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• W281696089 abstract "FEW MALE MOVIE STARS HAVE BEEN AS OVERTLY spectacularized as the young John Travolta. Indeed, Travolta's early popular persona is commonly condensed into single still image of the star in his white suit and platform heels, human clock forever stuck at four, with his right arm pointed vertically at the ceiling, his left diagonally at the dance floor (Cohn 191). This image, extracted from dance performance in Saturday Night Fever (1977), is moreover distinguished by the way in which all aspects of its mise-en-scene--from lighting and decor through figure position and costume--conspire to make Travolta the object of the erotic spectacle. According to Jeff Yanc, this feminizing objectification of Travolta's is countered, at least in Fever and Staying Alive (1983), by a blatantly overdetermined construction of (39) effected by narrative and stylistic procedures that hyperbolize the looking privileges and active agency that are conventionally conferred upon the male protagonist. And while the ideological contradictions of star's dramatic persona are often elided in the construction of his or her popular image, in Travolta's case the dynamic tension that Yanc points to was at least acknowledged by the publicity apparatus. Indeed, contemporary journalistic profile, in which pin-up photographs of semi-nude Travolta command more space than interview text, relates the star's popular image in terms of the synthesis of gendered qualities: Travolta is macho but vulnerable (Collins Sex 14), smug narcissist whose is nevertheless perpetually fetishized, hyperconfident heterosexual whose appeal is described as androgynous (Collins Sex 19). Given the elements of pin-up passivity, gender ambiguity, and fluid sexuality within even his popularly accepted star image, Travolta's marginalization during the politically and culturally conservative 1980s is not surprising. Indeed it seems in retrospect almost inevitable that Travolta should have been replaced as an embodiment of idealized masculinity by action film stars like Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger, paradigmatic Reagan heroes both, whose hard body images were implicitly defined against the symbolically soft 70s American male, for which Travolta, no less than Jimmy Carter, served as emblem. (1) Less predictable than Travolta's slide from cultural centrality in the 80s--the period between 1983 and 1989 is marked by his virtually complete absence from the mainstream mediascape--has been his subsequent comeback in the 1990s. Travolta's comeback required change in his image: the complex totality of meanings that had clustered around his persona over twenty years had to be renegotiated in order to restore him to prominence. The remarkable result of this renegotiation has been the near complete transcendence of his early image (and certainly of its culturally rejected components) and his reemergence as one of the highest-paid and most commercially successful movie stars of the decade. Given that the successful Hollywood comeback generally indicates the renewed popular acceptance of particular way of being gendered subject--in Travolta's case, particular way of being man--the star's new dramatic persona, and the films through which this persona is articulated, becomes text whose meanings are extremely pertinent to the analysis of contemporary culture. My reading of Travolta's recent films focuses on the kinds of masculinity that the star is meant to embody, and how the male figures that he portrays function within their respective narrative texts. Further, I will also suggest that masculinity in these films repeatedly intersects with the notion of performance. Indeed, performance figures both as an important term in Travolta's reconstructive movement from an eroticized object (the past) to serious actor (the present) and as recurrent motif around which questions and concerns about the present state of masculinity often cluster. …" @default.
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• W281696089 date "1997-07-01" @default.
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• W281696089 title "Staying Alive in the 90s: (John) Travolta as Star and the Performance of Masculinity" @default.
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