The Star Phenomenon of Will Smith - Essay Example

Will Smith A celebrity or a star is the reflections of a realm to which we extend our own selves in our dreams, in our unconscious. Will Smith’s riseto celebrity hood thus can be interpreted as the rise of the unfulfilled aspirations of a generation of white and black people in USA and to an extent, in the world. That is why Redmond and Holmes (Preface to Stardom and celebrity: A reader, 2007, 11) have stated that stars and celebrities “ ‘house’ our dreams and fuel our fantasies.” Quoting Dyer (2007, 5) they (Redmond and Holmes, Preface to Stardom and celebrity: A reader, 2007, 7) also said that “stars articulated ideas about person hood and individualism in a capitalist society.” The star phenomenon is said to have begun in 1820s, when “certain actors’ names” were printed in theatre advertisements (Branston and Stafford, 2003, 108). It was in 1970s that study of stardom and celebrity status was included into the academic discourses. (Redmond and Holmes, Preface to Stardom and celebrity: A reader, 2007, 5). This was only after, “manufacturing and marketing of celebrities” had become a big industry itself. (Rein et. al., 1997, 1-2). The economic, historical and psychological aspects of celebrity hood have been discussed at length by many scholars since then. The economic angle produced observations like “the cultural industries …produce the famous for surplus profit” (Redmond and Holmes, Preface to Stardom and celebrity: A reader, 2007,4) and “the value of visibility has become a commodity in its own right quite independent from accomplishment, sacrifice, heroics” (Redmond and Holmes quoting Rein et. al., Preface to Stardom and celebrity: A reader, 2007, 5). The psychological angle can be explained by scholarly statements like “stars and celebrities are consumed and appropriated by fans in ways which have a profound effect on their identity, self-image and sense of belonging. “(Redmond and Holmes, Preface to Stardom and celebrity: A reader, 2007,6). The success myth (Dyer, 1998) that existed in human society since time immemorial is another explanation for star creation when viewed from a historical viewpoint. Will Smith had special talents and his high school teachers used to call him prince charming which inspired him to later take on the nick name fresh prince when he became a rapper. (Doeden, 2009, 13). So, the personality of a star or celebrity also matters a bit at least in the early period of his or her making. On May 29, 1990, Jefferson Graham (1990) quoted NBC Entertainment President Brandon Tartikoff in ‘USA Today’, commenting about Will Smith. Will Smith was about to enter the television screen with his debut series, ‘The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air’, and Brandon said that his comical skills matched that “of Eddie Murphy” and he was going to be “a big break-out star”(Graham, 1990). At that time, Smith was only a popular rapper and even then his personality effused with the potential and promise that was kept at bay. But the star as we see him now is the creation of another machinery; a system in which business interests and the social psyche act in harmony with each other to build a hyper reality. That was how the fresh prince who dominated the small screen became Big Willie on the silver screen. (Mitchell, 2007, 1996) Adorno and Horkheimer (2007, 34) have analyzed this process in the following words: No one can escape from himself anymore. Once, a member of the audience could see his own wedding in the one shown in the film. Now the lucky actors on the screen are copies of the same category as every member of the public, but such equality only demonstrates the insurmountable separation of the human elements. It is this equality or resemblance that creates a star and also makes him or her unequal or unlike the rest. This is what Redmond and Holmes have also felt when they said, “the machinery of myth and personality construction is all to do with creating a space for strong and lasting identifications to emerge” (Redmond and Holmes, Preface to Stardom and celebrity: A reader, 2007, 3). Walter Benjamin, in his celebrated work, ‘Work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’, approaches this phenomenon from a different angle. He (Benjamin, 2007, 15) says that “the cult of the movie star, fostered by the money of the film industry, preserves not the unique aura of the person but the ‘spell of the personality’, the phony spell of a commodity”. We can also base our enquiries on Rojek’s (2001, 10) statement that “celebrities are cultural fabrications.” Rojek (2001, 10) says that there are cultural intermediaries like “publicists, marketing personnel, promoters, photographers, fitness trainers, ward robe staffs, cosmetic experts” etc. “who operate to stage-manage celebrity presence in the eyes of the public.” But a more relevant approach for analyzing the celebrity status of Will Smith will be the historical approach. Though the rap music was historically born in 1979 ( Rappers’ delight, Sugar hill gang), it was only in the later years that political and urban issues grew as the common theme of this genre of music (Deoden, 2009, 10). The rap music that came from Jamaica and Africa and later reinvented itself from the streets of America (where emigrants from these countries lived), had a direct appeal to the hearts of the common man (Mitchell, 2007, 1987). The worries of common man are presented in a lighter vein, comprising of both socio-critical and self critical attitudes. It is this context that the arguments and findings of Rojek (2001, 52) gains value. He (Rojek, 2001, 52) has observed that the breaking up of community and family bonding in modern society has left us with a deficit and to compensate, we tend to create a new kind of para-social relations like that with a celebrity. Turner (2004, 6) extents this argument by saying “ we are using celebrity as a means of constructing a new dimension of community through the media.” Will Smith was a representative of this phenomenon. An introspection of Will Smith’s early self was given by the actor himself when he said, “I went to school with all white people for 9 years and then all black people for three years…..that helped me because I have a great understanding of what black people think is funny and what white people think is funny.” (Will Smith quoted by Doeden, 2009, 13). This kind of a consensus regarding one’s identity was very difficult for an average African-American to achieve but Will Smith had the right mix of social settings to back him. In a way, he knew how to tread in a white man’s world with the same self-confidence and also he knew how to carry the burden as well as the dreams of the black man on his shoulders. In his personal voyage towards fame, we can see this kind of real heroism which eventually got projected on to his screen self in subtle ways. In a society where, “fame is seen as promising the ultimate form of social experience and existence,” (Redmond and Holmes, Preface to Stardom and celebrity: A reader, 2007, 6) Will Smith made it to become an icon for both black and white men. When in 1985, Smith along with DJ Jazzy Jeff published their first song together, it was simply about the worries of a boy about his “girltroubles” and the song went straight into the heart of the young generation of that period (Doeden, 2009, 17). The magic of identification that we discussed earlier was at work. “Parents just dont understand’ was yet another saga of the mundane world. Will Smith’s lyrics so much identified with the white youth that there was criticism that “he was appealing to white fans” only and “was betraying rap’s African-American roots.” (Doeden, 2009, 20). This was a serious allegation and takes our study back to the consensual avenues of his self. But Smith replied to this allegation by saying the followed, “I don’t think anybody can (say) what is black and what is not black…we are trying to show the world, and black kids, that you can dress nicely and speak well and still be considered black. Our music is black music” (Doeden, 2009, 20). Here, we see a celebrity becoming a role model also, just in the way old and real heroes used to be. Thus Will Smith can be seen as a star who has an identity and politics apart from the industrial construct of celebrity. Because of his black skin, and because of the way in which he made it to the mainstream, he becomes a representative of a new black politics of success. Will Smith has been quoted by Doeden (2009, 24) as replying to the question on why their songs did not carry socially conscious messages like the songs of other rappers, on 1989, October 6, after winning the first rap Grammy. Doeden (2009, 24) quotes the reply as “we chose not to preach… (because) when you preach, children have a tendency not to listen.” One should remember that this kind of an attitude, though seemingly sober and sensible from one view point, might also have made Will Smith acceptable to the mediated space of the mainstream. The mainstream film industry which has largely been accused of having a racial bias towards black actors thus gets a consensus candidate. Among the three groups of “ascribed, achieved and attributed” celebrities listed by Rojek (2001, 17), Will Smith thus belongs to the latter two groups, namely the achieved and the attributed. The super hero that Smith plays in his action movies and his other cultural intermediaries attribute a public self to him which is to be sure very different from the real fun loving and fame loving actor, the real private self. This phenomenon has made Rojek (2001, 35) say that celebrities are “ akin to transformers, accumulating and enlarging the dehumanized desires of the audience, and momentarily rehumanizing them through dramatized public representation and release.” The popularity of film stars in 1920s was attributed by structuralists to “the crisis in masculine identity wrought by the liberation of women and economic uncertainty” (Rojek, 2001, 42). Richard Dyer (2007, 83) has observed that Marilyn Monroe’s “image has to be situated in the flux of ideas about morality and sexuality that characterized the 50s in America.” Similarly, the popularity of Will Smith whose most celebrated role is that of a savior of America and the world , in the film ‘Independence Day’, should be studied in relation to the psycho-sociological responses to terrorism and the 9/11 attacks. The characterization in that movie alone did impart a new celebrity value to this actor which was quantitatively more than produced by all his other movies put together. Post-structuralist studies move a few steps ahead of this kind of analysis and want to find out the meaning of celebrity as a “field of production, representation and consumption” (Rojek, 2001, 45). Here, the audience and cultural intermediaries play an equal role in the making of a celebrity. Will Smith, through all these schools of thoughts, emerge as a star who represents the American society, in its fears and aspirations and also in its conflicts and crises of identity. References Sean Redmond and Su Holmes, eds., Stardom and Celebrity: A Reader (Sage Publications, 2007).  Mitchell, Susan.K.,Will Smith, (Gareth Stevens,2007). Adorno, T.W., and Horkheimer, M, The culture Industry: Enlightment as mass deception, In Stardom and celebrity: A reader, (Sage Publications,2007). Matt, Doeden, Will Smith: Box office superstar, USA Today Lifeline Biographies, (Twenty-first Century Books, 2009). Benjamin, Walter, 2007, Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, In Stardom and celebrity: A reader, (Sage Publications,2007). Rein et. al., High Visibility: The Making and Marketing of Professionals into Celebrities, (NTC Publishing Group 1997) Turner, Graeme, Understanding Celebrity, (Sage Publications, 2004). Rojek, Chris, Celebrity, (Reaktion Books 2001). Branston, G., and Stafford, Roy, The Media Students’ Book, (Routledge 2003) Read More