have finally gotten noticed. In each case, a sequence shows them singing in an unprestigious locale, establishing their exceptional, but as yet undiscovered, talent and quality. The starmakers are now actors or singers, who can open doors for their discovery but are not in a position to shape them. The film and music industry are seen as obstructive to varying degrees, but this is just what the star has to break through: authenticity will out.

The move away from an awareness of the manipulation, or at the least the role of others and technology, in the production of stars toward a wholehearted embrace of a notion of transparent star quality is aided by the role of men and black people. One of the things that most struck me about the new A Star Is Born was how very male it is. There are fleeting glimpses of comedienne Luenell, singers Brandi Carlile and Halsey, an engaging but brief appearance by Rebecca Field as Gail, an aide to the man here, Jackson Maine, and his childhood friend Noodles has a wife (Drena De Niro), but the only sustained representations of the female, apart from Ally, are the drag queens in the bar where Jackson first sees Ally. With these, the film plays on the paradox of a swaggering, often muscly masculinity being adorned with sequins, lip gloss, and baroque hand gestures, the male beneath the feminine accoutrements emphasized by having Ally perform there, an assertion of a non-paradoxical alignment of body and adornment. She sings “La Vie en Rose,” a song made famous by the ne plus ultra of raw expressivity, Édith Piaf, but covered more recently by another pop performance artist, Grace Jones. The song positions Ally between the performativity that has made Gaga famous and the expressive self that the film wants us to credit her with. It also completes the salute to the queer culture that Gaga has allied herself with — a tribute that began in the film with Ally singing a snatch of the verse to “Somewhere Over the Rainbow”; now the film, Ally, and perhaps Gaga can move on. When Ally makes forays into the kind of glam femme artifice that made Gaga famous, Jackson is contemptuous and the film shoots from behind television cameras and cuts away as soon as it decently can. By the end of the film, she has left queerdom behind.

Ally (Stefani Germanotta) is positioned between the performativity that has made Gaga famous and the expressive self that the film wants us to credit her with.

Not only does this A Star Is Born sideline women (despite its central star and protagonist), it is also bursting with masculine maleness. The film opens with Jackson Maine in concert, his country rock among the most virile of authenticity musical genres (and the band used in the film is named Promise of the Real). Neither he nor Ally has mothers anymore. She has a father who hangs out with his taxi driver chums (all men), plays opera, and venerates Frank Sinatra. It’s a cheerful background and we learn no more, and she seems to have no women friends or colleagues. Jackson, who has the fuller backstory and attendant occasions for melodrama, with a brother-manager old enough to be his father, anguishes over the destruction of his drunken father’s grave and hard-drinking, hard-driving habits. The screen treatment of Ally’s performances cuts back to him — his pleasure, his drunkenness — and her final affirmative performance, for the first time giving herself a surname, his, with a song he wrote that declares she’ll never love again.

Earlier versions of the story have also had few women in them other than the star who is born. It is the incandescence of the star who played each one that distracted attention away from the lack of other women. There is even something of a progression through the various versions, as men gradually eclipse women. This may have something to do with the decreasing involvement of women in their making. Adela Rogers St. Johns, a successful journalist well connected to Hollywood, wrote The Skyrocket and the original story for What Price Hollywood? Dorothy Parker contributed to the script of the 1937 Star and Joan Didion to the 1976. Judy Garland was the driving force behind the radio version, although she had to wait until she left MGM and married Sid Luft to get the 1954 film made. Barbra Streisand was an even more decisive driving force behind the 1976 version.

The Skyrocket has a best friend, helpful wardrobe and make-up artist, rival and supportive stars and ex-stars, all women. While Max in What Price Hollywood? is a magnetic male figure (whose lack of apparent sexual interest in Mary, together with prissy mannerisms, might suggest him as queer), the film keeps Mary center screen. And though much of the drama focuses on both her gratitude toward and need to get away from Max, there is also a well- (some say too well-) developed plot concerning her marriage to a playboy. In the 1937 Star, Esther’s parents and brother make fun of her fandom, but it is her grandmother, a pioneer woman who compares Hollywood to the frontier, who understands Esther’s aspirations, lends her the money to go to Hollywood, and then, at the end of the film, after Norman’s suicide, persuades her to go back to work.

In the 1954 Star, attention is more or less equal between the man and the woman, but later versions build on the melodrama of his troubles, providing him with more screen time and backstory. One index of this is the presentation of his death. Norman Maine in 1937 and 1954 wades into the sea and drowns off screen, as if easefully swallowed by the watery element; John in 1976 kills himself in a car crash and Rahul in Aashiqui 2 throws himself of a bridge, both in drawn-out dramatic sequences; in 2018, more discreetly but horribly, Jackson hangs himself.

In 1954’s “A Star Is Born,” Esther Blodgett (Judy Garland) peers around a mirror to observe the men coordinating her transformation into Vicki Lester.

It might be objected that the films do no more than reflect the fact that most of the powerful roles in Hollywood and the music industry have been occupied by men. Occasionally there does seem to be an awareness of this. In the 1937 Star, men discuss what name to give Esther, in front of her but without consulting her, and others worry over the qualities of her face. The latter idea is developed in the 1954 version, where three make-up men stand around Esther on the morning of her screen test, wondering what to do with her unsatisfactory face. The composition features mirrors within mirrors that Esther has, as it were, to peer round as the men discuss the problem, herself unable to get a word in edgeways. The men produce her as a pink amalgamation of a number of other stars, unrecognizable to Norman when he comes to pick her up. Yet such perceptive moments are rare and nowhere to be found in the later versions.

Men change women’s names in more than one way. The studios make Esther Blodgett “Vicki Lester” in 1937 and 1954, while bridegrooms make Mary Evans “Mrs. Lonny Borden” in What Price Hollywood?, Esther/Vicki “Mrs. Albert Henkel” in 1937, and “Mrs. Ernest Gubbins” in 1954 (Norman Maine’s birth name respectively in the two films). The films play on the tensions between these names. Being treated as Mr. Evans or Mr. Lester is wounding. After Norman’s suicide, Esther/Vicki makes her first public appearance proudly announcing she is “Mrs. Norman Maine,” effectively subsuming her identity in both that of her husband and the film industry that gave him his name. In 1976, Esther refuses to have her name, Hoffman, changed, a gesture as much to do with not eclipsing a Jewish identity as female autonomy, but she does, after John’s suicide, announce herself as “Esther Hoffman Howard,” a common gesture that nonetheless parades a woman’s connection to a man in a context where the man rather seldom does the same vice versa. In 2018, Ally has a surname for the first time in the film, when, after Jackson’s suicide, she is announced as “Ally Maine.” Only in Aashiqui 2 does the question of the woman’s name not come up, neither from the studios nor from Rahul, since they do not marry.

Esther (Barbra Streisand) in 1976’s “A Star Is Born” performs in a trio called the Oreos.

In What Price Hollywood? Mary has a black maid, Bonita (Louise Beavers, who had played the black support for a white career woman in the 1934 Imitation of Life), whom she treats casually even as Bonita attends to Mary’s material and cosmetic needs. In 1954, black dancers are briefly seen, leaping with tambourines or performing a crooked walk, in the “Swanee” routine in the “Born in a Trunk” number, a routine celebrating, in time-honored fashion, a Southern white homeland with marginalized and merry blacks. Later, in “Lose That Long Face,” a number cut from the original release, Esther is dressed like a street urchin and dances between two black kids. In 1976, Esther is first encountered as lead singer between two black women in a trio called the Oreos, a naming decision which I won’t even begin to try to unpack; the first word of their number is “black” (sung only by Esther/Streisand, with a near-Afro hairdo alongside her African-American back-ups’ relaxed styling). In 2018, Jackson’s school friend Noodles (yes, well) is black, and it is he and his black wife who encourage Jackson and Ally to marry and in the former’s local black church. This shift from servant to terpsichorean and musical support to emotional, even spiritual validation suggests that in telling this story it is hard quite to let go of, or exactly to acknowledge, the role of African Americans in securing the material, rhythmic, and affective authenticity of white Americans. Perhaps Esther’s grandmother in the 1937 Star is not all wrong when she compares Hollywood to the frontier.

Nearly all versions of the story have the moment in which the man sees the woman in performance for the first time. It’s the moment when the man — and we — must be convinced the woman is the real deal, has “that little something extra,” as Norman says in 1954. From 1954 on, that moment is a song, and in all cases they do not perform their own material and what they sing has nothing to do with what is happening in the story at that point. “The Man that Got Away,” the big torch song hit of the 1954 version, has no relation that we know of with Esther’s past and everything to do with her skill and pleasure in singing, signaled by this emotionally desperate number ending with her smiling and laughing with her fellow musicians. Later, Esther, in deep despair at Norman’s self-destructive drinking, pours out her sorrows to the studio boss, but in between takes of the upbeat “Lose That Long Face” that is the antithesis of what she is feeling.

The following Stars close that gap between self and performance. This is partly signaled extra-textually: it is widely known that Streisand part-composed the songs she sings in 1976 and that Gaga was even more involved in the composition of the 2018 songs. Their characters in each film also write, to varying extents, the songs they sing. This conflates tropes from the musical biopic — where the song expresses the person’s inner self and also what they are feeling at the moment of composing and/or performing — with the mythos of the singer-songwriter. (The cover of Carole King’s LP Tapestry is prominent on Ally’s bedroom wall.) Potentially, then, the Star Is Born template, and the ambiguity of that title, lends itself to exploration of the strange tension between self and performance in cultural production since romanticism, and even more so in conditions of industrial, capital-intensive and now digital production. However, in different ways, both the premeditated quality of Streisand’s performance style, evident in every spontaneous wisecrack and affective grimace, and Gaga’s chameleonic theatricality sit uneasily with this.

In Aashiqui 2, the song at the moment of discovery is by Rahul and he later tells Aarohi that she sang it better than he has and that he “never felt any of my songs like this.” As she sings it she looks at a large portrait on the wall of Lata Mangeshkar, uncontested as the greatest playback singer in Hindi cinema; Rahul notices this and later tells Aarohi it was this that made him realize that she, Aarohi, wanted to be a singer. In fact, Shraddha Kapoor, who plays Aarohi, is sung for by three different singers: within the fiction of the film, the voice belongs to her and makes her special enough to be considered alongside Lata, but, to a culturally incompetent viewer at any rate, there is something giddying when in the film we see Aarohi/Kapoor recording a soundtrack to be dubbed for another actress when the voice we hear is anyway not Kapoor’s. At this moment, Aashiqui 2 seems to register the problematic of self and performance.

In the 1954 Star, we see the end of the screening of Vicki’s first film. “Swanee” comes to a climax and theater curtains close on it; the lead singer steps through the curtains, thanks the audience for the applause, and then, in the “Born in a Trunk” number, tells her life story, illustrated by danced and sung moments culminating in the just seen “Swanee” number, which then, as the curtains close, dissolves back to the singer bringing the song to an end. But who is this and whose story? Vicki, who has only recently been invented by the studio? The character she plays in the film, about whom we know nothing? Esther? Judy Garland? A change of framing near the beginning of the sequence shifts it from being something more evidently a film within a film to something apparently taking place in a theater and addressed to — whom? The theater audience? The audience in the film (including Esther) watching the film? Us? These ambiguities are in part a result of the whole piece being added under a different director after the film had supposedly been completed, but it also catches the shifting ontological levels of stardom — real person, star image, character — that run through both this film and the whole star phenomenon. Lady Gaga would seem to be the perfect performer to play more fully on such complexities, but it is not the road that the film, or she, has chosen to go down. Rather than a celebration of female image-manufacture, we have the fantasy of male parturition and the lure of authenticity. A film for our times.

¤

Richard Dyer is Professor Emeritus at King’s College and Honorary Professor at St Andrews’s, and a Fellow of the British Academy. His books include Stars, Heavenly Bodies, White, The Culture of Queers, Pastiche, In the Space of a Song, Lethal Repetition, and La dolce vita.

Source: https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/between-parturition-and-manufacture/

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