Real/reel politics and popular culture

Abstract

The intersection of film culture and politics is both intriguing and varied. Certain film actors embody political stances within their film roles. This embodiment of a position is expressed through the film’s political message and the characterisation of the actor in the film, but just as importantly in the meta-story of engagement and involvement that the actor has had in bringing the story to the screen. The intensity of this form of investment by American actors such as Ben Affleck, George Clooney, Matt Damon or Angelina Jolie has certain designs for the kind of persona that these celebrities cultivate for themselves. It is qualitatively different from the direct movement into representative politics by film stars such as Arnold Schwarzenegger or Ronald Reagan. This article explores how celebrities utilise their own value within their industry and the external world. John Street identifies two forms of celebrity politics: the CP1, as he labels it, is the direct Reagan-like involvement in political governing; and CP2 can be defined as political engagement and what others have described as celebrity advocacy or activism (Street 2004). What we are outlining here as ‘reel’ politics is closer to CP2, but produces a definitive move by the celebrity to make their film identity intersect with their ‘real’ persona. We describe this variation on CP2 as a form of celebrity-political magnification. In effect, these particular public personalities politicise Hollywood very directly and produce a ‘sentimental’ global education for their audiences (Wilson 2014): they are producing a sense of a magnified and magnificent global citizenship that has a distinctive economic value in the film industry as well as added political value for themselves and particular issues. This form of celebrity-political magnification directly connected to film is not entirely new. In the last 40 years certain public personas developed by performers have gone well beyond the benign and into advocacy and activism. Jane Fonda was the ur-text of this persona as Hanoi Jane and her anti-Vietnam stance in the late 1960s, which perhaps had some politically peripheral relation to her performances in Coming Home (1978) and the anti-nuclear China Syndrome (1979) a decade later (Dyer 1979, pp. 89–98). Wheeler’s comprehensive work on celebrity politics helps isolate the operational quality of celebrity: when deployed by any organisation from Greenpeace to Darfur, the celebrity draws attention to wherever they are. In a dispersed media ecology, the celebrity is a powerful force that perhaps better than any other practice/object identifies the operation of the contemporary attention economy: their physical proximity to an issue brings it alive as a political entity (Brockington 2014). Depending on the international