Wotcha Lookin' at, Anyway? an Examination of Point-of-View in Denys Arcand's Stardom

Satire is a sort of glass, wherein beholders do generally discover everybody's face but their own; which is the chief reason for that kind reception it meets in the world, and that so very few are offended with it. But if it should happen otherwise, the danger is not great; and I have learned, from long experience, never to apprehend mischief from those understandings I have been able to provoke; for anger and fury, though they add strength to the sinews of the body, yet are found to relax those of the mind, and to render all its efforts feeble and impotent. --Jonathan Swift (1710) (1) Working with his producer, Denise Robert (and Robert Lantos) and with his writer, J. Jacob Potashnik, Denys Arcand designed Stardom as an illustration of Andy Warhol's prediction that in the future everybody would be famous for 15 minutes. Ironically, what was supposed to happen to the star has happened to the film. Although it was considered sufficiently prestigious in 2000 both to close the Cannes Film Festival and to open the Toronto Film Festival, it scarcely migrated at all to any theatre screens. It has had no theatrical release in either the United States or Great Britain and only a repertory release in English Canada. It immediately became un film maudit--a film not fit to exist except in VHS and DVD formats tucked away inside the more enterprising video outlets. Many of the reviews were negative and, given the absence of release, not numerous. Writing an interview article for Take One, Maurie Alioff understood what the film was doing, (2) as did Mark Peranson writing from Cannes for Toronto's Eye Weekly. (3) But Elvis Mitchell of the New York Times entirely missed the complexities of the film, fulminating that a film so superficial should last only 15 minutes. (4) Even Jonathan Rosenbaum found it so full of contempt that [s]itting through this barrage of all-purpose insults aimed at obvious targets was an unenlightening chore. (5) But all film critics are media people, and possibly a film that so savagely attacks media people cannot easily be approached by other media people without relaxing the sinews of their minds, as Jonathan Swift has suggested. If the film is, indeed, informed by contempt (which is questionable), it is a contempt which is itself informed by the conditions of the world in which we live---especially as reflected through the media. However, Stardom is not about its subject matter. It is not just about celebrities or about the insistent triviality of television sound-bites. Ultimately, I want to argue, the film is about loss--loss of self, loss of centre, of sincerity, and especially of moral purpose. To evoke the language of Roman Catholicism within which Arcand grew up, it is about the absence of grace. The film is, from this point-of-view, a journey through hell. Arcand's hell is different, however, from any hell imagined by the church. In Arcand's hell, everyone is smiling. Everyone is having a good time--or at least pretending to. Stardom's antecedents are less Woody Allen's Celebrity (1998) or Robert Altman's Prete-a-Porter(1994) than that classic allegory of a search for a meaningful existence, Federico Fellini's La Dolce Vita (1960), along with, of course, Arcand's own Jesus de Montreal (1989). Artists and intellectuals of Arcand's generation, born in Quebec in the 1930s or 1940s--people like Hubert Aquin, Jacques Godbout, Marie-Claire Blais, Jean Pierre Lefebvre--all grew up within the atmosphere of a most insistent Catholicism, largely Jansenist to boot. Whether directly in spite of themselves or indirectly through the church's many prohibitions, they inhabited a world that was deemed to pos sess a moral centre. Furthermore, the proscription of critical intelligence by Roman Catholicism meant that these young people all read the works that were proscribed. Among these were the great existential novels that grew out of the Second World War, which were themselves written in response to the failings of the church--La Nausee (1938) by Jean-Paul Sartre, L'Etranger (1942) by Albert Camus, La Condition humaine (1946) by Andre Malraux, Il Conformista (1951) by Alberto Moravia. …

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