Conclusion: The End of the Golden Age?

Abstract

The preceding chapters have shown how the prized aura of antiquity, the enduring appeal of its mythology, and particularly the iconography and attributes of its gods, served the maturing Hollywood industry as it defined itself as an entertainment and art. I have argued that through the temporal, and indeed physical, elusiveness of these classical figures, cinema found the basic fabric for a template for stardom itself, building on a history of cultural appropriations in art, literature and theatre. As the industry — especially the fan-magazines, its supporting organs — importuned desire for these figures, the sculptural lines and Pygmalionesque metaphors of ancient statues were brought into play. As often broken fragments of the past, these objects, like the ruins of antiquity in old Europe, permitted imaginative and sometimes literal Grand Tours for its stars and vicariously, in their travel accounts and in the star body itself, for the fan. In the wake of the First World War, these ruins, and the valorised images of youth and beauty promoted by the star industries, held special and sometimes troubling meaning. These meanings were explored by Ben-Hur and Flesh and the Devil in overt and more implicit ways. When Rudolph Valentino died in 1926, the underlying pathos of stardom as a medium of the ever-fleeting present that bears one back to the shadows of the past became all-too visible.