International Film symposium talks consumption of celebrity, race

Fame can be fickle and fleeting, and the general public can be quite cruel to the stars that they may love one minute and hate the next. The International Film Symposium, which was hosted at Texas State University and coordinated by TXST Professor of French Dr. Carole Martin and TXST Associate Professor of Digital History Dr. Louie Valencia, had films on the schedule that explored the dichotomy between fame and infamy. The three week festival concluded in a day of symposiums based on different topics about celebrities, including one that explored the evolution of roles available for Hispanic women. Another discussed society's consumption of celebrity.

Dr. Mary Beltrán, University of Texas Department of Radio-Television- Film professor, discussed Latina Stardom, including some of the difficulties that Latina actresses faced in the film industry historically and the evolution of roles available to them over time.

“I feel like there has actually been some progress in different ways,” Beltrán said, adding that before the 1990s there were fewer roles that Latinas were given an opportunity to audition for.

Beltrán said that in the few roles that Latinas were allowed to audition for in the past, those roles often involved stereotypes.

“The idea of representing Latinos as potentially more involved in criminal activity. The Jennifer Lopez image [surrounding] the idea that Latinas are more sexy, maybe beautiful but more sexy and sexualized [and] more passionate,” Beltrán said. “And then Sofia Vergara [who played the] Gloria character from Modern Family, similar to Carmen Moreno in the 1940s, Latina characters were more repressible, maybe seeming less smart than other people and speaking in broken English.”

Beltrán said that Latinas were often described using words like 'spicy' and 'caliente' and other words related to heat and passion. “It’s something that used to be expected,” Beltrán said. “I do think it’s changing, and we see a bit less of this.”

Rita Moreno was a famous actress during the Golden Age of Hollywood, who Beltrán said won an Oscar for her role in Westside Story but found that didn’t do much for her career.

“She was still offered gang-member’s-girlfriend [type] characters,” Beltrán said. “I bring this in in part to show you how amazing Rita Moreno was, but also the kinds of roles that Latinas could play were often really not portraying them in a very positive light. It seems like it was probably quite challenging to be an actor in that time period and want to have more acting challenges and do something good for the Latino community. It wasn’t always possible to do all of those things.”

Beltrán showed the evolution of available roles for Latinos/as by showing several examples, including Blue Beetle — a superhero movie in which the character and his family are Latino.

“His ethnic identity is brought in, but he’s not just there representing Latinos,” Beltrán said. “I think that we’re really seeing major changes that might have an influence on potential stardom for different actors.”

Beltrán used Jenna Ortega as another example of the evolution of available roles for Latino/a characters.

“I pose that while Rita Moreno … as a young woman, she was a star, but she was always seen as distinctly Latina,” Beltrán said. “I think Jenna Ortega is part of this new stage in which we’re seeing Latino and Latina stars as American stars first who happen to be Latina and Latino. I think that that is really linked to the different kinds of roles that they’re playing [and] linked to the fact that Latinos' status has changed in the U.S.”

In addition to concepts surrounding race and stardom, there was a discussion centered around how we consume celebrities — figuratively, and in the case of the festival film Der Fan, literally. The movie is a 1982 German film in which a fan becomes so obsessed with a celebrity that, after several attempts to contact him with no success, she goes to meet him in person. He approaches her, and they end up having intercourse. Then she kills him and eats him. The movie facilitated a discussion by Dr. Lisa Haegele, Texas State University associate professor of German, her former student Joey Prather and a current master’s program student Madison Woodrom.

Prather said some of the more interesting aspects of the film are the connection to celebrity and the equivalency to cannibalism.

“As kids, how many of us had celebrities that we were huge fans of that we started to take aspects of?” Prather said. “It’s almost like this cannibalism.”

Woodrum has been researching and writing about the distinction between literal cannibalism and metaphorical cannibalism.

“What I’m curious about is how we consume people socially, and what it means to consume a person — that power dynamic that plays out there,” Woodrum said, adding that she has picked up verbal ticks from a roommate or music tastes from people that she knows. “[It’s about] the little ways in which we consume each other's presentation. In the way that I’m looking at you and you’re looking at me. We’re making first impression judgments of one another. We are consuming each other’s image, and the conclusions that we draw based on that image are how we form relationships with one another. This cannibalism, this consumption, is inherently tied with community and the ways that we see each other or don’t see each other as people.”

Haegele said we often think of celebrities as God-like and not as actual people, and the discussion turned to many females in the industry who are “chewed up and spit out” by it — people like Amanda Bynes and Britney Spears. Society loves to watch them succeed and fail, and people consume every bit of it. Woodrum explained what she thought was behind that phenomena.

“Once we’re done with them, once they run out of power, once they snap and shave their heads and get addicted to drugs, we’re done with them. And we spit them back out,” Woodrum said. “We as humans are gluttonous creatures. We get a certain personal satisfaction from consuming. Whether it’s consuming each other socially or consuming your breakfast, we are very inclined to pursue our own interests and our own satisfaction at a priority to that of other people.”

Haegele said with technology people are able to consume celebrity content in our own home making it all the more easy to blur the boundary between their lives and our own.

“That can be fantastic and it can also be very consuming,” Haegele said.

Der Fan can be watched on Roku for free.