Sarah Thomas

Celebrity in the ‘Twitterverse’: history, authenticity and the multiplicity of stardom Situating the ‘newness’ of Twitter

Analyses within celebrity studies of the increasing use of Twitter as an effective tool of communication by stars and their fans emphasise shifts in the parameters of stardom. The convergence, connection and the potential for interactive address between star and audience that the online platform creates appears to position the concept of stardom in the twenty-first century as something new. This article argues that while Twitter may represent a deviation from older models of stardom, there remain important continuities and contexts between ‘old’ and ‘new’ celebrity behaviours and media forms. It argues that Twitter exposes, rather than creates, the multiple ways in which stardom and celebrity status can exist and be analysed, and that many online practices characterised as new have clear antecedents in wider histories of stardom. It suggests that much of the value of exploring celebrity Twitter accounts lies in how the site, its usage and its content, renders historical negotiations around the construction and presentation of stardom visible. In order to do this, it draws upon a range of examples –with a particular focus on the Twitter account of John Cusack – examining how the management of online behaviour and identity illustrates significant debates around the subject of authenticity within celebrity culture.

Introduction: Star-Making, Cult-Making and Forms of Authenticity

The phrase ‘cult film star’ has had a marked presence and circulation in popular culture for at least the last twenty-five years. From Danny Peary’s reference book Cult Movie Stars (1991), to The Guardian’s obituary for ‘cult movie star’ Edward Woodward in 2009 (Addley 2009), or the official invitation to ‘join cult film star Tommy Wiseau’ on the Tommy Wi-Show YouTube channel throughout 2011, the term has been employed in publicity and popular journalistic writing as a commonsense term, ostensibly as a means of differentiating certain actors or recognizable personalities from that of the conventional star and often with the purpose of celebrating their unconventionality. The rise of the cult star is undoubtedly linked to the growing discourse around, and industry acknowledgement of, cult film, offering one means with which to understand the appeal of cult and subcultural media through championing the excesses and offbeat qualities of those ‘stars’ who appear in such texts (whether, as J. P. Telotte argues (1991), they are conventionally considered as mainstream or marginal films). But the term is also employed away from canonical cult texts to describe other atypical performers who nevertheless have a presence within mainstream film and media, such as Simon Pegg, Jackie Chan, Lee Van Cleef, Johnny Depp or (as chapters in this collection illustrate) Montgomery Clift and Bill Murray, all of whom appear to offer different pleasures in their on- and off-screen performances/behaviour to that of the ‘film star’.

'Marginal moments of spectacle' : Character Actors, Cult Stardom and Hollywood Cinema

In 1986, Harry Dean Stanton was celebrated in the New York Times as a character actor who had achieved cult star status (Oney 1986). This redefinition of Stanton emphasized the loss of his supposed anonymity to audiences through noted roles in Paris, Texas (1984), Fool for Love (1985) and Pretty in Pink (1986) and through the circulation of other extratextual knowledge such as friendships with established stars, which raised his public profile. Unacknowledged by the author was the parallel role played by the newspaper itself in treating Stanton as a public star-figure worthy of nationally distributed copy. Here, the concept of ‘cult stardom’ was created by applying established paradigms of stardom to a secondary cult figure. To treat a performer as a star is to recognize them, to name them and to acquire knowledge of them beyond their screen work; to treat them as a ‘cult star’ is to do this to examples of hitherto marginalized actors who are not actively publicized by employers as conventional star figures.