Greta Gerwig's Gestures: Agamben in the Land of Stardom

Abstract

In a brief essay, “For an Ethics of the Cinema”, Giorgio Agamben names the film star as the twentieth century figure representing an elision of what is individual and what is collective. It is impossible, he argues, to separate the actor from the character in the thorough commodification of the star, drawing examples from classical Hollywood cinema. Yet consideration of contemporary film provides for a different account of stardom in which the common language of performance is seen to be an inheritance to be inhabited critically and citationally by the star. This article brings Agamben's cinema essays on ethics and gesture respectively into dialogue with Greta Gerwig's emphatically gestural style of performance, a style that belongs to what Erin Manning has named the minor gesture. Incomplete and imperfect performances of heterosexual femininity, Gerwig's gestures are incisive in their revelation precisely of binary gender identity as the major, the defining and delimiting paradigm of adulthood that her characters consistently resist.