9783319711737

Reluctant Celebrity
Affect and Privilege in Contemporary Stardom
LORRAINE YORK
Reluctant Celebrity
Lorraine York
Reluctant Celebrity
Affect and Privilege in Contemporary Stardom
Lorraine York
McMaster University
Hamilton, ON, Canada
ISBN 978-3-319-71173-7 ISBN 978-3-319-71174-4 (eBook)

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71174-4
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Acknowledgments
I am anything but reluctant to admit how much this book and its author
have benefitted from the labour, thinking, and care of others. I am fortu-
nate to work with generous faculty and graduate colleagues in McMaster
University’s Department of English and Cultural Studies. I thank, in par-
ticular, former research assistants Kasim Husain, Pamela Ingleton, and
Katja Lee, each of whom has contributed energetically and so intelligently
to this project. I am indeed fortunate to have been able to work with you.
Sarah Brophy, as always, has been a source of valuable recommendations
for reading: thank you for suggesting Eva Ilouz’s book! I thank Pamela
Ingleton and Katja Lee for their perceptive and searching critiques of the
Introduction and first chapter, from which I benefitted greatly. Those
chapters are better because of their suggestions. I’m also aware that I am
privileged to have my research supported by the Faculty of Humanities’
Senator William McMaster chair in Canadian Literature and Culture. I
learn every week from colleague-friends Daniel Coleman, Chandrima
Chakraborty, Sarah Brophy, Nadine Attewell, and others, embodiments all
of critical generosity, and from our supportive, creative thinker of a depart-
ment chair, Peter Walmsley. And I thank, by now, several cohorts of stu-
dents in my graduate seminar on Celebrity Culture for keeping my
thinking about this endlessly fascinating subject fresh and dynamic.
I have been beyond lucky to have brilliant people want to collaborate
with me, for reasons that remain somewhat mysterious to me. I’ve been
honoured to continue working with Katja Lee on our mutual obsession
with all things celebrity, even from the distance of Australia. Co-editing
our volume Celebrity Cultures in Canada was a delight. A special thank
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
you (the third on this page!) to Pamela Ingleton for bringing her deep
expertise on social media out to play with my interest in reluctant celeb-
rity. I’ve never had so much fun keeping up with those Kardashians.
Jocelyn Smith’s intelligent and witty research on fandom, girlhood, and
socially prescribed femininity is a constant model of how to do academic
work joyfully and for the right reasons. And my cross-Atlantic collabora-
tion with the University of Leeds’s Amela De Falco on Alice Munro, eth-
ics, and affects, has been sustaining and inspiring.
Thank you to the conference organizers, and especially to Gaston
Franssen, who organized the international Celebrity Studies conference in
Amsterdam in 2016, where Pamela and I took our Kardashian work and
I shared thoughts about reluctance as a neoliberal affect, and to the
Carleton University Prestige of Literature conference organizers whose
plenary invitation allowed me to do some embarrassingly preliminary
musing on this subject in 2014. Many thanks to the Association for
Canadian College and University Teachers for letting me show beefcake
photos of Daniel Craig as part of my contribution to their 2017 Toronto
conference, and to the Popular Culture Association of Canada, the Popular
Culture Association (U.S.) and the Canadian Association of Cultural
Studies, who, at their 2016 meetings, allowed me to hold forth on reluc-
tant celebrity as neoliberal affect, De Niro’s taciturnity, and John Cusack’s
activism.
I appreciate the labour that sustains academic archival work; in my case,
I thank Elizabeth Garver, French Collections Research Associate at the
Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin, for generously
providing helpful information while I was planning my trip to their Robert
De Niro archive. Once there, I benefitted from assistance above and
beyond from Michael Gilmore, Library Assistant II in charge of cinema.
In addition to his knowledgeable guidance to the sizeable De Niro archive
and interest in my project, I appreciated being greeted with a cheery “Back
for more Bobby D?” as I set up for another day in the archives.
More locally, I thank the staff of the Queen Video on—no surprises
here—Queen Street West in Toronto for assistance with difficult-to-locate
materials. (You are missed!)
At Palgrave Macmillan, I am grateful for the keen suggestions and
insights of the two anonymous readers of my manuscript—yet another
form of invisible labour that sustains academic work. And Lina Aboujieb,
Senior Commissioning Editor for Film, Television, and Visual Culture at
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
vii
Palgrave Macmillan UK, has been responsive and enthusiastic about the
project from the beginning. Thanks also to Scott Uzelman and the copy-
editing team at SPi Global for their work on the manuscript.
Love and all admiration to my circle of wonderful people: Michael
Ross, Anna Ross, Silvia Ross, Mark Chu, David Ross-Chu, Isabella Ross-
Chu, Charles Ross, Reg and Carol York, Peggy Frank and Bob Farrell,
Marie and Dave Thody, Pat and Dave Homenuck and their families. I am
ridiculously lucky to be in your lives.
Contents
1 Treasonous Drift: Celebrity Reluctance as Privilege 1
2 Inviting the Shadow to the Party: John Cusack

and the Politics of Reluctance 27
3 Robert De Niro’s (In)articulate Reluctance 67
4 “I’m Not Going to Be the Poster Boy for This.

Although I am the Poster Boy”: Daniel Craig’s
Reluctant Bonding 101
5 Conclusion: Reluctance’s “Other” 137
Index147
ix
CHAPTER 1
Treasonous Drift: Celebrity Reluctance

as Privilege
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:
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)
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 con-
trary, 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, reluc-
tance, marries apparent equanimity and roiling emotional countercur-
rents, I find it a rich point of access to the phenomenon by which certain
individuals develop a hyper-visible social persona: celebrity.
© The Author(s) 2018 1

L. York, Reluctant Celebrity,
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71174-4_1
2 L. YORK
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 posi-
tioned 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
TREASONOUS DRIFT: CELEBRITY RELUCTANCE AS PRIVILEGE 3
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 celeb-
rity 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 commit-
ment of John Cusack to global anti-capitalist politics, set in implicit con-
trast 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 identi-
fied 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 behav-
ing 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 celeb-
rities 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.
4 L. YORK
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 veridi-
cal 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 reluc-
tance marks an ambivalence rather than a rejection: a condition of sustain-
ing simultaneously positive and negative reactions while acting in a way
that suggests apparent compliance. Faced with Depp’s situation, a reluc-
tant celebrity might suffer the paparazzi while complaining of their intru-
siveness. 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 affec-
tive 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 pub-
lication 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 compari-
son, 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 reclu-
siveness are not necessarily discretely parcelled out to individual celebri-
ties, 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 pre-
cisely 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 dis-
tinguish, 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
6 L. YORK
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 reclu-
siveness 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-known love of privacy and “being
alone.” But her film career, examined more closely, is largely a drama of
reluctance, in that she engaged fully with the industry while sustaining
ongoing disaffection. One the one hand, she displayed energetic profes-
sional agency: she made films, 28 of them; she made her feelings about
scripts clear; she disputed her contract with MGM in 1932 and won a new
one. At the same time, however, she refused to sign autographs, would
not answer fan mail, or appear at the Oscars. She had found, that is, a way
of simultaneously participating and not participating: reluctance. As Judith
Brown writes, in an essay that otherwise treats Garbo as reclusive, her
celebrity “tells us something about the desiring system … her ambition for
celebrity was countered always by her resistance to it” (108). Consequently,
I argue, Garbo the famous recluse, was, during the years of her active film
career, a reluctant celebrity, and not, as yet, a reclusive one. As such, she
differs from the male celebrities whom I examine in this study, in that her
reluctance forms merely one phase of a very long public life that eventually
devolved into full-blown reclusiveness; figures like De Niro, Cusack, and
Craig, on the other hand, perform reluctance in an ongoing, ceaseless
fashion—treading water, affectively speaking. Still, recognizing Garbo’s
reluctant phase, and not just her reclusiveness, allows us to discern reluc-
tance in general as an ambivalent conjunction of conflicting affects that
constitutes a continuing engagement with the “desiring system” that is
celebrity.
Moving toward the milder end of the affective spectrum, reluctance is
also frequently correlated with modesty—a disinclination to take credit for
one’s virtues or talents, or an ability to see those virtues and talents in rela-
tion to the greater accomplishments of others. However, there are signifi-
cant distinctions between the two that point, once again, to reluctance’s
affective complexity. Modesty, writes Nicholas Dixon in a philosophical
treatise on its relations to snobbery and pride, “consists in deliberately giv-
ing a low assessment of our abilities and achievements in our public pro-
nouncements” (417). As this definition suggests, modesty involves a
calculated decision to moderate one’s claims in the light of an assessment

of comparable achievements, but reluctance is, by contrast, a two-way,
foot-dragging, conflicted force. Although modesty may, indeed, lead one
to adopt a reluctant stance, reluctance, with its drag upon forward (e)
motion, is a more frictional, two-way feeling than its cooler, calculating
relative, modesty.
Reluctance: Etymology and Usage

So far, I have defined reluctance by distinguishing it from other affective
states, but the evolution of the term “reluctance” allows us to perceive the
layered, evolving understandings of what reluctance is. Internal disso-
nance, the quality that I perceive as the very essence of reluctant celebrity,
only gradually emerged as a standard meaning associated with the term
“reluctance.” The English word “reluctance” etymologically took shape
during the mid-seventeenth century. Previously, other words described
this mixture of inclination and disinclination, such as “loath” (i.e., being
loath to do something)—a term common in Shakespeare, for instance,
and reaching back to the Middle English of the fourteenth century and
earlier still in its Old English and other antecedents. Much earlier still, in
ancient Greek culture, for instance, the concept of reluctance was well
established; in English translations of Oedipus Rex, for example, when
Tiresias comes to the palace, he observes that “I never should have come,”
and Oedipus in turn queries, “Never should have come? Why this reluc-
tance, prophet?” [37]? Plato, for his part, in The Republic, has Socrates’s
choleric Sophist interlocutor, Thrasymachus, bend unwillingly to the for-
mer’s argument: “To this he assented with a good deal of reluctance”
(163).
In early to mid-seventeenth-century English, “reluctance” entered the
language as a way of describing several interconnected phenomena: a
struggle against or resistance to; the act of recoiling from something;
regret or sorrow; and its current usage: unwillingness or disinclination.
The first usage, a struggle against, comes closest to the Latin roots of the
term: re (intensifier) + luctari (verb: to struggle). But the usages that are
more concerned with outright opposition and sorrow fell out of favour by
the late nineteenth or early twentieth centuries, leaving the mixed emo-
tions signalled by the current usage. In 1702, for example, in the English
playwright Nicholas Rowe’s Tamerlane, an unfortunate character is
described as holding “down life, as children do a potion, / With strong
8 L. YORK
reluctance and convulsive strugglings” (10)—an image that viscerally dra-

matizes the term’s negative, oppositional connotations. Around the same
time, accounts of the deaths of notable people were often attended by the
reflection that the event took place “to the great Reluctance of all that
knew” them, the term here having the sense of “sorrow” or regret. Both
usages dwindled away. The meaning of reluctance that has persisted in
common usage, that is, disinclination, appeared as early as 1633
(“Reluctance”) and was in steady usage thereafter. Thomas Jefferson, for
instance, recalled in his Autobiography (1821), that when he received an
offer from President George Washington to serve as Secretary of State in
1789, he was unwilling to accept, for he preferred to return to Paris, to
witness the end of the French Revolution. A second, importuning letter
from the President, however, “silenced my reluctance and I accepted the
new appointment” (99). From there, of course, Jefferson became Vice-
President and then President—an instance of reluctance powerfully over-
come, and a pattern that would shape many a narrative of humble ascent
to public life.
The kinds of multivalent energies that I discern in reluctant celebrity,
then, were complexities that the very term “reluctance” gained over time,
and if we scan its usage in literary texts since its emergence, that multiva-
lence is repeatedly at play, and sometimes pointedly distinguished from
simple opposition. In Kenneth Grahame’s 1898 children’s story “The
Reluctant Dragon,” a boy meets a dragon that is more interested in read-
ing and writing than in fighting, and when St. George arrives upon the
scene, they devise a way for their epic battle to be staged without loss of
face for either combatant, for St. George, too, it turns out, is a reluctant
warrior. Grahame draws upon the capacities of reluctance to show how the
warrior ethic strives to override (some) young men’s disinclination to kill.
In the field of love as well as war, reluctance plays a part in clarifying
states of emotion and will. Charlotte Brontë, in her closing chapter of Jane
Eyre, validates Jane’s and Rochester’s love when she has Jane declare that
the blind Rochester “loved me so truly, that he knew no reluctance in
profiting by my attendance: he felt I loved him so fondly, that to yield that
attendance was to indulge my sweetest wishes” (397). Reluctance, that is,
has no place in the Brontë-esque total communion of souls. In
D.H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, reluctance is explicitly associated with
an insufficiently authentic or deep relationship. Paul Morel, irked by being
drawn away from his lover Clara to his would-be lover Miriam, wonders,
“But what was his reluctance?” (322). He immediately recognizes that his
reluctant feeling about Miriam has nothing to do with pure opposition:

“He had no aversion for her. No, it was the opposite: it was a strong desire
battling with a still stronger shyness and virginity” (322). Strong desires
doing battle: the two-way tango of reluctance.
Reluctance: Methodological Questions

and Scientific Analogies
As even this brief excursion through selected literary texts suggests, reluc-
tance has accrued meanings that definitively set it apart from modesty,
revolt, and reclusiveness. We are, as a consequence, better equipped, it
would seem, to recognize reluctance when we encounter it. But a pressing
methodological concern arises in thinking about recognizing the perfor-
mance of reluctance by celebrity—or other—subjects: How do we discern
reluctance? What acts characterize its presence? And how, in particular, do
we locate and identify it as distinct from faux reluctance: the performance
of reluctance that, like faux modesty, seeks personal aggrandizement with-
out seeming to do so? Many observers, faced with a celebrity’s disinclina-
tion to perform as expected, automatically assume that this disinclination
is a ruse to ensure greater public attention. My concern, in this study, is
less to authenticate the presence of “genuine” reluctance in a celebrity
subject than to study the workings of what is understood to be celebrities’
reluctant behaviour in the public sphere—whether that understanding is
expressed by the celebrity, or by onlookers/fans/critics. Like Jo Labanyi
and Sara Ahmed, I am less interested in what affects are, and more inter-
ested in what they do—in Labanyi’s words, “in what it might mean to
think of emotions as practices rather than as states that exist inside the self
and are often regarded as properties of the self” (223). In that sense, we
might say that reluctance is present relationally, that is, when there is the
impression, held by any of the agents in the celebrity system (celebrities,
onlookers, entertainment journalists, fans, critics), that normative codes of
dealing with celebrity are being breached so as to suggest unwillingness to
comply with them, even as the acts associated with maintaining a celebrity
persona are being carried out, sometimes to the letter.
In the field of celebrity studies, there is a tendency, sometimes valid, to
read celebrities’ performance of unwillingness as a strategy to augment
their fame. For example, Stanley Shapiro, writing about Charles Lindbergh,
argues that the celebrity aviator’s apparent reticence was faux reluctance:
10 L. YORK
“an outward manifestation of his deep self-absorption” (28) and thirst for
fame. Lindbergh’s six memoirs, “an imposing corpus of autobiographical
work, must put to rest the notion that Lindbergh was a reluctant celeb-
rity” (29), and while that may certainly be the case for Lindbergh, the
production of autobiographical text, however extensive, cannot ipso facto
be taken as evidence of a lack of “true” reluctance. Charles Ponce de Leon
develops a more nuanced approach to Lindbergh’s reluctance, noting that
his disinclination to answer reporters’ personal questions was a way of
ensuring that public coverage of his persona would accomplish his primary
goal: to support the fledgling aviation industry. In reflecting on this situa-
tion, Ponce de Leon comes close to defining celebrity reluctance as I do in
this study: “many celebrities in later years found themselves in a similar
situation, torn between a desire to exploit their fame and an equally pow-
erful one to retreat from the glare of publicity and limit the ways in which
the press could portray them” (3).
In the case of J.D. Salinger, once again, critics may be lured by the
ironic increase in public attention that a reclusive (or even reluctant) celeb-
rity generates, to assume a causal relation between the desire for retreat
and the desire for celebrity. As Myles Weber observes, “For some, includ-
ing his two biographers, it is only a short leap from making such observa-
tions to voicing the accusation—neither provable nor disprovable—that
Salinger knowingly designed his career this way, to elicit greater acclaim
and remuneration” (124). As a methodology for studying celebrity reluc-
tance, I propose that we do not make that “short leap”—that we do not
automatically diagnose reluctance as a case of hypocrisy or bad faith, even
though at times those may be discernable, arguable explanations for a
celebrity’s reticence. To do so is to unthinkingly adopt one of the “teleo-
logical assumptions” that Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank find are
challenged by Silvan Tomkins’s principle that any affect may have any
object, and that “the affect system as a whole ‘has no single “output”’”
(100). Revulsion or desire may equally attach themselves to celebrity as an
object and, I would add, they may also do so in tandem with desire not
necessarily rendering revulsion inauthentic—and vice versa. Still, as Katja
Lee has pointed out, the way we tend to speak about an individual’s desire
for celebrity, on one hand, and their recoil from celebrity, on the other,
reveals how little we are inclined to trust the authenticity of the latter:
unwillingness “is often coded as strategic and logical while desire is often
coded as affective” (K. Lee). A non-teleological theory of reluctance,
though, allows us to perceive the possibility of simultaneous, persistent

countercurrents of emotion: vorrei e non vorrei.
In theorizing reluctance thusly, as feelings, acts, and relations that can
be at once complicit and uncomfortable, desiring and recoiling, I seek to
add to and complicate the substantial theoretical literature that reads what
Lauren Berlant calls “intimate publics” as a harmful neoliberal trading on
the personal that distracts citizens from substantive issues of public poli-
tics. Berlant reads this “collapsing” of “the political and the personal into
a world of public intimacy” (The Queen of America 1) as fully complicit
with neoliberal affective regimes. Clearly, emotions can be and often are
manipulated to that end; as Berlant argues, “intimacy rhetoric has been
employed to manage the economic crisis that separates the wealthy few
from everyone else in the contemporary United States” (The Queen of
America 8) and around the globe. But in making this argument, Berlant
extends a school of critique that is decidedly more conservative, one reach-
ing back at least to Richard Sennett’s influential 1977 study, The Fall of
Public Man (which Berlant, in a note, describes as “a prophetically longer
view of the emergence of intimacy as the index of normativity in the
United States”; The Queen of America 263). Sennett, like Berlant, decries
the collapse of the political into the personal but in such a way that the
new triumph of the emotions marks a decline from an imagined past when
social issues were seriously debated in the public sphere: “When a culture
shifts from believing in presentation of emotion to representation of it, so
that individual experiences reported accurately come to seem expressive,
then the public man loses a function, and so an identity. As he loses a
meaningful identity, expression itself becomes less and less social” (108).
Sennett makes an exception for the arts, in which, he argues, the perfor-
mance of personality may augment rather than diminish the artistic perfor-
mance (287), but in the realm of politics, he believes that the reverse is
true: “The content of politics is thus narrowed by the perception of per-
sonality in it” (287). To consume, produce, and perform personality, I
argue, is not to slide into either Berlant’s “intimate public” or Sennett’s
degraded sphere of private discourse, but neither is it necessarily resistant
or liberatory, and the same obtains for expressions of celebrity reluctance.
There are affective performances that are commonly expected of the pub-
lic person, and so a departure from those expectations marks something of
a disruption, though that disruption may issue, as I will argue in this study,
from a position of privilege.
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In seeking to theorize celebrity subjectivity in general, and reluctant

celebrity in particular, as a field of coexisting divergent energies that are
not readily categorized as harmful or salutary, I turn to a specialized mean-
ing of the term “reluctance” from physics whose etymology I have not yet
mentioned or traced: “magnetic reluctance.” Reluctance in a magnetic
circuit is a form of resistance that operates somewhat analogously to resis-
tance in an electrical circuit; that is, in an electrical circuit, the current
follows the path that offers the least resistance or dissipation of its energy,
and so too, in a magnetic circuit, magnetism flows in the path of least
resistance. For many years, in fact, magnetic reluctance was referred to as
magnetic resistance. However, in a magnetic circuit, the properties of
resistance are different, in that whereas electrical resistance dissipates
energy, losing it in the form of heat, magnetic reluctance stores it in a
magnetic field that, once collapsed, returns the energy to the circuit. To
avoid false analogies between electrical and magnetic circuits, therefore, in
1888 the British physicist Oliver Heaviside, who made enormous contri-
butions to electrophysics, suggested the change in terminology, from
magnetic resistance to magnetic reluctance:
There is a tendency of at the present time among some writers to greatly

extend the application of the word resistance in electro-magnetism, so as to
signify cause/effect. This seems a pity, because the term resistance has
already become thoroughly specialised in electro-magnetism in strict rela-
tionship to frictional dissipation of energy. …
I would suggest that what is now called magnetic resistance be called the
magnetic reluctance; and when referred to unit volume, the reluctancy [or
reluctivity]. (168)
Precisely because of the special qualities that Heaviside sought to pre-

serve by bestowing this term, magnetic reluctance serves as a helpful anal-
ogy for reluctance in the celebrity circuit. In distinguishing reluctance
from faux reluctance, from reclusiveness, or from the assumption that
reluctance needs to be coded as strategic or complicit, as I have done
above, I have, in effect, argued that celebrity energy is not dissipated in
cases of reluctance, not cancelled out, but stored, persisting alongside
desire as an equally possible energy source out of which the celebrity’s and
fan’s acts may proceed. And like magnetic reluctance, celebrity reluctance
is not purely oppositional, though there is a dragging effect that initially
throws an obstacle in the way of the easy flow of energy in the circuit.
Rather than dissipating celebrity energies, then, reluctant celebrity remains
an engagement with celebrity, and unlike reclusiveness’s continuing

engagement with celebrity, which is indirect and often supplied by other
agents (fans, critics, etc.), reluctant celebrity places those stored, friction-
produced energies at the potential disposal of the celebrity as well as other
agents in the celebrity system—for a wide variety of purposes.
While considering the theoretical model that magnetic reluctance pro-
vides for reluctance of the celebrity variety, we should note the long-
standing, everyday usage of the language of magnetism to describe
celebrity. Rooted in Max Weber’s notion of charisma, which is an early
foundational concept of celebrity theory (Dyer, Stars 30–32; Marshall
Celebrity 20–22), the notion of star magnetism makes explicit the analo-
gies between physical forces and celebrity feelings that I have been pursu-
ing here. At the same time, celebrity theorists have been rightly cautious
in importing Weber’s concept and its attendant language of magnetism to
explain celebrity phenomena. Richard Dyer, in Stars, noted “certain prob-
lems in transferring the notion of charisma from political to film theory,”
most notably the tendency to read charisma in terms of “suspect eternal
universals” (30) that obscure charisma’s ideological “specificities” as well
as the “specificities of … the audience” (31). P. David Marshall is initially
more positive about Weberian charisma’s contributions to a robust theory
of celebrity, finding Weber’s “arguments concerning the domain of the
rational and irrational … central concerns in understanding the contem-
porary celebrity,” but he, like Dyer, stipulates that “some modifications
would be necessary” to make the model suitable for applying to celebrity,
“in order to explain the contemporary condition of accepted domains of
irrational or emotive forms of power (i.e., the celebrity) as part of a larger
system of rationality” (22). Chris Rojek, for his part, finds that the applica-
tion of the “term charisma to modern forms of celebrity is a misnomer”
(Fame Attack 62). Rather than reading charisma as intertwined with prob-
lematic universalist discourses of magnetism, Rojek distinguishes them
altogether: charisma, he argues, is “a genuine, revolutionary force,” that
has wide-ranging social effects, whereas “What the PR-Media hub calls
‘charisma’ today is really commodified magnetism” that has little force
outside the restricted field of the celebrity’s endeavour; it is “calculated,
limited and compartmentalized” (Fame Attack 63). While I agree with
Dyer’s and Marshall’s cautions that celebrity charisma needs to be read
ideologically, I am less inclined than Rojek to associate charisma with top-
down manufacture. The reluctant celebrity that I will theorize and analyse
involves, by analogy, a magnetism that is fully engaged in ideological
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s ystems but whose workings are not produced in a hegemonic, top-down

fashion. This magnetism is one that is theoretically enriched by a consid-
eration of the model I have drawn from physics precisely because its ener-
gies are multidirectional, resistive but not dissipating. It allows for a more
complicated affective analysis than an invocation of celebrity charisma or
magnetism often affords us. In place of Judith Brown’s observation of
Greta Garbo as recluse, “She was pure magnetism, but a magnetism forged
in negativity…” (108), I propose a study of reluctant celebrity whose
magnetic forces go beyond simply negative opposition—beyond the dis-
sipation of energy modelled by the electrical circuit.
Reluctance Theorized as Affect

The multidirectional, dragging stored energies of reluctance find an affin-
ity with the work of recent critics of affect who explore non-normative
“ugly feelings,” for they draw upon the same tropes of reluctant or
obstructed forward movement that we find in the physical sciences model
of reluctance. In Depression: A Public Feeling, Ann Cvetkovich considers
how depression might qualify as what Lauren Berlant calls an “impasse”: a
political and affective “cul-de-sac” in which one “dogpaddle[s] around”;
“one might keep moving, but one moves, paradoxically, in the same space”
(Cruel Optimism 199). As Cvetkovich adds, “For Berlant, an object of
knowledge becomes a (productive) impasse when it slows us down, pre-
venting an easy recourse to critique or prescription for action” (20). For
Sara Ahmed, complying with the values of an “affective community” is
imagined as being ideally situated to move forward, to “flow into space”
(12): “When we feel pleasure from objects, we are aligned; we are facing
the right way” (41); and “Going along with happiness scripts is how we
get along; to get along is to be willing and able to express happiness in
proximity to the right things” (59). Heather Love, writing of reengaging
with painful legacies in queer history, admits that, “Sometimes it seems it
would be better to move on…” (1), but she offers an eloquent argument
in favour of looking—and “feeling backward.” In each instance, the for-
ward movement so prized by neoliberal regimes of feeling experiences a
countervailing tug, a reluctance that frustrates, at least momentarily, the
urge for social energies to flow through the circuit with as little obstruc-
tion as possible.
While these theorists of negative affect choose to validate the sluggish
tug over the easy flow, my own approach is less celebratory or, at least, less
inclined to see the performance of reluctance as necessarily noble or resis-

tant. To be fair, there is a great deal of debate among these scholars as to
whether resistant action is a possible outcome of negative feelings or not,
though it is clear that such resistance is desired. Ann Cvetkovich, pursuing
the spatial movement metaphor, asks whether “it might be possible to
tarry with the negative as part of daily practice, cultural production, and
political activism” (3). But Sianne Ngai, on the other hand, finds that
“ugly feelings” like envy, paranoia, irritation, animatedness, and “stuplim-
ity” (a combination of shock and boredom; 3) tend to be “diagnostically
concerned with states of inaction” (22) and are “less than ideally suited for
setting and realizing clearly defined goals” (26). Indeed, their power lies,
for Ngai, more in diagnostics than in action. In my work on reluctant
celebrity, I champion neither reluctance as resistance, nor the capacity for
less-than-enthusiastic celebrities to change the world. But since I agree
with Richard Dyer’s foundational insight that “Stars articulate what it is to
be a human being in contemporary society … they articulate both the
promise and the difficulty that the notion of individuality presents for all
of us who live by it” (Heavenly Bodies 8), it is worth attending to the ways
that celebrities articulate this reluctant mixture of promise and difficulty in
a neoliberal time. This articulation is messy, and it does not align clearly or
consistently with larger political forces or objectives; in this respect, celeb-
rity reluctance is an example of Raymond Williams’s “structures of feel-
ing,” for as Williams explained, these present, “actively lived” “meanings
and values … are in practice variable” (132) and do not map directly upon
social formations or ideologies that are theoretically formulated as entities
fixed in the past. Indeed, Williams cited reluctance as an example of the
variability and complexity of these lived structures of feeling: they may
cover “a range from formal assent with private dissent to the more nuanced
interaction between selected and interpreted beliefs and acted and justified
experiences” (132). In this study, I argue that reluctance—“formal assent
with private dissent”—as performed by those most visible of public sub-
jects, celebrities—is not as simple as Williams suggests; it, too, is a nuanced,
interactive circuitry in which emotional forces exert their push and pull.
By taking up recent work that is part of the so-called “affective turn in
cultural criticism” (Cvetkovich 3) as a foundation for my understanding of
reluctance, I face the same need as these thinkers to clarify my termino-
logical choices. Much criticism has been directed the way of critics who
equate “affect” with “emotion” or “feeling,” for the field of affect studies
that grows out of Deleuzian theory supports the distinction between
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affect as “precognitive sensory experience and relations to surroundings”

and emotion as “cultural constructs and conscious processes that emerge
from them, such as anger, fear, or joy” (Cvetkovich 4). Still, other thinkers
call for a less dualistic episteme or a more porous relationship between
biology and culture. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank, for instance,
critique Cvetkovich’s earlier work for theorizing a nature/culture dualism
that, in their view, threatens “the loss of conceptual access to an entire
thought realm, the analogic realm of finitely many (n > 2) values,” that is
“important for…enabling a political vision of difference that might resist
both binary homogenization and infinitizing trivialization” (108). In her
valuable article, “Doing Things: Emotion, Affect and Materiality,” Jo
Labanyi is similarly invested in breaking up binary ways of talking about
affect. She follows Teresa Brennan in using “feeling” as a term that negoti-
ates between affect as precognitive and emotion as interpretations of sen-
sory information; as Brennan writes, “Feelings are sensations that have
found a match in words” (19): they are “sensory states produced by
thought” (116). This is crucial for Labanyi, since she is less interested in
guarding the purity of terminological boundaries than seeing the points at
which they become permeable; feelings, she suggests, like ideas, are “pro-
duced through the interaction between self and world,” an interaction
that is not “the coming together of two separate entities, but … a process
of entanglement in which boundaries do not hold” (223).
In Deleuzian terms, then, the celebrity reluctance I study in this vol-
ume is technically a feeling. After all, reluctance is conscious and it incor-
porates judgment; we know we feel reluctant and that reluctance is, in
turn, an interpretation of what Sianne Ngai calls “predicaments … posed
by a general state of obstructed agency with respect to other human actors
or to the social as such” (3). More accurately, reluctance is the “process of
entanglement” of (at least) two feelings (“I want celebrity and I do not
want celebrity…”) that attend the carrying out of actions that appear, in
an economy of visibility, to skew more towards inclination. For that rea-
son, I will not technically label reluctance an “affect.” In recognizing the
permeability that Labanyi discerns, however, I will sometimes use the
adjectival form “affective” to talk non-technically about emotional states,
for, as Labanyi asks, is “affect really … as non-discursive as [a Deleuzian
theorist such as Brian] Massumi gives us to understand” (226)? In the
same spirit, Ann Cvetkovich decides to “use affect in a generic sense … as
a category that encompasses affect, emotion and feeling,” and “feeling in
part because it is intentionally imprecise, retaining the ambiguity between
feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experi-

ences” (4). Like Cvetkovich and other cultural theorists of negative affect
from whom I derive a great deal of inspiration, I recognize the termino-
logical distinctions that Deleuzian theorists of affect like Massumi have
clarified, and their importance in breaking down body/mind binaries, and
while technically respecting those distinctions, I deliberately choose a cer-
tain amount of permeability.
The influence of those theorists of negative affect whom I have men-
tioned necessitates another critical distinction, one that reaches far beyond
questions of terminology. For the most obvious difference between this
study and that body of theory is that I do not examine a negative feeling …
exactly. Though Cvetkovich, Berlant, Ngai, Love, Halberstam, and others
query the boundaries between “good” and “bad” affects, they nevertheless
all take their departure from feelings or affective states that are socially
understood to be negative: shame, depression, envy, paranoia. The obvious
exception is Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, in which she announces
a departure from recent work on negative affects, though in the final event,
as Ahmed readily admits, it, too, is a study of unhappiness: “I thus offer an
alternative history of happiness not simply by offering different readings of
its intellectual history but by considering those who are banished from it,
or who enter this story only as troublemakers, dissenters, killers of joy” (17).
In focusing on the figures of the “feminist killjoy,” the “unhappy queer,”
and the “melancholic migrant,” Ahmed aims “to follow the weave of
unhappiness, as a kind of unravelling of happiness, and the threads of its
appeal” (18). In the course of studying happiness by attending to its unrav-
elling, though, there appears a fissure in Ahmed’s theory, between studying
(un)happiness as a counter-feeling (a feeling that isn’t the feeling one
should be having), and as an ambivalent amalgamation of emotions (a feel-
ing that is an uneasy mixture of socially approved and disapproved feel-
ings). On the one hand, she figures unhappiness as resistance: “We become
alienated—out of line with an affective community—when we do not
experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are attributed as being
good” (41). On the other hand, and almost in the next breath, unhappi-
ness becomes inextricable from and constitutive of happiness: “Cultural
and psychoanalytic approaches can explore how ordinary attachments to
the very idea of the good life are also sites of ambivalence, involving the
confusion rather than separation of good and bad feelings. Reading
happiness would then become a matter of reading the grammar of this
ambivalence” (6). When Ahmed takes this second path, of ( un)happiness
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as ambivalent amalgamation, she comes very close to theorizing reluctance

as I formulate it: “Going along with happiness scripts … can mean simply
approximating the signs of being happy—passing as happy—in order to
keep things in the right place” (59). Like Raymond Williams’s “formal
assent with private dissent” (132), we have here a structure of feeling of far
greater ambivalence than the alienation from affective communities that
Ahmed theorizes at other moments.
Since I figure reluctance not as the unravelling of willing eagerness, but
as a simultaneous feeling of willingness and disinclination, reluctance is
not a counter-feeling to another. Instead, what is generally thought socially
positive (“getting on with it”) and negative (“not getting on with it”) are
already circulating and sparring within the feeling that is reluctance.
Reluctance is therefore closer in its workings to what Sianne Ngai calls
“fundamentally ambivalent ‘sentiments of disenchantment’” (5) “marked,”
that is, “by an ambivalence that will enable them to resist … their reduc-
tion to mere expressions of class ressentiment” (3). As a result of this
simultaneity of feelings, reluctance can be socially understood in a multi-
tude of ways; it can mark the celebrity subject as a difficult, ungenerous
player of the game, or one rich in exclusive cultural capital for coura-
geously playing the game differently—as long as they are in possession of
some form of privilege that allows them to bypass disapproval.
Celebrity reluctance, therefore, need not mark one as a temperamental
outlier or “killjoy,” in Ahmed’s term, and this is because there is a long
history of reluctance being valorized in celebrity systems. Indeed, one
prominent but controversial narrative has the American film industry and
its stardom born out of an act of reluctance: the film production studios’
and actors’ reluctant agreement to release the names of actors in films
around 1910. Some theories held that actors did not want to jeopardize
their work in up-market theatre by publicizing their labour in the down-
market cinema; others held that the companies did not want to cede eco-
nomic power to the actors (Turner 12). Still other historians dispute both
of these theories. What interests me is less the question of historical verac-
ity and more the discursive work performed by a narrative of reluctance
that we have not left behind in the dusty archives of Hollywood history.
While P. David Marshall rightly observes that “the reluctance to release
the names of performers gradually gave way to an industry that used its
performers as one of the primary forms of promotion and marketing of its
product” (Celebrity 80), I suggest that the very power of this disputed
narrative of Hollywood stardom’s history places a value upon reluctance
that we have not entirely relinquished. To what extent has celebrity long
been thought of as an intersection of acknowledgment and denial? To
what extent has celebrity always been intertwined with reluctance?
Moving from historical to structural analysis of the celebrity industries,
Joshua Gamson’s characterization of celebrity systems as a “tug of war”
(94) among competing industrial agents also partly relies on reluctance as
a prime (non)mover. In promoting a new television show, web series, or
film, for example, an actor may be reluctant to accede to the studio’s
desire for them to associate themselves closely with this particular project,
since the long-term viability of their celebrity depends upon being “liber-
ated from particular projects and abilities” in order to “gain attention and
loyalty for his [sic] self, for being ‘unique’ and unprecedented” (Gamson
83). (In Chap. 4, we will see this tug of war in action, in Daniel Craig’s
love-hate relationship with his role as James Bond.) A similar drama of
conflicting objectives attends the workings of celebrity print and online
journalism, for Gamson sees it as a skirmish for “information commod-
ity”: the star and their publicists have insider information that journalists
working in various media desperately want (i.e., a “scoop”), and so the
strategy is to release enough information to keep one in the public eye
while holding other information in reserve. One might describe Gamson’s
see-saw celebrity information system as the systemic reluctance of the
celebrity-media industry.
Reluctance has also been valorized in celebrity systems because it may
mitigate the appearance of blatant fame seeking and its attendant notions
of individuality. As Jo Littler writes, not about reluctance but about celeb-
rity self-indictments, apologies, and self-parodies,
whilst the hyperindividualism of celebrity is structurally antithetical to

democracy, then, there is also, to an extent, … widespread understanding of
this social weakness. In these terms, the performance of celebrity soul, or the
performance of celebrity internalisation of social anguish, becomes a neces-
sary part of contemporary celebrity, acting as an attempt to gesturally redress
the insecurities of the system it is a part of. (248)
Littler’s analysis is particularly helpful to my project because it steps back

from celebrity affects and, rather than seeking to validate or question them
as authentic or inauthentic, attends to the way they function within the
field of celebrity understood as a system of power relations. Frequently,
though, scholars of celebrity find themselves wanting to recuperate
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reluctance (or silence, or modesty) as a beneficial and strategic means of

mitigating fame’s dangers and risks, as Hugh Dauncey and Douglas
Morrey do when they argue that football star Zinedine Zidane’s (off-field)
reserve, his “careful refusal to take up ideological positions or explain his
actions may represent a canny negotiation of a global media arena in which
the slightest utterance is subject to fine scrutiny” (318). But, as I have
suggested, to have one’s reluctance read as courageous or creative rather
than stubbornly noncooperative requires some fund of privilege. And
while Zidane is less privileged because of his racialization in the world of
European soccer (consider the open discrimination he faced on and off the
field), this reading of his strong, silent reluctance resonates with apprecia-
tions of (male) stoicism that are associated with his privileged gender.1 As
Dyer reminds us, though celebrities are articulations of what it means to
be human in a capitalist society, these articulations are liable to be refrac-
tory, internally and ideologically contradictory; “the whole phenomenon
[of stardom] is unstable, never at a point of rest or equilibrium, constantly
lurching from one formulation of what being human is to another”
(Heavenly Bodies 18).
Precisely because the manifestations of reluctant celebrity that I exam-
ine in this study are explicit, they reveal these intersecting forms of privi-
lege and disempowerment, whether they relate to relative power within
the celebrity world, or in terms of lived relations of power such as race,
gender, and sexuality. In celebrity systems, there are those who find it pos-
sible to display and express reluctance: who, to put it another way, have no
need to discipline and police reluctance as an “ugly feeling” that runs
counter to their objectives or the objectives of other agents in the celebrity
system. For example, in a study of reluctant celebrity Tweeters, Pamela
Ingleton and I found that there was a correlation between celebrities’
reluctant Twitter usage or outright denunciations of Twitter and their
supposed rankings in the industry (A list, B list, etc.). We found evidence
of a rough distinction among three groups of celebrities in this regard: the
A-listers; the micro- or subcultural social media celebrities; and all those
in-between. A-listers were by far more likely to denounce Twitter whole-
sale; first of all, their continued stardom is not reliant upon its resources
and, furthermore, not using Twitter safeguards the legendary distance and
exclusivity that have long been associated with the stars. However, micro-
or subcultural DIY celebrities whose fame is produced through social
media obviously cannot denounce the very medium of their celebrity and,
in fact, need to embrace it. Those in-between more often than not enact
reluctance as a means of inhabiting “something not entirely dissimilar to

‘noblesse oblige’ in their acts of connecting with fans, while simultane-
ously maintaining some sense of division between stars and not-stars”
(Ingleton and York “To Tweet or Not to Tweet”). As Pamela Ingleton has
written of B-list celebrities and social media, they enact a “simultaneous
denial … and reinforcement” (526) of celebrity as both privilege and dis-
entitlement: in a word, reluctance.
In reading expressions of emotion as sites of privilege, I engage in a
political project, at a site that many critics of neoliberalism would not con-
sider particularly urgent or politically serious: celebrity. And whereas theo-
rists of celebrity have long considered fame to be intensely ideological and
political (Dyer, Marshall, Turner), readings of celebrity/fan affect have
not always fully engaged with the political or perceived the links between
affect and politics. Sean Redmond, in a 2014 keynote address at the
International Celebrity Studies Conference, called upon scholars in the
field not only to understand “celebrities as constructions and commodifi-
cations, or as neo-liberal bodies made in the service of liquid modernity
and late capitalism—as a great deal of the literature suggests” but “as cer-
tain types of experiences; composed of, and involved in circulating, clus-
ters of affects and intensities.” In the very first issue of the Celebrity Studies
journal, though, in 2010, Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi showed how
deeply celebrity affect and politics are intertwined. Working from Arlie
Hoschchild’s notion of “emotion work,” they made a compelling case for
celebrity emotion as a form of labour that speaks to “ordinary” citizens’
lived struggles under capitalism: “the tensions and dilemmas at the heart
of celebrity emotional labour (as media workers and as ‘personalities’)
critically foreground the affective terrain which all individuals are forced to
negotiate in the public realm in order to be regarded as socially successful”
(49–50). P. David Marshall makes the same kinds of connections when he
remarks that “The celebrity can be seen as instrumental in the organiza-
tion of” the “affective economy” of “contemporary capitalist democracy”
(Celebrity 247). The celebrity considered as a locus of emotion, then, does
not require a dispersal of the political, as I have argued in critiquing
Richard Sennett, for instance, nor an alternative to it, as Redmond sug-
gests, but, rather, a manifestation and performance of the political.
Indeed, pace Sennett, emotion is political and the political is emotional;
as Eva Ilouz argues in Cold Intimacies: The Making of Emotional
Capitalism, “emotions are cultural meanings and social relationships that
are inseparably compressed together and it is this compression which
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c onfers on them their capacity to energize action” (3). Although Ilouz

does not directly analyse celebrity, she cites the rise of what she calls thera-
peutic culture, as expressed through the career of Oprah Winfrey, as a
contradiction of the common assumption that the rise of capitalism
marked the triumph of rationality over emotion. Indeed, she coins the
phrase “emotional capitalism” to describe both the instrumentalization of
therapeutic culture in spaces like the corporate office, and the reciprocal
seepage of the language of economy into intimate personal relations. I
argue that celebrities are a major site of the “compression” that Ilouz
returns to repeatedly as a figure for this social expression of emotion, but
in so doing, I also see the potential for lukewarm emotions like reluctance
to register responses to neoliberal capitalism’s selective consecration of
emotions that are instrumental to its prosperity.
In contrast, then, to accounts of the management of the affective realm
that emphasize the pervasive nature of that management (Berlant,
Hochschild), I see reluctance as a form of emotional labour that may (or
may not) wiggle out of the bonds of that management. Hochschild defines
emotional labour as that labour that “requires one to induce or suppress
feeling in order to sustain the outward countenance that produces the
proper state of mind in others” (7). In her landmark study, The Managed
Heart, she studied flight attendants from Delta Airlines who were
instructed to adopt a particular mode of emotional engagement—always
smiling, always positive. But even though Hochschild emphasizes the
power of this emotional regime, one that very closely resembles Ilouz’s
“emotional capitalism,” she also, in a somewhat offhand way, discloses
some of its fissures and seepages. She briefly remarks, for instance, that
because of the growing emphasis in many jobs upon emotional labour,
spontaneity, or even apparent spontaneity, has become much more highly
valued “as if it were scarce and precious” (22). Like reluctance, arguably
also a seepage and fissure in neoliberal dictates to “move forward,” spon-
taneity, even of the performed variety, suggests that emotional manage-
ment is, like the celebrity system, porous and non-monolithic.
When reluctance does manage to seep out of the management of celeb-
rity affect, it can point the way to a critique of various forms of privilege,
whether that be the sexist, racist, homophobic, transphobic, spaces in
which celebrity labour occurs and is consumed, or other inequalities (e.g.,
economic) that characterize the industries in which celebrities work. (On
the other hand, it is important to remember, reluctance can also shore up
any of those inequities.) As Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi muse, c elebrity
emotion can also place on display social contradictions such as “the expec-
tation that we have the right to live pain-free lives bound up with the cur-
rent pressure to understand those lives through painful emotion work”
(54). Reluctance, I would add, can also work as a site of contradiction
between that fantasy ideal of a pain-free life that celebrity often represents
to an onlooker and the all-too-everyday pain occasioned by the inequities
of neoliberal capitalism, patriarchy, and other regimes of control.
In the following pages, I think about the ways in which reluctance, that
complicatedly tepid feeling, reflects larger cultural patterns, anxieties, and
ideologies in a neoliberal global order. I think about who gets the privilege
of being able to express reluctance, to opt in and out of affective invest-
ments, as it were, and at what risk, if any. Although reluctance may signal,
like Sara Ahmed’s unhappiness, that you are not “aligned, facing the right
way” (41), those who carry their reluctance into social performance of
some sort bear the privilege of being able to do so. Or as superstar
Madonna would have it, “You realize that having a number one record
and being loved and adored isn’t the most important thing in the world.
But at the same time, I don’t have a problem with it” (Garfield).
Note
1. I thank Pamela Ingleton, McMaster University, for this insight.
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CHAPTER 2
Inviting the Shadow to the Party: John

Cusack and the Politics of Reluctance
During the years 2008 to 2013 the American actor John Cusack was con-
tributing blogs to the Huffington Post, mainly on the political issues that
had increasingly occupied his attention during those years, such as govern-
ment surveillance, the privatization of war, the loss of journalistic indepen-
dence, and the persecution of whistle-blowers such as Julian Assange and
Edward Snowden. But in a series of three blogs in 2012, he departed from
that focus to feature a conversation with the psychiatrist Phil Stutz, who,
along with psychoanalyst Barry Michels, had just published a self-help book
called The Tools. As the three-part conversation unfolded it became clear
that Cusack had been one of Stutz’s many Hollywood clients, and he was
unusually forthcoming on this occasion about his personal struggles with
stardom as a very young man. He recalled seeing a photograph of a beauti-
ful girl on a magazine cover on a newsstand at that time, and thinking “‘my
God, if I could get that girl’ … I felt I was being excluded from this unbe-
lievable secret VIP circle, but if I could date that girl, I’d have access.”
In fact, Cusack was, at that time, dating this young woman. Nevertheless,
at that precise moment, the young woman on the magazine cover seemed
“unattainable” to him. Stutz, in analysing the situation, related it to two
phases of success: the “conquest phase” in which one attains a measure of
success in the eyes of others; and an “alienation phase” in which “you have
to alienate yourself from the world again” because the seeming omnipo-
tence wrought by success inevitably clashes with the dawning knowledge
that you do not control the forces of success just because “you’re special.”

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71174-4_2
28 L. YORK
Stutz calls this clash a “biphasic fantasy,” to which Cusack wryly quipped,
“You’re basically describing a movie star. For the record.” Stutz’s phases of
conquest and alienation, if experienced simultaneously, would constitute
reluctance as I have theorized it: a condition of wanting and not wanting
heightened social visibility. As he continues to remember that particular
episode, Cusack performs exactly this condensing of Stutz’s phases into
that frictional, two-way feeling: “I … was just being a stubborn Irish fuck
where I wanted to get endorsed by the VIP circle, but I didn’t want to go
hang out there. I wanted it, but I didn’t want it, and so I always felt excluded
from it [stardom] even when I was in it” (Cusack “The Alchemists” Part 2).
“I wanted it, but I didn’t want it”: classic reluctance.
John Cusack’s reluctance is sustained and fundamental to his star image.
The opening of his IMDb biography summarizes his thirty-year career as
a paradigmatically reluctant one: “John Cusack is, like most of his charac-
ters, an unconventional hero. Wary of fame and repelled by formulaic
Hollywood fare, he has built a successful career playing underdogs and
odd men out—all the while avoiding the media spotlight” (“John Cusack:
Biography”). The two-way pull is here evident, between the “successful
career” and the unconventional wariness, repulsion, and avoidance.
This pull is evident even in the most cursory survey of Cusack’s career,
from 1980’s teen angst classics like Sixteen Candles and Say Anything, to
alternative succès d’estime like Being John Malkovich, High Fidelity, to
recent political projects like War, Inc. and Grace is Gone, and critiques of
celebrity culture (Maps to the Stars, Love & Mercy), with commercial suc-
cesses (Con Air) and failures (Must Love Dogs) lodged in-between, as they
are for any steadily working actor. Notwithstanding IMDb’s confident ref-
erence to a “successful career,” these vehicles construct “success” vari-
ously and contradictorily: is it independent filmmaking and producing?
Blockbuster action? Art films? Popular rom-coms? As Cusack himself told
Jonathan Ross of “BBC Movies,” “it all depends on what your definition
of success is. I think that film [Being John Malkovich] is really cool, but
maybe if you don’t make a lot of money you’re not a movie star” (Ross).
Cusack here adopts a Bourdieusian reading of cultural capital; artistic con-
tributions to the field of small production may wipe out any possibility of
consecration, as Bourdieu would say, at the site of large-scale production
and vice-versa. Such negotiations mark a particularly fertile site for reluc-
tant feeling, as celebrities may covet whatever form of cultural capital they
happen not to possess at a particular stage of their career; indeed, they may
desire both large-scale and small-scale success simultaneously. As Bourdieu
INVITING THE SHADOW TO THE PARTY: JOHN CUSACK… 29
wrote, what is at stake in the estimation of cultural capital is no less than

the definition of human accomplishment (42). It is also at stake in the
affective state of reluctance, in which one’s estimations of success are simi-
larly troubled and mingled. As I have theorized the affective muddle that
is reluctance, the dragging pull that slows the more ready embrace of
celebrity builds and stores energy that can be potentially used (or not)
elsewhere. As I will show, John Cusack is a walking, breathing example of
my theoretical precept that reluctance in celebrity, as in magnetic circuits,
stores rather than dissipates energy that can then be put to other, in his
case political, uses.
Reluctance so thoroughly imbues Cusack’s star image that it is both
ascribed to and openly claimed by him in a way that is remarkably self-
conscious, rather than simply performed through reluctant actions (as it is
for the most part, we shall see, by a star like Robert De Niro). It is remark-
able how consistently journalists describe Cusack as reluctant without
questioning that stance as inauthentic or strategic. Henry Barnes of The
Guardian, sitting down with Cusack to discuss Maps to the Stars (2014),
describes the man across from him as “hangdog but amiable,” and by the
end of the interview, he is convinced that Cusack would as easily welcome
the annihilation of his celebrity as its prosperity; describing the film post-
er’s graphic of flames licking at the names of the cast members, Barnes
muses that “After [director David] Cronenberg and [co-star Robert]
Pattinson, Cusack’s name would be next to burn. I’m not sure he’d mind
that much” (Barnes). Often journalists, striving to capture Cusack’s star
image, describe it as fusing two incommensurate affects in the way that
reluctance does, such as New York Times film reviewer Janet Maslin’s refer-
ence to his “appealing diffidence” (Maslin), or BBC’s “The Movie
Lounge”’s James King’s observation that Cusack’s signature mode as an
actor is “stress and charm”: the versatility of charm in his characters meet-
ing “that ever-present underlying stress” that “makes him ‘one of us’”
(King). What’s more, when King meets Cusack, he ventures to say that
this affective combination characterizes Cusack himself too, as he goes
about the professional task of promoting his films: “Over [to England] to
promote his new film [Serendipity], here was no slick interviewee with
media-friendly soundbites and witty anecdotes. Cusack was charming,
yes—but twitchy, uncomfortable, and undoubtedly stressed with the
whole promotional experience” (King).
30 L. YORK
Charming stress: perhaps this was the combination that New York
Magazine journalist Maureen Callahan was reaching for when she wrote
in 1997 that Grosse Pointe Blank provided a “most fitting vessel for his
off-kilter charm” (143).
Cusack himself is just as voluble as these journalists on the subject of his
reluctance, and he repeatedly frames it in terms of a code of hospitality and
politesse. “It doesn’t seem polite to try to be in the limelight more,” he
admitted in an interview; “I don’t even know if I was invited in to begin
with. I’m well aware that I might have worn out my welcome already”
(Gilbey “John Cusack”). His mantra, then, is, to quote him in another
interview, “Go do your thing, then get out” (IMDb). In yet another
interview, this time with Howard Stern, Cusack figures his career in similar
terms, as a sequence of accepted invitations punctuated by periods of
polite withdrawal: “I’m in everybody’s houses; they didn’t invite me in,”
and so “it’s kinda nice to step away and go away for a while” before mak-
ing another film and re-entering the publicity machine. Stern, for his part,
like other journalists and media people, doesn’t question or profess disbe-
lief of Cusack’s self-characterization (though he does, of course, try—
unsuccessfully—to get Cusack to spill some gossip): “You’re not one of
those guys who is seen out there all the time, which I’m sure you con-
sciously make sure you don’t … you know, you’re not out on the town too
much. You don’t want to be in the newspapers” (Howard Stern). In a
truly strange moment, John Cusack has Howard Stern, of all people, sing-
ing the praises of reluctance.
At other moments, particularly when Cusack is handling invasive ques-
tioning, his language of politesse fades and a more directly articulated
unwillingness takes its place: “I’m tired of people talking to me about
me,” he responds to Howard Stern at that point in the interview when
Stern presses him to talk about his personal relationships (Howard Stern).
Questioned about his view of celebrity, Cusack claims to “have a healthy
fear of it. I’m not into the celebrity culture aspect of being an artist,”
deftly substituting the latter term, with its connotations of substantial and
valuable cultural accomplishment (IMDb). Indeed, Cusack’s wariness has
become, in recent years, so well known that it can become an in-joke;
interviewing Cusack in September of 2014 at the Toronto International
Film Festival, where he was promoting Maps to the Stars, Bonnie Laufer
puts on a valley-girl/surfer dude accent to ask, “I know you’re not into
the Hollywood B.S., and we could talk about that for hours…” Cusack,
picking up and extending the joke, assumes the Californiaese to respond
in kind: “I am soooo into Hollywood B.S. I, like, [eyes rolling skywards]

looove it!” (Laufer).
One strategy that Cusack has developed in interviews that might tend
more toward “Hollywood B.S.” is to displace the thirst for personal infor-
mation onto his cinematic work. Cusack argues on several occasions that,
if he were to give in to the appetite for celebrity gossip, people would no
longer be drawn to his films in order to find out who he is. In one inter-
view, Cusack likens celebrity to “extinction. The more people know about
you, the less they want to figure out what you have to say in your movies,
and the less credibility you have” (IMDb). In another interview, he
declared that he doesn’t like doing interviews, and “If it was up to me, I’d
just put the movies out there. … If people are constantly reading about
you, and you’re overexposed, they’ve got no reason to go see your mov-
ies” (Gilbey “John Cusack”). This is an argument that has a fairly long
lineage in celebrity culture; Mark Twain once exclaimed that, “If papers
and magazines can get and print interviews with me … they won’t buy my
articles, and then where should I be?” (1357). It was a questionable argu-
ment in Twain’s time, and remains so in the current cinematic context,
given the number of celebrity mainstays of gossip magazine covers whose
projects do pull in large box-office numbers. However, the validity of the
argument is less important for my purposes than the work being done by
its deployment. For Cusack, as for the mid-twentieth-century literary New
Critics, the text as an autonomous object becomes the epicentre of mean-
ing. In effect, he says here, I want to be the star of movies; I just don’t
want to be a movie star. Considering the filmic text as a self-contained
artefact becomes a way to simultaneously “Go do your thing and get
out.”
Cusack’s desire for his star text to be synonymous with his perfor-
mances is a preference for being a “picture personality” rather than a
“star,” to use film historian Richard DeCordova’s terms. The discourse of
the “picture personality,” according to DeCordova, emerged around
1910: a discourse that identified the actor with his or her on-screen roles.
As he explains, “the intertextuality that constituted the identity of the
picture personality was produced and maintained largely by the cinema
itself; it did not depend so much on outside reference” (51)—most nota-
bly, to the “private” life of the actor; “the site of interest was the personal-
ity of the player as represented on film” (86). The “star,” whose discourse,
according to DeCordova, started to emerge around the beginning of
World War One, was, on the contrary, constructed by that which the
32 L. YORK
icture personality discourse excluded: “the private lives of the players

p
were constituted as a site of knowledge and truth” (98). Though
DeCordova’s taxonomy is deeply embedded in the history of early twen-
tieth-century North American cinema, P. David Marshall has maintained
that his “classifications” of star and picture personality “continue to define
the way in which stars are constructed in the American film industry”
(Celebrity 264 n15). John Cusack’s star text, among many others, offers
ample evidence of the continuing function of the “picture personality” in
cinematic stardom.
Still, Cusack, like most stars, does not get his wish to be identified only
with his on-screen work, for personal gossip does circulate about him,
though it operates largely through back channels and is, as a result, scarce.
As Guardian journalist Ryan Gilbey reflected in 2009, “For an actor of his
stature and celebrity, Cusack is a virtual stranger to the gossip rags” (Gilbey
“John Cusack”); Cusack’s director for 1408, (2007), Mikael Hafstrom,
agrees: “You never read anything about him in the gossip papers, he
doesn’t talk about his private life” (Gilbey “I’m Basically A Brand”).
Largely because of this relative lack of alternate sources of “private” infor-
mation, Cusack’s picture personality occupies a larger proportion of his
overall star text. I argue, furthermore, that the predominance of his pic-
ture personality deters journalists from questioning the authenticity of his
reluctant stance on celebrity because reluctance correlates strongly with
Cusack’s picture personality as the diffident, witty outsider. As film critic
Jason Solomons wrote in The Guardian, “He has often played men strug-
gling with taking the next step” (Solomons): struggling, that is, with their
reluctance as they step forward.
From the very early days of his career, Cusack’s roles have indeed fore-
grounded reluctance and its ambivalent attitude towards “taking the next
step.” In his breakout film, Say Anything (1989), Cusack’s Lloyd Dobler,
a young man poised on the threshold of adulthood, subscribes to a funda-
mentally reluctant philosophy of how to live in the world. Pressed by the
father and friends of his girlfriend to tell them about his future plans, he
responds with that “appealing diffidence” that reviewers have perceived in
Cusack’s picture personality:
I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career.

I don’t want to sell anything bought or processed or buy anything sold or
processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair any-
thing sold, bought, or processed—you know, as a career I don’t want to do
that. So my father’s in the army and he wants me to join but I can’t work for
that corporation. So what I’ve been doing lately is kickboxing.…
Lloyd’s description of his refusal to live within commodity capitalism (and

its subset, the military-industrial complex) is simultaneously a humorous
admission of its inevitability. It is a Beckettian vision (“I can’t go on. I’ll
go on,” to quote the ending of The Unnameable). Not surprisingly,
Lloyd’s reluctance is met with uncomprehending silence at the bourgeois
dinner table, where future plans are expected to be framed in positive, go-
getting rather than negative, unwilling terms, to describe how one will fit
oneself to the existing system of supply and demand, rather than scuttle it.
The sequence of camera shots, alternating close-ups of Lloyd as he ingen-
uously explains his thinking and close-ups of Diane’s father and two-shots
of the dinner guests uncomfortably averting Lloyd’s gaze bespeaks the
utter discrepancy of values and priorities. Lloyd’s reluctance is part of the
film’s overall vision of teenage angst, which goes far beyond the generic
anomie-lite of many a Hollywood teen film; at the beginning of the film,
Diane Court, the girl whom Lloyd adores at first from afar, is practicing
her valedictorian speech in the car for her doting father, and one of her
jokes plays on a similar upsetting of the tropes of youthful ambition that
the valedictorian speech typically trades in: “Having taken a few courses at
the university this year, I’ve glimpsed our future and all I can say is….Go
back!”
“Go back” is exactly what reluctant hitman Martin Blank from Grosse
Pointe Blank (1997) attempts to do, and for similarly reluctant reasons.
We first see him confessing to his (frightened) psychiatrist (Alan Arkin)
that, “I’m uneasy, man”; though he is continuing to kill as part of his post-
high-school job, he feels “ill at ease.” In typically reluctant style, Blank is
moving forward while feeling backward. Accordingly, he takes the oppor-
tunity to move forward and backward at the same time: to accept a hit job
in Detroit that would allow him to attend his tenth-year high school
reunion and seek out the young woman (Minnie Driver) he abandoned on
prom night. But he avoids opening the envelope that contains instructions
for the hit as long as he can. As Elizabeth Abele, in her study of “Gen-X
Hamlets” observes, Martin recognizes “his own moral ambiguity” (103)
and he therefore stands as one of the “disenchanted American sons” (109)
in the “darker comedies” (99) of the 1990s that feature “Hamlet wan-
nabes … adrift in an impersonal, fragmented, postmodern world” (100).
For that matter, the original Dane is morally ambiguous, disenchanted,
34 L. YORK
adrift—in a word, reluctant—enough. In the second scene of Hamlet,

Claudius and Gertrude exhort Hamlet to let go of his open mourning for
his father and move on, affectively speaking, but Hamlet’s disinclination
to do so sets the rest of the play’s events in action. And much as this reluc-
tance satisfies an ethical imperative to discover the circumstances of his
father’s death, he later reflects that his melancholic tendency to let affect
act as a drag upon action can also frustrate his objective of just retribution:
“And thus the native hue of resolution/Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast
of thought” (3.1.84–85). So in becoming a “Gen-X Hamlet,” Cusack’s
Martin Blank inherits a rich dramatic tradition of reluctance, considered as
neither a “good” nor a “bad” affect in itself, but as a site of mixed affect.
In Cusack’s repertoire, the artist is often the locus of this affective mix-
ing, in a way that compromises the notion of the celebrated individual as
uncomplicatedly moving forward in the pursuit of pure, idealized art. In
Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway (1994), we first see Cusack as play-
wright David Shayne expostulating to his agent Julian Marx (Jack Warden),
“I’m an artist and I won’t change of word of my play to pander to some
Broadway audience! … I won’t see my work mangled again!” David’s
artistic high-mindedness is influenced by the philosophy of his mentor
Sheldon Flender (played, fittingly, by Cusack’s early mentor Rob Reiner),
that “No truly great artist has been recognized in his lifetime.” So when
Julian finds a mob backer for his play, who will allow the show to go on
but only with his gun-moll girlfriend cast in a role, David’s sense of integ-
rity undergoes merely the first in a series of compromises: “I’m conflicted!”
he complains to Julian, and haunted by his conflict, he wakes up in the
middle of the night, throws open his window and shouts, “I’m a whore!”
But Allen’s comedy skewers this high-minded anguish when, it turns out,
David is willing to change more than a word of his play when the gun-
moll’s bodyguard (Chazz Palminteri) turns out to have a more sophisti-
cated sense of dramatic language, plot, and structure than he does.
Nevertheless, David maintains and enjoys his onward-upward ascension to
celebrity, seeing his name in lights and winning the affections of his campy
leading lady (Dianne Wiest), all the while psychologically inhibited by the
knowledge that he isn’t the “truly great artist.”
Being John Malkovich (1999), in examining a similarly vexed relation-
ship between celebrity and “Art,” discloses layer upon layer of reluctance
within celebrity subjectivity. There is, to begin, the character John
Malkovich’s status as a celebrity subject who acts and yet is simultaneously
being acted upon—indeed, is being taken over—by others. As Martin Kley
observes, “Being John Malkovich, for John Malkovich, means to be

invaded and invented as a public persona” (25)—a prospect that Malkovich
(as a character in the film) greets with horror. As he insists to Craig
Schwartz (Cusack), the nebbishy puppeteer who has discovered the portal
that allows him (or anyone else passing through it) to gain access to
Malkovich’s consciousness, “That portal is mine and it must be sealed
over.” Malkovich here argues, fruitlessly, for the celebrity to have sole
access to and ownership of their privacy, much as Cusack himself has
attempted to direct fans away from his private life and towards his film
roles as a source of knowledge about him. But such a stance ignores that
celebrities, as Kley suggests, are all partly invaded/invented by the gaze of
others.
Reluctance in Being John Malkovich is not confined to its eponymous
celebrity figure; Craig, when he takes over Malkovich’s body, enacts a
dragging, reluctant forward movement of his own. Previously, as a repre-
sentative of the unseen and unfamous (perfectly captured in his out-of-
sight labour as a puppeteer), Craig, like Lloyd Dobler and Martin Blank,
was a young man adrift in an economy of alienated labour; as he face-
tiously remarks to his wife Lotte (Cameron Diaz), “We’ve been over this.
Nobody’s looking for a puppeteer in today’s wintry economic climate.”
He holds the strings and performs the labour, but “nobody” is “looking
for” him; he remains unseen. But when he discovers the portal to
Malkovich’s subjectivity, he begins to occupy a position suspended mid-
way between hyper-visibility and obscurity, as beautifully captured in
director Spike Jonze’s plentiful use of point-of-view shots from the per-
spective of Craig-inside-Malkovich. Craig resides in the nether-space
between those whom P. David Marshall calls socially visible individuals
who “move on the public stage while the rest of us watch” and the rest of
us, who are “constructed as demographic aggregates” (Celebrity ix). As
Craig (inside Malkovich) tells his co-conspirator Maxine (Catherine
Keener), “I could use Malkovich’s existing notoriety to launch my own
puppeteering career”; this he proceeds to do, by donning Malkovich’s
body and going to tell his agent that he’s no longer content to work as an
actor and wishes to launch a second career as a puppeteer. Although Craig
puts this plan into action, and wins acclaim for Malkovich as a puppeteer,
he remains vulnerable, his feelings of insecurity acting as a drag upon the
forward trajectory of his (still hidden) career inside Malkovich’s body: “If
I leave Malkovich,” Craig bewails, “then I’m Craig Schwartz again, no
career, no money.” As Being John Malkovich suggests, the fear of obscurity
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comes from inside, rather than outside, the celebrity subject, and it in part
constructs that subject. Rather than being a foreign, obscure parasite
inhabiting a celebrity host, as initially appears to be the case, Craig-inside-
Malkovich is the celebrity: a reluctant amalgamation of success, obscurity,
confidence, insecurity. Within every glossy exterior of a reluctant celebrity,
does there lurk a scruffy “ugly” feeling that tangles the strings that enable
forward, successful movement?
A more recent Cusack film, the Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy
(2014), in which Cusack plays the former Beach Boy in middle age, shows
how persistently his picture personality has been involved in examining
refractory celebrity feelings. The film juxtaposes scenes from the mid-
1960s at a time when the Beach Boys were at a creative crossroads follow-
ing their initial successes, with scenes from the 1980s, when Wilson was
abused and manipulated by his therapist Eugene Landy. The opening
scenes of the film depict Wilson and the other band members in the ‘60s,
frolicking on the beach, in stereotypically Beach-Boy fashion, forming
scenes that fans will recognize as famous publicity photos of the band:
leisure here is being produced as part of the labour of making stars. Such
scenes provide the sense of all-in, forward-moving participation in the
stardom publicity machine, against which the moving story of Wilson’s
private struggles and disinclinations take shape.
Indeed, the film is obsessed with the conflict between the pressure felt
by Wilson to go forward, play along with that machine, and his artistic
desire to explore other musical ideas, which constantly tugs at him to resist
this propulsion. Because of his fear that the Beatles are creatively outpac-
ing the Beach Boys, Brian (played as a young man by Paul Dano) pleads
with the band to let him stay home from their Japan tour: “I can take us
further. If you let me stay at home in the studio.” In a scene that perfectly
dramatizes reluctance as I have theorized it, Wilson argues that he can go
forward by resisting forward movement.
In the parts of the film set in the 1960s, as the band debated whether
to repeat their successful formula, or struggle musically towards some-
thing new, this tension is captured in repeated images of moving forward
or backward—like the metaphors that I have noticed fill theoretical writ-
ings about negative affects or “ugly feelings.” Band member Mike Love
(Jack Abel) is the spokesperson for following the formula:
Mike: “We need to write some of the old stuff again, fellas. That’s all
I’m saying.”
Brian: “The old stuff is old!”

Mike: “So we can make it new again!”
Brian: “I can’t go back in time!”
Brian’s abusive father Carl readily joins Mike’s side, interrupting one
exploratory rehearsal session to crow over a new band he’s promoting that
is copying the Beach Boy sound: “This is what you guys need to get back
to.”
This temporal conflict between moving ahead or back in time, and the
contradictory pressure upon Wilson to move forward by staying in the
past, finds its physical expression in the key scenes of the film that involve
cars. In the first 1980s scene, we first see Brian’s shoes rather than his
body; we follow car-salesperson Melinda Ledbetter’s gaze as she looks
from the shoes carefully taken off outside a showroom Cadillac up to the
face of the man who has taken off the shoes and climbed into the car to try
it out. Like the puppeteer Craig in Being John Malkovich, this hyper-visible
man is, ironically, not visible to her at all, at first—fittingly, since she does
not know of his celebrity until the prestige-obsessed Dr. Landy informs
her after they’ve already had a full conversation inside the vehicle: “Do
you know who this man is? Brian Wilson.” To Melinda’s laughing rejoin-
der to Brian that “You didn’t mention that!” Wilson responds, “Well,
‘cause that stuff doesn’t matter. That’s ego stuff, you know?” The conver-
sation they have had in a non-moving car has taken them much farther;
Wilson has already spoken to Melinda of the recent drowning death of his
brother.
In the final scene of the film, which parallels and recasts that first car
scene, Brian, having fully disentangled himself from Landy’s control, waits
near Melinda’s house so that he can walk across the intersection in front
of her moving car, to provoke a meeting with her. He asks her to take him
home, by which he means, though she only gradually realizes it, his child-
hood home. But when they arrive there, only a dead end and a raised
freeway meet their gaze; the childhood home, site of both his father’s
painful abuse and Brian’s nascent creativity, is no longer there. When
Melinda stops the car, and they climb out to survey the scene, a panoply
of mixed emotions, not the least of which is relief as well as mourning, play
across Cusack’s features. They cannot go further, and they cannot go
back. And yet, as in the early scene in the car showroom, they go further
though they are standing still. As the strains of “Wouldn’t It Be Nice?”
begin to play, they draw towards each other once again.
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As even this brief analysis of films from Cusack’s early to recent career
demonstrates, John Cusack’s picture personality has formed a recogniz-
able persona that features a reluctance that can be represented in any num-
ber of ways in individual vehicles (satirized as hypocritical in Bullets Over
Broadway, romanticized and championed as the sign of an authentic artist
in Love & Mercy). But because reluctance is a constant feature of his roles,
journalists and fans register any departure from or relocation of that famil-
iar aggregate picture personality with pleasure, surprise, disappointment,
or a host of other possible responses. For example, when Cusack appeared
on The Late Late Show to promote his film War, Inc. in 2008, host Craig
Ferguson opened discussion of the film by proclaiming it to be markedly
different from what he has seen Cusack perform in before. “It’s a strange
film,” Cusack good naturedly agreed, acknowledging its combination of
dark comedy and biting satire, but Ferguson seemingly could not quite
reconcile himself to the generic hybrid, and he kept pressing the point:
“It’s very weird … a very odd film … It’s not a romantic comedy”
(Ferguson 2008). No, it certainly wasn’t; it was, instead, an uncompro-
misingly anti-neoliberal film that used black comedy as its mode of deliv-
ery, and critics were baffled by Cusack importing his picture personality as
the likeable cynic into this radically different vehicle. As Stephen Holden
mused in the New York Times, Cusack is “a actor who even when playing
the ultimate cynic can’t keep from coming across as a misguided nice guy
on the verge of seeing the light” (Holden), and Philip Marchand, in the
Toronto Star, was bothered by what he saw as the discrepancy between the
film’s political satire and the “Resurrecting” of “Cusack’s role as a hitman
in Grosse Pointe Blank” (Marchand). But this mindful recycling of Cusack’s
picture personality in a different generic vehicle—one that aligns much
more closely with his politics—is a reluctant performance. Cusack will
agree to give fans another Martin Blank performance—inserted into
another vehicle, in effect delivering and not delivering a repeat perfor-
mance of a much-loved film.
A significant site for fans to register their varying responses to Cusack’s
few departures from his reluctant picture personality is social media, for
it is one space in which Cusack has, at times, created and allowed for
representations that are not consonant with his main picture personality
or role persona but that nevertheless form part of his star text as a whole.
As Elizabeth Ellcessor has written, “Through the visibility of their new
media and social network content production, and their displayed rela-
tionships with others, stars’ personas may be read in a densely
intertextual manner, through the connections that these media enable”

(50). Social media, Ellcessor suggests, reinforce the understanding of
the celebrity as a “discursive production” that has been a foundation of
the field of celebrity studies reaching back to Richard Dyer’s founda-
tional 1979 book Stars (47). As such, that notion of the celebrity as an
assemblage of multimedia social meanings is consonant with digital
media scholar Henry Jenkins’s equally foundational notion of conver-
gence (the migration of content from one media platform to another).
As Ellcessor explains,
The star, therefore, can be seen as a convergent, transmedia text. But I want
to argue further that the star text, in the age of social networking, is also an
agent of media convergence that functions through connection. By forming
textual, industrial, and personal connections through the use of online social
media, the star text itself can be used to shape or reinforce a star’s multi-
modal image, to promote creative labors, and to smooth the convergences
of aesthetics, audiences, and industries that complicate the contemporary
media landscape. (48)
What Ellcessor tends not to recognize, in her characterization of this “star

text of connection” (48), is that star texts can also be internally divergent,
because she concentrates on celebrities like Felicia Day, whose celebrity
has migrated from a “marginal presence in Hollywood” to major online
recognizability, and who markets and promotes her mainly digital creative
products most pointedly and intentionally online.
For many other celebrities, however, John Cusack among them, con-
vergence can prove to be a messier affair precisely because of the capacity
of social media to amplify not the creation of a coordinated or consistent
public persona but the variability that Dyer saw as at the heart of the star
text, creating its ideological complexity. To repeat Dyer’s valuable insight,
“the whole phenomenon [of stardom] is unstable, never at a point of rest
or equilibrium, constantly lurching from one formulation of what being
human is to another” (Heavenly Bodies 18). As Sarah Thomas has plenti-
fully demonstrated, with reference to Cusack’s Twitter account, his early
use of the interactive platform convinced some fans that he was not acting
according to the expectations created by his “familiar star image of easy-
going, smart and quirky coolness” (251). In the early days of his Twitter
account which, as Thomas recounts, took over from his MySpace site, he
blocked a number of people (some who complained, oddly, given the
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medium, about his spelling, and others who took offense at his progressive
political writings). This blocking, in turn, provoked a further measure of
online backlash, because some fans, in Thomas’s words, “saw this version
of Cusack as being very different to their expectations of the actor as
derived from their awareness and enjoyment of his films and offline star
image, seeing the behaviour as not enough like ‘John Cusack’ to be an
authentic and pleasurable representation of the star” (251–52). Thomas,
surveying the evolution of Cusack’s Twitter account, concludes that
Cusack made “concessions to conventional star-like behaviour” after
2009. “It remains a highly politicised account,” she observes, but “the
balance has also shifted to include ‘real-life’ personal and professional con-
tent,” a “re-presentation of ‘John Cusack’ in line with a more familiar and
publically circulated star image” (252). My own reading of Cusack’s
Twitter account would suggest less of a dramatic redirection; professional
postings about film projects in the making have always been a feature of
the account, and the nature of the “personal” content is always carefully
restricted to well-known interests that support more often than contradict
Cusack’s picture personality (enthusiasm for Chicago sports teams, for
example1). Indeed, what is important, for my purposes here, is the way in
which Cusack’s online self-representations show the tenacity of his role-
persona or “picture personality”; because there is less gossip circulating
about him, the picture personality holds considerable sway, and any dis-
cordant representations that do appear on social media have that much
more impact.
A further testimony to the plentiful overlap between John Cusack and,
as Thomas would say, “John Cusack,” is the way his name signifies in
popular culture references to him, of which there have been several. There
is a very early (2003) Fall Out Boy song, for example, “Honorable
Mention,” in which the Chicago-bred emo pop punk band describes the
male protagonist’s yearned-for romance with a girl that is frustrated by his
tendency to say awkward things. The repeating line assures her that “I can
be your John Cusack” (Stump, Wentz, and Trohman). The implicit refer-
ence is to Cusack’s 1980s teen hit Say Anything, in which the main char-
acter, Lloyd Dobler, is similarly plagued by (appealing) awkwardness—the
“charming stress” that is often identified with his picture personality.2 The
song lyrics, though, use Cusack’s name to signal this role personality: le
rôle, c’est l’homme même. Similarly, in the American pop culture com-
mentator Chuck Klosterman’s collection Sex, Drugs and Cocoa Puffs
(2013), the opening story, “This is Emo,” describes a man in love with a
woman who loves John Cusack—a parasocial romance with which he feels
he cannot possibly compete. What’s more, Klosterman explicitly muses on
the parasocial and takes note of the distinction that the Fall Out Boy song
erases, between John Cusack’s picture personality and his “real” life; while
noting that, in his opinion, “countless women born between the years of
1965 and 1978 are in love with John Cusack” (2), he points out that
“They don’t love John Cusack. They love Lloyd Dobler. … When they see
Mr. Cusack, they are still seeing the optimistic, charmingly loquacious
teenager he played in Say Anything… That’s the guy they think he is”
(2–3). Though Klosterman, unlike many recent celebrity theorists, is not
prepared to grant the parasocial relationship much value, his story pro-
vides yet more evidence of the readily discernible nature of John Cusack’s
picture personality as a reluctant charmer—and its displacement onto the
actor himself.
As an affective mode, the awkward charm that characterizes Cusack’s
picture personality is consonant with reluctance: a condition of wishing to
win over one’s audience while not being certain of how—or whether—to
do so. But seemingly minor affective outbreaks of this sort can occupy a
space along a continuum that includes some truly homely and frightening
emotions. This, indeed, is the deeper significance of Cusack’s “off-kilter
charm.” The unattainable girl is not just a trademark of teenage hetero-
sexual emo films and songs; she is also a feature of Cusack’s own reluctant
celebrity, as in the story he told psychiatrist Phil Stutz about his younger
celebrity self’s desire for the girl on the glossy magazine cover. More gen-
erally, Cusack has made this coincidence of wanting and not wanting—
reluctance—a central part of his acting technique in a way that directly
engages with distinctly uglier feelings. On the influential American pro-
gram Inside the Actor’s Studio, hosted by James Lipton, Cusack responded
to an acting student’s question about feeling blocked on stage by explain-
ing, in effect, that one must bring ugly feelings to the fore rather than
clambering over them in order to succeed as an actor. Drawing on Jung’s
theory of the Shadow, Cusack tells the student that
Anything that’s interesting in a film or in a character—all your passion, your

sex, your anger, your rage—all that comes from that part of you that you
want to hide and push away and … deny. … So I think that if you … can
visualize a version of your shadow, and if you just sort of invite him to the
party, or her to the party, and if you can understand that this is where you’re
going to let that shadow come out, that this is where it’s home, it’s really
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just understanding that your job is to get vulnerable. I just try to remember:
the part of you that’s going to do a good job is the part of you that you want
to most deny” (Inside the Actor’s Studio)
That Shadow, for Cusack, is consonant with the kinds of emotions that
Sianne Ngai dubs “ugly feelings”; as he explains, “It’s not just the way it
physically looks, but what feelings it provokes. Shame, embarrassment,
fear, worry, angst” (“The Alchemists” Part III). Enabling the forward
movement of performance by using the very psychic materials that you
imagine will block or slow its progress is reluctance reformulated as theat-
rical practice.
It is clear from the conversations that Cusack had with Phil Stutz on his
Huffington Post blog that he adapted this theatrical practice from Stutz’s
psychological method, and that he has a very clear visualization of his own
Shadow:
My Shadow is like some version of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. I was

doing a baseball movie in Chicago [John Sayles’s Eight Men Out 1988], and
I had broken my ankle. I was eating and drinking a lot, so I was kind of
puffy, and my skin kind of broke out, and it was really fucking cold, and I
was depressed. It was some weird mutation of me. I try to bring that guy
into the room whenever I work and whenever I get a cue that I need to use
that Tool. (“The Alchemists” Part 3)
As an embodiment of the ugly feelings, Cusack’s Shadow is notable for its

bodily excess; failing to reproduce the idealized image of the svelte,
smooth-skinned, warm-clime-frequenting celebrity, Cusack becomes,
instead, puffy, cold, and afflicted with acne. The reference to the character
of Colonel Kurtz in Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now reinforces the
link between the Shadow and bodily transgression; Marlon Brando
appeared on set forty pounds heavier than expected and he insisted that
Coppola shoot him from the waist up. Brando’s excessive body, though, is
the source of enormous performative power and the stuff of cinematic
legend. As with the method itself, that which is the block, the friction, is
that which provides the tools for forward movement, but one must, in
reluctant fashion, take it along rather than leave it behind; one must invite
the puffy Shadow to the party.
When John Cusack jokes to Phil Stutz that the “biphasic fantasy” of
believing one can control the forces of creativity is the calling card of the
movie star, he opens up the workings of reluctance into a larger social

field. The fantasy is no longer solely an individual psychodynamic, but one
that characterizes a whole industry. So, too, does reluctance fuel Cusack’s
critique of Hollywood as an industrial culture. When he, along with co-
stars, promoted the 2014 David Cronenberg film Maps to the Stars at
Cannes in May of that year, Cusack gave an interview to The Guardian
that itself made headlines: “John Cusack: Hollywood is a Whorehouse and
People Go Mad.” In it, Cusack critiqued Hollywood’s venality, ageism,
and sexism in a way that some found overly aggressive and others found
forthright; he claimed that Cronenberg’s biting satire was realism, pure
and simple. Co-stars such as Julianne Moore and Mia Wasikowska were
asked about how they saw the relationship between Maps and their own
experience of Hollywood, and several of them implicitly backpedalled or
softened Cusack’s criticisms; Wasikowska, for instance, said at a Cannes
interview, “no, I wouldn’t say it’s like my experience of Hollywood, but
there are certain elements … If I were to have a fever-dream about
Hollywood, it would be something like this” (“Cannes 2014”).
(Wasikowska, a young and rising star who could ill afford to write off
Hollywood at this stage of her career, could be forgiven her cautiously
diplomatic reply.) At the post-premiere press conference, even Cronenberg
cautioned that, while “I’m not being evasive here, … the movie is not only
about Hollywood. You could set this in Silicon Valley, you could set it on
Wall Street, or any place where people are desperate, ambitious, greedy,
fearful” (Pulver). Cusack, at the same press conference, echoes
Wasikowska’s point about the extreme nature of the portrait of Hollywood,
and Cronenberg’s point about the applications of its satire to other social
sites, but ends up making a pitch for the specificity of its Hollywood
critique:
It is a very familiar ecosystem, a heightened myth of it perhaps, an ecosystem

of fear and greed and desperation. There are all sorts of people within acting
who feed it and enable it, and are predators. It could be Washington, or the
financial district. But there’s something about LA, and fame, and the need
for acknowledgment, which is very infantile. (Pulver)
In the brief interview that appeared on the DVD extras of the film, Cusack
stuck to this distinction; calling Maps to the Stars “the most savage, mean-
est, indictment, deconstruction of Hollywood and fame and secrets and
the whole toxic brew that exists in Los Angeles,” Cusack added that “I’m
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sure it’s slightly different than corporate ethics because it has more to do
with dreams and fantasies of freedom” (Maps to the Stars). Cusack verita-
bly makes a project out of refusing to soft-pedal Cronenberg’s—and his
own—critique of Hollywood. And the fact that he has fashioned a success-
ful career over some decades just heightens the reluctant tug-of-war of
incommensurate feelings.
Even a year after Maps to the Stars’s Cannes premiere, journalists con-
tinued to refer back to Cusack’s “Hollywood is a whorehouse” comment
in The Guardian; indeed, on New Year’s Eve 2014, that publication chose
this interview as one of its top ten film interviews of the year precisely
because of Cusack’s uncompromisingly biting criticism (“Our Ten
Favourite”). Marlow Stern of The Daily Beast prefaces his interview with
Cusack to promote Love & Mercy the following April with a reference back
to the Guardian piece, which he sees as admirable proof that Cusack
doesn’t “have a filter” (Marlow Stern). The surprise—whether welcome
or unwelcome—occasioned by Cusack’s comments seems oddly dispro-
portionate, given the project of Cronenberg’s film: to show, in effect, that
Hollywood is a whorehouse and people go mad. (Cusack observed in one
interview, “I secretly thought it was David trying to make his Sunset
Boulevard.” [Hill])
Cusack’s critique of Hollywood and celebrity culture more broadly,
which forms the backbone of his reluctance, is of long standing. As a
young actor, making Say Anything, he was reading Frederick Exley, pre-
sumably his best-known book, the cult classic A Fan’s Notes (“Inside the
Actor’s Studio”). Exley’s self-described “fictional memoir” revolves
around the protagonist’s obsession with football great Frank Gifford,
whose success acts as a depressing counterpoint to his own failures. One
can see the correspondence between the classic Cusackian scruffy slacker
character and Exley’s fan’s certainty that he lacks the proper celebrity body
and mien. A decade later, making Being John Malkovich with Cameron
Diaz, he was delighted that the Hollywood expectations of proper star
bodies were not being enforced on set; as he recalled on Inside the Actor’s
Studio, “We were both happy that there weren’t people about trying to
make us look good.” In a review of the film for Film Quarterly, Scott
Repass makes a point of director Spike Jonze taking an actor who was, at
that point, known for her beauty (for Diaz started out as a fashion model)
and making her “the frowsiest of the frowsy characters” (31). Though
Repass doesn’t mention it, arguably because this disciplining of the celeb-
rity body afflicts women more than men, much the same could be said of
Cusack, who was leaving behind his decade-old profile as a teenage heart-
throb. In Being John Malkovich, he is stubbly bearded, frowsily long-haired
and generally unkempt—some would say even unrecognizable. The
dishevelled Shadow, it seemed, could occasionally make an appearance in
performance … but only in an alternative, smaller-budget vehicle.
In the publicity work he does to promote his films in recent years,
Cusack has allowed his critique of L.A. filmmaking culture to come to the
fore. Journalists now make regular references to this newfound critical
explicitness; as Marlow Stern declares in April of 2015, “John Cusack has,
at 48, lost interest in playing the part off-camera. He has no desire to pan-
der to you, the moviegoing public, or the celebrity industrial complex”
(Marlow Stern). Logan Hill, in Details, follows suit to introduce his
October 2014 interview with the star: “Now, at 48, he’s skewering the
industry that made him in his latest film and he happy as hell he’s not 22
anymore.” Both interviews are part of the publicity for Maps to the Stars,
and so the critical tone Cusack adopts should be in line with the vehicle he
is promoting. But as Stern’s nervous reference to “you, the moviegoing
public” as one target of Cusack’s critique, and Hill’s allusion to Cusack
biting the hand that has fed him suggest, Cusack’s recent explicit critique
has occasioned some tremors in the publicity machine.
No wonder: his recent critiques could not be more uncompromising,
less soft-pedalled. To Marlow Stern’s admiring question about his being
“outspoken on the issues of the day,” unlike “A lot of celebrities” who
“pussyfoot around,” Cusack retorts, “No, I don’t care about any of that
shit. All those people are just full of hot air and networking” (Marlow
Stern). And in response to Hill’s (predictable) question about the accuracy
of Maps’s critique of Hollywood, Cusack responds, “The film is more like
a Greek myth, but it’s pretty real. People in L.A. are more passive-
aggressive but just as vicious and cutthroat and cruel” (Hill). This might
be considered reluctant promotion: doing the full rounds of publicity
while meditating on the blocks to creativity that the industry sets up
through its promotional culture, a situation, as we will see, whose ironies
Cusack is well aware of.
Both journalists in the recent interviews I have examined here make
mention of Cusack’s age, 48 in 2014, as part of their commentary on his
brash critiques of Hollywood, and age is certainly a factor in Cusack’s
reluctance, though not necessarily in the way that these journalists are
intimating. In his controversial interview with The Guardian, he made a
point of emphasizing the deleterious effects of Hollywood on young
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actors: “The culture just eats young actors up and spits them out” (Barnes).
In follow-up interviews, he repeats his concern, telling Logan Hill of The
Daily Beast, for example, that he fears younger actors today don’t have
enough people in Hollywood looking out for them and offering sound
advice: “I survived by being taught by people I respected that you have to
grow up, man up” (Hill). The journalists’ reference to his age, coupled
with his criticisms of the system, imply that he’s somehow older and bitter,
and while it is true that the constant demand for “22-year olds” (Hill) has
implications for him, Cusack’s concern with young actors is capable of a
very different reading. By turning to young actors—who invariably prompt
comparisons with his own early struggle with fame—Cusack positions age
and ageing as another site of reluctance. He genders his critique, to be
sure; he notes in the Guardian interview that the thirst for young bodies
disproportionately affects women: “I have actress friends who are being
put out to pasture at 29. They just want to open another can of hot 22”
(Barnes). The steady desire for new, young faces and the exploitation that
this desire has always engendered in Hollywood (see the career of Judy
Garland) are evidence of the relentless forward movement of consump-
tion. Cusack’s ageing body and unvarnished critique of that system of
consumption, on the other hand, form the reluctant traffic bumps that
frustrate this headlong movement. Reluctance, at heart an ironic mode,
materializes in the act of “biting that hand that feeds one.”
One way of managing the irony of reluctance—and its self-implication—
is to distinguish among forms of “moving forward,” preferring some to
others. This Cusack does by coupling his critique of Hollywood with a
consideration of alternative forms of production within the system that
allow him to “move forward” with his career in a way that he finds more
palatable. He consistently draws distinctions between a post-Fordist style
of Hollywood production and the smaller ventures that he prefers, though
he recognizes that these distinctions are not airtight. Large projects can
produce valuable art (though Cusack might say, less often), and smaller
projects still need funding and other industrial supports (actors with rec-
ognizable names, publicity, etc.). His reluctance is entirely caught up with
these distinctions among modes of production and his ironic self-
implication in them. As he told Ryan Gilbey,
Sometimes I think I’m in control, but more and more I realize that it’s just
a complete farce. It used to be that if you did a big, big movie then you
could leverage it and make some smaller, cooler ones. And I got away with
that for a few years. But now they just want you to put on tights. If you
don’t put on the tights they just want to get rid of you. And I’m not putting
on the tights. (Gilbey “John Cusack”)
Cusack refers here to the current mega-popularity of superhero films that

have dominated the box office, films that have featured the labour of
actors otherwise known for non-action genres (Mark Ruffalo, Scarlett
Johanssen, Robert Downey Jr., etc.). Though Cusack may not be, in his
words, “putting on the tights,” he has, like many a working actor, made a
wide generic range of films—including action, though not in the super-
hero genre.
In dealing with the more commercial films he has made, or would con-
sider making, Cusack once again performs a tricky, self-implicating nego-
tiation that is reluctant in its bearings. Asked by Jonathan Ross of “BBC
Movies” if he hasn’t done blockbusters, apart from Con Air, because he
isn’t offered the roles or because they hold no interest for him, Cusack
replies, frankly, “Probably a combination of both,” but he goes on to draw
yet another distinction between the “really, really good big action films,”
which are few, whose roles would go “to someone who does those kinds
of movies” and “the rest of them” that “I’m just not that interested in”
(Ross). In subdividing action films into the “really, really good” ones and
“the rest of them,” Cusack sees his one foray to date into the action genre,
Con Air, as belonging to the former category. Joking that he was “the first
post-Heston non-Biblical action hero in sandals,” Cusack praises the ven-
ture and aligns it with more independent vehicles in his career:
To me, it was a really great time in Hollywood where you had people like
Joe Roth running these big studios, so you could make Con Air or High
Fidelity or Grosse Pointe Blank and make these big, fun summer movies, and
it wasn’t so corporatized. (Marlow Stern)
This seems an odd grouping, considering the frankly commercial nature of

Con Air; Cusack pointed out to Jonathan Ross, Being John Malkovich is an
accomplished film “but that’ll probably make worldwide what Con Air
made in its opening weekend” (Ross). Though a sceptic might suggest
that Cusack is placing any film of his in a superior category, as a means of
rationalizing his participation in these larger vehicles, that reading is not
supported by Cusack’s unusually candid assessments of some of the other
commercial vehicles he has done: “I’ve made 10 good films,” he frankly
48 L. YORK
opened his conversation with Ryan Gilbey, “I’m sure you know which
ones they are. The ones that suck I tend to blank out. It’s like I never even
made them.” (“I’m slightly taken aback at his honesty,” Gilbey confesses.)
(Gilbey “I’m Basically a Brand”).
Although it may seem that Cusack is drawing a by now recognizable
snobbish distinction between “lower” and “higher” film genres, his
engagement with action films as a spectator as well as actor suggests that
his aesthetic categories are a bit more complicated than that, and his posi-
tioning, therefore, more typically reluctant. The locker-fight scene that
Cusack filmed with Benny “The Jet” Urquidez in Grosse Pointe Blank is an
homage to one of the most famous of action-film fight scenes: The Jet’s
fight with Jackie Chan in Wheels on Meals (1984). (Cusack has a black belt
in kickboxing and Urquidez has served as his mentor and teacher. So
Lloyd Dobler’s choice in Say Anything of “kickboxing” as one pursuit that
seems clear of the entanglements of commodity culture is no coincidence.)
In an interview promoting Dragon Blade, an action film he made in China
with Chan (2015), he revealed his long-standing interest in both martial
arts and Asian film in general. After listing, with evident relish, his favou-
rite Asian directors and films, Genevieve Loh, the interviewer, clearly sur-
prised, exclaims, “You really know your Asian film!” (Loh). Cusack, in
turn, uses his pleasure in the films to distance himself from Hollywood-
centric notions of the action genre. “We can think that everything’s about
Hollywood or the United States, but it’s not …. I’d rather be doing
[Dragon Blade] than the Fantastic Four” (Loh). At this point, though, he
backtracks and allows that the Fantastic Four is not that bad. International
action film, then, becomes a way of negotiating his reluctance to “put on
the tights” and make the Hollywood superhero films that are on offer: a
reluctant stance that says, in effect, yes to (some) action films, while saying
no to (other) action films.
Within the Hollywood system, working with a director who has a sin-
gular, distinctive vision is, for Cusack, another way of saying (a reluctant)
“yes” to Hollywood. In his interviews, it is fairly common to hear him
criticize a form of film production that is caught up in an excess of workers
with non-defined but prestigious-sounding roles. As he comments to
Bonnie Laufer, often films seem to be made by a committee, on a set
where a squadron of producers network on their cellphones. In another
interview for Maps to the Stars, he repeats the criticism: “Producing is a
lost art. Now there’s just fifteen people with the title standing around on
their phones not doing anything. They’re just feeding at the trough”
(Hill). In contrast, Cusack values the experience of working with David

Cronenberg on Maps, on a set where actors and directors work together,
intensively, to bring a director’s vision to the screen; he describes the set as
“intense…quiet and focused” (Laufer).
At this point, it is useful to place Cusack’s critique of “big” productions
in the context of scholarly thinking about Hollywood as a system. In
Otherness in Hollywood Cinema, Michael Richardson questions the model
of Hollywood as a manufacturer of films compliant with dominant
American values. “Such a projection” of those values, he argues, “is … far
from being monolithic”:
Even within the framework of a system which has for most of its history
sought to impose a strict regularity on its modes of production, the sheer
scale upon which Hollywood functions has generally given scope for aber-
rant or personal expression and at times to violate or contradict the logic of
its own rational [sic] as a dream factory. (viii–ix)
Even the most cursory check of right-wing Republican impressions of

Hollywood would bear out Richardson’s argument that “Hollywood’s
relation to American values is ambivalent and sometimes uneasy” (1), but
Cusack’s specific argument is not that it has never been possible to make
resistant films in Hollywood, nor that it is not currently possible to do so;
rather, it is more difficult to leverage one’s larger projects against the
opportunity to make smaller, alternative films. As he comments to The
Guardian, the “one for you, one for them” rule no longer obtains. “Now
it’s six for them—with a committee cutting the film who weren’t part of
making it—and maybe one for you” (Barnes). One can certainly find
exceptions—Diablo Cody’s 2007 hit Juno, to name just one example—
but the crucial thing is that Cusack explains the incontestable difficulties
of making an independent film via a narrative of decline.
One way to circumvent this predicament is to assume roles such as pro-
ducer, writer, director, film company owner oneself, providing that one
can raise sufficient funds on the strength of one’s “star power,” and John
Cusack has managed to do so with some regularity over the course of his
career. Faced, then, with questions about his participation in an industry
that he is clearly critical of, Cusack can simultaneously participate and opt
out on those occasions when he has significant input into the project, in
one or more of those roles. Jonathan Ross, speaking with Cusack in 2000,
when he was promoting High Fidelity, pointed out that the actor has
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ritten or co-written films he’s starred in on several occasions, and he

w
claims that “it’s quite an unusual thing in Hollywood these days for
American stars to write their own films.” Cusack, taken with this thought,
struggled to think of another example: “I don’t know too many actors
who do it, but there are a few” (Ross). More recently, when asked if he
thought any of his films were underrated, Cusack reached for some of his
own productions: “I’ve made a couple of small movies like Max or Grace
is Gone or incendiary vaudeville things like War, Inc.” (Hill).
Two of those “small movies”—Grace is Gone and War, Inc.—were
made by Cusack’s own film company—yet another way of circumventing,
to a degree, Hollywood rules of engagement and “moving forward” dif-
ferently. In 1992, he and former high school friends Steve Pink and
D.V. DeVincentis formed New Crime Productions, an outgrowth of their
1988 New Criminals Theatre Group in Chicago, which was roughly mod-
elled on friend Tim Robbins’s Actors’ Gang in Los Angeles (IMDb). They
have made recognized indie successes Grosse Pointe Blank, High Fidelity,
Grace is Gone and War, Inc. but also lesser known films like Chicago Cab,
Never Get Outta the Boat, and the made-for-television movie The Jack
Bull, written by his father Dick Cusack, in 1999. Most recently, they made
a film that has received almost no North American press, No somos animals
(2013), the experimental film that Cusack co-wrote with the Argentinian
director Alejandro Agresti. But the company has also produced the enor-
mously successful Hot Tub Time Machine (2010), which has recently
spawned a less successfully reheated sequel. New Crime, then, could be
considered another part of John Cusack’s reluctant star text; it is the vehi-
cle by which Cusack and associates are able to make films that would be
less likely to win backing from the major studios, but it also operates
according to the six-for-them/one-for-me principle that Cusack has so
lamented. Only now the proportion is reversed, and the balance favours
the making of alternative film.
On the many occasions when Cusack critiques the Hollywood celebrity-
commodity production line, he offers a caveat that is worth noting and
analysing. He frequently qualifies his complaints about the consequences
of his stardom by reminding his interlocutor and his public that these are,
after all, “first-world problems,” to use a current phrase. Even in his vitri-
olic “Hollywood Is a Whorehouse” interview in 2014 with The Guardian,
he reminds his interviewer that, “It’s a blessed life” (Barnes). Cusack is at
all times aware of the disingenuous spectacle of wealthy celebrities bewail-
ing their plight; when he is asked by a theatre student on “In the Actor’s
Studio” what it is that he most dislikes about celebrity, he quips, “I’ll cri-
tique celebrity as I’m being interviewed!” (Inside the Actor’s Studio). Even
with a commiserating interviewer such as Bonnie Laufer at the 2014 TIFF,
Cusack is quick to direct his complaints about Hollywood away from indi-
viduals to the culture of Hollywood celebrity; it’s not individual actors or
directors, he specifies; “it’s really just the culture around it where it can be,
can be kinda tough. But,” immediately recalling himself, he adds, “you
know it’s not something that you should really complain about too much
because you still get to make movies. And you still get paid really well”
(Laufer). Asked by Logan Hill about reports that he was less than welcom-
ing to fans or interviewers who wanted to talk about his early films, he
offered the same response: having to speak frequently about his older films
in interviews is “a high-class problem” (Hill). Although it would be easy to
interpret such reminders as a sop to the fans and an appeal to their loyalty,
I see them as more thoroughly interwoven with Cusack’s growing critique
of privilege … and recognition of his own. Together with his critique of
Hollywood culture, they form a spectacle of privileged disadvantage: a
reluctant affective mixture that, as Heather Nunn and Anita Biressi sug-
gest, exposes the social contradiction of believing in the right to live pain-
free lives while grappling with the “emotion work” that arises when
patently leading lives that are anything but painful.
A distinctive aspect of the “emotion work” created by Cusack’s reluc-
tant celebrity is that it can be mapped geographically, but not in an easily
dichotomous way. The love it/hate it sides of celebrity reluctance do
roughly correspond, in Cusack’s life, to the cities of Chicago and Los
Angeles, but, as befits reluctant affect, there are complicated overlaps
between the two sites. Born in the Chicago suburb of Evanston, he began
his acting career when he signed as a teenager with the respected theatrical
agent Ann Geddes. Geddes, with her sister Elizabeth, ran the Geddes
Agency, splitting the business, as does Cusack, between Chicago and Los
Angeles. (Elizabeth closed the Chicago office in 2011 and moved to L.A.,
where Ann had been looking after that arm of the agency for many years.)
Cusack, at 16, went to L.A., and with Ann Geddes’s support he soon won
roles but has maintained residency in Chicago. “I kept saying that I’d
never live in L.A.,” he told one interviewer more recently, “and I didn’t
think I would. But that’s where the work is, and I ended up making a lot
of friends there, and my old friends moved out to Los Angeles too”
(IMDb). The swings of reluctance are discernible here (I said I never
would; I didn’t think I would; but I did) as is its simultaneity; Cusack
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maintains a place of residence in each city. For Cusack, L.A. unquestion-

ably encapsulates the depredations of commodity-driven Hollywood pro-
duction; it is, in his words, “a town full of so many desert crazies, snake-oil
salesmen, carnival barkers and fake spiritualists that it’s impossible to spot
a real one” (IMDb). People in the business can be “vicious and cutthroat
and cruel” (Hill) there. And Cusack has taken up reluctant residence there
with them.
Chicago, on the other hand, appears to figure, for the most part, as an
antidote to Hollywood excess and commodity fetishism, but the distinc-
tion is not an airtight one. On one hand, Cusack says, living in Chicago is
a means of surviving Hollywood: “if you live somewhere else [i.e., other
than L.A.], and you talk to the people who are into other things and have
other interests, you know? And then, to me, you know, I just live in
Chicago and when I’m in Chicago it’s … you know, real life is going on”
(Laufer). “Real,” that is, as opposed to the fake spiritualism of the
Hollywood carnival. One of his most engaging blogs for The Huffington
Post that is not of a political nature is his 2008 piece “Bleary-Eyed in
Bangkok: Daybreak Memories of Chicago,” in which he sings the praises
of his hometown, “the best-kept secret in America” (Cusack, “Bleary-
Eyed”), with special attention to his memories of its sports heroes, music
venues, bars, and theatres. Chicago seems regularly to figure as the ur-city,
the space in which the relentless forward movement of celebrity briefly
slows or even reverses.
However, because celebrity, as perceived reluctantly, is a matter of
both/and rather than either/or, Cusack’s geographical dichotomy ulti-
mately breaks down. Precisely because Chicago is not Hollywood, because
it is not the primary site for celebrity watching, he is, ironically, the object
of more public recognition when he is in the Windy City. As Cusack
explained,
I think that when you’re famous it’s hard to live in a small town. Not that
Chicago is a “small” town, but when I’m there, which I am a lot because I
love it and I still have an apartment there, people stare at me. It’s like I’m
more famous in Chicago. In L.A. and New York, nobody gives a fuck.
(IMDb)
It is the measure of Cusack’s reluctant celebrity that Chicago becomes the

geo-industrial-psychic space in which he both is, and is not, a Hollywood
star.
This curious working of geography in Cusack’s star image is reflective

of a larger truth about Hollywood as an industry and its history: Hollywood
both is and is not L.A. As Michael Richardson has argued, although “the
culture of the American South and Mid-West are as much (if not more)
‘other’ to many Hollywood film makers as foreign cultures…”— with the
Mid-West in particular as “a place for travelling through rather than tarry-
ing in” (2)—it is constitutive of Hollywood in a way that is not often
recognized:
Hollywood itself may be said not to be an indigenous industry, but one

transplanted from elsewhere…. It was not generated out of the Californian
soil, but was formed by people who had “exiled” themselves from their
bases in New York, Chicago and other places east. (3)
People like Ann Geddes… and John Cusack. Chicago is not Hollywood,
and yet, in a curious way, it reluctantly is.
As I have postulated, reluctance is an affective spinning of wheels, and
yet there is always the possibility for the energy that is generated by that
friction not to dissipate but to be stored up for other uses. Politics, I
argue, is the receptacle for John Cusack’s reluctant energies. Like Ann
Cvetkovich, wondering if we might “tarry with the negative” as part of a
political practice (3), I wonder how the mixed negativity of reluctance,
and its tarrying sluggishness, can be turned to a political project, and what
the limits of that project might be. First of all, it is clear that the reluctant
affects that Cusack tarries with in his public conversations have broader
political implications. When he told Genevieve Loh that “We can think
that everything’s about Hollywood or the United States, but it’s not,”
Cusack was not only repeating his familiar critiques about alienating
Hollywood modes of production; he was seeing its belief in its monopoly
on that production as yet another site of a xenophobic American excep-
tionalism. And when he discusses the psychodynamics of the Shadow with
Phil Stutz, it is also clear that both he and Stutz see the Tools method as
much more than an effective strategy for actors to use in their professional
practice. When Cusack asks Stutz why he thinks actors don’t apply his
insights to their personal lives as well as their professional blocks, Stutz
points out that “It’s not just stars that have that problem. In our consumer
society we have a misapprehension about what success is. We believe that
success is the state where you’re so rich, so famous, so esteemed, that you
can basically stop making an effort” (“The Alchemists” Part II). In the
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next instalment of their conversation, in which Cusack shares his own

visualization of his Kurtz-like Shadow, he once again makes the connec-
tion to the larger neoliberal order: “Obviously, it’s a society that denies its
own Shadow in every way,” to which Stutz adds that the ultimate social
goal of his method is to convince people that we all own a larger Shadow:
that we are responsible for each other’s well-being—a proposition that
neoliberal economics denies on both the macro and micro levels (“The
Alchemists” Part III).
When Cusack and Stutz begin to speak of the implications for their
reluctant practice to travel beyond the realm of personal psychodynamics,
they use a metaphor that directly expresses the creation, storage, and
deployment of the energies brought into play by ugly-ish feelings: alchemy.
“We’re trying to use that darkness in an alchemical form,” Cusack reflects;
“We’re trying to turn it into something that creates art” (“The Alchemists”
Part III) and, I would add, progressive political practice. Alchemy, with its
historical overtones of quackery and bad science, does not seem the most
reliable metaphor for the social theorist looking to conceptualize new
social acts of inclusiveness and ethical care for others. But that is precisely
the point. Alchemy’s disrepute marks it as a fittingly reluctant place to
look for socially positive organization and activism. Out of the abjected,
shameful failure of a science comes a way of, in Jack Halberstam’s words,
dismantling “the logics of success and failure.” For “Under certain cir-
cumstances,” Halberstam explains, “failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking,
undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more
cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world” (2–3). Good sci-
ence tells us that nothing can come of nothing (“Speak again,” as Lear
would urge), from the disproval of theories of spontaneous generation to
the refuting of alchemy. But what if alchemy, as a means of thinking about
social good erupting from the reluctant emotional forces that keep us
from marching forward to dominant notions of the good life, becomes a
possible way of conceptualizing a political practice that can emerge from
collective feelings of failure in a neoliberal society?
The same query might be made of John Cusack’s reluctant picture per-
sonality. The slacker misfits plentifully found in Cusack’s oeuvre, from
Rob Gordon to Martin Blank, might reasonably find themselves critiqued
as yet another reactionary outbreak of what has come to be called, more
particularly in Britain, “lad lit.” But Elizabeth Abele, who analyses High
Fidelity’s Rob Gordon as one of her “Gen-X Hamlets,” prefers to read
them as failures more in Halberstam’s sense. “The dismissal of these young
men as merely slackers ignores both the subtext of Gen-X films and the
generation itself ”: their “lack of faith in society” for which their “intimate
relationship with popular culture” (98) functions as an alternative mode of
engaging with the world.
Where has John Cusack as a political celebrity placed the energies stored
by his reluctance? His politicization, which commentators often refer to as
of recent provenance, is actually long standing, but it is only relatively
recently that he has openly brought it into his star profile. Born into a
politically activist Chicago family (his mother Nancy Cusack is an ener-
getic social activist; both she and his father, actor Dick Cusack, were
friendly with the anti-racist, anti-Vietnam-war activist brothers Daniel and
Philip Berrigan), Cusack defined his political stance early. At the age of 17,
in 1983, he discovered “the most important book I’ve ever read”: The
Noam Chomsky Reader: “I had my countercultural instincts” (before he
was seventeen!), “but this book validated them, gave them context, a gen-
uinely radical way of looking at the world” (Spark 55). By the time he
formed the New Criminals Theatre Group, five years later, he was well
advanced in his thinking about the relationship between art and political
dissent; he got its name from a broadcast signal interruption that occurred
in Chicago on November 22nd, 1987. A man wearing a Max Headroom
mask and a female accomplice dressed in a French maid outfit managed to
intercept two Chicago television stations’ broadcast signals. This prank, in
turn, inspired a similar December 1989 interruption of one of Ronald
Reagan’s speeches. “As the Feds came in and tried to catch [them],”
Cusack remembered of the original disruption, “they realized that with
the new technologies” they “had, there was no law on the books against
what they had done, so they had invented a new crime.” Smiling at the
memory, he told James Lipton, “And I do believe that film and art and
theatre … should have a bit of a revolutionary spirit to them. You know,
you want to throw a brick through a window once in a while” (Inside the
Actor’s Studio). That Reagan’s presidency should have figured so strongly
in Cusack’s nascent politicization is no coincidence; he also told Lipton
that “When I was in high school, Ronald Reagan was President and they
were joking about nuclear war, and I thought it was a scary time” (Inside
the Actor’s Studio).
In those early years, there was no recognition that Cusack was a politi-
cized celebrity in the making; that would have to wait for his mid-career
and a growing sense that his politics were becoming part of his star text.
As Cusack made more political films in the 2000s he concurrently sought
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both print and digital platforms for his political writing: The Huffington
Post (in the years that it was doing political journalism) and Twitter. When
Sarah Thomas wrote in 2014 that the “overtly political” tweets were signs
of a politicization that is “an acknowledged but minor feature of Cusack’s
popular star persona” (251), she was just on the cusp of a significant shift
in that persona in 2014–2015: one that would bring Cusack’s politics to
the fore. In those years, Cusack’s politics becomes the subject of conversa-
tion in much of the publicity he was doing, for the reason that a good bit
of that publicity is now appearing in political venues. “I just say what I
think,” he told The (sympathetic) Daily Beast’s Marlowe Stern in April of
2015, “and if people don’t like it, that’s OK” (Marlowe Stern). Significant
amounts of air/print space are devoted to Cusack’s political activism in
those interviews, and Cusack becomes both increasingly explicit about his
views and increasingly sophisticated in the political language he uses to
espouse them:
If you’re speaking about basic Rubicon lines that should or shouldn’t be

crossed, if you can’t be against state-sanctioned murder being made accept-
able or economic policy, making the difference between language and
meaning so absurd that Orwell and Kafka laugh, these are not heavy-duty
things, these are just basic, Cartesian things. They’re common sense, and
were debated constitutionally a long time ago. (Marlowe Stern)
Reactions to Cusack’s increasingly politicized star image have been var-

ied; Cusack has commented that he feels his political interests are so
removed from the industry’s interests that they are met only with gaping
apathy; asked by Mark Guarino of Salon if he’s been treated differently
since he has become more explicit about his politics, Cusack replies, “For
me, I haven’t really sensed that anyone gives a shit,” but he hopes that the
increasing level of visibility of his political activism could raise some aware-
ness: “I think if you stand up and feel like you’re a grandstander and
maybe I have, then I think that’s a different deal. I think if you actually say
what you think, I think people respect it. Even if they disagree with you…”
(Guarino). Explicitly aligning his star image with politics, then, has been a
conscious strategy to make people aware, to provoke conversations even
with those whose political opinions diverge from his.
Judging from the media coverage of Cusack’s political activism, this
strategy appears to have worked; news of Cusack’s progressive politics has
made some media commentators distinctly uncomfortable. I have already
mentioned the stir caused by Cusack’s “Hollywood is a Whorehouse and

People Go Mad” interview for Maps to the Stars. Around the same time—
the spring of 2015—media outlets reported that Cusack had declared in
an interview that Obama was worse than Bush. The interview in question,
with The Daily Beast, offers the needed context that their headline (“John
Cusack Talks Love and Mercy, Drug Trips, and the Ways Obama is ‘Worse
than Bush’”) silenced:
Well, Obama has certainly extended and hardened the cement on a lot of
Bush’s post-9/11 Terror Inc. policies, so he’s very similar to Bush … that
way. His domestic policy is a bit different, but when you talk about drones,
the American Empire, the NSA, civil liberties, attacks on journalism and
whistleblowers, he’s as bad or worse than Bush. (Marlow Stern)
Not quite as uncompromising a blanket statement as the Daily Beast’s

headline suggests, and certainly one that is not unusual among American
progressives on the left. As he told Mark Guarino a few months later, “The
country’s moved so far to the right. You think, on domestic policy Obama
is to the right of Nixon” (Guarino): again, not unusual as a position in
leftist circles. When Cusack read The Daily Beast’s headline, though, he
called them out on their disregard for the context of his comments in a
series of tweets: “Shame on U – whomever is doing headlines & editing
the interview for taking a long conversation abt. Brian Wilson/and turn-
ing it into salacious gossipy eye catching out of context headline grabbing
manipulative bullshit – I spoke” (“Shame on U”; “and turning it”). Other
news outlets, taking The Beast’s headline bait, lashed back at Cusack; as the
headline for Hunter Schwarz’s The Washington Post piece sneered, “John
Cusack Says Obama is Worse than Bush. But He’s Just a Guy with a
Boombox” (Schwarz)—using the iconic scene from Say Anything to
attempt to discredit Cusack as an immature celebrity trading on his public
charm. Two years earlier, Carole Cadwalladr from The Guardian had dis-
missed Cusack in similar terms, as a jejune political parvenu: “like Clooney,
he’s a committed actor-activist-of the rails-against-the-neocons-on-
Huffington-Post variety. He’s friends with Naomi Klein, posts endless
fanboy pictures of himself with Arundhati Roy on Twitter….” Cadwalladr’s
project is to send Cusack back into the palace of art where (she thinks) he
belongs: “He obviously has a talent for writing [films] that I can’t help
thinking could be better channelled elsewhere than celebrity angsting on
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the Huff Post” (Cadwalladr). Clearly, Cusack’s increasingly politicized star

image has attracted far uglier feelings than apathy.
In the act of establishing this increasingly explicit and controversial
Chomskyian political star image, John Cusack makes room, yet again, for
an implicit theory of reluctance. In his June 2015 interview with Salon, he
suggests that his political activism comes naturally to him as an artist who
is hardwired to resist authority…to an extent: “I don’t want to join any
club. You know, my ego does and I want all the things that I really want.
But intrinsically I want to be an individual” (Guarino). In a frank move,
Cusack speaks of desiring and not desiring what capitalism has to offer—
frank because he acknowledges the pull of Hollywood-stardom-fuelled
consumer culture. Like recognizing the workings of the Shadow, on the
political level, Cusack shows how a politics of reluctance, with its acknowl-
edgment of the repressed, can open up activism not only to those whose
anti-authoritarian politics seem to have always been secure, but also to
individuals who frankly have desires for the commodities and cultural capi-
tal that the capitalist system can (selectively) offer.
Once again, reluctance fuels rather than dissipates political energies,
and Cusack directs that stored energy into the building of political alli-
ances, especially those with well-recognized figures in the progressive
movement, like Naomi Klein, the anti-globalization, anti-capitalist, envi-
ronmentalist writer and filmmaker. Cusack, when he was writing for The
Huffington Post, did a two-part interview with Klein on the occasion of
the publication of her Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism in
2007. In turn, War, Inc., in which private corporations with links to high-
ranking U.S. politicians take advantage of war-torn countries, just one
year later, shows the ways in which Klein’s ideas, particularly her 2004
Harper’s article “Baghdad Year Zero,” have proved generative for Cusack.
In recent years, Cusack has consolidated his ties to major figures on the
activist left, from Glenn Greenwald and Laura Poitras, the journalist and
documentary filmmaker, respectively, who became Edward Snowden’s
first confidantes, to Indian activist and writer Arundhati Roy and whistle-
blowers Julian Assange, Daniel Ellsberg, and Snowden himself. In 2012,
with Ellsberg, Greenwald, Poitras, and others, Cusack formed the Freedom
of the Press Foundation, which crowdfunds to support journalistic free-
dom. In January of 2014, Snowden joined their Board of Directors.
Although sceptics, like the aforementioned Carole Cadwalladr, would
dismiss Cusack’s building of networks with fellow activists as fashionable
“fanboy”ing, it is, on the contrary, the building of effective alliances across
cultural and historical fields of political endeavour. The meeting of Edward

Snowden, Daniel Ellsberg, and Arundhati Roy that Cusack arranged and
attended in the winter of 2014–2015 shows him forging a political activist
circuit that is, I argue, fuelled by his reluctant approach to fame. As Cusack
recounts in one of the series of three articles he and Arundhati Roy wrote
about the meeting, “Things That Can and Cannot Be Said,” his occa-
sional, intense conversations with Roy about surveillance, military-
industrial complexes, and whistleblowing led him to imagine the meeting:
one morning, while scanning such depressing news items, he “began to
imagine a conversation between him [Edward Snowden] and Daniel
Ellsberg…. And then, interestingly, in my imagination a third person
made her way into the room—the writer Arundhati Roy. It occurred to
me that trying to get the three of them together would be a fine thing to
do” (“Things that Can and Cannot be Said” Part 1). And so, after calling
Roy in Delhi at 3 a.m., and after a complicated process of obtaining the
necessary visas, they met, in Snowden’s Moscow hotel room.
Roy, for her part, in writing about how she came to do political work
with Cusack, appears to associate Cusack’s reluctant fame with his activ-
ism. In explaining why she agreed to Cusack’s plan to meet with Snowden
and Ellsberg, she cited two reasons: first of all, Cusack was, in her view,
one of the first public commentators to publicly voice his support for
Snowden in an essay and, second, she recalls, “I’d walked the streets of
Chicago with him, a hulking fellow hunched into his black hoodie, trying
not to be recognized” (Roy and Cusack 31). It is as though Cusack’s
reluctant stance regarding his celebrity—his simultaneous willingness to
use it in order to gain a public hearing for a pro-whistleblower point of
view and his desire to evade recognition as a celebrity on the streets of his
hometown—impressed Roy, a public figure who has embraced the chance
to use the celebrity she gained as a result of the global success of her 1997
Booker-winning novel The God of Small Things to, among other things,
support Kashmiri separatism, critique Israel’s treatment of Palestinians,
oppose the building of dams, and criticize India’s nuclear policy.
In her account of the meeting with Snowden, which she dubbed the
“Un-Summit,” Roy explains why such an event is no media stunt: “because
the world is a millipede that inches forward on millions of real conversa-
tions. And this, certainly, was a real one” (Roy). What is especially produc-
tive about this meeting is its bringing together of two widely separated
generations of American whistleblowers; as Roy remembers, the meeting
began with an intense, detailed and acronym-filled conversation between
60 L. YORK
the then-31-year-old Snowden and the then-83-year-old Ellsberg. The

international coverage that the meeting of these two men attracted served
an important purpose: to remind Americans, in particular, of the genera-
tions and legacy of American whistleblowers, especially in the face of the
broadscale denunciation of Snowden that erupted with his revelations in
2013. Cusack and Roy published their collected essays and conversations
arising from the “Un-summit” in 2016 as Things That Can and Cannot
Be Said.
Such a circle of political allegiance, I argue, intersects with another
form of alliance that Cusack has built over the course of his reluctant
celebrity career: links with other reluctant stars. Filming Being John
Malkovich, in 2000, was a crucial moment in this process of building an
intertextual web of reluctant celebrity, for it allowed Cusack to bounce his
increasingly reluctant star text off that of another, at that point, much
more recognizably reluctant star. As Scott Repass writes in his review of
the movie in Film Quarterly, Malkovich was perfect for the film because
he “stays out of the limelight—as much as is possible for an actor—by
avoiding dealings with tabloids and entertainment magazines and by not
having a press agent” (29). This sounds strikingly like John Cusack’s
IMDb entry some decades later. Indeed, around the time the film was
made, Malkovich was quoted as saying that he was reluctant to even asso-
ciate himself with the star known as “John Malkovich”: “I don’t really
have a relation to this person called ‘John Malkovich,’ who’s supposedly
in the public domain,” the actor admitted. “So I’m already quite removed
from ‘John Malkovich.’ He’s not even a cousin once removed” (Repass).
Once Malkovich signed on for the film—and he was the first to do so—
other actors signed quite readily, including Cusack. This alliance with
Malkovich has persisted through Cusack’s twenty-first-century career; as
recently as October 2014, when he was doing publicity for Maps to the
Stars, he made a reference to keeping in touch with Malkovich—to discuss
their similarly critical views of Hollywood production. He recalls having
dinner with him in Puerto Rico, where Malkovich was filming the televi-
sion series Crossbones, “and he was saying that the business in which we
made movies together is gone. Anything that would be adult-themed—
The Grifters or Being John Malkovich—that isn’t out there” (Hill).
More recently, in the 2015 Brian Wilson biopic Love & Mercy, Cusack
cements yet another relationship between his star text and that of another
reluctant celebrity. Wilson, surprisingly, agreed to do some publicity for
the film, in spite of what journalist Scott Tobias called “his well-known
reticence to [sic] doing press” (Tobias). This interview, released on June

5th of 2015, is fascinating not only for what the two men say, but mainly
for the interaction between them. There is a palpable sense, in the inter-
view, of how difficult it indeed is for Wilson to do the press work; it comes
through in his halting responses, but John Cusack at all times shows him
support and affection. For example, when the interviewer asks Wilson
about the documentaries made of the Pet Sounds recording sessions, and
how those sessions were not only “arduous” but “also joyful,” Wilson’s
response was raw in its frank emotion: “I felt scared. I felt a lot of anxiety
because I knew that if I didn’t get the band to sound good, then I was a
loser…” Cusack responded in a way that both supported Wilson in assur-
ing him that he was anything but a “loser” and validated his feelings of
anxiety: “you made everybody feel good…. He was in total control. It
seemed to be. I’m sure [now turning to Wilson] you had anxiety about it”
(Tobias). In this moving exchange, we see not only the bonding of two
reluctant celebrities but also, I argue, an externalized reluctant interior
monologue of a reluctant celebrity—it might just as well be John Cusack—
who is, and is not, in “total control” of his Shadow.
Cusack’s alliance building with political activists and with fellow reluc-
tant celebrities may make it sound as though his activism takes place either
in the global anti-neoliberalism networks or at the site of Hollywood film-
making. But in recent years, these two fields of action that are fuelled by
Cusack’s reluctant celebrity have overlapped. A perfect case in point is the
controversy that erupted over Spike Lee’s 2015 film Chi-Raq, a south-side
Chicago retelling of Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, the Greek drama in which
the women of Greece withhold sex from men as a protest against their
participation in the Peloponnesian war. Its title, a merging of the words
“Chicago” and “Iraq,” drew fire for the way in which some critics saw it
reinforcing negative views of the south side as violent and unsavoury, but
the name was a well known one used by south-side rappers to refer to the
neighbourhood. When Chicago mayor Rahm Emanuel called Lee on the
carpet for damaging the city’s tourist industry, and the Chicago city coun-
cil threatened to hold back municipal tax credits for the film unless Lee
changed his title, Lee, cast members, and people in the community fought
back by staging public protests in Chicago. John Cusack, who plays a
white south-side preacher based on the south-side activist Catholic priest
Father Michael Pfleger, came in for some hometown criticism for “let-
ting” the New Yorker Lee tarnish the good name of the city. In response,
both at protests (where he appeared alongside Lee, co-star Jennifer
62 L. YORK
Hudson, who lost her mother, brother, and nephew to gun violence in the
city in 2008, and Father Pfleger), Cusack made impassioned pleas that
racially specific gun violence in Chicago take centre stage as a concern,
rather than politicians’ and businesspeople’s concern for the city’s (thriv-
ing) tourism industry. “Art must be courageous,” he said at a May 14,
2015 press conference, “and everyone who wants a more peaceful America
will understand where the heart of this film is. Put it this way: I am 100
percent sure that the great city of Chicago can survive a film of conscience,
just like it did Transformers” (Messer). Those online commenters who
bridled at his comparison, finding Transformers an insufficiently serious
note to sound in a statement on gun violence, missed the point of Cusack’s
satirical comment: big-money-maker blockbusters rarely receive the politi-
cal scrutiny directed at politically progressive risk-taking films. In express-
ing, as a public figure, how Hollywood filmmaking intersects with
community activism, Cusack, the reluctant celebrity, is newly energized,
and as part of a politicized alliance of community and industry agents, his
activism spans both worlds.
From his early struggles with fame, wanting and not wanting it, to his
more recent, exuberantly political star image, John Cusack has found a
way to tarry with reluctance, to dance with his Shadow. And in so doing,
he has unearthed the spectre of a reluctant neoliberal capitalist America,
that both does and does not want the “good” things in life that non-stop
commodity production brings.
Notes
1. Such sports-fan postings are consonant with, for example, his 1988 film
Eight Men Out, a cinematic treatment of the fixing of the 1911 World Series.
Director John Sayles even joked that he picked Cusack and Charlie Sheen
not so much because they were stars on the rise but because they could play
ball. In an important sense, this was not a joke; working with a smaller bud-
get that made painstaking digital alterations an impossibility, Sayles needed
actors who could move convincingly enough like ball players.
2. Other Fall Out Boy songs make references to Cusack, such as “A Little Less
Sixteen Candles…A Little More Touch Me” and the video for “The Best of
Me”/“The Starting Line” that parodies Say Anything’s iconic boom-box
scene.
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CHAPTER 3
Robert De Niro’s (In)articulate Reluctance
On the seventh floor of the building that houses actor Robert De Niro’s
New York restaurant, the Tribeca Grill, hangs a photograph of Greta Garbo.
It is there not only to mark Garbo’s obvious connections to Manhattan as
a long-time resident, whose solitary perambulations of its midtown streets
in her later years are legendary. The image is also resonant in a very specific
way for America’s most famous Method actor. His father, the painter
Robert De Niro Sr., was fascinated by Garbo, especially in her role in Anna
Christie (1930), her first talkie film, publicized on posters with the slogan
“Garbo Talks!” She was a recurring image in many of his paintings; and so,
given De Niro’s promotion of his late father’s work in a 2014 HBO docu-
mentary, and his hanging of his father’s paintings in the Tribeca Grill as well
as the De Niro-owned Greenwich Hotel next door, it makes sense that
Garbo’s broodingly beautiful image should find a place there.
But critics, academics, biographers, and journalists have found plenty of
other reasons to invoke the legend of a reclusive Garbo when they discuss
the artistry of the painter’s son, particularly when they try to account for
De Niro Jr.’s well-known taciturnity, protection of personal privacy, and
halting, inarticulate interviews. De Niro, according to these sources,
doesn’t talk. Playboy introduced their painfully fractious 1989 interview
with him by noting that “De Niro is almost as famous for his silence as for
his movie roles. He has thrown a Garbo-like cloak of mystery around him-
self, leaving gossip columnists a diet of hearsay. He apparently looks on
interviews as a form of torture” (Grobel). Their interview, intermittently

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punctuated by De Niro shutting off journalist Lawrence Grobel’s tape

recorder or glancing at his watch, would appear to bear out this claim.
Patrick Agan, in his book Robert De Niro: The Man, the Myth and the
Movies, notes that, in the 1980s, as the full extent of De Niro’s aversion to
interviews became clear, journalists would routinely refer to him as “the
male Garbo” (16, 76). John Parker, in his 1995 biography, ascribed De
Niro’s Garboisms to his Method acting principles: “He kept silent, like
Garbo, and stuck rigidly to Stella Adler’s tenet that you should never
reveal yourself 100 per cent” (235). Rex Reed observed, “When the cam-
era isn’t turning, he turns into Greta Garbo, shunning all communica-
tion” (Levy 172). De Niro’s most recent biographer, Shawn Levy, points
out that, during the filming of New York, New York (1977), De Niro “had
been installed, aptly enough, in Greta Garbo’s former dressing room on
the MGM lot” (199). The spatial propinquity must have been suggestive
to others who were on the set of that film; De Niro’s stand-in for that film,
actor Jon Cutler, observed of the star, “He’s truly non-verbal. He would
have been a great silent movie star” (Dougan 13). Guess which one.
The Garbo comparisons have been rife, journalists have called him
reclusive (Allan Hunter, Bosworth 103), a sphinx (Allan Hunter, Leonard),
and even his closest professional associates testify to his unknowability:
long-time collaborator Martin Scorsese called him “mysterious. He never
talks about his personal life. I didn't know for years that his father was a
painter,” and another frequent director-collaborator Brian De Palma
observed that, “It takes years to know Bobby, because he spends so much
time in silence” (Bosworth 174, 172). But for all this public testimony to
De Niro’s hermetic silence, there is a compelling counter-current that
marks his approach to public performance as reluctant rather than reclu-
sive: his cultural pervasiveness and his increasing availability, whether as
an actor (with, at the time of writing, 109 acting credits), founder-director
of the Tribeca Film Festival, and public face of the city of New York and in
particular its Tribeca neighbourhood. Indeed, some critics of his career
consider that he has made himself too available, with too many roles of late
in what some would consider down-market or popular films, too willing
to lend his name and image to promotional ventures with corporations
like American Express, for whom he did a commercial in their “My Life,
My Card” series in 2005. Greg Smith, alone of De Niro’s academic critics,
apprehends the irony inherent in De Niro being, as Patricia Bosworth
paradoxically phrases it, “a public recluse” (103): in his essay, “Choosing
Silence: Robert De Niro and the Celebrity Interview,” Smith argues that
ROBERT DE NIRO’S (IN)ARTICULATE RELUCTANCE 69
De Niro has made himself available but in what many might consider the
wrong way; rather than fulfilling the implicit celebrity interview pact,
which holds that the celebrity will, in some measure, divulge aspects of a
self thought to be underlying the public image, De Niro offers, instead,
through his acting method, his body, using that body as the basis for a
physical preparation for a role, most dramatically when he controversially
gained sixty pounds to play boxer Jake La Motta in Raging Bull: “To say
that De Niro is silent in the discourse about his own stardom,” Smith
concludes, “is to overlook the fact that De Niro offers his body fairly freely
into the discourse” (50). I argue that De Niro’s body-focused acting
method is only one way, and only an occasional way more typical of his
early career, that he might be read as overly available, and that one needn’t
turn to his on-screen performances to find instances of his availability in
discourses of his celebrity. Eschewing the Garbo comparison, and with it,
as I have already argued, its assumption that the famous silent film star was
herself only ever reclusive, I claim that Robert De Niro’s inarticulacy
speaks: it speaks of a profound reluctance that, like that of John Cusack,
stores affective energy for deployment elsewhere.
Unlike Cusack’s fluent and self-aware articulations of his reluctance, as
it relates to Hollywood means of production or current American domes-
tic and foreign policy, Robert De Niro’s reluctance is more difficult to
descry, for it operates through obstructed speech and embodied perfor-
mance. De Niro “speaks!” but he often does so haltingly, intermittently,
selectively, charting a movement through cultural space that is, at once,
both forwards and backwards, in the very mode that I have termed reluc-
tant. The lexicon of this reluctant movement features the offering of
simultaneous “yes” and “no” responses to paths, possibilities, or proposi-
tions that are placed before him. And while John Cusack is correspond-
ingly much more explicit about his political projects that I argue are the
focus of his saved reluctant energies, De Niro’s politics are much more
modestly displayed, sometimes covert, and sometimes puzzling. Like
Cusack, in his formation of New Crime Productions, De Niro pours his
diverted energies into the Tribeca Film Festival, which he founded in
2002, and into his advocacy for Tribeca itself, but decidedly unlike Cusack,
he embraces capitalism as the apparatus of choice for that act of
diversion.
Partly because De Niro is not, for the most part, articulate about his reluc-
tance, but performs it, as Smith would say, through his body, it is not as
well understood, decoded, or received as Cusack’s. For though Cusack has
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c ertainly been criticized, as I have shown, by those who feel he should stay
out of the political realm altogether, he has, more often than not, been
accorded respect by those who perceive his reluctance as authentic, and in
tune with his picture personality as a diffident, cynical—but voluble—
outsider. Instead, the instances of De Niro’s reluctant public speech have
been received with uncomprehending frustration and even antipathy. As the
film critic Barry Paris observes in the journal American Film, “It’s ironic that
the very thing that draws people to De Niro on the screen—this powerful,
largely nonverbal projection of character, emotion and meaning—is what
baffles and annoys … people about him offscreen” (33).
Interviews are the primary site for this clash and disappointment, and a
whole subgenre of journalistic writing on De Niro is devoted to descrip-
tions of his reticent interviews; Allan Hunter observes, “Ask a straightfor-
ward question and it may provoke blood-chilling silence or a lengthy
pause followed by a mumbled, inconsequential response. In an interview,
every word is a prisoner, every sentence an agony” (Allan Hunter). Stephen
Hunter, interviewing the actor for The Washington Post in 2006, dwells on
the tension pervading the room: “answers to questions … seem to go
nowhere, then pop like a soap bubble into nothingness, leaving silence”
(Stephen Hunter). “A lousy interview,” his otherwise reasonably balanced
and well-disposed biographer Shawn Levy pronounces him: “grudgy,
stammering, terse, evasive, sometimes adversarial, and almost always itchy
to end it” (397).
Such a performance breaks the implicit celebrity interview pact not only
by refusing to play along with the ritual offering of some aspect of a “real”
subject thought to be “behind” the celebrity persona; it also breaks the
pact by refusing the implied division of labour involved in such an exchange
of information for publicity. As Joshua Gamson has plentifully shown in
Claims to Fame, the celebrity publicity industry is a matter of “negotia-
tions and skirmishes” (79), a tug of war in which cultural “workers actively
battle each other throughout the production process” (107). Applied to
the celebrity interview, this negotiated skirmish involves a canny awareness
on the part of journalist, celebrity, and, usually, publicist, that the inter-
viewee will play along—but only to predetermined extents—to give the
journalist something, some tidbit, however small, in return for which the
celebrity receives (acceptable) exposure and publicity. But because De
Niro short circuits that exchange, journalists end up describing their inter-
views in terms of unproductive labour, both theirs and, sometimes, his.
A. O. Scott, interviewing De Niro in 2012 for The New York Times
Magazine, launches into the usual tropes of the difficult interview, and
notes in particular that De Niro “sat with his feet planted on the floor and
his hands flat on the arms of a deep leather chair, and the answers to my
questions did not always come readily or easily. It seemed like work”
(Scott). It seems, given Scott’s metaphors, like the sufferings of a man
strapped down in an interrogation cell. But this trope of the difficult inter-
view also testifies to the non-productive labours of the journalist who
comes away devoid of their scoop; Johanna Schneller, interviewing De
Niro for the Canadian seniors’ magazine Zoomer, in setting the usual con-
text for the Herculean effort awaiting her as an interviewer, creates a
moment of sympathy for a fellow journalist when she recalls that she saw
De Niro a few years earlier “onstage … at the Tribeca Film Festival … in
front of 3,000 people, and he said so little that his interlocutor was openly
mopping sweat off his face” (57).
I have found evidence that De Niro is quite conscious of this breaking
of the celebrity interview pact, of sending the journalist home with noth-
ing to show for their labours; in his thorny 1988 Rolling Stone interview
(“‘How did you like that answer?’ he asked with an odd mixture of defi-
ance and contriteness after one effective evasion”), he speaks about a pre-
vious, unauthorized profile in Vanity Fair that was based solely on the
third-party testimony of friends:
I didn’t want to do it. I just sort of stayed out of it. I didn’t want to be—not
that they were doing that—but I didn’t want to be shaken down: We’re
writing an article about you. If you talk to us, you’ll only set the record
straight. Well, who cares about setting the record straight? (Schruers 45)
Despite his contrite-seeming acknowledgment that the Vanity Fair jour-

nalist was not, in fact, “shaking him down,” that is the overwhelming
impression that De Niro’s statement creates: that there was a proposed
(or, more to De Niro’s mind, threatened) trade of information for good
(or at least better) publicity that De Niro rejected outright. Like the mix-
ture of “defiance” and “contriteness” that characterizes his evasive answers
during this interview, his refusal of the celebrity interview pact minimally
deploys politeness scripts that superficially gesture towards the fulfilment
of the make-nice pact while incontrovertibly breaking the implied
contract.
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This recurring journalistic narrative of the De Niro interview as a scene

of difficult labour has become so well worn that its repetitions become
tinged with a distinctly cruel tone which I suggest is tied to a nascent
awareness that the repeated narrative is wearing thin, depriving the jour-
nalist of the possibility of saying anything new about this most cagey of
subjects. And since providing a new twist or scoop is the raison d’être of
each new interview with a celebrity, the foreclosure of this opportunity
sparks acrimony. As Shawn Levy keenly observes,
by then [the late ‘80s], seeking an interview with De Niro and then writing
up how frustrating the experience was had become its own trope of maga-
zine journalism. And the tenor had shifted from amusement with a fellow
who seemed to struggle with words offscreen to a mystery about a reclusive
movie star to waves of thinly veiled hostility … and superiority. (399)
The hostility Levy perceives is, I believe, palpable in earlier profiles too,
and it gives rise to humorous jibes that are chronic in this subgenre of
horrible-De Niro-interview journalism. Canadian journalist, Bruce
Kirkland, for example, cruelly jokes that “Robert De Niro never completes
a sentence but he rarely starts one, so you hardly notice” (ctd. Smith 49).
Journalists vie with each other to cite the most humorously awkward of
De Niro’s recalcitrant replies: “his interrogator fumbles to fill [the silence]
with hardballs like, ‘So, what kinds of movies did you see when you were
a kid?’ Answer: ‘You know, double features’” (Stephen Hunter). And
Martha Sherrill of The Washington Post is downright contemptuous of her
subject: “For whatever reason—fame, respect, the brutal characters he’s
played so well—people are afraid of poor tongue-tied Robert De Niro
even while he stares sleepily at the hotel carpet and stumbles over his sen-
tence constructions” (Sherrill). Sherrill draws upon these undocumented
“people” who are overly respectful of De Niro several times in her profile
of the actor—but her own condescension makes clear that she is not one
of them. Evidently, the price of not respecting the celebrity-interview pact
is a lack of journalistic protection—and even respect.
The clearest sign of this loss of protection is the way in which many
journalists narrating their difficult De Niro interviewers eschew the usual
editorial enhancements of their subjects’ words. In reading through the
available De Niro interviews, I was struck by how these early- to mid-
career interviews backed up the interviewers’ claims of their difficult
labours by transcribing De Niro’s words in a presumably exact, and there-

fore halting, way that offers a devastating exposé of his inarticulateness:
Bernardo Bertolucci once told me that I became an actor to get out certain
emotions that I couldn’t get out in life. And I thought about that for a long
time and, uh, uh, uh…um…uh…I think that’s right (Kaye)
I guess…ummm…because…the ummm…the ummm…a lot of free clothes.
It’s GQ…umm, but I want it to be more interesting. Frankly, if there was no
interview, I’d be just as happy, but I have to justify getting the clothes
(Richman qtd in Levy)
Yeah, well … I think that … umm…you know… uh-hah (Schickel 68)
I, uh, can’t, ah, umm … Well, let’s, ah, see uh, I, uh (Thompson 26)
Of all the De Niro critics who have made an issue of De Niro’s constipated
speech, Greg Smith alone, to my knowledge, has partly ascribed it to a
departure from normal journalistic practice; as he rightly notes, “Usually
a reply in such halting, ‘naturalistic’ speech would be cleaned up, and awk-
ward false starts would be edited out” (54). He argues that this editorial
choice has the effect of othering De Niro, and the resulting passages high-
light, in their roughened linguistic state, the constructed nature of the
co-produced celebrity interview. It also, to my mind, marks De Niro’s
reluctant transgression of that information-publicity exchange pact: De
Niro both gives and does not “give” an interview, and these halting tran-
scripts denote a reluctant speech that is simultaneously offered and
withheld.
Such editorial representations are specific, of course, to the print
medium, but there is enough visual and aural evidence, especially online,
of De Niro’s verbal blockage to make his inarticulacy a case of much more
than journalistic payback. His 1981 Best Actor Oscar acceptance speech is
still available online; biographer John Parker calls it “one of the most
uncomfortable, stumbling acceptance speeches in the history of the
Oscars” (127), and even though Parker is De Niro’s least sympathetic
biographer (another biographer tartly notes that he “seems to regret the
fact that he cannot accuse De Niro of having run a Soviet gulag” [Kenny
147]), his assessment is not unreasonable. In the television interview
genre, De Niro’s one and only interview on the Late Show with David
Letterman in 2010, also still available online, has become a prototype for
awkward interviews; appearing with his close colleague Dustin Hoffman
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to promote Little Fockers, De Niro remained so quiet that Hoffman jokily

assured Letterman, “I am the De Niro whisperer,” and proceeded to
answer most of De Niro’s questions for him. As the embarrassing segment
drew to a close, Letterman, hoping to win at least some sympathetic
laughter, and perhaps unleash some of his own exasperated hostility,
assured De Niro, “Bob, I just want to say this is like jury duty, you won’t
have to be here for another seven years” (Letterman). (In 2015, the Late
Show’s new host, Stephen Colbert sought to redress that legendary inter-
view disaster; welcoming De Niro who was promoting the film Joy, he
invited him to enjoy, in the words of the segment title, “A Cold Martini
and Silence,” 18 Dec 2015.) In yet another format, the DVD commen-
tary, De Niro is similarly taciturn; on the commentary for Meet the Parents,
he introduces himself, “I’m Bob De Niro,” and then falls silent. Prompted
by the director, Jay Roach, who is clearly desperate to engage his star in
some—any—conversation about the film, “You always seem to really like
these cats, Bob. Was that just acting, or did you actually have a connec-
tion?,” De Niro barely obliges: “Well, I like animals, I like cats.” Roach
gamely tries again: “Were you able to keep track of which of the three cats
you were working with each time?” De Niro: “I thought we only had
two” (Meet the Parents).
Much ink has been spilled by those who seek some explanation for the
actor’s taciturnity, but what they all share is an agreement that De Niro is
unquestionably, maddeningly inarticulate, and that his condition requires
explanation and, implicitly, disciplining. One of the crueller theories,
linked to those aggressive journalistic responses to De Niro’s refusal to
play nice in interviews, is that, put simply, there is nobody home. When
Art Linson, producer for The Untouchables (1987) met De Niro for the
first time, he called up the director, Brian De Palma in the middle of the
night to bemoan the casting choice of “this guy about one hundred and
fifty pounds, with a ponytail, looked thirty, weird, barely articulate”; he
could not imagine how such a taciturn person could deliver a nuanced
portrayal of Al Capone, a decidedly non-taciturn subject (Brode 180).
Mark LeFanu, briefly testing the possibility of writing a biography of De
Niro in 1985, before the slew of extant biographies began to appear,
watched, increasingly nonplussed, as De Niro gave one of his recalcitrant
interviews onstage at the UK’s National Film and Television School in
Beaconsfield and concluded, “All along I had been searching for a life—
and perhaps there was no life to discover” (48). David Weaver, reviewing
John Parker’s biography, mined the same theory to the point of insult—
“on those rare occasions when [De Niro] has spoken out publicly he has
proven so inarticulate that he emerges as a sort of naïf genius” (Weaver)—
coming dangerously close to calling De Niro an idiot savant.
Shifting the critique away from De Niro’s person and towards his act-
ing methods—but barely—Pauline Kael offered a similar criticism of De
Niro’s putative emptiness. An early admirer of De Niro, Kael struggled
with some of his mid-career performances, and by the time he made True
Confessions in 1981, she warned that
something has gone wrong with Robert De Niro’s acting. In The Godfather
II, he was so intense that he seemed in danger of imploding. Now, in True
Confessions, when he’s quiet and almost expressionless, there’s no inten-
sity—there’s nothing. He could be a potato, except that he’s thoroughly
absorbed in the process of doing nothing. (Brode 143)
The very next year, in reviewing The King of Comedy, she renewed her
attack, accusing De Niro of transferring his emptiness to his characters:
A great actor merges his soul with that of his characters—or, at least, gives
us the illusion that he does. De Niro in disguise denies his characters a soul.
It’s not merely that he hollows himself out and becomes Jake La Motta, or
Des the priest in True Confessions, or Rupert Pupkin (in King of Comedy)—
he makes them hollow, too, and merges with the characters’ emptiness.
(Brode 9)1
Kael’s critique, though it claims to operate at the level of De Niro’s acting

method, contributes to the growing suspicion that there is, in a more ad
hominem sense, no one home.
Greg Smith offers an academically respectable version of this theory
when he argues that, “Robert De Niro becomes a structuring absence in
the discourse about himself” (45). He reads the increasingly prevalent view
that De Niro has no “centre” as a challenge to Western assumptions about
an agential private subjectivity that underlies and directs the public perfor-
mance of self. But he also argues that this emptying out of De Niro’s sub-
jectivity sets him apart from “other reclusive film stars to whom he is
sometimes compared (Garbo, Brando)” because in their case “the existence
of a ‘real’ though elusive personality is never brought into question” (53).
I would, instead, say that the theory of De Niro as hollowed out, devoid of
ego, is only one of many competing explanations of his taciturnity; it exists
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alongside and in conversation with other theories that do deploy the same
kinds of public/private dichotomies that Smith sees at work in the star texts
of Garbo and Brando.
One of those explanations for De Niro’s silence, closely related to the
hollowness proposition, is that De Niro is composed of body and body
alone; as Smith points out, one reason why De Niro’s interviews are so
transgressive of the celebrity interview genre is that they offer body rather
than speech on an occasion when “The fan requires the celebrity body to
speak, to reveal the inner truths it contains” (50).2 Other proponents of
this theory of De Niro as disproportionately constituted by body tend, not
surprisingly, to employ uncomfortably primitivist language: Ulu Grosbard,
who directed De Niro in True Confessions and Falling in Love, defends the
actor against charges that he “is not terribly sharp-witted” by arguing that
“his intelligence is merely of a more primal order, expressed in physical
gesture and voice intonations” (Brode 10). Such a defence ironically aban-
dons and evacuates De Niro’s verbal performances, while reinscribing a
problematic identification of the body with the “primal” that leaves verbal
performance undisturbed in its position of privilege. My own theory of De
Niro’s reluctance would approach the question of his bodily availability by
noting that, by contributing his body, his physical presence, at publicity
functions or interviews, De Niro to that extent suggests his participation
and even inclination, but his taciturnity sets limits upon, and affectively
decelerates that forward movement.
Others do a more thorough and thoughtful job than Pauline Kael of
seeking an explanation for De Niro’s reserve by ascribing it to acting the-
ory, in particular the much maligned and misunderstood Method acting
theory with which he is so frequently identified. Greg Smith traces some
of that misunderstanding, particularly the assumption that Method acting
placed primary emphasis upon the psychic relationship to the role and
only secondary importance on the physical preparation for it. De Niro, he
argues, places impersonation (physical transformation) first, and Smith
reads the actor’s reticence as “an attempt to promote impersonation over
simple personification” (49) because De Niro reasons that impersonation
of the role will be more effective if there isn’t a representation of a “real”
celebrity person getting in the way. This is a way of understanding De
Niro’s embodiment as acting theory that at least steers clear of personal
insult and primitivism.
It also recalls, to a degree, John Cusack’s preference that fans infer
his personality through the medium of his roles; as Paul Schrader, the
screenwriter for Taxi Driver, put it, De Niro “doesn’t feel the need to
establish an identity apart from his screen persona. He doesn’t want to.
The only thing he desires to be public about himself is his work. That’s
the only thing he estimates has any real value” (Agan 14). Why, then,
would Cusack’s emphasis on the cinematic text earn him a measure of
respect, and De Niro’s only frustration and criticism? The answer lies in
the forms of knowledge that their textual emphasis excludes. What
Cusack is blocking out, in directing fan attention to the filmic text, is
gossip, a form of non-consensual publicity which he has managed fairly
successfully to keep at a minimum, but what De Niro seeks to block is
expression through celebrity- and publicist-driven publicity, which comes
with a higher cultural capital than “gossip.” More fans will forgive a
short-circuiting of personal gossip rather than an evasion of contextual
information that they may see as more relevant to their reading of those
filmic texts. For example, in one interview, De Niro even declined to
answer the question of what moved him to become an actor, on the
grounds that it was too private, a response that provoked disbelief and
antipathy, since the question appeared to be readily answerable in a way
that would pose little challenge to his privacy.
Although Robert De Niro does not articulate his acting theory with the
theoretical acumen and volubility that John Cusack does when he speaks
of actors needing to incorporate their repressed Shadow into their prac-
tice, he does promote a theory of minimalism that correlates with his well-
known taciturnity. In a clip called “One Minute of Brilliant Acting Advice,”
De Niro offers this theory in a suitably minimalist, halting verbal style:
It’s simpler than you think. I get caught up in myself where actors you [sic]
have to do more, you have to do something. You don’t have to do anything.
Nothing. You’re better off. It’ll work. The way people are in life—they
don’t do anything. You know I’m talking and I’m looking at your expres-
sion, and you could have been told that somebody in your family was this or
that—some terrible thing—and you’re still going to have the same look on
your face. And that says more, allows the audience to read into it opposed
[sic] to telling them what they should feel. And actors tend at times…so
[sic] they have to give it something; you don’t have to give it anything.
(“One Minute of Brilliant Acting Advice”)
De Niro has subscribed to this philosophy from the very beginning of his
career; he told American Film that when he was studying baseball players
78 L. YORK
for Bang the Drum Slowly (1973), “I saw in every baseball game how
relaxed the players were… I could pick it up. I could practice in my room
watching them do nothing” (Kenny 19). This is fairly standard advice to
theatre students—don’t act as though you’re “acting”—but in the case of
De Niro it is also a philosophy that he brings to his performance as a pub-
lic persona.
Compounding this overlap between acting theory and linguistic per-
formance is the strong correlation that De Niro’s taciturnity bears with his
roles and, it follows, with his picture personality—at least one, very influ-
ential aspect of it. In many of the roles for which De Niro is most cele-
brated, he creates a sense of tightly coiled, non-verbal menace; as Mark
LeFanu observes, his early defining roles were “always so physical, so
poised on the borders of the articulate” (49). Vito Corleone, for example,
in The Godfather II is primarily a watcher: he watches the machinations of
the Black Hand boss who extorts protection money in his lower East Side
neighbourhood and silently plans his demise; the murder seems to erupt,
shockingly, out of Vito’s taciturnity. When he revisits his Sicilian village,
Corleone, years later, he once again watches and waits for his chance to kill
the local capo in revenge for the killing of his brother and mother. And in
both of these parallel scenes, he acts swiftly, silently, and seemingly unemo-
tionally. In Taxi Driver, Travis Bickle similarly watches and silently judges
the people on the street who take advantage of others, like the 12-year-old
sex worker Iris (Jodie Foster) with whom he forms a friendship. Biographer
Shawn Levy’s description of De Niro on the chaotic set of Taxi Driver
eerily echoes Travis Bickle’s comportment: “But in the center of it all, De
Niro was remarkably silent, still, and inward-gazing” (172).
The intersection of De Niro’s silences at the sites of publicity and of
filmic role has been read by some observers as an admirable consistency:
the silent actor implicitly authenticating his silent roles. Barry Paris
observes, for example, that “Robert De Niro’s sentences—his thoughts—
are like his acting. Grammar, syntax and vocabulary are all there, but not
always in words. His eloquence is often silent: an upturned palm, a tilted
shake of the head, a half-shrug, a furrowing of eyebrows or—most often—
an expression.” And for Paris, this consistency is a sign of laudable
authenticity and discrimination: “He struggles to make himself clearly
understood. But always, he would rather pick no word at all than the
wrong one” (30). But for others, this melding of picture personality with
public persona creates the opposite effect: disingenuousness, as though
the celebrity’s absorption into the role were a shady, shifty disappearing
act, a strategy to increase his fame, hide an unpalatable truth, or both.

Such an argument typically appears sans evidence. In the Vanity Fair pro-
file, Patricia Bosworth uses the well-worn trick of negative suggestion
when she writes that “De Niro’s friends accept his need to be private, and
deny that his reclusiveness is some sort of deliberate star trip” (103),
though at the end of her profile, she makes her contrary position clear, still
without a shred of evidence beyond the perceived congruence between
picture personality and celebrity image: “I believe he has invented the
brooding, reclusive mystique he hides behind—as successfully as he hides
behind the characters he plays onscreen” (177). Occasionally, this theory
emerges as a means of symbolically gaining access to the taboo “private”—
with, again, little evidence to support this linkage of public taciturnity and
private scandal; Kathi McGinnis, a cast member on New York, New York
speculated, “I think he’s hiding something he thinks may be too weird….
I mean he’s protecting himself with all that silence” (Dougan 102).
Biographers, for their part, may adopt this speculative mode as well, with
just as little evidence; even the normally scrupulous Levy suggests that De
Niro’s chariness of reporters during the early 1980s was attributable to his
“living a lifestyle that he was keen never to have revealed” (258): drug use
and womanizing. The fact that De Niro was wary of reporters from the
beginning is a fact that Levy acknowledges, but does not fully square with
this claim. Nor does Levy’s theory of strategic reluctance square with his
argument that De Niro’s silence is deeply embedded in his psyche. After
sketching artists Robert De Niro Sr. and Virginia Admiral’s bohemian
Greenwich Village lives, Levy speculates, “It can’t be any sort of surprise
that a child raised among adults—and adults who were swimming deter-
minedly against the current of mainstream postwar American ideas of
normalcy—should turn out to be guarded, suspicious, leery” (8). Maybe
yes and maybe no, as De Niro himself might ambivalently say.
Surveyed broadly as I have done here, the explanations that journalists,
academics, biographers, colleagues, and fans have offered for De Niro’s
reluctance are deeply embedded in preexisting ideas about celebrity: as
strategic manufacture, as psychological hiding place, as cultural or psycho-
logical emptiness, as primitive embodiment, or as an expression of an
artistic practice. But what all of these theories agree upon, it would seem,
is that Robert De Niro is inarticulate and that this is an unacceptable
symptom of his withdrawal from public life. In viewing De Niro’s tacitur-
nity as reluctant, however, I remain committed to the idea that what looks
like the celebrity’s abandonment of the field of celebrity is always an
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engagement with it, but not in the purely self-seeking, instrumentalist

manner that proponents of the strategic-reluctance theory would suggest.
Is De Niro really reluctant in the common sense way in which the term is
often used, that is, retiring, blocked, disinclined, or is he reluctant in the
bidirectional way in I have understood reluctance to operate, as an affec-
tive mixture of inclination and refusal?
In terms of speech, the primary site at which De Niro’s reticence is
apprehended, it is clear that De Niro does linger and draw back, but what
is less often recognized are the moments at which his speech is not reluc-
tant. Greg Smith is, once again, alone amongst De Niro scholars in
acknowledging that there are “subjects that De Niro will talk about with-
out reticence” (49), such as his painstaking physical preparations for a
role. Smith does not elaborate further on these subjects, nor on De Niro’s
non-reluctant speech, for he quickly shifts the topic to De Niro’s body-in-
performance, which he sees as the primary vehicle of De Niro’s non-verbal
communication. However, remaining with the verbal, it is worth noting
that the painfully transcribed inarticulateness one finds in many profiles of
the actor does not tell the entire story; that “state of obstructed agency”
(3), in Sianne Ngai’s words, exists in relationship with occasional bouts of
verbal flow and generosity. Barry Paris, interviewing him in American
Film, recounts that he was all too aware of De Niro’s reputation as a dif-
ficult interviewee, but found, on the contrary, that De Niro was “punctual
to the minute, thoughtful, self-effacing” and he “never once shuts off the
tape recorder” (32). This was only the fourth interview De Niro granted,
Paris tells us, after he won an Oscar for Raging Bull, so De Niro was pre-
sumably being discriminating in his choice of venues. American Film, an
industry magazine produced by the American Film Institute, could be
reasonably expected to focus on the film work and not press the gossip
angle too heavily; it was, from that perspective, the anti-Playboy. Also, if
the 2008 interview with Al Pacino gives any indication, De Niro is also
capable of discussing any number of subjects with little of the halting
speech that he is so known for producing in an interview, let alone the
awkward silences of his Letterman interview; he speaks on that occasion
about his well-known attachment to New York, his experience acting
alongside Pacino, politics, and his admiration for Barack Obama (“Robert
De Niro and Al Pacino”). Speaking with another actor may be the key to
the verbal flow; the format of a discussion between two actors disrupts the
usual journalist-celebrity interview dynamic.
The documents found in the De Niro archives at the Harry Ransom

Center at the University of Texas in Austin are a rich source of exchanges
that highlight not only the actor’s well-known reticence but also his
attachments and commitments. Indeed, many of these letters convey
thanks to him for doing things, for participating in various initiatives.
Many of those open with what I call a “reluctant salutation”— an opening
reference to De Niro’s well-known disinclination for public display as a
prelude, ironically, to discussing his activity in the public realm: “Dear
Bobby: I know you don’t like these things. Neither do I, but I really
enjoyed my evening. The Museum is doing a lot for the industry, and I
think it will help you in what you are doing downtown.” Elia Kazan in
1989 (Robert De Niro Archives 26 Sept 1989; 167.1). “I know how most
of us dislike these kinds of occasions. But it seems to me that this may be
a special one with a truly historical character.” Lee Strasberg, making a
game appeal to De Niro to attend an Actors Studio benefit in 1980 (14
Aug 1980; 167.3) From Al Pacino: “I don’t mean to bother you right
now, for I know your [sic] working” (1 Nov 1989; 167.2) And a glori-
ously funny opening-night telegram from DUSTY (Dustin Hoffman?) in
1986: “DEAR BOB, GOOD LUCK TONIGHT. I WOULD SAY MORE
BUT I KNOW YOU DON’T LIKE TO TALK A LOT” (16 July 1986;
42.6). James Woods’s 1990 salutation is similar in its method of engage-
ment: “Dear Bob, I know you hate this kind of thing, but I must tell you
how moved I was by the work you and Joe and everybody did in Goodfellas”
(1 Oct 1990; 167.4). Many of these salutations share a similar strategy:
displacing De Niro’s disinclinations onto the letter writer, who either
shares or deeply understands them, followed by an invitation or a testa-
ment to engagement. Amid it all, the realization that, flowing concur-
rently with De Niro’s well-known disinclination is the evidence of
participation, persuadability, chosen commitments, inclination. A perfect
demonstration of this concurrence that I call reluctance appears in a lovely
note from the British director Michael Powell in 1984, thanking De Niro
for offering his thoughts on a script: “Thank you for reading the draft
script. It was just like you: very deliberate before making a move and very
generous when you do” (25 Mar 1984; 167.2). We have, it would seem,
made much of Robert De Niro’s deliberation, to the exclusion of his
generosity.
Professional subjects, like role preparation and his Tribeca Film Festival,
draw out a more generously conversable, if not exactly loquacious, De
Niro. Indeed, he once described his preparation for his role as Travis
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Bickle in Taxi Driver as one that required a departure from his more char-
acteristic reserve: “I am normally a fairly quiet man,” he admitted, risking
radical understatement, to one London interviewer, “but I chatted to my
passengers [in the taxi he drove in New York for several weeks in order to
prepare for the role], keeping within the character I was about to play, and
I learned a great deal” (Agan 62). Any director who has worked with De
Niro can vouch for the prolixity of De Niro’s conversation in the pursuit
of defining a role; many have recounted how he engages them constantly
with questions about the tiniest nuances or colours of his role, sometimes
to the point of wearing upon their patience. And the Robert de Niro
archives are rich in annotated scripts in which De Niro expatiates upon
those details of how to approach a scene, a line. Shawn Levy, first among
De Niro biographers to draw upon the rich resources of those archives,
links this verbal plenitude to De Niro’s theatrical training, noting, for
instance, that De Niro marks up an early script “in a fashion he would fol-
low for the rest of his life, with all sorts of insights, reminders, questions,
prompts, and instructions, much the way that Stella Adler’s script analysis
class had taught him” (61). Such verbal engagement sits side by side with
the nonverbal habits of work in a way that I see as reluctant; for example,
one thing De Niro does when he combs through his scripts is reduce his
lines where possible (Levy 127), a practice that correlates with his acting
theory that less is more (“You don’t have to do anything. Nothing. You’re
better off.”)
Also to be found in the archives are transcripts of discussions that De
Niro and colleagues have held with subjects whose lives can shed light
upon the role, discussions in which De Niro is anything but a silent part-
ner. In preparing to film Casino, for example, De Niro participated in an
interview with Frank Culotta, a former enforcer for the Chicago Outfit.
The director, Martin Scorsese, and screenwriter, Nick Pileggi, upon whose
book, Casino, the film was based, were also participants, but on this occa-
sion De Niro does not fade into the background, as he tends to do in
group publicity interviews. Instead, he is very much a presence in this
fascinating discussion of the ins and outs of mob hits, jealousy, and inter-
nal clashes, asking many a question about how such events would precisely
unfold—rather in the way, one imagines, that he would ask a director for
precise guidance on the tiniest of performance details (Robert De Niro
Archive 40.2).
In a similar manner, whenever De Niro speaks of his Tribeca Film
Festival, founded with Jane Rosenthal in 1988, his speech tends to loosen
up, become more relaxed and fluid: “I thought it would be nice to have a
place where ideas can generate off each other, that come up because peo-
ple are in proximity to each other. Who knows how it will evolve? All I
know is that I am putting together something I have always dreamed of”
(Parker 207). Even within an interview that has its more verbally sluggish
moments, one can perceive the pace quicken when the conversation turns
away from abstract formulations and towards his own experience (whether
of building the Tribeca film festival or, in this case, of fame):
I think it’s good if you’ve had a little bit of life experience being not famous
or well known or anything so if it comes a little later it’s more … um you
you you’re a little more balanced maybe. I mean, some people become
famous very young, or well known, and they don’t … really, they’re kinda
‘green’ in a certain way and they don’t really…. And some people can’t
handle it. Others handle it but handle it in strange ways and go through….
Anyway … um, but uh ... you know, that’s that’s that’s all I would say. It
would be … it’s better if you have a little … a little time under your belt
before you start getting … uh … become well known or whatever. ‘Cause
it’s it’s a weird feeling when you … when you get all this attention all of a
sudden. I mean I’m so used to it now after all these years but sometimes it
bothers me at certain times. People ask me for an autograph and I say “I
don’t wanna do it now” or something. And And I don’t feel uncomfortable
about that ‘cause I … I don’t want to do it now. Another time I will, gladly.
If it’s a kid, you always try of course (“Robert De Niro on Young Actors
Being Pushed into Fame too Early”)
The transcript of De Niro’s spoken words shows fewer hesitations in the

latter half of the statement3; what the transcript cannot convey, exactly, is
the resulting quickening of the pace of speech evident in the original video
version (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m33P2Rr1qlo).
An easier verbal delivery on topics of work and the everyday experience
of being a star is to be expected; both sources of fluency correlate with the
value De Niro places on the cinematic role as the locus of meaning, and
his keen interest in critiques of the fame experience, respectively. But
another source of unexpected openness in recent De Niro interviews is
decidedly counterintuitive, given the broadly accepted knowledge about
De Niro’s fierce protection of his privacy: emotional responses to private
domestic relationships and situations. For some years, this openness has
been apparent in interviews whenever the conversation turns to his father.
In the documentary he made for HBO in 2014, Remembering the Artist:
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Robert De Niro, Sr., the actor is openly emotional when he speaks of his
father’s life and career, his struggles with lack of recognition, and with
being gay. In promotional work he did on behalf of the film, too, he is
often moved to tears; when New Yorker staff writer Peter Hessler “Asked
if he watched over his father as a father might, tears sprang to his eyes”
(Hessler); when Out magazine asked him if it felt strange, to be more
famous than the man for whom he’d been named, he once more broke
into tears: “I get emotional. I don’t know why” (Portwood). But even
years earlier, in a 1994 profile in Esquire, Elizabeth Kaye knew to expect
this reaction: “Mention his childhood and he mumbles and averts his
gaze; mention his father, who died in May, and his eyes glaze with tears”
(36).
More recently, in 2013, De Niro, participating in an interview on The
Katie Couric Show to publicize Silver Linings Playbook, along with David
O. Russell, the film’s director, and co-star Bradley Cooper, broke down
when he referred to Russell, who, like De Niro, has a child with autism:
“I don’t like to get emotional, but I know exactly what he goes through,”
said De Niro, breaking into tears (Nathan). Before this occasion, De Niro
had alluded generally to his child’s condition, but had never publicly con-
firmed what that condition was, or which one of his six children it affected.
This interview is marked not only by De Niro’s open display of emotion,
which has become more frequent in his later years (as his close friend
Martin Scorsese has speculated, “People get older. They change. You open
up or you close off. He opens” [Kaye 36]), but also by his articulateness.
A sure sign of his comfort with the tactful way in which Katie Couric
handled the breakdown, not drawing attention to it, but, instead, observ-
ing that the film served as a cathartic means for the whole cast, was De
Niro’s decision to grant Couric a one-on-one interview two years later, at
the 2015 Aspen Ideas Festival where he was screening the documentary
about his father. On that occasion, too, De Niro touched on his family’s
experience of mental illness; indeed, it is one of the most intimate and
articulate interviews with the actor on record (Couric). When there is a
sense of commitment, then, to a cause, whether a professional one, such
as Tribeca’s support for filmmakers, or a personal one, growing out of his
own experience, De Niro reveals, even if for a moment, his affectively
open, communicative side. This aspect of his performance as a public per-
sona, rather than contradicting or cancelling out his verbal blockage or
disinclination to publicize, exists alongside and even within those more
recalcitrant affects. As Barry Paris has aptly phrased it, “De Niro’s para-
doxical language is at once ambiguous and accessible” (33).
Another factor in assessing De Niro’s reluctance is its evolution over
time, though few observers see it as anything but his immutable, inherent
condition. Scorsese’s observation about De Niro opening up with time
applies to more than the expression of his emotions; his willingness to do
publicity has undergone a shift in his later career, and De Niro is now a
much more recognizable figure on the publicity circuit; as Levy notes,
“publicity campaigns … seemed to have become less onerous to him over
time” (549–50). Various explanations have been offered for this seeming
reversal; some observers note that, once he co-founded the Tribeca Film
Festival in the late 80s, he could little afford to eschew publicity; the con-
tinued vibrancy of his new enterprise depended upon his standing very
visibly behind the festival and using his considerable star power to pro-
mote it (Dougan 210). Others, predictably, have read his renewed engage-
ment with publicity negatively, as yet more proof of his supposed “selling
out” and decline into unworthy, down-market vehicles. But such a view
does little to explain De Niro’s especially energetic promotion of the criti-
cally esteemed Silver Linings Playbook, the Best Picture of 2013, for which
he was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar. His biographer Shawn
Levy describes him “plung[ing] into the Oscar race, doing interviews and
personal appearances, travelling and smiling and accommodating
requests—behaving in short, as he never had, not even when he was an
eager up-and-comer” (544). Levy suggests this may have been attribut-
able to a combination of reasons: friendship with Harvey Weinstein, who
optioned the memoir by Matthew Quick upon which the film was based
even before that book was published; his “special relationship to the mate-
rial” of the film; and gratitude for being recognized for the quality of his
work, against the naysayers who claimed he was in decline. All of these
motivations may indeed be in play, but it is also true that De Niro has, of
late, tended to gamely play along with a publicity machine that he once
clearly dreaded even when the vehicle is less critically acclaimed than Silver
Linings Playbook. De Niro’s vaunted about-face is less a reversal than an
ongoing condition of reluctance: the simultaneous performance of will-
ingness and its resistance. The measure of these affective pushes and pulls
can shift, with De Niro balking at particular aspects of publicity (he will
certainly not hesitate to refuse to answer questions, even today), and
embracing others. John Parker has written of this post-Tribeca period as
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one in which these divergent impulses of promotion and protection con-

join in a complicated dance:
for the first time in his life he had to give media interviews to promote his
movies, because he was not at the very sharp end of the business and finan-
cial effort of promoting them. But, still tight-lipped as ever about his inner
thoughts, he was prepared to speak only about the movie, its plot and its
development. He was protective of himself and even his image. Sometimes,
when a fan has spotted him and taken his picture, he has approached that
person and said, “I am going to tell you, you shouldn’t have done that”
(226)
This shunting and shifting of eagerness and disinclination, approach and

rebuff, is exactly what makes Robert De Niro a reluctant celebrity.
As the language of shunting back and forth suggests, reluctance is a
matter of simultaneous movement forward and backward, and De Niro’s
celebrity is rife with these movements, particularly those that play upon
temporality. For example, although De Niro has often sent undeniable
messages to interviewers that his past and childhood are off limits and that
discussion of his career should focus on the present film and the present
moment, his career repeatedly shows signs of tarrying with that past.
There are, first of all, the films that mine the New York past, whether the
world of lower Manhattan (Mean Streets, Godfather II) or the Bronx
(Raging Bull, A Bronx Tale). It is a world that De Niro seems always ready
to discuss with interviewers; as The Telegraph’s travel writer Dan
F. Stapleton recalls, “he agreed to talk to me about Tribeca after I explained
how enamoured of the neighbourhood I had become” (Stapleton).
Particular career choices, too, are suggestive of De Niro’s affective tar-
rying in the New York past, even as he remains adamant that his past is not
relevant to an understanding of his career. For example, in 1986, De Niro
agreed for the first (and last) time to act on Broadway, in the first full-
length play by Reinaldo Povod, a twenty-six-year-old Hispanic playwright
from the Lower East Side. The play, Cuba and His Teddy Bear, set in a
Lower East Side Tenement, examines the relationship between a drug-
dealing father and his son who is, unbeknownst to him, becoming an
addict. The perceived connection between De Niro and the world of the
play appears nowhere more clearly than in a letter written to him, now part
of the Harry Ransom Centre Robert De Niro archives, by an audience
member, perhaps a friend, who also grew up in Lower Manhattan: “all the
roles you play always remind me of people I used to know. Watching you
perform is like reading Steinbeck or watching Arthur Miller or Paddy
Chayefsky—always the unfulfilled American Dream—2nd, 3rd generation.”
Referring to a line in the play about “the sins of the Fathers,” she contin-
ues, “Go easy on us in the future. I’m sure many of us survivors carry
some guilt on having made it out and left friends behind!” (Robert De
Niro archives 42.6). She exhorts De Niro to move ahead and think back-
wards, and one piece of evidence that, in fact, he has approached his career
reluctantly—moving forward by looking backward—is the fact that this
letter remains, among the other letters and telegrams of opening-night
congratulations, in his archive.4
As a matter of fact, De Niro’s career, and the narratives that cluster
around that career, are very much taken up with the question of moving
forwards or backwards (or both). Critics who sound the cultural-prestige
alarm about De Niro deigning to play lesser roles in lesser vehicles implic-
itly expect a particular narrative of progress from critically acclaimed suc-
cess to critically acclaimed success, and they will react to his more variegated
career either by denouncing it or compensating for it. On the side of
denunciation is, not surprisingly, the ill-disposed biographer John Baxter,
who calls De Niro’s films of the 1990s “a coarsening of his work, and a
descent into the clichés of genre film” (350). So too Shawn Levy, who sees
the recent work not only as a decline from, but an erasure of, the cultural
capital of the actor’s early career: “He was capable of moments of inspira-
tion, but by and large, the De Niro of the twenty-first century erased
much of the goodwill—and, indeed, awe—accrued by the younger De
Niro” (5).
Douglas Brode, in his fourth edition of The Films of Robert De Niro,
opts for compensation rather than denunciation or mourning, but he
struggles to keep the celebratory, onward-and-upward narrative of his pre-
vious editions of the book in place. He tries to retain the laudatory mode
by silently shifting criteria over the course of his book from critical esteem
to box-office success. His opening chapters are full of praise for De Niro’s
brilliant early roles, but surveying the mid-career, Brode warns of the dan-
ger of the down-market cameo part. “Thankfully,” he assures us, “De Niro
would shortly move away from the clever-cameo trap and back into the
kind of leading roles and substantive supporting parts that his talent both
deserved and demanded” (177). Brode is still drawing upon the language
of cultural respectability as earned through quality drama, but by the end
of his book, he can only complete the triumphal narrative he has set on
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course by constructing success in economic terms. Citing the box office

success of Meet the Parents (2000), he concludes: “Clearly, Robert De
Niro’s awkward period—bouncing between character-cameos and head-
lining questionable projects—was over; happily, the next stage of his
ongoing artistic achievement has just begun” (298). If Brode’s book has a
fifth edition, he will no doubt need to amend this narrative to accommo-
date, say, Dirty Grandpa (2016).
As critics vie to decide whether De Niro is moving forward or backward
in his career, there are few who are able to conceptualize the possibility
that his trajectory is not such a linear one at all. Anne Helen Petersen, in
“The Shaming of Robert De Niro,” criticizes those narratives of decline
for having more to do with the cultural capital needs of the critics than
with De Niro’s career, and, as for that career, she sees it as an assemblage
of variegated labour that frustrates the very notion of an ascent or descent.
As Petersen rightly notes, De Niro has made less “successful” movies—
whether using the metric of critical or economic success—from the very
beginning: “Instead of a desperate star clinging to the last vestiges of
glory, he might be a journeyman actor who refuses, in a way not dissimilar
from the trajectory of his entire career, to care about the things that other
people would deem important” (Petersen).
I see such a heterogeneous trajectory as a reluctant movement par
excellence: a movement neither solely forwards, nor backwards but lateral,
backwards, forwards. The metaphor that De Niro himself drew upon to
describe his Taxi Driver character, Travis Bickle, aptly describes this side-
winding movement through cultural space:
I got this image of Travis as a crab. I just had that image of him…. You know
how a crab sort of walks sideways and has a gawky, awkward movement?
Crabs are very straightforward, but straightforward to them is going to the
left and to the right. They turn sideways, that’s the way they’re built.
(Grobel Playboy interview qtd. Brode 1)
So too the career of Robert De Niro, flying in the face of constructed

notions of cultural ascent by working steadily, heterogeneously, and, on
his own terms, straightforward in a sideways gait.
De Niro’s linguistic usage shows a persistent, telltale sign of this
backwards-forwards reluctant pace: the simultaneous offering of yes/no
responses to many of the propositions and questions that come his way.
Rolling Stone’s Fred Shruers recalls that when he asked De Niro if he felt
like a loner as a child, the actor replied, “Some ways yes, some ways no”
(74); to Martha Sherrill of The Washington Post, who asked him if he’s shy,
he responded, “In some situations, I am … Some I’m not” (Sherrill).
Same response to Johanna Schneller, who asked him whether it was diffi-
cult to play violent scenes: “They’re hard in some ways, not in others”
(57). The published interviews are chock full of such yes-no formulations,
and while the interviewers not unreasonably see such equivocations as
simply evasive, I believe that they are much more than that. These non-
committal—or, more properly speaking, these multiply-committal—
responses function meaningfully in relation to his reluctant celebrity as a
way of signalling a disengaged engagement.
Not only the verbal formulations in interviews but the negotiations
about the interviews themselves are filled with these yes/no responses. For
example, he (actually) contacted Barbara Goldsmith of Parade (The
Washington Post insert) for an interview because he’d read a piece she’d
written for The New York Times on celebrity that he admired, and felt that
her critique resonated with his own. But when he called her to discuss the
possibility, he opened the conversation thus: “Hi … this is Bob De Niro.
Maybe we can talk … [long pause] maybe not” (Parker 153). As Goldsmith
recalled years later, he called her again after the interview to make sure she
didn’t reveal his address, and then phoned one more time to say “he
regretted having given the interview” (Bosworth 175). Yes—but no—but
yes—but no. Behold the crab-walk of reluctant celebrity.
De Niro also described the unauthorized Vanity Fair profile (the one in
which he felt “shaken down”) as exactly this kind of forward and back-
ward shunting between agreement and refusal, with friends and associates
not sure whether to proceed, to cooperate with the journalist, Patricia
Bosworth, and De Niro assuring them that they could go forward or they
could retreat: “The fact is, there was a mixed signal. People were asking
me if they should do it, and I said, ‘Do what you want.’ And there were
other people that were saying, ‘I’m not gonna talk,’ and I said, ‘Fine, then
don’t’” (Schruers 45). As with reluctance itself, De Niro, in seeking to
remove himself from the exchange (“I didn’t want to do it. I just sort of
stayed out of it”; Schruers 45), draws himself into the thick of it, sending
a “mixed signal” (Go ahead. Or don’t) that is entirely appropriate to that
mixed affective state that is reluctance. As for the journalist caught amid
the locomotive-like shuntings of De Niro and his intimates, she reported
that De Niro’s personal assistant told her “Mr. De Niro will probably
never talk to you, but he is giving you permission to talk to his friends”
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(Bosworth 103). Even the no-yes dichotomy here breaks down into mud-
dlement, with that “probably never” that offers the ghost of a hint of a
“maybe.”
Many of those who have worked comfortably with De Niro over the
decades have been aware that a yes can, in fact, be a no, and vice versa. Art
Linson, the producer of The Untouchables (1987) asked De Niro what he
thought of the costumes for the 1930s Prohibition-era film, and received
a somewhat tepid “OK.” Linson took this to mean, correctly as it turned
out, that De Niro hated the costumes, and he immediately set about
arranging to have them replaced (Baxter 234). Stephen Colbert, seem-
ingly aware of the capacity for a De Niroesque lukewarm “yes” to mean
“no,” asked him in his 2016 Late Show interview about director David
O. Russell’s tendency to call out new lines during shooting “Try this line!
Try that line! Do you like that?” De Niro replied, “I do, I do.” Colbert
pressed, “Say I love it. Say I love it.” De Niro: “I love it, well…I don’t
really love it” (Colbert). De Niro, for his part, has often learned to mis-
trust a “yes” in the world of Hollywood film; he once recalled pitching an
idea to a studio executive, to be told by him, “Yeah…I’m going to do it.”
“He said yes so easily,” De Niro recalled, “I knew he was lying. It’s hard
to say yes if you really mean it” (Kaye).
Because De Niro mistrusts unmixed affect, like the apparently easy
“yes,” his own variegated responses to propositions—his yes/no’s—leave
many observers unsure of his commitments, particularly in the realm of
politics and ethics. As the 2016 Tribeca film festival kicked off, an interna-
tional controversy erupted about the festival’s decision to screen Vaxxed:
From Cover Up to Controversy, a film by a now widely discredited former
doctor from the UK, Andrew Wakefield, who has claimed that the mea-
sles, mumps, and rubella vaccine was linked to autism. De Niro at first
defended the inclusion of the film because he believes “that it is critical
that all of the issues surrounding the causes of autism be openly discussed
and examined” (Carroll). Shortly thereafter, though, in the wake of wide-
spread protest, De Niro withdrew the film, saying, “we do not believe it
contributes to or furthers the discussion I had hoped for” (Smith and
Child). The controversy seemed, at that point, to have run its course, but
a little over a week later De Niro reignited it when he appeared on the
Today Show, expressed regret at his decision, and reinstated his support for
the film: “I think the movie is something that people should see. ... And I
want to know the truth. I’m not anti-vaccine. I want safe vaccines”
(B. Lee). De Niro’s shift from yes to no to yes was the cause of much
speculation; the fact that De Niro intervened in the first place to include
the film in the festival (Bennett) suggests that his support for these widely
debunked theories has remained constant, and that only the overwhelm-
ing controversy that ensued convinced him to remove it against his own
wishes. His own situation as the father of an autistic child makes the pres-
ence of mixed affects understandable to say the least (though among the
critics of the film are many parents of autistic children, such as the film-
maker Todd Drezner [Bennett]). And being the father of a mixed-race
autistic child would make De Niro susceptible to Wakefield’s pseudo sci-
ence, since one of the film’s claims is that African American boys are espe-
cially vulnerable to the development of autism after receiving the MMR
vaccine—a claim that has been thoroughly disproven by scientists. (The
World Health Organization has confirmed that there is no link between
the MMR vaccine and autism in any ethnic or racial group.) As Rebecca
Carroll of The Guardian suggests, though, the history of harm done to
black bodies, in the Tuskegee experiments of the 1970s, for instance, not
to mention the lead poisoned water crisis in Flint Michigan, would under-
standably make parents of black children anxious about the connections
between systemic racism and the health of their children—but even so, she
is adamant that De Niro was wrong to support a film that proffers misin-
formation. So in spite of all these reasons why De Niro might well be beset
by mixed affects, there remains the spectacle of his reluctant public posi-
tioning on this question of medical ethics that mixes forward resolve with
contrary action—and with lingering regret.
In the realm of partisan politics, De Niro is also less easy to “read” than
Cusack, who channels his reluctant celebrity into a political agenda that is
anything but reluctant or private. De Niro, on the other hand, has long
been thought to be fairly non political, though his support for the
Democratic Party has been generally well known. Andy Dougan, in his
1996 biography, observes that “Although he was raised in a political
household and must have absorbed liberal views from his parents from an
early age, De Niro was not a political activist,” and he notes that, apart
from his anti-Vietnam stance, he has, “Unlike many stars … seldom loaned
his name to political causes or fundraising movements” (106). Barry Paris
contends that “De Niro is no more inclined to discuss his political beliefs
than his private life” (35), and even his most recent biographer Shawn
Levy, writing with the advantage of having seen De Niro’s extensive
archives, claims that he “had never been especially political, and never
in public,” though his views were known to be “left-leaning” (393).
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He allows, however, that “he would peek his head out a little more openly
in political matters” in the years after 1990, supporting Bill Clinton and
opposing his impeachment (393). The documents in the archives do,
indeed, offer nuance to a consideration of De Niro’s politics, and show
him to be more politically active than Levy’s updated exceptions would
allow. Though he could hardly be called an activist, it is no longer possible
to see him as apolitical. The archives reveal, instead, an under-the-radar
political activity that is, at heart, reluctant in its operations. Dating from
far earlier than the 1990s, there is, in the De Niro archives, correspon-
dence written to the actor by Tom Hayden, who was a Democratic candi-
date in California for the U.S. Senate, between 1975 and 1976. Hayden,
a prominent political activist, anti-Vietnam War leader of the Students for
a Democratic Society (SDS) during the war, and one of the “Chicago
Eight” who led the protests at the Democratic National Convention in
1968, wrote an introductory letter to De Niro after an event (3 Dec.
1975; Robert De Niro archives 167.1) and then again after the campaign
was over, to thank the actor for his support: “We lost,” he wrote, “but in
fundamental ways the campaign was a victory” because “someone … who
has been described in the media for an entire year as a ‘radical’” won 1.2
million votes (167.1). Earlier in the campaign, his then-wife, actor and
anti-Vietnam War activist Jane Fonda, had also written to De Niro to ask
him to donate memorabilia to help support the campaign because, in her
words, it “Turns out there are a lot of people who’ll pay high prices for
Hollywood-related memorabilia” (30 Jan. 1976; 166.9). We already know
that De Niro was decidedly anti-Vietnam; he had lent his name to benefits
for victims of Agent Orange (Paris 35), and one of the occasions on which
he did go on the public record politically was to denounce the war, around
the time he made The Deer Hunter:
I thought that the war was wrong, but what bothered me [the most] was
that people who went to war became victims of it; they were used for the
whims of others. I don’t think that the policymakers had the [necessary]
smarts. I didn’t respect their decisions, or what they were doing. And it was
a right of many people to feel, “Why should I go and get involved with
something that’s unclear—and pay for it with my life?” It takes people like
that to make changes. (Brode 119)
Hayden was one of those people who questioned, who put himself on the
line, and apparently De Niro never forgot: almost a decade after the
Democratic National Convention in Chicago, he supported Hayden’s

attempts to pull the Democratic Party further to the left.
This evidence challenges the picture of De Niro as a tepidly progressive
political thinker, though he did carry out his political action in a fairly
covert way: he was willing to contribute to the cause, but the archival evi-
dence suggests that he was a bit less willing to join Hayden in a public
display of his support. In his letters to the star, Hayden tended to add,
often as a postscript, that he would like to follow up on De Niro’s sugges-
tion that they might meet someday. The fact that these postscripts were
recurrent suggests that De Niro, for all that he supported the campaign,
was still keeping his distance and supporting Hayden from afar.
Other political activity of De Niro’s also tends to fly under the radar;
the archives contain notes from many such beneficiaries of De Niro’s sup-
port. One is a statement of thanks from the resource development man-
ager at the Wounded Knee District School for a benefit screening of
Thunderheart, a 1992 film based on the Wounded Knee resistance, and
filmed in South Dakota, that De Niro produced (23 Mar 1992; 144.3).
According to Sharon L. Gelman, the Director of Human Rights Programs
at the Hollywood Policy Center Foundation, in a letter to De Niro, the
evening raised 35,000 USD for the Native American Rights Fund (15 Apr
1992; 144.3). Another letter, dating from De Niro’s only appearance on
Broadway in Cuba and his Teddy Bear, from Father Bruce Ritter, President
of Covenant House, a shelter for homeless youth on West 41st Street,
sends “Thanks for all you’ve done for my kids. You gave them an evening
they’ll never forget. For most of my kids who had the good fortune to
attend, it was their first exposure to the theatre” (18 Sept. 1986; 42.6).
There is some evidence that De Niro’s cautious approach to political
expression is tied to his reluctant speech, and specifically to his suspicion
that there are others—perhaps like Tom Hayden—who are more skilled in
public political speech than he is. As he explained to Barry Paris, who
asked why he disliked discussing his political beliefs in interviews, “It’s not
a question of politics—it’s a question of what’s right and what’s wrong.
I know certain things that I feel, but I don’t think I can articulate them
very well right now, and I don’t want to sound like a jerk” (35). The dis-
tinction De Niro draws here is revealing: he has a decided politics and
ethics, a sense of personal right and wrong about public events, but he
doubts his ability to articulate, to put those commitments in words in ways
that will remain true to them; there is also, in De Niro’s fear of sounding
“like a jerk,” more than a hint of a critique of celebrities who undertake
94 L. YORK
political speech in a maladroit way, and do a disservice to the causes they

support.
As with other instances of De Niro’s reluctant speech, though, it needs
to be seen alongside instances of bold, outright speech; Levy is right to
suggest that De Niro has been more inclined, of late, to speak of his politi-
cal views. But as we have seen, he has occasionally spoken out most freely
and feelingly—about Vietnam, about Clinton’s impeachment. More
recently, at the 2011 Tribeca film festival, he attacked Donald Trump,
who was at that time publicly questioning the existence of President
Barack Obama’s American birth certificate, along with other right-wing
“birthers.” He was in the middle of a fairly taciturn interview with the
NBC’s Brian Williams, when the subject of politics came up, and De Niro
abruptly shifted from taciturnity to energetic, voluble speech: “It’s like a
big hustle. It’s like a car salesman. Don’t go out there and say things
unless you can back them up. How dare you?” (Vanairsdale). More
recently, in April 2016, presenting an award to Morgan Freeman, De Niro
once again heaped scorn upon the birthers and joked that, in comparison
with Freeman’s role as the President in the film Deep Impact, President
Obama faced a greater problem: “Morgan’s President Beck only had to
deal with a giant asteroid hitting the earth and wiping out mankind.
President Obama has had to deal with a Republican Congress”
(Van-Sykle).
In spite of this spirited political intervention, and others like it, the evi-
dence shows that politics, for Robert De Niro, is not the site where he
places the energies built up from his reluctant performances as a public
individual wholeheartedly, as it is for John Cusack. It is, instead, one of the
sites of his reluctance. Although he is a public figure who is capable of
pointed political remarks that break forth from otherwise sluggish inter-
views, he is also a man who declares that he would prefer not to speak of
his politics and who offers his support, for the most part, behind the
scenes.
The one space where Robert De Niro places his diverted energies,
without hesitancy or qualms, is his Tribeca production company, its associ-
ated yearly film festival, and, by association, the neighbourhood whose
name it bears. Like John Cusack, De Niro was tempted by the prospect of
controlling production of film projects; “I never had the full responsibility
for a film before and never wanted it,” he commented at the time he
formed the production company, in 1989. “But now I do. Ultimately, it’s
to have control” (Brode). De Niro had also bought a good bit of real
estate in the Tribeca neighbourhood, reaching back into the late seventies
when, newly successful, he moved into the area himself and found the real
estate prices to be relatively low. He and his business partner and co-
founder of Tribeca Productions, Jane Rosenthal, moved the company to
Greenwich Street. He added a restaurant, The Tribeca Grill, in 1990. One
year after the founding of the film festival in 2002, he purchased the
Tribeca Cinemas on Varick Street to add a much-needed additional venue
for screenings. Beside the Film Center, on Greenwich, De Niro, with part-
ners, also owns the Greenwich Hotel, which opened in 2008. De Niro,
already a powerful landowner in lower Manhattan, was building, along
with his partners, a major international company. In 2010 that company
was incorporated as Tribeca Enterprises, which is, in the words of its web-
site, a “diversified global media company,” (“Tribeca Enterprises”) and a
subsidiary of MSG (Madison Square Garden Company), which bought
50% of Tribeca Enterprises in 2014. Tribeca Enterprises owns the original
production company, Tribeca Productions, as well as the Tribeca Film
Festival, and Tribeca Cinemas. As this partial summary of De Niro’s artis-
tic entrepreneurship shows, he is wholeheartedly investing his energies
into ventures that benefit filmmakers and the neighbourhood, using capi-
talism and property acquisition as the major instruments. While John
Cusack, one might well argue, also operates within that system, in forming
New Crime Productions, the scale of De Niro’s enterprises dwarfs those
of the Chicagoan, and Cusack deploys his public prominence in an ongo-
ing critique of neoliberal capitalist regimes and their tenacious control of
information—a larger structural project that De Niro, as a large-scale capi-
talist entrepreneur, would hardly be inclined to take up.
Robert De Niro, then, takes us deeper into the study of reluctant celeb-
rity. Lacking John Cusack’s explicit theorizing of his reluctance, and cor-
respondingly explicit redirection of his energies to a very clear political
project, De Niro’s is a performed reluctance that is left largely for the
observer to puzzle out. For that reason, many have assumed, based on
what they did not see or hear, that De Niro is a man devoid of articulate
speech and chronically on the run from the public sphere. And while evi-
dence of his reticence and retreat is certainly plentiful, a fuller consider-
ation of his engagements alongside his detachment, considerably aided by
a reading of his archival papers, allows us to see the cross-currents of reluc-
tance at work, quietly, under the radar. These cross-currents derail any
attempt to read De Niro’s career as a progression from the silence of the
youthful rebellious star to the speech of the older, wiser, calmer man.
96 L. YORK
Martin Scorsese’s assessment, “People get older. They change. You open
up or you close off. He opens” (Kaye 36), though tempting in its chronol-
ogy of progression, obscures the “openings” and “closings” of Robert De
Niro’s reluctant career. It recalls other tempting narratives of progression,
such as that of the nineteenth-century British philosopher Thomas Carlyle,
who saw the road to faith as one that runs from the “Everlasting No,” a
condition of disbelief, denial, and rebuff; through the “Centre of
Indifference,” a state of detachment and agnosticism; to the final terminus
of faith, the “Everlasting Yea.” And while Robert De Niro might well
embrace what Carlyle called “the worship of Silence”—a respect for silence
as the hatching ground of great ideas, or what a current comedian like
Stephen Colbert might translate in the vernacular of our day as “a cold
martini and silence”—the centre of indifference for De Niro, the reluctant
celebrity, is the meeting place of yea and no. Or as he might well phrase it
to the irritation of his interviewer, “Some ways yes, some ways no”
(Schruers).
Notes
1. Kael does not stop to consider that in the case of Rupert Pupkin, his lack of
a “soul” has everything to do with that film’s caustic critique of the desire
for fame: the two-dimensionality of the cardboard cutouts of stars that
Rupert “interviews” in his basement fantasy sessions are very much to the
point.
2. Such a claim is questionable; some fans may indeed express the need for a
speaking body, but other fans may desire the body and may actively disre-
gard or reconfigure what that body has to say. To assume the former is to
privilege the verbal as a source of fan-celebrity interaction.
3. I am indebted to Dr. Katja Lee for this observation.
4. This conceit, of De Niro reluctantly tarrying with his past, needs to be miti-
gated by the facts of his upbringing in New York’s Greenwich Village in the
forties and fifties. As Greg Smith points out, “He is often believed to have
grown up in a lower-class New York environment, but actually his father was
a fairly successful modern artist” (52), though I would caution that his suc-
cess did not necessarily translate into enormous economic benefits for the
family. Besides, his parents’ marriage broke up when De Niro was very
young (2), his father moved, and his mother had to work to support her
family. Still, the De Niro home had been a gathering place for artists and
intellectuals, and Mark LeFanu, in pointing this out, comes closest to
describing De Niro’s class identity as “not … ‘middle class,’ but casual and
bohemian” (49).
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p. E15.
CHAPTER 4
“I’m Not Going to Be the Poster Boy

for This. Although I am the Poster Boy”:
Daniel Craig’s Reluctant Bonding
The photograph shows the dark outline of a man dressed in blue swim-
ming trunks dangling his legs in a pool, his back turned to the camera,
rippling, well-defined muscles in his arms and upper body, his image suf-
fused by the blue light that is thrown up by the pool (See Fig. 4.1). The
image is sombre, moody, faintly menacing. In 2012, as the James Bond
film franchise prepared for the release of their twenty-third film, Skyfall,
they issued this teaser publicity photograph showing—and not showing—
Daniel Craig as Bond. As Craig later recalled, “They wanted a picture of
me with my shirt off ”; no doubt the executives were seeking to replicate
the widespread, prurient buzz that greeted the sight of an impressively
ripped Craig, in tight-fitting blue bathing trunks, emerging from the sea
in his first Bond film, Casino Royale, six years earlier. But Craig, who has
consistently greeted discussion of that notorious scene with embarrassed
impatience, told the executives, “You can have the one with my back
turned” (Weiner). The photograph sums up much of Craig’s public treat-
ment of his turn as the martini-quaffing British spy, and his treatment of
celebrity in general: a carefully calibrated exposure that simultaneously
says “yes” and “no” to fame.
Though he has been known, like Robert De Niro, to be a difficult,
sometimes moody, interviewee, Craig doesn’t share the famous American
method actor’s well-known (though exaggerated) taciturnity. But neither
does he share John Cusack’s volubility on all subjects political; Craig has
gone so far as to opine that, in his economical phrasing, “politicians are

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71174-4_4
102 L. YORK
Fig. 4.1 Daniel Craig, publicity photo, Skyfall, Dir. Sam Mendes 2012
shitheads” (Rodrick), but beyond that, although he holds liberal views, like
De Niro he concedes that other actors—he names George Clooney—are
better prepared than he to articulate them publicly. In analysing the reluc-
tance of both Cusack and De Niro, I have argued that the energy accumu-
lated by their reluctance is deployed elsewhere, whether in politics,
independent filmmaking, or capitalism-fuelled promotion of the arts or a
city. But the case of Daniel Craig shows us that the stored-up energies of
reluctance needn’t be diverted to other venues for release; they can accu-
mulate and compound, like funds in a savings account. Craig does indeed
bank his reluctance, and it is such an abundant, pervasive commodity that
it fills his celebrity persona and the interest spills over into the persona he
has brought to his most highly publicized filmic role, that of James Bond
(Casino Royale 2006; Quantum of Solace 2008; Skyfall 2012; Spectre 2015).
And because Craig’s project is to steadily accumulate the social capital pro-
duced by his reluctance, his objective becomes not diversion or dispersal of
that capital but justification for its accumulation. In reasserting his resis-
tance to celebrity pressures on privacy, especially, he is drawn to justify it as
a choice whose value increases by direct, favourable comparison with other
celebrities he deems overly eager in their pursuit of fame. In so doing, he
articulates what the other subjects of my study have left unsaid, implicit:
that their reluctance is invariably constructed and understood in relation to
a desire for celebrity that is derided as unseemly. However, as my theory of
“I’M NOT GOING TO BE THE POSTER BOY FOR THIS. ALTHOUGH… 103
reluctance has it, such resistant, regressive modes of performance are cou-
pled with a countervailing impulse to rush forward, to embrace celebrity
privilege. In a curious way, then, I would argue, Craig banishes not only
those celebrities he deems giddy with fame, but that part of his reluctant
celebrity self that responds sympathetically to their forward, propulsive pull.
There is no doubt that the public acknowledgment of Daniel Craig’s
reluctance generally emphasizes his disinclinations rather than his con-
flicted state. Craig is widely hailed as fame-shy in a fashion that is very
different from De Niro’s public reputation as a difficult public man.
Whereas, for De Niro’s public the challenge is to diagnose, to account for,
a puzzling, seemingly inarticulate reluctance that is widely understood to
be frustrating, there is broad consensus—and unquestioning acceptance—
that Daniel Craig is, simply, disinclined to play the fame game, and the
term “reluctant” is repeatedly used, mostly approvingly, to label this con-
dition. A “reluctant self-promoter under the most optimum circum-
stances,” Entertainment Weekly dubbed him (C. Lee). Bond franchise
producer Michael G. Wilson, not known for reluctant self-promotion,
admitted that their star “was very reluctant” to take on the role in 2006;
“he didn’t want to do it” (Galloway). “I was incredibly reluctant to do it,”
Craig himself explained, reemploying his employers’ term, “because I
didn’t want to be thrown in the lion’s den” (Rankin). He repeated the
claim, and the adjective in question, on the BBC’s Graham Norton Show:
“I was very reluctant to say yes to Bond. I couldn’t understand why I was
being asked … I thought they had the wrong guy. They were quite persis-
tent” (D. Brown). BBC covered the story of the choice of Craig in an
article entitled, “Daniel Craig: The Reluctant Bond” (Lindrea). And the
title has stuck; a 2012 Vanity Fair profile christened him, in its opening
paragraph, “the reluctant actor” (Weiner), and as recently as 2015, as
speculation mounted over whether, after four Bond films, Craig might
hand over the role to another actor, The Guardian’s Steve Rose published
“Daniel Craig: A Reluctant Bond Who has Made the Role His Own.”
For the most part, these mobilizations of the term “reluctant” play
upon its everyday associations with retreat, rather than the struggle
between inclination and disinclination that I understand to be at the heart
of this feeling. British GQ’s John Naughton, for example, in claiming that
Craig “has adopted an approach to publicity that would make Greta Garbo
look garrulous,” performs that collapsing of reluctance and reclusiveness
that I have noted elsewhere. But because reluctance is much more than
the drawing back, the retreating, from fame, Craig’s participation in the
104 L. YORK
Bond franchise is more complicated than easy employments of the term

“reluctance” would suggest. As his biographer Sarah Marshall, working
with the same, everyday meaning of “reluctance” as resistance, writes of
the global fame Craig found when he joined the franchise, “In the past, he
had always been cast as the reluctant celebrity …. Despite his reservations,
though, he was savvy enough to realise he couldn’t play the reluctant
movie star any more” (212). On the contrary: it is with Daniel Craig’s
assumption of the Bond mantle that his reluctance—if by that we mean his
uneasy balancing of assent and dissent—comes most fully into view.
Accordingly, representations of Daniel Craig’s agreement to sign on as
Bond with Eon Productions call out for re-examination in the light of this
fuller sense of reluctance as affective crosscurrents. On one hand, the
undertow of Craig’s misgivings is a persistent theme of this publicity mate-
rial; when the first of the films, Casino Royale, appeared in 2008, Craig
gave an extensive interview to the Guardian in which he minutely detailed
his apprehensiveness about and reasons for taking the part: “When I got
the call, it really was left-field. Honoured though I was, I wasn’t deeply
enthusiastic” (Jeffries). He was intrigued by producers Barbara Broccoli
and Michael Wilson’s claims that they wished to imbue Bond with more
psychological complexity, but “Unfortunately, they didn’t have a script
and I can’t say yes without a script” (Jeffries). So, for the time being, he
walked away, but when he was eventually presented with a script, he “was
honestly wanting to dislike it.” He didn’t, though. Even then, according
to Craig, he “made pro and con lists” (Jeffries) and asked “everyone he
knew” if he should take the role. As befits Craig’s own vaunted mental
state, the response was divided: “Some of them said, ‘You’re gonna f***
yourself there.’ And they might be right” (Ogle 90). But others—and
here Craig draws upon respected names like Steven Spielberg, with whom
he was filming Munich during the time he was making his Bond deci-
sion—encouraged him to take the part. Even so, Craig continues to this
day to put his worries about his decision, and its possible impact on his
career, squarely on the record: “Of course, I am always going to think
about whether it is going to limit what I do,” he told the Daily Telegraph
(Ogle 90), and he has also mused in interviews that “I’d like to be in both
big and small movies and I wonder that, if I do Bond, whether or not
directors would employ me, which would be a big shame” (S. Marshall
135). At first glance, such an open admission of these concerns seems, and
is, quite frank, but the persistence of Craig’s public worryings—what
Lauren Berlant would call his affective dog paddling (Cruel Optimism
199)—plays another role too: preempting the very typecasting that Craig
fears by revealing him to be an actor aware of his potential to reach beyond
Bond and savvy enough to continue putting that awareness in front of his
public and the industry. As such, it is a profoundly reluctant stance.
Journalists have been quick to follow Craig’s lead in depicting himself
as not only an initially unwilling Bond, but a persistently unwilling Bond.
When the third film, Skyfall, opened in 2012, the question of Craig’s con-
tinuing with the franchise repeatedly came up in interviews; to Maclean’s
journalist Brian D. Johnson’s observation that both Sean Connery and
Roger Moore eventually felt trapped in the role, Craig responded that “I
hope I’ll jump out before I feel like that. That’s always been my instinct in
situations—last to arrive at the party, first to leave” (B. Johnson). To Time
Out, Craig put the case more viscerally; asked whether he could imagine
himself doing another Bond film, Craig retorted, “Now? I’d rather break
this glass and slash my wrists. … All I want to do is move on” (Calhoun).
Not surprisingly, Craig’s vehemence on this occasion made headlines, and
the franchise moved in to temper his words; as producer Barbara Broccoli
explained to the Associated Press two months later,
We had an 8-month shoot and he was tired. I think we all feel at the end of
a movie that the thought of doing another one right away is always a little
bit too much to contemplate. It’s like childbirth. You don’t ask a woman
who’s just given birth, “oh when are you going to do it again?” (Bahr)
Craig, for his part, seconded this interpretation, claiming that “I’m quite
straightforward and I say things when I feel it and then I change my mind
… I’m still enjoying Bond much more than I ever did, because I’ve been
allowed to bring what I know to the role.” (Beaumont-Thomas)
Craig’s shifting public pronouncements on his future as Bond are more
complicated than this one incident of curbed frankness would suggest.
The narrative of Craig’s feelings about his participation in the franchise
refused to remain linear, a progression from unwillingness to willingness.
Instead, he looped back to reluctance once again, telling yet another inter-
viewer that he would do the Bond role as long as he’s “physically able”
(Bahr), in so doing, neatly reframing the question of his continuing with
the franchise as the familiar reluctant apology: the spirit may be willing,
but the flesh might well be weak. Indeed, from the very beginning of his
tenure as Bond, Craig has alternated negative or lukewarm responses to
the question of his continuance with stridently gung-ho expressions of
106 L. YORK
eagerness to continue. In the aftermath of the success of Casino Royale,

Victoria Lindrea of BBC Entertainment noted that there was “no sign of
his earlier reluctance to embrace the role”; in fact, Craig told her “I’m
very excited about the idea of going on and doing another movie. That
was always the aim” (Lindrea). Publicity for the film emphasized how fully
Craig had (finally) committed himself to the role; as Steve Rose details in
his “Daniel Craig: A Reluctant Bond Who has Made the Role his Own,”
Craig “took control” of the role, citing stuntmen on the set who remarked
upon “how Craig throws himself into the action more than he needs to,”
and adding that he also meticulously curated Bond’s new Tom Ford suit
and persuaded director Sam Mendes to direct Skyfall and Spectre (Rose).
Again, the franchise spokespeople seconded this narrative of resistance
bravely overcome: producer Barbara Broccoli, acknowledging that there
was “a period of trying to woo him,” explained his hesitation by recourse
to the opposite tendency: Craig’s tendency to go all-in once he has made
a commitment: “He’s someone who’s very professional, and he throws
himself into whatever he’s doing” (Weiner). Like comments about Robert
DeNiro being “very deliberate before making a move and very generous
when you do” (25 Mar 1984; 167.2), Daniel Craig is represented as a
reluctant bundle of opposite trajectories of desire: to retreat and to advance
full bore.
At times, this tug of war between exuberant embrace and doubt takes
the form of John Cusack’s reminders that any complaint about the encum-
brances of fame must also include an acknowledgment of privilege; as
Craig told Stuart Jeffries of The Guardian, “the more success this film
[Casino Royale] may have, the more restricting that may become for my
career.” But after what Jeffries calls a mere “beat,” Craig is quick to add:
“But it’s not a bad problem to have. When I was at the Guildhall [School
of Music and Drama], we’d go to these meetings with Equity accountants
and they’d say 90% of you aren’t going to work. I’ve been very lucky”
(Jeffries). Around the same time, he told the Daily Telegraph, in terms that
reproduce Cusack’s repeated reminders of fame as a “high class problem,”
“I hope it’s going to be liberating [to be Bond]. I’m not putting any nega-
tive spin on this because to be typecast as James Bond is a very high-class
problem for an actor,” but—unlike Cusack—he immediately reneged on
his resolve, returning to his “negative spin”: “Of course I’m always going
to think about whether it is going to limit what I do” (Ogle 90).
Repeatedly, Craig positions his awareness of his privilege alongside his
divided feelings about doing the Bond role, with the awareness of that
privilege never really quelling his qualms; he told Esquire that the role has
“a kind of rigidity … You’re playing this very specific character and every-
body starts looking at you in that way,” but he immediately shifts gears
and tells them how little he now worries about typecasting of this sort: “I
relaxed. It was like ‘Fuck it. I’m James Bond for fuck’s sake. So I’ll do
James Bond.’ … I mean, talk about a high-class problem” (Bilmes). Once
again, Craig frustrates the linearity of the narrative he has produced, one
of a movement from doubt to engagement, by keeping his less than enthu-
siastic side always on the public record.
After each film appeared, speculation simmered about whether Craig
would continue in the role, particularly since he has consistently put his
less-than-enthusiastic initial embrace of the part on the public record, and
it is widely expected that he may “jump out,” to use his words, soon, per-
haps after he makes Bond 25, due to be released in 2019. When Skyfall,
his third, came out, he cagily responded to the Hollywood Reporter’s ques-
tion about his being signed for two more, “At the moment, that is the
plan. But I know this is the film business, and we’ll take it a picture at a
time. I’d love to continue beyond that” (“Daniel Craig: Debriefed”).
With the edgier Rolling Stone, Craig was correspondingly less diplomatic:
“I’ve been trying to get out of this from the very moment I got into it, but
they won’t let me go, and I’ve agreed to do a couple more, but let’s see
how this one does, because business is business and if the shit goes down,
I’ve got a contract that somebody will happily wipe their ass with”
(Hedegaard). Once more with feeling, not to mention expletives, Craig
jumps back and forth from commitment to the noncommittal and even
fierce disdain: a reluctant brew.
Once Craig had completed his fourth Bond film, Spectre, the specula-
tion became clamorous, and in this case, the question of contractual agree-
ment became a very public matter. In 2015, producer Michael G. Wilson
told the press “I think we’ve got Daniel Craig”—hardly a solid-sounding
guarantee. When pressed on this question, Wilson admitted, “We don’t
have a contract” (Galloway). In 2016, it had been reported that Craig
would leave the role, but subsequently the press learned that MGM was
willing to work around Craig’s schedule after the actor had agreed to star
in a television series based on the American writer Jonathan Franzen’s
novel Purity. Reports claimed that the company was willing to delay pro-
duction of the next Bond film for a year to allow Craig to work on the
series, in order to keep him on and keep him happy (“James Bond Film
Bosses”). The question of who will fill the coveted spy’s shoes is always a
108 L. YORK
source of avid speculation, particularly in Britain, but Craig’s very public

protestations of unwillingness fuelled the controversy beyond its normal
levels. Finally, on August 15th, 2017, after two years of rampant specula-
tion, Craig acknowledged during his appearance on The Late Show with
Stephen Colbert that he would do one last Bond film. But earlier that same
day, as Variety reported, he told a radio interviewer that nothing had been
confirmed (“Daniel Craig Confirms”).
In light of this twilight condition, Craig’s response to the frequent
question of future Bonds is fascinatingly riven. He has gone on the record
many times protesting that he doesn’t care who the next Bond might be
(his response when Time Out asked the question is typical: “Look, I don’t
give a fuck.”) But in the very same interview, he did speculate about the
advice he would offer his successor: “Don’t be shit! Go for it! Embrace
it… It’s worth it. It’s James Bond” (Calhoun). This from a Bond whose
embrace of the role has always been accompanied by a grimace.
Looking beyond Bond, Craig’s uneasy stance has characterized his take
on the condition of fame in general; though most onlookers would judge
him to be singularly resistant to fame, the situation is more mixed and
variegated than that. He presents himself as an actor who is little suited to
doing the promotional rounds of television, online, and print interviews:
“I’m a really bad liar,” he explained to GQ; “I don’t have those pat things
to say.” But in the next breath he contradicts himself: “Well, I have a
schtick; everyone has a schtick. But if I don’t feel it, I can’t turn it on”
(Naughton). In a few seconds, Craig goes from not having a schtick, to
having one, to only having one when the moment is right and authentic
(which is, after all, the antithesis of the “schtick”). Against the evidence of
his promotional work (think, for example, of the understandably high
degree of repetition in his, and many other stars’, responses to set ques-
tions), Craig works to preserve a cultural capital that is dependent on a
disdain for promotional culture: “the turning it on, making it, ‘You want
a show? I’ll give you a show right now’—I can’t really do that, I feel that’s
anathema to me” (Rankin). But he has also claimed that he has, in his
words, “nothing against self-promotion at all…. People who do it well,
I’m slightly in awe of. It’s a full-time occupation. And it does actually help
you get cast, I know. But … It just sort of makes me sick to the stomach,
really” (S. Marshall 41). Craig’s observation about promotion being a
full-time occupation contests his initial claim that he’s got nothing against
it: if one’s labour consists entirely of promotion, he implies, then where is
the labour of acting that presumably should justify the winning of that
fame? And by drawing upon such visceral language to describe his recoil
from promotion, Craig clearly locates it as a toxic invasion of a balanced,
healthy pursuit of a profession. He has drawn upon such language of phys-
ical aversion repeatedly when describing his dislike for doing publicity;
one story that recurs reaches back to his pre-Bond days when he decided
to grant an interview to a women’s magazine in the UK for an article on
eligible bachelors, “thinking it was just part of the press for Our Friends”
[in the North—Craig’s first UK television success]. But rather than pro-
motion for the vehicle, Craig learned, it “turned out to be … getting into
self promotion” (as if the two were ever completely severed). The fan
response led Craig to reflect that “I think you’ve got to be kind of sick to
want knickers through the post” (Ogle 56, 58). But while engaged in such
promotional acts, as he was on the Graham Norton show in the UK, for
example, alongside Skyfall co-stars Judi Dench and Javier Bardem, Craig
adjusted his line on fame: “It was quite disconcerting at first but I kind of
enjoy it now. I am enjoying making the films and it is part of my life and
it’s a real honour to do it so I take it and enjoy it” (D. Brown). What this
comment, taken from the heat of promotional activity, and his more
denunciatory comments about “sickening” promotion have in common is
a deferral to the activities of film acting and filmmaking as the proper site
of healthy labour.
An extension of promotional activity to publicize a film is the use of
commercial promotion within the film itself—product placement—and on
this subject, Craig is, given his well-known dislike of promotion, surpris-
ingly supportive of these ventures. Heineken, a commercial sponsor of the
Bond films for almost twenty years, placed products in Skyfall (showing
Bond, at one point, drinking the beer, label clearly visible), and part of
Craig’s contract involved doing ads for the company (Hobbs). When
asked by Vanity Fair whether he considered this cheapening (as some fans
apparently did), Craig was unapologetic: “A movie like this costs $118
million to make…. And it costs another $200 million to sell it … Heineken
gave us a ton of money … [The beer is] in the back of the shot…. I’ll drink
a beer in the shot, I’m happy to, but I’m not going to do an ‘Ahhhh’
[exclamation of refreshment]” (Weiner). So there’s promotion, it would
seem, and promotion; here Craig mobilizes the same sorts of dichotomies
between seemly and unseemly promotional culture that he calls upon
when distinguishing between proper and improper attitudes towards
fame. He is going to be a promotional subject, he tells us, but not a chees-
ily, improperly eager one, and therein lies his reluctance.
110 L. YORK
Social media is the primary site upon which Craig tends to construct
and justify his distinction between the seemly and the unseemly perfor-
mance of celebrity. His public statements about the absolute necessity of
privacy are numerous and vehement (“I genuinely believe that it is a
f***king [sic] human right, no matter who you are or what you do, to
have some privacy. I understand that you lose a bit of that when you do a
job like this, but aspects of my life are nobody’s f***ing business” [Ogle
144].) And as often as not, Craig reaches for social media as a test case for
the limits of that publicity, and, in turn, for the trustworthiness of the
celebrity’s statements about their wishes to guard their privacy. His state-
ments about online platforms reproduce in their logics many of the things
he has said about inviting publicity of any kind:
You watch the mess people get into when they invite people into their
homes and say, “This is the stress I’m under at the moment because I’m
breaking up with so-and-so, or my child is dying, or my mother is dying, and
I’d like to share this grief with you because it would be good for other
people.” It may seem like a valid statement, but I can only see it damaging
you. Later, people will say, “But you shared your grief with us when your cat
died, what do you mean you won’t talk to us now you’ve had an affair with
so-and-so.” (S. Marshall 39)
The argument is exactly the one that Craig mobilizes in his controversial
GQ UK interview in which he denounced reality television and internet
stars the Kardashian family:
I think there’s a lot to be said for keeping your own counsel.… It’s not
about being afraid to be public with your emotions or about who you are
and what you stand for. But if you sell it off it’s gone. You can’t buy it
back—you can’t buy your privacy back. “Ooh I want to be alone.” F--k you.
We’ve been in your living room. We were at your birth. You filmed it for us
and showed us the placenta and now you want some privacy? Look at the
Kardashians, they’re worth millions…. You see that and you think, “What,
you mean all I have to do is behave like a f--king idiot on television and then
you’ll pay me millions?” … I’m not judging it—well, I am obviously.
(Naughton)
As Pamela Ingleton and I have written, because of the frequent “external

characterizations of [the Kardashians] as the de facto media sell-outs
against whom other celebrities (often explicitly) position their own social
media (non-) involvement, the Kardashians, as unreluctant celebrities

inversely define the privileged reluctant expressions of more ‘accepted’
stars such as Craig” (Ingleton and York “I’m Not a Kardashian”).
Furthermore, note the slippage between Craig’s acknowledgment that,
after all, a certain amount of invasion of privacy is part of the celebrity’s
job, and his denunciation of the “invitation” to invade that privacy; though
he is right not to draw an airtight division between celebrities who zeal-
ously protect their personal privacy and those who invite it, since all celeb-
rity is, ipso facto, heightened social visibility, his argument enters muddier
waters when he insists upon the unseemly celebrity’s choice of publicity,
signalled through the invitation. As he commented, “I used to think the
press was a necessary evil and now I don’t think it is. I think it’s something
that you choose” (S. Marshall 127). But clearly, and in his own experience,
some of that choice is taken out of the celebrity’s hands (“you lose a bit of
that when you do a job like this”).
Because Craig identifies choice as the determining criterion for “seemly”
versus “unseemly” public personae, it follows that he must show himself
publicly to be eschewing forms of public sharing, and for Craig that means
renouncing social media. “I’m not on Facebook and I’m not on Twitter
either! ‘Woke up this morning, had an egg?’ what relevance is that to any-
one? Social networking? Just call each other up and go to the pub and have
a drink” (S. Marshall 259–60). In a conversation with playwright and
director Martin McDonagh, Craig flatly stated, “I don’ t go on the
Internet” (McDonagh). In most cases, Craig is praised for such choices;
McDonagh goes him one better and claims, “I don’t even have a phone.
I don’t want to get into all that Twitter bullshit either,” and in the GQ
article in which Craig denounces the Kardashians, journalist John
Naughton introduces the subject of publicity with the admiring observa-
tion that Craig is charting “a taciturn course … Against a running tide of
emotional incontinence” (Naughton)—presumably as represented by the-
you-know-whos. As Ingleton and I argue, “Social media denouncers cre-
ate and police various cultural hierarchies that distinguish between
celebrities who are serious-minded as opposed to trifling” (“I’m Not a
Kardashian”).
Since sharing information needs to be thus constructed as difficult dis-
closure, rather than lazy “incontinence,” Craig, like Robert De Niro, is
known for performing the celebrity interview with a great deal of dragging
dereliction (He replied to one journalist’s question about what his rather
unsuccessful 2011 film Cowboys and Aliens was “about” by snapping, “It’s
112 L. YORK
about cowboys and fucking aliens, what do you think it’s about?”
[Bilmes].) Still, like De Niro, his disinclination can be gainsaid by moments
of fluency. For example, biographer Sarah Marshall makes much of his
taciturnity, but contradicts herself as she does so:
He developed a reputation for being difficult with the press. Journalists

would arrive at interviews, prepared to do battle with a man notorious for
his monosyllabic responses. When he did speak, his conversation was pep-
pered with expletives. … Reluctantly, he would conduct interviews only
when it was necessary. (39–40)
Initially this does sound a great deal like Robert De Niro, but Marshall’s
reference to Craig’s fondness for expletives (substantiated already in this
chapter by citations I have made from numerous interviews) gainsays his
supposed taciturnity, especially since the moments in his interviews that
are the most expletive laden are often, not coincidentally, the most
garrulous.
As with DeNiro, reports of Craig’s stubborn taciturnity are much exag-
gerated, and what we have, instead, is more of a verbal stop-start combina-
tion that is typical of many a reluctant celebrity. Naughton, interviewing
him for GQ, notes the frequent swearing and his “relaxed, funny and
polite” demeanour (Naughton). He tells a decidedly filthy, sexist joke to
Erik Hedegaard of Rolling Stone, taking that journalist by surprise, “if
only because he’s not a guy usually taken to telling jokes in public, any
kind of jokes” (Hedegaard). But apparently he is. One of the gems to issue
from Craig’s Vanity Fair interview is his response to the case of an
American town that was reportedly considering banning swearing: “You
just kind of want to go, ‘Fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck!’” (Weiner). Taciturn?
Maybe not so much.
Decidedly unlike De Niro, though, Craig is constantly reminding us
that he is, contrary to these impressions, a difficult interviewee. As John
Naughton cannily observed, “interviewing Daniel Craig … gets very meta
very quickly.” He and Craig engaged in a conversation about Craig’s
moments of unresponsiveness, culminating in Craig engaging in self-
parody: “Sometimes they get guests like me [Adopts upbeat voice] ‘So,
how are you?’ [Switches to surly teenager] ‘All right.’” Craig is here revel-
ling in his taciturn persona, even though he contradicts its accuracy:
“Actually I did it [publicity] recently for Cowboys and Aliens, and I kind of
relaxed about it a bit more. Say less, laugh more.” Play along. And Craig’s
version of playing along still manages to protect his reputation for verbal
stinginess: “Say less.” This self-consciousness about the “game,” com-
bined with the able performance of taciturnity, do specific kinds of work,
marking Craig as an actor of intelligence who knows, in that “meta” way,
that he is playing the game. And it adds to the reputation Craig has for, in
director John Maybury’s words, “not suffer[ing] fools” (Rose), allowing
him to perform publicity reluctantly, knowingly—and in what he would
consider a seemly fashion.
As Craig’s denunciations of the “unseemly” Kardashians would sug-
gest, he sets himself up as an intelligent defender of the borders of the
private and the public, and one notable site at which he does so is through
reference to his marriage to actor Rachel Weisz. By contrast to the
Kardashians offering up their privacy (as figured by Craig in gendered
terms, as a view of their domestic spaces of birthing, placenta, etc.
[Ingleton and York “I’m Not a Kardashian”]), Craig offers up his mar-
riage as an ideal zone of achieved, chosen, inviolable privacy. Because he is
married to another public figure, the challenges to retaining privacy are
correspondingly increased, but, Craig insists, they have been met and van-
quished. As he told GQ in the interview in which he famously trashed the
Kardashians, he also spoke of what interviewer John Naughton called his
“stealth operation” of marrying Weisz in Manhattan with no “TMZ leaks,
no advance speculation”—figuratively speaking, no Kardashians: an
instance of “not playing the game to an almost heroic degree,” as
Naughton approvingly notes. In the interview, conducted several months
after the wedding, Craig would still not give details about how he had
pulled off this feat: “We got away with it. We did it privately. … But that
was the point. We did it for private reasons.” The secret marriage becomes
a guarantor of Craig’s policing of the boundaries; in another interview he
reiterated, “I did it secretly—I can’t tell you how I pulled it off. My private
life is incredibly important to me” (Ogle 168). No Kardashian he. And
Weisz, for her part, reinforces the message; in Hello! Magazine (ironi-
cally), she defends her determination to keep her marriage to Craig pri-
vate, associating unseemly sharing with a gendered immaturity, invoking
not the Kardashians but their presumed equivalents, adolescent girls:
“When you’re young, you tell your girlfriends everything. One of the
great pleasures of not being an adolescent is that you don’t have to share
everything … that door closes. The audience goes, and you’re in your own
life.” Hello!, for its part, makes explicit the ironies of Weisz speaking to
Hello! about privacy by noting that, pace the regime of privacy in the
114 L. YORK
Craig-Weisz household, “the 45-year-old cuddled up to her husband” in

a “rare public display of affection” at the London premiere of Spectre
(“Rachel Weisz Explains”).
Reluctance, for Craig, is mappable not only in terms of his marriage
(which is, by definition, a public declaration of a private feeling) but also
in reference to class and geography. That is, Craig’s class and geographical
origins become, like his marriage, forms of guarantee that he is not an
unseemly fame seeker. When he protested to John Naughton that he
“didn’t get into this business to become famous,” he offers as evidence his
economic-geographic past: “at the back of my head, there was probably
always an idea, ‘God I’d love to be a movie star.’ But honestly, I come
from Liverpool. I thought there would be fat chance of that happening”
(Naughton). (Tell it to the Beatles.) Juli Weiner, interviewing him for
Vanity Fair, that most pliant of celebrity publicity outlets, noticed Craig’s
discomfort in discussing his fame: “a modesty born, perhaps, of a middle-
class English childhood; he was raised in Chester, near the border with
Wales, the son of a publican and an art teacher” (When his parents
divorced, Craig moved with his mother up the Wirral Peninsula to nearby
Liverpool.) His biographer Sarah Marshall predictably makes much of this
rise-from-(not such)-humble-origins narrative; she retells the story of
Craig being presented to his mother at birth wrapped in newspaper.
“Ironically,” she proposes, “it was a foretaste of his future as an actor
famed for his working-class sentiments and complete disregard for the
trappings and luxuries of celebrity life” (3). Craig himself has used the
anecdote to similar, though subtler effect, joking that “Perhaps I should
lie in interviews and say it was a copy of the Times Literary Supplement”
(S. Marshall 3). Craig’s self-presentation as the rough and tumble, non-
effete “lad” from the North attempts to counteract the discourse of celeb-
rity as privileged, feminized subject in the curiously irrational way that
such arguments about humble origins purport to do. At times, he posi-
tively revels in his class origins, recalling that “When I left drama school it
was Merchant Ivory or nothing,” referring to the elaborately costumed
literary dramas popular in the 1980s and 90s produced by the Merchant
Ivory production company formed by the producer Ismail Merchant and
director James Ivory. “I think they figured out that I was as common as
muck” (S. Marshall 92). The progeny of an art teacher and pub landlord
can hardly be thus described, but Craig’s arguably middle-class origins do
not prevent him from being celebrated in Britain’s Daily Mail as “the
working class boy from the Wirral” (Price).
Doing discursive battle with this image of Daniel Craig as a tough-

speaking working-class lad are representations of him as a distinctly up-
market thespian—representations that Craig is just as eager to reinforce.
Many observers of his career make much of his dramatic credentials and
register, whether positively or negatively, a measure of disjunction with the
popular Bond franchise; Karen Brooks and Lisa Hill, in their study of
Craig’s Bond, “Masculinity, Identity and Cultural Nostalgia,” note that he
“provides an enticing authenticity and gravitas [in the role], possibly
because of his modest career in theatre and substantial training as an actor”
(122). Skyfall and Spectre director Sam Mendes latterly admitted that he
felt casting Craig as Bond might have been a misstep; as journalist Alex
Bilmes paraphrases him, “the feeling was he was too serious an actor, too
searching, too saturnine” (Bilmes). Erik Hedegaard noted that, before
Bond, Craig was mainly known in Britain for his television series Our
Friends in the North and “numerous highbrow art-house movies”
(Hedegaard). The persistent question appeared to be: would Craig resur-
rect the Bond series into up-market glory, or would his involvement in the
franchise tarnish and downgrade his own “serious” credentials as an actor?
One way in which Craig and the Bond franchise have handled this
question of popular-culture “taint” is by emphasizing the quality of the
people he has worked with, and in some cases drawn into, the franchise. In
the same breath that producer Barbara Broccoli praises Craig’s interpreta-
tion of the character, she pays tribute to the up-market personnel he has
been able to bring with him to the projects: “He’s so great and attracts so
many people who want to work with him like Christoph (Waltz) and Lea
[Seydoux], Ralph Fiennes and Ben Wishaw” (Lee). Publicity for Skyfall
made much of the fact that Craig had persuaded Sam Mendes, director of
Oscar contenders American Beauty and Revolutionary Road, to direct:
“London stage sensation turned classy Hollywood auteur,” to quote
Esquire (Bilmes). “No Bond movie has been so loaded with talent,”
enthused Maclean’s’s Brian D. Johnson, noting in passing that one of the
“Bond girls,” Naomie Harris, is “a Cambridge-educated, classically trained
British stage actress.” So there. In asking Craig about this impressive
“pedigree of the cast and the filmmakers,” Johnson observed that although
“Bond has always been a guy with class, … the franchise hasn’t always
been worthy of him” (Johnson). Craig responded by seeing the hiring of
Mendes (which was, after all, largely his doing), as the crucial factor: “Sam
coming in tempted a lot of people to get involved” (Johnson). In taking
this line, Craig safeguards his own involvement too, of course, and
116 L. YORK
r einforces his anti-fame fame: “My thing isn’t about getting on the cover
of this or that” (as it is, presumably, for other celebrities); “it’s about
people I want to work with” (S. Marshall 31). Once again, Craig empha-
sizes the vehicle, and the labour that produces it, as a means of injecting
his celebrity with cultural value.
This taking of pleasure in the up-marketing of Bond, though, comes
with its dangers, most notably of seeming to disdain one’s own vehicle
(not to mention irk the franchise operators), and so Craig’s public com-
mentary on the cultural value of Bond is often fraught by contradiction. It
is both a vehicle that is unworthy of him as an actor, and one that he has
upgraded so as to make it worthy of him. For example, his discussion of
the first Bond script presented to him—the one that convinced him to sign
up—is a classic instance of this reluctant, simultaneous cultural up/down-
grading. He told Victoria Lindrea of the BBC that “I don’t think I would
have taken the role if it had been a continuation of Bond as we knew him,”
a position that Lindrea seconds by noting that the role is “not typically
associated with serious actors” and that Craig, for his part, was “under-
standably reluctant to give up a versatile career” for it. But it was the script
that changed Craig’s mind: “As far as I was concerned, the script I got was
an actor’s piece, so I was absolutely into doing it” (Lindrea). What, exactly,
does “an actor’s piece” mean? Craig’s other statements on this ur-script
for Casino Royale clarify his use of the decidedly up-market-sounding
term. He told the Guardian that “Paul Haggis had sprinkled his magic
dust on it” and “I thought, this is a great story, probably because it
adhered to the book quite closely” (Jeffries). Once again, the “people I
want to work with,” in this case, Haggis, the writer of Million Dollar Baby
and Crash, were a decisive part of upgrading the Bond project, but so too
were the literary quality and foundations of the script. At the same time,
though, Craig is just as likely to tease an interviewer for expecting the
Bond films to be up-market, “serious,” or literary. In the very same inter-
view in which Craig praised Haggis for sprinkling some glittery literary
value on the Bond story, he met queries about some of the more question-
able parts of the Casino Royale (film) plot by saying, “I’m not trying to kid
anybody here: it’s a Bond movie—it’s not Ingmar Berman, for Christ’s
sake” (Jeffries). But if it had been simply “a Bond movie,” Craig has sug-
gested, he would have turned it down.
The other way in which Craig rationalizes his participation is by claim-
ing that this script, otherwise seen as having been magic dusted into
respectability by others, was also partially his creation. As he told Alex
Bilmes of Esquire, “I’d been prepared to read a Bond script and I didn’t.
They’d stripped everything back and I went [approvingly] ‘Oh, shit!’ It
felt to me they were offering me a blueprint” (Bilmes) and space in which
to bring something new to the character—which Craig clearly did, making
of Bond the more troubled, haunted man who has figured in the past four
films. This was another way that doing the Bond films could be reconciled
with the representation of Craig’s thespian up-market previous career: by
making them “actor’s pieces.” This is one reason why the appreciable
wealth that Craig has earned playing Bond, which he frequently acknowl-
edges, does not appear to threaten his avowed allegiance to art over com-
merce: Steve Rose of The Guardian declares that “If it came to a toss-up
between money and art, there is little doubt which way Craig would jump,
but he might be wondering if it is not too late” (presumably to rescue his
high-culture associations, after having done four Bond films). As for Craig,
he protests this allegiance openly: “I can say, hand on heart, though, that
I’ve never made movies for money. I’ve always made them because I’ve
truly wanted to do them” (Rose). Except, that is, when he is likening
doing them to slitting his wrists.
Looking briefly at Craig’s pre-Bond roles, we can also see that express-
ing disinclination to do a role has not been exclusively a product of Craig’s
Bond period. John Maybury, the director of Love is the Devil, a 1998
biopic about the British painter Francis Bacon, recalled that Craig was
similarly wary of taking on the part of Bacon (Derek Jacobi)’s thief lover:
“He was very reluctant to do the part originally. He wasn’t too comfort-
able with the idea of sleeping with Derek Jacobi” (Rose), presumably
because he wondered about a straight actor being given the part. But set
against this reasonable trepidation his feelings about doing Lara Croft:
Tomb Raider opposite Angelina Jolie in 2001; “I had mixed emotions
because it was an action movie,” Craig recalled, “And as an actor who asks
himself, ‘What’s the truth in this?’ that can be a bit strange” (S. Marshall
68). Though Lara Croft is often cited as an example of Craig taking a role
for money, to be fair, he also took it as a means of expanding his career by
breaking into the American market, which, in 2001, he had not yet man-
aged to do successfully. Again, though, we see the invocation of the
“actor’s piece”; action film, for Craig, appears, as a genre, inimical to the
dramatic strategy of plumbing the role for truth, and yet, in taking up
James Bond he would set about doing precisely that.
The main way in which Craig set about it was, arguably, to turn
Bond into a reluctant hero in the style of Craig’s previous role persona.
118 L. YORK
As Katharine Cox argues in her study of “Daniel Craig, Rebirth, and
Refashioning Masculinity in James Bond,” Craig’s previous roles “unite
elements of action hero, working-class man with the Byronic and tortured
soul, in a composite” (186) that she argues prefigures Craig’s reconfigur-
ing of the Bond figure in the films. Steve Rose of The Guardian, surveying
Craig’s pre-Bond roles, notes that “he excels as tough, brutish characters
with an underlying vulnerability” (Rose). “[A]n actor of ferocious inten-
sity, a specialist in wounded masculinity on stage and screen,” Alex Bilmes
pronounces him, adding, perhaps needlessly, “He doesn’t do a lot of
sunny romcoms” (Bilmes). Precisely because Craig had a part in rebooting
the character of James Bond in the four films beginning with 2006’s
Casino Royale, and inflecting it with his reading of the character, it is
revealing to read these four films as texts in which Craig’s reluctant star
text, his role persona, and the ever-evolving Bond text cross paths, inflect,
and invigorate each other. And so it is no surprise to learn that Craig’s
Bond is a much more reluctant one, in the sense of being caught in the
throes of simultaneous urges to do and not to do, to be invulnerable and
vulnerable, cold and emotional, to move forward and to recoil or, more
accurately, to recoil at the very act of moving forward.
First of all, the Bond figure is ready made for the sorts of various and
conflicting cultural meanings that reluctance expresses; as Tony Bennett
and Janet Woollacott explain,
If Bond has functioned as a “sign of the times,” it has been as a moving sign
of the times, as a figure capable to [sic] taking up and articulating quite dif-
ferent and even contradictory cultural and ideological values, sometimes
turning its back on the meanings and cultural possibilities it had earlier
embodied to enunciate new ones. (19)
This is exactly what happened when Craig took over as the interpreter of
Bond, moving the predominant understanding of the British spy from a
cool, savvy invulnerability to something much more heterogeneous and
frangible. Craig’s Bond is, at once, both assured and out of control. As
Brian D. Johnson, interviewing Craig cannily observed, Bond’s “style and
bravado are a construct, even for him,” to which Craig eagerly assented:
“that’s what has always appealed to me about him. Most people who
behave in a macho way, it’s bluster” (Johnson). A perfect example in the
Craig tetralogy of the simultaneous presence of control and chaos in Bond
are the pre-credits scenes in Casino Royale, shot in black and white, that
show Bond earning his 00 status by making two kills. The first sequence
that shows Bond killing his mark in the bathroom is gritty, messy, difficult;
he is sweating profusely, he misses and shoots a sink that explodes into
pieces. By contrast, the second kill is the kind of vintage cold, noirish
Bond suavity that viewers of the previous films will recognize; Bond kills
his mark, finishing the man’s sentence about the second kill being easier as
he does so. It is as though Bond is attempting to silence his own previous
disorganization, for his second mark, an MI6 insider gone wrong, upbraids
Bond about his difficult first kill: “He made you feel it, did he?” (Casino
Royale). As Anna Katherine Amacker and Donna Ashley Moore observe,
the first scene shows Bond killing “as a thug” and the second, “as a techni-
cian” (143). Many critics of the film, though, tend to privilege the first
view of Bond—as thug—as the predominant and distinctive mode of
Craig’s Bond; Amacker and Moore argue that “Despite the latter [i.e.,
technician representation], it is the raw, forceful Bond, the emotional
brute that is the focus of Casino Royale” (143). Lucy Bolton agrees; she
maintains that the “brutal black-and-white pre-credit sequence … sig-
nalled the dawn of a pared down, gritty Bond era. Daniel Craig is a muscle-
bound slugger: what he lacks in finesse and grace he makes up for with
relentless physical ferocity” (73). While I agree that Craig’s Bond is grittily
physical, I see the opening two scenes as establishing a simultaneity of
control and chaos, rather than the cancelling out of one by the other.
Craig’s Bond is both thug and technician, and therein lies the moody
drama of this quartet of films: as Peter C. Kunze observes of the third in
the series, Skyfall, “The film continues to waver between vulnerability and
infallibility, and this fluctuation makes it nuanced in its characterization”
(243). The famous Bondian finesse and control grows out of, and coexists
with the gritty, out-of-control violence of becoming a trained killer, and
what is nuanced in Craig’s depiction of the character is precisely this ten-
sion and sombre knowledge.
Indeed, in Craig’s hands, Bond becomes more vulnerable than he has
ever been in his cinematic representations, and that vulnerability acts in
the tetralogy as the dragging counter-force that signals reluctance. Several
critics have noted how physically vulnerable this Bond is; Katherine Cox
lists the various ways “Bond’s corporeality is frequently threatened”—
through bleeding, penetration by a nail gun and a tracker device in his
arm, poison—and concludes that “This is a Bond barely in control as he
stumbles apparently drunkenly to the toilet to induce vomiting” (191).
This scene of a poisoned Bond in the casino bathroom offers a visual echo
120 L. YORK
of the chaotic first kill scene in an earlier bathroom: a sign that its chaos is
not external to Bond but, like the tracking device, deeply imbedded in
him. And critics agree that this is unprecedented in the Bond filmic canon;
Karen Brooks and Lisa Hill note that, “unlike previous Bonds, Craig’s
efforts to accomplish his mission remain inscribed upon his body. He flails,
falls, sweats; we see him bruised and bloodied” (123)—the latter consis-
tently throughout the course of the film. To be more precise, this is almost
without precedent; as Beth Butterfield writes of 1999’s The World Is Not
Enough, when Elektra King (Sophie Marceau) notices Bond’s (Pierce
Brosnan) wounded shoulder, “In twenty films and nearly fifty years, it’s
one of the first times we’ve really seen James Bond get hurt” (3), but even
there the scene is hardly the bloody, sweaty mess of the Craig films. Jack
McMorrow confirms that, with Casino Royale, “This was the first time
Bond conceivably bled” (428), a condition that correlates with Bond’s
greater emotional vulnerability, since McMorrow also notes that Casino
Royale marks the first time, since On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969),
Bond falls “in love with his female lead” (426) rather than simply engag-
ing in what Craig has archly called the usual “rumpy-pumpy” (Jeffries).
Casino Royale’s stunt coordinator, Gary Powell, a man who knows a thing
or two about bleeding and sweating, contrasted Craig’s Bond with that of
Brosnan, who would always emerge “from a punch-up or a huge explo-
sion with an unruffled tie and immaculate hair.” Citing the adage, “Sean
Connery sweated, Roger Moore perspired, and Pierce Brosnan glowed,”
Powell added, “Daniel Craig bleeds” (Ogle 114–15). Although there are
Brosnanian moments in the Craig Bond films (one thinks here of the
breathtaking train chase scene at the beginning of Skyfall in which Bond,
hanging desperately onto a train car that is about to separate from the rest
of the train, manages to jump to safety into the next car, just as his barely
abandoned car crashes into a flame-filled oblivion behind him. Bond,
seemingly unfazed, in a classic move, stands up amidst the screaming, pan-
icked passengers … and adjusts his cufflink.) Craig sees his bloodied Bond
as a sign that the famous forward propulsion of the character—like that
propulsive jump onto the next train car—is bought at some cost: “that’s
the thing with this Bond. He bleeds. It’s more about the fact that he
bleeds, goes down and gets up again” (Ogle 109). And adjusts his
cufflink.
Blood is not the only fluid that marks this Bond’s sluggish path towards
suavity and forward movement; tears are just as unprecedented a bodily
emission in the world of Bond. When M (Judi Dench) dies at the end of
Skyfall, Bond closes her eyes and he weeps over her body in a tableau that
Karen Brooks and Lisa Hill suggestively call “an inverse Pietà” (125). In
that moment, control and chaos, strength and vulnerability join; as Brooks
and Hill reflect, “Bond understands he is both redeemer and destroyer, an
antichrist and Good Shepherd” (125): a forward-propelling missile (M.
has called earlier called him a “blunt instrument”) and a melancholy
lingerer.
Part of the understanding that Craig’s Bond slowly gains is that he, like
everyone else, is simultaneously living and dying: the most elemental
reluctance of all. In Skyfall, that awareness of ageing is omnipresent, and
it acts as a corrective to the tradition of James Bond as eternally vigorous,
victorious in life though constantly threatened by death. Gareth Mallory
(Ralph Fiennes), Chair of the Intelligence and Security Committee, point-
edly tells Bond “It’s a young man’s game”; this just after we have wit-
nessed Bond’s body sweating, stressing while undergoing tests to see if he
is fit for field service after his spectacular “skyfall” off the bridge when he
is mistakenly shot by Eve Moneypenny. As he will find out much later, he
has failed those tests, and he is only able to return to the field because M.
has lied and said that he has been successful in order to give him another
chance. (In the meantime, during the time that Bond has been presumed
dead, M. herself has been pressured by Mallory to retire.) The vulnerabil-
ity of ageing is compounded for Bond when he meets his new Q (Ben
Wishaw), a computer geek, in the National Gallery for the first time.
Surveying a J.M.W. Turner painting of an old ship being hauled off for
scrap, Q opines that it shows us “the inevitability of time, don’t you think?
What do you see?” An unimpressed, defensive Bond grumbles in reply, “A
bloody big ship.” Disbelieving that this mere chit could be his technical
expert, Bond exclaims, “You still have spots!” [i.e., acne], to which Q
quips, “Age is no guarantee of efficiency,” and Bond retorts, “And youth
no guarantee of innovation.” This repartee, its duality sharpened by the
use of a two shot of Q and Bond looking at the painting/camera, rein-
forces Skyfall’s pervasive sense of Bond as an ageing man under pressure
to prove himself and his vaunted outsize masculinity (“A bloody big
ship”). This age-related vulnerability is likewise unprecedented in the
Bond films; as Klaus Dodds observes, “Skyfall is the first to present the
impression that both Bond and M might be too old to continue in their
professional roles” (214), and Karen Brooks and Lisa Hill argue that “this
interplay between ‘old’ and ‘new’, between ‘continuity’ and ‘change’
122 L. YORK
permeates Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace … and Skyfall … as well as

Craig’s evolution in the lead role” (Hines 121).
In the next film, too, Spectre, this image of the formerly powerful “ship”
being scrapped returns, when the new M (Gareth Mallory [Fiennes]) tells
Bond that the government is thinking of scrapping the 00 programme. The
insecurity about being superannuated, too old, hangs over this film too; the
new bureaucrat “C” is convinced that “The 00 program is prehistoric,” and
he feels that the agents could be replaced by drones. The sweating, stressing,
weeping, bleeding body is about to be scrapped, reviled as it is as a recalci-
trant drag upon the forward thrust of the posthuman brave new world.
In the face of this neoliberal tide that is sweeping MI6, M (Judi Dench),
in Skyfall, when she is called on the carpet to answer for the inefficiencies
of the human 00 programme, gives voice to a view of existence that is
fully, and triumphantly, reluctant in my sense of the term. In response to
being told by the oversight committee that MI6’s techniques are out-
moded, she quotes the ending of Tennyson’s “Ulysses”:
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’

We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are,—
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield. (Houghton and Stange 32)
Tennyson’s poem is an (appropriately melancholy) rallying cry for the

reluctant: MI6 and, by extension, its leader M and operative Bond are
simultaneously weak and strong, poignantly aware of their lost strength
and even more determined, by virtue of that awareness, to soldier on (The
scene alternates close ups of M reciting the poem with shots of Bond vig-
orously chasing the villain Raoul Silva [Javier Bardem] who is threatening
to break into the chamber where M is reciting Tennyson and kill her.) On
a broader level, the film by no means stints on the nationalist aspects of the
poet laureate’s lines; it is also, implicitly, a patriotic paean to post-imperial
Britain: the reluctant state aware of its past “strength.”
The fact that M is the one to pour forth this message, at such a crucial
moment in MI6’s history and in such an authoritative (Judi-Dench-ish)
fashion, speaks revealingly of the way in which the drama of reluctance in
these Bond films is partly accomplished through discourses of gender. M,
as a woman under constant pressure to be “tough” in a conventionally
male profession, inversely reflects Craig’s Bond’s unprecedented tarrying
with affects and positionings not conventionally gendered male. Many

critics have noted the way in which Craig’s body is made the object of sala-
cious interest by the camera (think back to Bond emerging from the sea in
those blue swimming trunks in Casino Royale); as Lisa Funnell has argued,
“Craig’s Bond is positioned as a visual spectacle and aligned with the Bond
Girl character type rather than his Bond predecessors in the filmic fran-
chise” (“I Know” 456). Specifically referring to the blue-swimming-trunks
scene, Funnell shows how,
Shot through medium close-up, Bond’s wet muscular body, covered only by
his square leg swimsuit, glistens in the sunlight and fills up the screen. This
scene presents the exposed muscular body of Bond as spectacular, passive,
and feminized, positioning Craig in the role of Bond Girl as the visual spec-
tacle of the Bond film. (467)
The obvious precedent here is Jinx Johnson’s (Halle Berry) emergence

from the sea, clad in a bikini, shot in the same manner, in Die Another Day
(2002), a scene whose scopic dynamic reproduces Laura Mulvey’s “Visual
Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” in a near-textbook fashion: her emer-
gence is watched by an appreciative Bond (Pierce Brosnan), raising his
binoculars to his eyes not once but twice, and summarizing the results
with the comment, “Magnificent view” (Die Another Day).
To say that Craig’s Bond is being popped into this feminized cinematic
space is true, but the very placement creates new effects; as Katharine Cox
observes, the scene offers a simultaneous performance of masculinity as
well as femininity: “Although the actor’s impressively muscular corporeal-
ity visually emphasizes his masculinity, there is an excessiveness here cou-
pled with the fetishisation of Craig through the use of these shots before
the release of the film which positions him as object of the gaze” (186).
Rather than a simple submersion of masculinity by femininity, we have a
much more reluctant clash of gendered discourses: like Craig pointing out
that Bond’s excessive masculine posturing is arguably bravado that dis-
closes vulnerability, so too the setting up of the muscular masculine body
in a filmic shot traditionally used in the series for representing women
shows us a forward-striding masculinity subtly undone by the undertow of
a feminizing visual context that has widely been recognized as limiting. A
further manifestation of this clash of gendered visualizations is the inter-
play between dressed and undressed Bond; the impeccably suited Bond, a
staple of both the literary and cinematic traditions, bespeaks a muscular
124 L. YORK
masculinity barely contained, temporarily tamed; but in Sarah Gilligan’s

words, “Craig’s Bond can be seen to mark an interesting configuration in
the representation of cinematic masculine identity, one which combines
the iconography of both the sheathed suited hero and the fetishistic spec-
tacle of the stripped male body” (75). Craig’s Bond thus embodies both
ends of the spectrum of power and vulnerability that art historians have
associated with the representation of the clothed and the unclothed; he is,
simultaneously Kenneth Clark’s naked (vulnerable) and nude (confident)
artistic subject; both the nude woman and the clothed male picnickers in
Manet’s Dejeuner sur l’herbe.
This double embodiment of clothed/unclothed Bond and the vulner-
ability of his body signal an emotional vulnerability that is truly unparal-
leled, at least in cinematic representations of Bond. Craig’s Bond is, in
short, the most “emo” of Bonds, and this disposition is of a distinctly
reluctant cast. As Michael W. Boyce comments, “While Craig’s Bond is
the most bloodied and battered in the series, he is also emotionally vulner-
able, visibly shaken by his own capacity for violence” (279). Indeed, one
critic has claimed that Craig has thoroughly “turned the role so dark that
… the villains began to look less steel-eyed, Nordic and mentally tortured
than the hero” (Mason). As Craig explains the transition, this new, “emo”
Bond was at least partly his own creation, in collaboration with the fran-
chise and his directors, and in response to contemporary shifts in represen-
tations of North American action heroes:
The aim was to rebrand Bond: they wanted to create a new 007 with inter-
esting psychological flaws to enable him to compete with troubled modern
icons such as Jack Bauer [of the television series 24] and Jason Bourne [of
the highly successful series based on Robert Ludlum’s novels] … They
would make him voguishly vulnerable, hint that he was an orphan and give
him a proper love affair…” (Jeffries)
Katharine Cox also cites post 9/11 superheroes like the Batman of Batman
Begins (2005) and the Superman of Superman Returns (2006) who are
“dark, afflicted and not ‘super’” (187). This is one reason why Craig
was—controversially, at the time—chosen for the role; as John Naughton
has pointed out, his previous work gave rise to a role persona of “glamor-
ous gloom” (Naughton), and that would appear to be the perfect oxymo-
ronic combination that the Bond franchise was looking for: a “voguish
vulnerability” that would not cancel out the tradition’s commitment to

the suavely debonair.
The producers at the Eon company were particularly concerned to
strike the right note, since they knew, from the history of the Bond series
of films, that a turn to the depressive, even in a minor way, had spelled
box-office failure in the past. As Lisa Funnell points out, the 1969 On her
Majesty’s Secret Service, in which George Lazenby replaced Sean Connery
in the series, “revealed a more emotional and vulnerable side to Bond,
who was struggling with the conflict of love versus duty” (“I Know
Where” 456–57). It was also much more faithful to the occasionally
depressive tenor of Fleming’s novels. Two decades later, Timothy Dalton
made a similar experiment, especially in Licence to Kill, where he unveiled
a “moody and angst-ridden performance” that “reveal[ed] a darker side to
James Bond, who is plagued by moral ambiguities and struggles to dif-
ferentiate his personal from his professional life” (Funnell “I Know Where”
457). But once again, the box-office figures were disastrous, and Dalton
was promptly given his walking papers, even though his depiction of the
spy was arguably nowhere near as drenched in angst as Craig’s is in Skyfall
or Spectre. As Funnell concludes, “Audiences have traditionally responded
more positively to the wittier portrayals of Bond (Connery, Moore,
Brosnan) over darker and dramatic performances (Lazenby, Dalton)” (“I
Know Where” 458). So what Craig has done, in effect, is to combine not
the wit of earlier portrayals (which occasionally tipped over into camp—
see Roger Moore), but, instead, a harder-edged toughness and even cal-
lousness with this vulnerability to find a meeting ground likely to please
audiences and therefore the franchise.
In that specific sense, then, this new “emo” Bond is something of a
departure, but in assembling this tough-tender Bond, Craig has also
renewed contact with Ian Fleming’s novels. In the aftermath of the less-
than-successful Dalton period, Lisa Funnell argues, “film producers
decided to part ways with Fleming’s novels and began developing film
scripts independent of the literary tradition” (“I Know Where” 457).
Craig’s first Bond film, Casino Royale, constitutes a reboot, then, not only
because it remakes the 1967 film and renarrates the beginnings of James
Bond, but because it signals a return to the literary texts as touchstones,
since its plot follows that of the novel fairly faithfully. As Daniel Craig
responded to Brian D. Johnson’s observation that “You’ve given us an
existential Bond,” “But you read the [novels by Ian] Fleming, which I do,
and the conflict is through every book. He doesn’t want to do this job,
126 L. YORK
and Fleming put his own angst into the character” (Johnson). Claude
Monnier agrees and sees a thread of introspection running through the
novels: “cette tendance à l’introspection douloureuse … était déjà celle de
Ian Fleming dans ses romans, le hero connaissant aussi bien l’amour
(Casino Royale) que la peur et les larmes (Vivre et laisser mourir), la demo-
tivation (début d’Opération Tonnerre) que la depression (début d’On ne
vit que deux fois)” (244) [This tendency towards painful introspection …
already characterized Fleming’s novels, for the hero was just as acquainted
with love (Casino Royale) as fear and tears (Live and Let Die), lack of moti-
vation (the opening of Operation Thunder), and depression (opening of
You Only Live Twice).] Monnier’s singling out of the opening of several
Fleming novels as a space of disaffection is no coincidence; Fleming’s
Bond often experiences ennui and alienation in the periods between jobs,
and is snapped out of them by a call from M with a new assignment in the
opening pages of the novel.
Craig’s Bond brings his literary counterpart’s disaffection into the space
of the assignments themselves: it pervades all that he does, and it acts as
that dragging force that resists energetic forward motion in a reluctant
state of mind. In Casino Royale, for instance, though Bond is his usual
tough, confident-seeming self even while being cruelly tortured by Le
Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) (by being strapped to a seatless chair and having
his genitals whipped with a rope), he only looks vulnerable when he hears
his lover Vesper Lynd (Eva Green) being tortured in the next room. When
they escape, he confirms to Vesper that his love for her is the vulnerable
chink in his hard shell: “I have no armour left. Whatever I am, I’m yours.”
As Karen Brooks and Lisa Hill reflect, “Unlike the old Bonds, Craig’s ver-
sion is surrounded by a brooding darkness that only briefly evaporates
when he decides to resign from MI6 and create a life with Vesper” (Hines
123). (Briefly indeed; because Le Chiffre and his associates know that
Vesper emotionally disarms Bond, they blackmail her into betraying him,
promising her that, if she agrees, they will halt Bond’s torture, which she
can also hear from the room next door.)
In the next film, Quantum of Solace, Bond has fallen back into his mel-
ancholy, accompanied, though, by a forward-driving compulsion: his need
to find and wreak vengeance on Vesper’s killers; as Bond confides to
Mathis (Giancarlo Giannini), he has not been able to sleep since her death.
He is moving forward, that is, but feeling backward. Dominic Greene
(Mathieu Amalric) (the low-level villain who is busily securing the water
rights of Bolivia under the cover of doing conservation work) taunts Bond
and Camille (Olga Kurylenko), a Bolivian woman also bent on revenge,

for the murder of her family, “You are both, what is the expression, dam-
aged goods,” and in this respect, if no other, he is correct. As Camille will
later regretfully tell Bond, as she caresses his temples, “I wish I could set
you free but your prison is in there.”
Bond, then, is a haunted figure, his energetic forward movements
always dragged back by the force of his melancholy loss. In the third film,
Skyfall, when Bond seemingly resurrects from the dead (after being shot
during the train scuffle) and turns up in M’s house, she asks, “Where the
hell have you been?,” and Bond replies, “Enjoying death.” Reflecting
upon the pervasive sense of superannuation that I have already traced in
this film, M disconsolately concludes, “So this is it. We’re both played
out.” During this entire scene Bond looks barely alive, red-eyed, stubble-
chinned, with flecks of grey in the stubble: a haunted man. Lucy Bolton’s
assessment of Skyfall as a “highly personal Bond film, with a damaged,
resurgent Bond brought face-to-face with his childhood traumas” (74) is
accurate, and her conjoining of the terms “damaged” and “resurgent”
underline what, for me, is the conflicted, reluctant tenor of that haunting:
Bond is, emotionally, one of the walking dead. It is appropriate, then, that
in the final sequences of the film, when he decides to take M with him to
make a final stand in his childhood home, Skyfall, in Scotland, he is mov-
ing both forward and backward: “Where are we going?,” asks M as Bond
retrieves the famous Astin Martin well known to fans of the franchise, to
which he replies, tersely, “Back in time.”
In the next film, Spectre, too, Bond finds himself projected forward
while feeling backward. The film opens in Mexico City on the Day of the
Dead, and during the title sequence that follows, we see “spectres” of
figures from Bond’s past—M, Le Chiffre, Vesper Lynd, Raoul Silva (Javier
Bardem). When Bond tracks down the daughter of Mr. White, a killer
hired by the Spectre group, she is a psychologist with the ultra-Proustian
name Dr. Madeleine Swann (Léa Seydoux). And this melancholy immer-
sion in the past and its traumas and losses informs the final torture scenes
of the film; Blofeld (Christoph Waltz) places photographs of people from
Bond’s past—the same ones we see in the opening credits—on the walls of
the chambers to which he lures Bond, in the old, disused building that
used to house the MI6 offices. Picking up on the language of superannua-
tion from Skyfall, Spectre moves the external action decidedly inside, as
Bond treads warily through the chambers of his mind: walking forward,
feeling backward.
128 L. YORK
In distinction to analyses that would see the latent emotional content

that drags Bond down as the “real” state of the character, a reading fully
attuned to the reluctant dimensions of the character would draw attention
to those moments when Bond in fact does move forward; in a reluctant
state, moving in one direction does not cancel out an affective movement
in the other direction. As Alex Bilmes sums up Craig’s Bond, he is “embat-
tled, conflicted, but still standing, still ready to take on the world” (Bilmes).
In Quantum of Solace, Bond’s moments of lingering with the past are
clearly meant to be distinct from sentimentality; when Mathis is shot,
Bond cradles him in his arms and tells him, “I shouldn’t have left you
alone.” Mathis, in his dying breath, speaks of the past and of a way to
move past it: “Vesper. She did everything for you. Forgive her. Forgive
yourself.” But hardly is this message from the past uttered than Mathis
dies, and Bond rather unceremoniously takes the cash from the dead
man’s wallet and tosses his body into a dumpster, from whence it is briefly
seen in a hauntingly disconcerting aerial shot. To Camille’s shocked
response, he replies that Mathis would have understood and wouldn’t
have cared. Faced with this forward-moving callousness, Camille not
unreasonably queries, “Is that how you treat your friends?” Camille’s
question lingers, but the action proceeds apace nevertheless. As an
exchange between M and Bond late in the film restates the importance of
moving forward, even as that movement may be haunted by the spectres
of regret:
M: “I see you have no regrets.”

Bond: “I don’t. What about you?”
M: “Of course not. It would be unprofessional.”
And while their lingering doubts are certainly hovering behind their
words, the ending of the next film, Skyfall, demonstrates the continuing
force of their resolve and professional compulsion. Eve Moneypenny gives
Bond the box that M has left him in her will, containing the china bulldog
wrapped in the British flag that she had often displayed (to Bond’s amuse-
ment) on her desk. “Maybe it was her way of telling you to take a desk
job,” Moneypenny suggests, to which Bond decisively replies, without
missing a beat: “Just the opposite.” As with M’s reading of Tennyson,
forward movement in full recognition of the dragging forces of vulnerabil-
ity and doubt is celebrated by recourse to images of wounded but persis-
tent (bulldoggish) British nationalism.
Several of the Craig Bond films feature these key moments of dialogue
in which Bond is briefly challenged or tempted by emotional scruples and
expresses a dogged (pun intended) persistence to move forward. In Casino
Royale, Vesper Lynd quizzes him about his job as a hired assassin:
Vesper: “It doesn’t bother you, killing those people?”

Bond: “I wouldn’t be very good at my job if it did.”
Vesper: “You’ve got a choice, you know. Just because you’ve done some-
thing doesn’t mean you have to go on doing it.”
But for James Bond, it curiously does, and the affective life of Bond some-
what enacts Newton’s first law of motion: that inertia will keep a moving
object travelling at the same speed unless acted upon by a countervailing
force. The law is seemingly proven when, two films later in Spectre, Bond
has almost the same conversation with another woman, Dr. Madeleine
Swann:
Swann: “Is it really what you want, [i.e., being an assassin], hiding in the
shadows, hunted, always looking behind you, always alone?”
Bond: “I’m not sure I ever had a choice. Anyway, I didn’t stop to think
about it.”
Swann: “What would happen if you did?”
Bond: “Stop?”
Swann: “Yes.”
Bond: “I don’t know”
Bond now seemingly has considered Vesper Lynd’s contention that he has
a choice, and the undecidability of that question is overwritten, for him,
by inertial force. Here, Bond is brought to the brink of considering life
beyond that relentlessly inertial movement, but the conversation is, fit-
tingly, interrupted by a brutal attack that he and Swann must fend off, and
muscular action wins the day. Inertial action slips the bonds of the possible
dragging effects of doubt and choice.
Criticism of the Bond films pre-Craig often stresses how little held back
Bond is by scruples of any sort; Jeremy Black, in his 2001 study of The
Politics of James Bond, which surveys the films only up to 1999’s The World
is Not Enough, sees him as a hero defined by action rather than contempla-
tion: “Bond’s character was displayed in his actions: he represented and
defined a notion of gentlemanliness understood as action, not as a set of
130 L. YORK
empty conventions” (xii); “In the Bond films, there can be no qualms
about killing or about admiring killing, although it is sanitized, at least
until Licence to Kill (1989)” (105). Black’s clear preference, suggested in
his verbal choices, for “gentlemanly” action as opposed to “empty con-
ventions” suggests a more conservative reading of the series; this reading
of Bond is most taken to its conservative extreme by Sean Connery who,
when asked which of Bond’s qualities he most admired, replied
His self-containment, his powers of decision, his ability to carry on through

till the end and to survive. There’s so much social welfare today that people
have forgotten what it is to make their own decisions rather than leave them
to others. So Bond is a welcome change. (Bennett and Woollacott 59)
Bond’s propulsive movement here becomes consonant with Thatcherite

social Darwinism: one shouldn’t tarry with thoughts about social justice
or the unequal distribution of social opportunity.
Attempts to read the novels as similarly untroubled by reflection show
how often Bond has been read only in terms of his forward propulsive
movement. Ayn Rand famously preferred the books to the films because
she thought the films undercut the literary Bond’s gloriously untroubled
masculine individualism (Miller 236). Infinitely less categorically, Umberto
Eco claimed that the James Bond of the novels “does not meditate upon
truth and justice, upon life and death, except in rare moments of bore-
dom, usually in the bar of an airport but always in the form of a casual
daydream, never allowing himself to be infected by doubt” (35–36). But
those exceptions are meaningful, and they arguably inform Bond’s actions,
when he does resolve upon them. Notably, Eco had to backtrack from his
position somewhat, allowing that his claim fit the novels better than the
short stories in which, he allows, Bond “does indulge in such intimate
luxuries” (35–36). If we take “Quantum of Solace,” a story from Fleming’s
1960 collection For Your Eyes Only as an example, we can see that doubt
is more than a luxury; it is pervasive and it changes the psychological
import of the actions Bond does take. He is sent to the Bahamas to put a
stop to the Castro rebels in Cuba receiving arms, and Fleming tells us that
“He hadn’t wanted to do the job. If anything, his sympathies were with
the rebels,” but because the English government has an export deal with
Cuba, they had agreed not to support the rebels. So clearly, he must take
a course of action that will frustrate his own political sympathies. But the
story that he hears while in the Bahamas, about a woman who was seated
next to him at dinner, and who has cruelly mistreated her first husband,
puts his own espionage narrative into jarring perspective:
Suddenly the violent dramatics of his own life seemed very hollow. The affair
of the Castro rebels … was the stuff of an adventure-strip in a cheap news-
paper. He had sat next to a dull woman at a dull dinner party and a chance
remark had opened for him the book of real violence—of the Comédie
Humaine where human passions are raw and real, where Fate plays a more
authentic game than any Secret Service conspiracy devised by Governments.
(Fleming 102)
And the story ends with Bond’s reflection that the meeting he was going
to have the next morning in Miami with the Coast Guard and FBI, pre-
sumably to plot his operations, a “prospect, which had previously inter-
ested, even excited him, was now edged with boredom and futility” (103).
Embracing Bond as solely defined by his propulsive forward movement,
then, leads to as partial an accounting of the figure as an overweening
emphasis on his nagging doubts.
A reading of the Bond series of films, as a project, similarly requires
attentiveness to the forward-backward shunting of the franchise, particu-
larly in this day of rebootings and prequels. William Proctor, for example,
argues that although Casino Royale was the much-vaunted reboot of the
series, Skyfall “destabilizes the new continuity explicitly by reintroducing
the classic Aston Martin DB5 from Goldfinger … with the same number
plate” (17). Even the series, it seems, like its main character, is looking
forwards backwardly. It seems suggestive of further destabilizations of a
franchise linearity that Spectre ends with Bond throwing his gun off the
bridge into the Thames and embracing Madeleine Swann; it seems as
though he has, at last, made a choice to walk away from espionage killing.
But they ride off together into the future in the repaired Aston Martin: an
eerie reminder of Bond’s riding off with M. to Scotland, and her death, in
Skyfall.
In Daniel Craig’s star persona, by now deeply intertwined with the
character of Bond, one frequently discerns a similar tendency to move
backwards and forwards simultaneously, to say “yes” and “no” to Bond.
“I say things when I feel it, then I change my mind,” he told a BBC inter-
viewer in October of 2015 (Rose) about his plans to continue—or not—
with the franchise, to take ownership of the role or draw back. Citing
Pierce Brosnan’s comment that doing Bond was like “being responsible
132 L. YORK
for a small country,” Craig, like Fleming’s Bond in “A Quantum of

Solace,” both signed on and off to the diplomatic mission: “I’m not going
to be the poster boy for this [franchise]. Although I am the poster boy”
(Weiner). Erik Hedegaard, a most canny interviewer for Rolling Stone, saw
this constant state of avowal and disavowal as typical of his interviewee:
Everything is “kind of ” and “maybe” and “I don’t; well, I do” and “that’s
it, except for.” He starts off in one direction, absolutely, positively, without
a doubt, and then almost immediately starts to waffle. It really is a bit odd,
and not Bondlike at all.” (Hedegaard)
But it is. Just as M from Spectre reminds his upstart bureaucrat “C” that
“A license to kill is also a license not to kill,” so too Daniel Craig’s James
Bond is caught in a reluctant state wherein action and dragging disinclina-
tion mutually define each other. Craig can, it seems, strike out bravely in
both directions, reluctantly wanting and not wanting to represent the
James Bond franchise, and largely gaining cultural capital from various
onlookers for doing so, banking the overflow for his long-term career
interests. Returning to the teaser publicity photo that Craig approved for
Skyfall, showing him in a Shanghai pool, darkly blue-lit, facing away from
the camera, he appears poised both to be and not be the “poster boy.”
And this reluctance is, itself, a performance of labour; after all, if we watch
the scene that this still shot alludes to, it shows us Bond, just released from
his stress tests, and under the mistaken impression that he has passed
them, sent back to the field in Shanghai. But this is not the easy-seeming
emergence from the sea of the blue-swimming-trunks beefcake scene from
Casino Royale. Bond finishes his pool lengths and sits on the poolside
spent, panting. Not at all the suntanned Greek god emerging from the
surf but instead a reluctant “blue” subject, “Made weak by time and fate,
but strong in will/To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield” (Houghton
and Stange 32).
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CHAPTER 5
Conclusion: Reluctance’s “Other”
In July of 2014, as I was just beginning to think about reluctant celebrity,

I also, by chance, happened to be captivated by the FIFA World Cup
Soccer championships held in Rio de Janeiro. In the final match, held in
Rio’s Maracanã stadium, which pitted Argentina against Germany, the two
teams found themselves evenly matched and headed for extra time.
Germany scored during that extra time, and so pressure devolved onto the
Argentinian team to answer in kind and even the score. As extra time drew
to a close, the gifted Argentinian forward Lionel Messi, who played for FC
Barcelona during the regular season, heartbreakingly missed a free kick
that would have tied the match, sending the ball far above the crossbar.
Argentinian fans groaned in agony, extra time ended, and Germany won
the World Cup 1–0. Minutes later, though, Messi was announced as the
winner of the golden ball trophy for the best player of the tournament,
and so, with very little time to recuperate from both his near miss and the
loss of the ultimate match, he was forced to make the long trudge up the
steps of the Maracaña stadium to accept his award. It was the most
dejected, woeful promenade I have ever witnessed: Messi morosely stared
straight ahead as he climbed up the steps. Onlookers reached out for him,
to touch the football great, perhaps to console him. But he continued to
stare straight ahead. When FIFA officials and German Chancellor Angela
Merkel congratulated him, he dolefully went through the motions of
shaking their hands as though he were sleepwalking. Once in possession of
the golden ball, Messi held it as though it were a bouquet of stinging nettles.

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138 L. YORK
It was the most painful train wreck of an award acceptance that I have ever
witnessed. And I watched every second of it, appalled … and enthralled.
For I realized, even at the outset of my thinking on this subject, that
Lionel Messi’s moody perambulation is the perfect if painful encapsula-
tion of reluctant celebrity performance. While it is true that the accep-
tance of individual awards in team sporting events is always problematic,
always fraught by the discordant clash of single player recognition and
team collectivity, a situation that players will often try to reconcile by
performing a bashful acceptance of the award, Messi’s zombified accep-
tance went far beyond the sporting norm. Faced with this apparently
unacceptable performance, commentators piled on to explain why he
was not playing along with the game of gracious (if necessarily awkward)
acceptance. Former footballer Gary Lineker opined that “there is some-
thing not right…. He looks jaded to me.” This diagnosis, one might call
it the Miss Clavel diagnosis, that “something is not right,” speaks
directly to Sara Ahmed’s thinking about how happiness becomes a
weathervane of proper social alignment: “When we feel pleasure from
objects,” Ahmed explains, “we are aligned; we are facing the right way.
We become alienated—out of line with an affective community—when
we do not experience pleasure from proximity to objects that are attrib-
uted as being good” (41). No question about it; Messi was radically
unaligned and was feeling no pleasure from that object; as another com-
mentator uncomfortably suggested, lobbing the issue of Messi’s non-
alignment back into his affective backfield, “Messi always looks like he
could use a hug.”
This example, and its sporting-world context (the awkward acceptance
of individual awards, particularly on the part of players whose teams have
lost), reminds us that celebrity phenomena must always be assessed in the
context of the cultural site at which they occur. As Graeme Turner reminds
us, “Tempting though these big connections are [between celebrity in
various fields of endeavour], they tend to obscure the fact that what con-
stitutes celebrity in one cultural domain may be quite different in another”
(20). In the field of celebrity studies, a great deal attention and effort has
been devoted to assessing and debating the specificity of celebrity in vari-
ous cultural realms. The urge to distinguish cinematic from televisual
celebrity, for example, which engrossed some celebrity theorists (Ellis,
Bennett, and Holmes, Langer, Turner), has been reconsidered of late in
the light of changes in what we mean by “TV” (streaming across various
platforms, binge watching, etc.; Bonner). It appears, then, that even our
CONCLUSION: RELUCTANCE’S “OTHER” 139
categorizations of discrete categories of media are likely to bleed into each

other, all the more so in the digital age of convergence. Stardom, too,
“spreads,” to use Henry Jenkins’s celebrated term. In Reluctant Celebrity,
I have, for the most part, confined my study to cinematic celebrity, in
acknowledgment of Turner’s cautious advice, which, I believe, is still salu-
tary for scholars of celebrity to remember; assumptions about the opera-
tions of celebrity do need to be tested by the assessment of context and
medium. Still, in this book, I recognize the porous nature of celebrity’s
workings across media (in John Cusack’s social media personae, Daniel
Craig’s rejection of social media outright, or Robert De Niro’s activities as
a capitalist entrepreneur as crucial parts of their celebrity personae). All of
these sites of celebrity activity, as Richard Dyer would say, contribute to
the complicated, refractory discursive formation we call a celebrity text.
Although they share commonalities—most notably being primar-
ily known for their work in Hollywood cinema—in many respects, the
three celebrities whom I have offered up as representative examples of
reluctant celebrity could not be more different from each other. Politically
gregarious and voluble anti-neoliberal, anti-capitalist activist John Cusack
is miles removed from the uncomfortably costive landlord-cum-capitalist-
film mogul Robert De Niro who, in turn, is temperamentally leagues away
from the cheerily foul-mouthed, (un)willing James Bond, Daniel Craig,
who is quite comfortable with his reputation as a tough interview sub-
ject. This unruly feeling, reluctance, can be variously performed, altered,
inflected, depending, in large part, upon the objectives and pressures at
play in each star’s career and public self-presentation. Reluctance can be,
for instance, a way of clearing ground so that more independent smaller
films can be made or of vouchsafing a large degree of one’s energies for
political activism (John Cusack); it can be a means of functioning in a pub-
lic sphere that privileges an easy loquacity that one does not consistently
possess, by allowing for a refocusing away from words to “deeds” (both
in the sense of acts, such as founding the Tribeca film festival to achieve
greater control over cinematic production, and in the sense of property
accumulation as a capitalist means of achieving that control [De Niro]).
Or reluctance can act, to extend the capitalist metaphor, as cultural-capital
funds in the bank, held against future prospects for an actor who fears
the professional consequences of a commitment to a popular franchise
(Craig). Reluctance is and does all of these things and more. But no mat-
ter its diverse strategies or deployments, reluctance is consistently a form
of power, even if (or especially when) it is wielded in situations where
140 L. YORK
one may feel relatively powerless: when asked to perform as an articulate

public subject in an interview; when feeling typecast; when feeling frus-
trated by one’s celebrity experiences that run counter to one’s political
commitments.
Reluctance, as we have seen in these pages, can assume power when it
forms the basis of an acting method: a key to the presentation of a self on
camera as well as off. For John Cusack, a reluctant acting method is one
that reminds him to bring his vulnerability, his “Shadow” into the chal-
lenge of “mastering” a role. In such a theory, reluctance imbues a work of
art with complexity and depth. For Robert De Niro, though, complexity
does not emerge from the excess of emotional presence that some actors
associate with “acting”: it is, as for Cusack, a product of a negative game:
a bringing of a void, of sorts, into a job that is often imagined to be a fill-
ing up, or a filling in, of a character. De Niro takes it to extremes, of
course, in talking about an actor needing to do “nothing,” but what else
might one expect from a reluctant celebrity whose dragging affective state
is often (though not, as I have argued, invariably) performed through
silence? And so, De Niro’s reluctance-as-acting-method reinstates power
too, creating a mystique of a “nothing” that somehow communicates
affective complexity—and that young acting acolytes have to figure out
how to produce, without seeming, of course, to produce anything at all.
Beyond acting method, and the labour of the actor, reluctance operates
as power in a broader sense, for what especially unites these three admit-
tedly very different reluctant celebrities is their inhabiting of social privi-
lege: the privilege of the white, straight, male A-lister. These tortured
souls are, we should remember, kings of the heap. Craig and De Niro, in
their shared deployment of the yes-and-no (or a yes-means-no) rhetorical
style that I have observed in their public communications, exhibit the
power to offer up contradictory responses to the questions that confront
them. Will Craig continue to play Bond? No. Yes. No. Yes. Does De Niro
support anti-vaccination activism? Yes. No. But yes. John Cusack, on the
other hand, does not draw upon this rhetorical omnipotence in the same
way the other two do, and I ascribe this to his stronger sense of the privi-
lege that he occupies: an awareness that his political activism has fostered.
After all, as Cusack knows full well, whereas disenfranchised subjects in
society are either not asked for any opinion at all (we might think, for
example, of voter restrictions in supposedly democratic countries, or the
manifold ways in which subaltern people’s voices are stifled), reluctant
celebrities are public subjects who have the power to say not only yea or
nay, but both—or neither.
The workings of this privilege have surfaced at intervals throughout

this study of reluctance when, for example, I analyse Daniel Craig’s per-
formance of a laddish public masculinity in his dealings with the media, or
when I note the discrepancy between the way in which both his and
Robert De Niro’s class backgrounds are regularly presented as solidly
working class (in Craig’s satisfied words, “common as muck”) when, in
fact, they both emerge from a more comfortable background than their
fans often suppose.
This privilege is at work, once again, when Craig upbraids celebrities,
like the Kardashians, who do not follow his own reluctant lead in the way
that they handle their status as public personalities. Eager over-sharing of
the private, for Craig, as for many other social commentators, becomes
conflated with an overly enthusiastic wielding of social media platforms.
And so, as Craig’s broadside against the K-klan indirectly suggests, the
way in which reluctant celebrities approach social media acts as a fascinat-
ing barometer of their performances of celebrity reluctance. John Cusack
is an avid, eager social media user who has embraced digital platforms as a
means of communicating his investments in progressive causes, rather
than using them to share private information. Unlike Craig, though, he
does not make a virtue of this choice; he does not, that is, automatically
conflate social media and the over-sharing of the “private.” As for De
Niro, he has no social media presence at all, apart from sites others have
set up for him, such as Facebook fan pages or unauthenticated Twitter
accounts (vide @notrobertdeniro). Again, this is what one would expect as
a correlative to his (largely) taciturn public persona. With Daniel Craig, we
move away from such a disinterested position to an intensely interested
denunciation of excessive indiscretion.
Craig’s explicit denunciation of the largely social-media-made
Kardashians teaches us that reluctant celebrity in general is necessarily con-
structed, whether explicitly or implicitly, against a celebrity that is under-
stood to be too eager. And so, in closing this study, I meditate on
reluctance’s other: the (perceived) hunger for fame. A subject that has, in
the past, been treated as a “soft news” topic relegated to the entertain-
ment pages, sites of segments of various news media, fame hunger has, in
recent years, become a lively subject of social concern, pedagogical debate,
and, in some quarters, cause for consternation. A 2006 report found that
16% of 16–19 year olds in the UK believe they are going to be famous,
and 11% of them declared themselves willing to abandon further educa-
tion in order to pursue this objective (Learning and Skills Council). Two
years later, 32% of British teachers surveyed reported that their students
142 L. YORK
modelled themselves on Paris Hilton: this finding was particularly singled

out as cause for social concern (BBC News, Chapman, Gould). Across the
Atlantic, in the U.S., in 2016, the Democratic Presidential candidate
Hillary Clinton was widely vilified for, among other reasons, seeking the
Presidency too eagerly. So where, ultimately, my study of reluctant celeb-
rity leads us, beyond the scope of this book, is to a consideration of its
inverse twin: the eager celebrity.
Whereas I took my departure in this study from an apparently negative
social feeling (a seeming refusal to “play the game”) and explored how
that affect is an admixture of refusal and willingness, one might, instead,
trace the inverse affect that is generally thought, especially in younger
subjects, and especially in a neoliberal time, to be socially positive—
eagerness—and look at the way in which it is often understood to tip over
into a much-maligned style of self-presentation. Eagerness is a hybrid of
two of the aesthetic categories that Sianne Ngai identifies as ambivalent
neoliberal affects: “cuteness” and “zaniness,” in that eagerness, like cute-
ness, calls forth surprisingly contradictory responses, “tenderness … but
also, sometimes, a desire to belittle or diminish [it] further” (Our Aesthetic
Categories 3), and like zaniness, that “aesthetic of nonstop acting or
doing,” eagerness, for all its playful energies, signals that “injury always
seems right around the corner” (7). Despite the widespread social encour-
agement of eagerness—in the young, in students, in aspiring workers—it
is perpetually poised on the edge of its own over-performance: the socially
disapproved condition of “trying too hard.”
Like its upside-down twin, reluctance, eagerness is a political feeling,
but instead of carrying power and privilege in celebrity systems, as I sug-
gest reluctance does, it attracts disdain, more often than not—of a particu-
larly gendered sort. If you were to draw up a list of twenty-first-century
celebrities who have been identified as fame hungry, the overwhelming
majority would be women—not only Paris Hilton, Miley Cyrus, Kim
Kardashian, her sisters and mother, but also Britney Spears, Kate Gosselin,
Courtney Stodden, Crystal Harris, Teresa Guidice, Dina Lohan,
“Octomom,” (see Chen) Dina Eastwood, Farrah Abraham (though in
noting this preponderance I do not meant to discount exceptions—see
Donald Trump). Accordingly, those celebrities who rail against the illegiti-
macy of other (more) fame-obsessed stars are most frequently white males:
consider not only Daniel Craig’s anti-Kardashian rant but other broad-
sides issued by actors James McAvoy (“McAvoy Slams”) and Michael
Caine (Welsh). Denunciation of the fame hungry is readily turned to the
gendered purpose of associating illegitimate star labour with a feminized

public sphere. Su Holmes and Diane Negra have argued that female celeb-
rities “have … played a highly visible role in fuelling and sustaining oft-
cited anxieties about the ‘declining’ currency of modern celebrity” (3):
eagerness as a celebrity feeling, I believe, is crucially caught up in that role.
This gendering of the unseemly pursuit of fame also has a class dimension;
Milly Williamson has observed that the denunciation of two types of
female celebrity, the “ordinary girl” reality television star and the self-
destructive pop star, discloses widespread anxiety about female working-
class subjects attaining social visibility (120), and I would add that both
“types” of female celebrity are frequently associated with an improper,
excessive desire for fame. These anxieties also cluster around the figure of
the young female fan who consumes these celebrities (Clarke); Kim Allen,
writing at the time of the post-2006 celebrity-desire panics in the UK,
pinpoints the overdetermined anxiety about young women’s desire to
become famous, arguing that such panics “reinforce classed hierarchies of
young people’s career aspirations” that privilege middle-class professional
careers and ignore the ways “becoming a celebrity may be seen as a more
attainable aspiration for working-class girls who have been traditionally
excluded” from those careers (150). Unseemly eagerness, reluctance’s
other, has its role to play in the maintaining of social hierarchies, especially
at moments when new, challenging media (reality television, social media)
are emerging and gaining currency.
A major focus of the denigration of fame-hungry women is the widely
subscribed belief in the connection between the overly eager pursuit of
fame and the energetic use of the new social media that emerged in the
first fifteen years of the twenty-first century (Facebook in 2004; Twitter
in 2006; Instagram in 2010, Snapchat in 2011). As Pamela Ingleton and
I have suggested, the Kardashians, to take one prominent example, have
been denounced by other (often white, male) celebrities for a fame that
is understood to be devoid of legitimating labour and that has become
synonymous with their manifold embrace of social media. Study of the
intersections of celebrity, gender, affect, and social media is indebted to
the growing study of the relations between contemporary celebrity and
social media in works such as Alice Marwick’s Status Update, Nick
Couldry’s Media, Society, World, and P. David Marshall’s “The Promotion
and Presentation of the Self ” and “New Media, New Self.” In “Gender,
Sexuality and Social Media,” Marwick explicitly connects gender, media,
and denunciation: “As Paris Hilton achieved fame by manipulating
144 L. YORK
celebrity tabloids and gossip television, Julia Allison has become famous
by leveraging Web 2.0 technologies. Allison also receives a staggering
amount of negative attention, mostly focused on her personal life, looks
and weight” (59). These negative associations between gender, celebrity,
and new media are embedded in a long history of media transformations
that spans over four centuries.
It seems appropriate for a study of a mixed feeling to come to a rest
here, with a meditation on what reluctance claims not to be and therefore
also is. Reluctance, so commonly misdiagnosed as a retreat fuelled by
repulsion, can more suggestively be thought of as eagerness held in per-
petual check, though that very act of being “in check” is invariably mobile
and fluctuating. Reluctance, that most fluidly ambivalent of emotions,
offers evidence aplenty that, in the words of Marianne Moore, “It is
human nature to stand in the middle of a thing” (56).
Works Cited
Ahmed, Sara. The Promise of Happiness. Duke UP, 2010.
Allen, Kim. “Girls Imagining Careers in the Limelight: Social Class, Gender and
Fantasies of ‘Success’.” In Holmes and Negra, pp. 149–173.
BBC News. “Celebrity Culture ‘Harms Pupils’.” news.bbc.co.uk, 14 Mar. 2008.
Bennett, James and Su Holmes. “The ‘Place’ of Television in Celebrity Studies.”
Celebrity Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 65–80.
Bonner, Frances. Personality Presenters: Television’s Intermediaries with Viewers.
Ashgate, 2011.
Chapman, James. “‘Barbie Doll’: Girls Only Want to be WAGs or Win the X
Factor, Complains Culture Minister.” Daily Mail, 15 Oct. 2008.
Clarke, Katrina. “Study Finds Thousands of Teens Going to Extreme Lengths for
Online Attention.” Toronto Star, 12 Nov. 2014. https://www.thestar.com/
news/gta/2014/11/12/study_finds_thousands_of_teens_going_to_
extreme_lengths_for_online_attention.html Accessed 30 July 2016.
Couldry, Nick. Media, Society, World: Social Theory and Digital Media Practice.
Polity, 2013.
Ellis, John. Visible Fictions: Cinema: Television: Video. Routledge, 1992.
Gould, Mark. “Girls Choosing Camera Lenses over Microscopes.” The Guardian,
3 Oct. 2008.
Holmes, Su and Diane Negra, editors. In the Limelight and Under the Microscope:
Forms and Functions of Female Celebrity. Continuum, 2011.
Langer, John. “Television’s Personality System.” Media, Culture & Society, vol. 3,
issue 4, 1981, pp. 351–365.
Learning and Skills Council. “Kids Seeking Reality TV Fame Instead of Exam
Passes.” 13 January 2006.
Marshall, P. David. “New Media, New Self: The Changing Power of Celebrity.” In
P. David Marshall, ed. The Celebrity Culture Reader. Routledge, 2006,
pp. 634–44.
———. “The Promotion and Presentation of the Self: Celebrity as Marker of
Presentational Media.” Celebrity Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 35–48.
Marwick, Alice E. “Gender, Sexuality and Social Media.” Senft, T. and Hunsinger,
J. eds. Routledge Handbook of Social Media. Routledge, 2013, pp. 59–75.
———. Status Update: Celebrity, Publicity, & Branding in the Social Media Age.
Yale UP, 2013.
“McAvoy Slams Fame-Hungry Stars.” Daily Express, Mon. Aug. 19, 2009. http://
www.express.co.uk/celebrity-news/80756/McAvoy-slams-fame-hungry-stars
Accessed 25 July 2016.
Moore, Marianne. “The Grave.” Complete Poems. Penguin, 1994, p. 49.
Ngai, Sianne. Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting. Harvard UP,
2012.
Turner, Graeme. Understanding Celebrity. 2004. Second Edition. Sage, 2014.
Welsh, Daniel. “Michael Caine Blasts Young Film Stars who are More Interested
in Fame than Acting.” Huffington Post UK, 9 May, 2015. http://www.huff-
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uk_573071efe4b05c31e5724f30 Accessed 30 July 2016.
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of the ‘Ordinary’ Celebrity.” Celebrity Studies, vol. 1, no. 1, 2010, pp. 118–120.
Index1
A Beaumont-Thomas, Ben, 105

Abele, Elizabeth, 33, 54 Beckett, Samuel, 33
Abraham, Farrah, 142 Being John Malkovich, 28, 34, 35, 37,
Activism, 15, 54, 56, 58, 59, 61, 62, 44, 45, 47, 60
139, 140 Bennett, Catherine, 91
Admiral, Virginia, 79 Bennett, James, 144
Agan, Patrick, 68, 77, 82 Bennett, Tony, 118
Agresti, Alejandro, 50 Berlant, Lauren, 11, 14, 17, 22, 104
Ahmed, Sara, 9, 14, 17, 18, 23, 138 Berrigan, Daniel, 55
Allen, Kim, 143 Berrigan, Philip, 55
Allen, Woody, 34 Berry, Halle, 123
Allison, Julia, 144 Beyonce, 3
Amacker, Anna Katherine, 119 Bilmes, Alex, 107, 112, 115–118, 128
Amalric, Mathieu, 126 Biressi, Anita, 21, 22, 51
Apocalypse Now, 42 Black, Jeremy, 129
Assange, Julian, 27, 58 Black Lives Matter, 3
Bolton, Lucy, 119, 127
Bonner, Frances, 138
B Bosworth, Patricia, 68, 79, 89, 90
Bahr, Lindsey, 105 Bourdieu, Pierre, 28
Bang the Drum Slowly, 77 Boyce, Michael W., 124
Bardem, Javier, 109, 122, 127 Brando, Marlon, 42, 75, 76
Barnes, Henry, 29, 46, 49, 50 Brennan, Teresa, 16
Baxter, John, 87, 90 Broccoli, Barbara, 104–106, 115
Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-71174-4
148 INDEX
Brode, Douglas, 74–76, 87, 88, Craig, Daniel

92, 94 and class, 114
Bronte, Charlotte, 8 and defense of privacy, 113
A Bronx Tale, 86 and gender, 122
Brooks, Karen, 115, 120, 121, 126 and Liverpool, 114
Brosnan, Pierce, 120, 123, 125, 131 marriage to Rachel Weisz, 113
Brown, David, 103, 109 and privilege, 106
Brown, Judith, 6, 14 and product placement, 109
Bullets Over Broadway, 34, 38 reluctance to assume James Bond
Butterfield, Beth, 120 role, 19, 118, 132, 139
reluctant participation in promotion
and publicity, 102, 103
C and simultaneous yes/no
Cadwalladr, Carole, 57, 58 responses, 69
Caine, Michael, 142 and vulnerable Bond
Calhoun, Dave, 105, 108 performances, 119
Callahan, Maureen, 30 Cronenberg, David, 29, 43, 44, 49
Carlyle, Thomas, 96 Cuba and His Teddy Bear, 86, 93
Carroll, Rebecca, 90, 91 Culotta, Frank, 82
Cashmore, Ellis, 3 Cusack, Dick, 50, 55
Casino Royale, 101, 102, 104, 106, Cusack, John
116, 118–120, 122, 123, 125, acting theory, 76, 77
126, 129, 131, 132 and association with other reluctant
Celebrity interview, 68–73, 76, 111 celebrities, 103
Chapman, James, 142 and Chicago vs. Los Angeles, 51
Charisma, 13, 14 critique of Hollywood, 43–46, 51
Chen, Mel Y., 142 founding of New Crime
Chicago Cab, 50 Productions, 69, 95
Chi-Raq, 61 and political activism, 56
Clarke, Katrina, 143 in popular culture, 40
Clark, Kenneth, 124 recognition of privilege, 51
Clinton, Bill, 92 reluctant film role personas, 35
Clooney, George, 57, 102 and social media, 38, 40, 139
Cody, Diablo, 49 Cusack, Nancy, 55
Colbert, Stephen, 74, 90, 96, 108 Cvetkovich, Ann, 14–17, 53
Con Air, 28, 47 Cyrus, Miley, 142
Connery, Sean, 105, 120, 125, 130
Cooper, Bradley, 84
Couldry, Nick, 143 D
Couric, Katie, 84 Dalton, Timothy, 125
Cowboys and Aliens, 111, 112 Dauncey, Hugh, 20
Cox, Katherine, 118, 119, 123, 124 DeCordova, Richard, 31, 32
INDEX
149
Deep Impact, 94 F
Dench, Judy, 109, 120, 122 Fall Out Boy, 40, 41, 62n2
De Niro, Robert Ferguson, Craig, 38
acting theory, 76, 77 Fiennes, Ralph, 115, 121, 122
and anti-vaccination movement, 140 Fleming, Ian, 125, 126, 130–132
and capitalist entrepreneurship, 3 Fonda, Jane, 92
claims of artistic decline, 95 Frank, Adam, 10, 16
and class, 96n4, 141 Franzen, Jonathan, 3, 107
defence of privacy, 83 Freedom of the Press Foundation, 58
and interviews, 67, 71–73, 77, 80, Freeman, Morgan, 94
82, 84 Frost, Robert, 1
and politics, 69 Funnell, Lisa, 123, 125
reluctant participation in promotion
and publicity, 70, 85
and Robert De Niro Sr., 67, 79, 84 G
and simultaneous yes/no Galifianakis, Zach, 3
responses, 88 Galloway, Stephen, 103, 107
Tribeca Film festival, 69, 71, 82 Gamson, Joshua, 19, 70
De Niro, Robert Sr., 67, 79, 84 Garbo, Greta, 5, 6, 14, 67–69, 75,
De Palma, Brian, 68, 74 76, 103
Depp, Johnny, 4 Garfield, Simon, 23
Derrida, Jaques, 4–5 Garland, Judy, 2, 46
DeVincentis, D.V., 50 Geddes, Ann, 51, 53
Die Another Day, 123 Gelman, Sharon L., 93
Dirty Grandpa, 88 Gender, 20, 143, 144
Dixon, Nicholas, 6 Giannini, Giancarlo, 126
Dodds, Klaus, 121 Gilbey, Ryan, 30–32, 46–48
Dougan, Andy, 68, 79, 85, 91 Gilligan, Sarah, 124
Downey, Robert Jr., 47 The Godfather II, 75, 78
Dyer, Richard, 2, 13, 15, 20, 21, Goldman, Jonathan, 5
39, 139 Goldsmith, Barbara, 89
Gosselin, Kate, 142
Gould, Mark, 142
E Grace is Gone, 28, 50
Eastwood, Dina, 142 Grahame, Kenneth, 8
Eco, Umberto, 130 Green, Eva, 126
Ellcessor, Elizabeth, 38, 39 Greenwald, Glenn, 58
Ellis, John, 138 Grobel, Lawrence, 67, 68, 88
Ellsberg, Daniel, 58–60 Grosbard, Ulu, 76
Emanuel, Rahm, 61 Grosse Pointe Blank, 30, 33, 38, 47,
English, James, 5, 7, 114 48, 50
Eon Productions, 104 Guarino, Mark, 56–58
Exley, Frederick, 44 Guidice, Teresa, 142
150 INDEX
H Jeffries, Stuart, 104, 106, 116,

Haggis, Paul, 116 120, 124
Halberstam, Jack, 17, 54 Jenkins, Henry, 39, 139
Hamilton, Ian, 4 Jobs, Steve, 3
Hamlet, 33, 34 Johanssen, Scarlett, 47
Hamm, Jon, 3 Johnson, Brian D., 105, 115,
Harris, Crystal, 142 118, 125, 126
Harris, Naomie, 115
Hayden, Tom, 92, 93
Heaviside, Oliver, 12 K
Hedegaard, Erik, 107, 112, 115, 132 Kael, Pauline, 75, 76, 96n1
Hessler, Peter, 84 Kardashian family, 110
High Fidelity, 28, 47, 49, 50, 54 Kaye, Elizabeth, 73, 84, 90, 96
Hill, Lisa, 115, 120, 121, 126 Kazan, Elia, 81
Hill, Logan, 45, 46, 51 Kenny, Glenn, 73, 78
Hilton, Paris, 142, 143 Khan, Fawad, 3
Hines, Claire, 122, 126 King, James, 29
Hoffman, Dustin, 73, 74, 81 The King of Comedy, 75
Holden, Stephen, 38 Kirkland, Bruce, 72
Holmes, Su, 2, 138, 143 Klein, Naomi, 57, 58
Hoschchild, Arlie, 21 Klosterman, Chuck, 40, 41
Hot Tub Time Machine, 50 Kunze, Peter C., 119
Hudson, Jennifer, 61–62 Kurylenko, Olga, 127
Hunter, Allan, 68, 70
Hunter, Stephen, 70, 72
L
Labanyi, Jo, 9, 16
I Lamar, Kendrick, 3
Ilouz, Eva, 21, 22 Langer, John, 138
Ingleton, Pamela, 20, 21, 23n1, 110, Lara Croft
111, 113, 143 Tomb Raider, 117
Inside the Actor’s Studio, 41, 42, 44, Laufer, Bonnie, 30, 31, 48, 49, 51, 52
51, 55 Lawrence, D.H., 8
Lazenby, George, 125
Learning and Skills Council
J (UK), 141
The Jack Bull, 50 Lee, Chris, 103, 115
Jaffe, Aaron, 5 Lee, Katja, 10, 96n3
James Bond, 101, 102, 106–108, 117, Lee, Spike, 61
118, 120, 121, 125, 129, 130, LeFanu, Mark, 74, 78, 96n4
132, 139 Leonard, Tom, 68
Jefferson, Thomas, 8 Letterman, David, 73, 74, 80
INDEX
151
Levy, Shawn, 68, 70, 72, 73, 78, 79, Michels, Barry, 27
82, 85, 87, 91, 92, 94 Mikkelsen, Mads, 126
Licence to Kill, 125, 130 Monnier, Claude, 126
Lindbergh, Charles, 9, 10 Moore, Donna Ashley, 119
Lindrea, Victoria, 103, 106, 116 Moore, Julianne, 43
Lineker, Gary, 138 Moore, Marianne, 144
Linson, Art, 74, 90 Moore, Roger, 105, 120, 125
Lipton, James, 41, 55 Morrey, Douglas, 20
Little Fockers, 74 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus, 5
Littler, Jo, 19 Mulvey, Laura, 123
Lohan, Dina, 142 Must Love Dogs, 28
Loh, Genevieve, 48, 53
Love, Heather, 14, 17
Love is the Devil, 117 N
Love & Mercy, 28, 36, 38, 44, 60 Nathan, Sara, 84
Lysistrata, 61 Naughton, John, 103, 108,
110–114, 124
Negra, Diane, 2, 143
M Neoliberalism, 21
Madonna, 23 Never Get Outta the Boat, 50
Malkovich, John, 28, 34, 35, 37, 44, New Crime Productions, 50, 69
45, 47, 60 New York, New York, 68, 79
Maps to the Stars, 28–30, 43–45, 48, Ngai, Sianne, 15–18, 42, 80, 142
57, 60 Norton, Edward, 3
Marchand, Philip, 38 Norton, Graham, 103, 109
Marshall, P. David, 13, 18, 21, 32, No somos animals, 50
35, 143 Nunn, Heather, 21, 22, 51
Marshall, Sarah, 104, 108, 110–112,
114, 116, 117
Marwick, Alice, 143 O
Maslin, Janet, 29 Obama, Barack, 3, 57, 80, 94
Mason, Paul, 124 Octomom, 142
Massumi, Brian, 16, 17 Oedipus Rex, 7
McAvoy, James, 142 Ogle, Tina, 104, 106, 109, 110,
McDonagh, Martin, 111 113, 120
McGinnis, Kathi, 79 On Her Majesty’s Secret Service, 120, 125
McMorrow, Jack, 120 Our Friends in the North, 115
Mean Streets, 86
Meet the Parents, 74, 88
Mendes, Sam, 102, 106, 115 P
Messer, Lesley, 62 Pacino, Al, 80, 81
Messi, Lionel, 137, 138 Paris, Barry, 70, 78, 80, 85, 91–93
Method acting, 68, 76 Parker, John, 68, 73, 74, 83, 85, 89
152 INDEX
Pattanaik, Dipti, 4 Repass, Scott, 44, 60

Pattinson, Robert, 3, 29 Richardson, Michael, 49, 53
Petersen, Anne Helen, 88 Ritter, Father Bruce, 93
Pfleger, Father Michael, 61, 62 Roach, Jay, 74
Pileggi, Nick, 82 Robbins, Tim, 50
Pink, Steve, 50 Robert De Niro Archives, Harry
Plato, 7 Ransom Center, 81, 82, 86,
Poitras, Laura, 58 87, 92
Ponce de Leon, Charles, 10 Rodrick, Stephen, 102
Portwood, Jerry, 84 Rojek, Chris, 4, 13
Povod, Reinaldo, 86 Rosenthal, Jane, 82, 95
Powell, Gary, 120 Rose, Steve, 103, 106, 113, 117,
Powell, Michael, 81 118, 131
Price, Richard, 114 Ross, Jonathan, 28, 47, 49, 50
Privilege, 1–23, 51, 76, 96n2, 103, Rowe, Nicholas, 7
106, 107, 111, 114, 119, Roy, Arundhati, 57–60
139–143 Ruffalo, Mark, 47
Proctor, William, 131 Russell, David O., 84, 90
Product placement, 109
Pulver, Andrew, 43
S
Sade, 3
Q Salinger, J.D., 4, 5, 10
Quantum of Solace, 102, 122, 126, Say Anything, 28, 32, 40, 41, 44, 48,
128, 130, 132 57, 62n2
Quick, Matthew, 85 Schneller, Johanna, 71, 89
Schrader, Paul, 76
Schruers, Fred, 71, 89, 96
R Schwarz, Hunter, 57
Race, 3, 20 Scorsese, Martin, 68, 82, 84,
Raging Bull, 69, 80, 86 85, 96
Rand, Ayn, 130 Scott, A.O., 71
Rankin, 103, 108 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 10, 16
Reagan, Ronald, 55 Sennett, Richard, 11, 21
Redmond, Sean, 21 Seydoux, Lea, 115, 127
Reed, Rex, 68 Shakespeare, 7
Reluctance Shapiro, Stanley, 9
etymology, 7–9, 12 Sherrill, Martha, 72, 89
magnetic reluctance, 12, 13 Silver Linings Playbook, 84, 85
vs. modesty, 4–7, 9, 20 Sixteen Candles, 28
vs. reclusiveness, 4–7, 9, 12, 103 Skyfall, 101, 102, 105–107, 109,
Remembering the Artist 115, 119–122, 125, 127, 128,
Robert De Niro Sr., 83 131, 132
INDEX
153
Smith, Greg, 68, 69, 72, 73, 75, 76, V

80, 96n4 VanAirsdale, S.T., 94
Snowden, Edward, 27, 58–60 Van-Sykle, Katie, 94
Social media, 3, 20, 21, 38–40, 110, Vaxxed: From Cover Up to
111, 139, 141, 143 Controversy, 90
Solomons, Jason, 32 Vietnam, 94
Spears, Britney, 142
Spectre, 102, 106, 107, 114,
115, 122, 125, 127, 129, W
131, 132 Wakefield, Andrew, 90, 91
Spielberg, Steven, 104 Waltz, Christoph, 115, 127
Stapleton, Dan F., 86 War, Inc., 28, 38, 50, 58
Stein, Gertrude, 5 Wasikowska, Mia, 43
Stern, Howard, 30 Weaver, David, 74, 75
Stern, Marlow, 44, 45, 47, 56, 57 Weber, Max, 13
Stodden, Courtney, 142 Weber, Myles, 4, 10
Strasberg, Lee, 81 Weiner, Juli, 101, 103, 106, 109, 112,
Stutz, Phil, 27, 28, 41, 42, 53, 54 114, 132
Weinstein, Harvey, 85
Weisz, Rachel, 113, 114
T Welsh, Daniel, 142
Taxi Driver, 77, 78, 82, 88 Wheels on Meals, 48
Tennyson, Lord Alfred, 122, 128 Williamson, Milly, 143
Thomas, Sarah, 39, 40, 56 Williams, Raymond, 15, 18
Thunderheart, 93 Wilson, Brian, 36, 37, 57, 60, 61
Tomkins, Silvan, 10 Wilson, Michael G., 103, 104, 107
Tribeca Enterprises, 95 Wilson, Owen, 3
Tribeca film festival, 68, 69, 71, Wishaw, Ben, 115, 121
81–83, 85, 90, 94, 95, 139 Woods, James, 81
True Confessions, 75, 76 Woollacott, Janet, 118, 130
Trump, Donald, 94, 142 The World Is Not Enough, 120, 129
Turner, Graeme, 18, 21, 138, 139
Twain, Mark, 31
Twitter, 20, 39, 40, 56, 57, 111, Y
141, 143 Yoo, Gong, 3
U Z
The Untouchables, 74, 90 Zidane, Zinedine, 20

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Reluctant Celebrity

Affect and Privilege in Contemporary Stardom

ISBN 978-3-319-71173-7 ISBN 978-3-319-71174-4 (eBook)

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017962436

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Image Credit: Cultura RM / Alamy Stock Photo

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Treasonous Drift: Celebrity Reluctance as Privilege 1

2 Inviting the Shadow to the Party: John Cusack

3 Robert De Niro’s (In)articulate Reluctance 67

4 “I’m Not Going to Be the Poster Boy for This.

5 Conclusion: Reluctance’s “Other” 137

Treasonous Drift: Celebrity Reluctance

As the autumnal closing stanza of Robert Frost’s “Reluctance” suggests,

Ah, when to the heart of man

© The Author(s) 2018 1

This is not to say that the performed celebrity self is necessarily a

very concept of celebrity—of being a visible public subject—an assumed

Theorizing Reluctant Celebrity: Reluctance vs.

sense of providing both an addition to and a substitution for it (Of

was living in East midtown Manhattan and assiduously avoiding public

calculated decision to moderate one’s claims in the light of an assessment

Reluctance: Etymology and Usage

reluctance and convulsive strugglings” (10)—an image that viscerally dra-

reluctant feeling about Miriam has nothing to do with pure opposition:

Reluctance: Methodological Questions

though, allows us to perceive the possibility of simultaneous, persistent

In seeking to theorize celebrity subjectivity in general, and reluctant

There is a tendency of at the present time among some writers to greatly

Precisely because of the special qualities that Heaviside sought to pre-

an engagement with celebrity, and unlike reclusiveness’s continuing

s­ ystems but whose workings are not produced in a hegemonic, top-down

Reluctance Theorized as Affect

inclined to see the performance of reluctance as necessarily noble or resis-

affect as “precognitive sensory experience and relations to surroundings”

feelings as embodied sensations and feelings as psychic or cognitive experi-

as ambivalent amalgamation, she comes very close to theorizing reluctance

whilst the hyperindividualism of celebrity is structurally antithetical to

Littler’s analysis is particularly helpful to my project because it steps back

r­eluctance (or silence, or modesty) as a beneficial and strategic means of

reluctance as a means of inhabiting “something not entirely dissimilar to

c­ onfers on them their capacity to energize action” (3). Although Ilouz

Inviting the Shadow to the Party: John

© The Author(s) 2018 27

wrote, what is at stake in the estimation of cultural capital is no less than

in kind: “I am soooo into Hollywood B.S. I, like, [eyes rolling skywards]

­ icture personality discourse excluded: “the private lives of the players

I don’t want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career.

Lloyd’s description of his refusal to live within commodity capitalism (and

adrift—in a word, reluctant—enough. In the second scene of Hamlet,

observes, “Being John Malkovich, for John Malkovich, means to be

Brian: “The old stuff is old!”

intertextual manner, through the connections that these media enable”

What Ellcessor tends not to recognize, in her characterization of this “star

Anything that’s interesting in a film or in a character—all your passion, your

My Shadow is like some version of Colonel Kurtz in Apocalypse Now. I was

As an embodiment of the ugly feelings, Cusack’s Shadow is notable for its

movie star, he opens up the workings of reluctance into a larger social

It is a very familiar ecosystem, a heightened myth of it perhaps, an ecosystem

Cusack refers here to the current mega-popularity of superhero films that

This seems an odd grouping, considering the frankly commercial nature of

(Hill). In contrast, Cusack values the experience of working with David

1 Treasonous Drift: Celebrity Reluctance as Privilege 1

2 Inviting the Shadow to the Party: John Cusack

3 Robert De Niro’s (In)articulate Reluctance 67

4 “I’m Not Going to Be the Poster Boy for This.

5 Conclusion: Reluctance’s “Other” 137

s ystems but whose workings are not produced in a hegemonic, top-down

reluctance (or silence, or modesty) as a beneficial and strategic means of

c onfers on them their capacity to energize action” (3). Although Ilouz

icture personality discourse excluded: “the private lives of the players

ritten or co-written films he’s starred in on several occasions, and he

Doing discursive battle with this image of Daniel Craig as a tough-

permeates Casino Royale, Quantum of Solace … and Skyfall … as well as