Being at Home with Roy Dupuis and Pascale Bussieres: Or, Star-Gazing in and out of Quebec
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Let me state at the outset that I see this essay participating, very modestly, in a (queer) film studies tradition that takes seriously fan culture and the notion that star images circulate among and are productively engaged with by audiences as ideological texts of self-stylization and collective identification. As such, I wish to point out that the immediate impetus for the following reflections was this particular fan's immense pleasure in learning of the double best acting wins by Roy Dupuis and Pascale Bussieres at the 2005 Genie and Jutra Awards (for Memoires affectives and Ma vie en cinemascope, respectively). Not only did this happy coincidence present an opportunity to reflect critically on the parallel twenty-year careers of two bona fide Quebec film stars--and my own identification with them as such--it also allowed me a quasi-scholarly platform from which to hazard a few critical speculations about the nature of Quebec celebrity culture more generally. If we accept, following from Richard Dyer and others (see especially the work of Jackie Stacey), (1) that film stars can be read semiotically as clusters of signs that intersect with and communicate to spectators at given historical moments larger ideas and meanings about gender, race, sexuality, nationality, and the like; and if we agree, moreover, that the phenomenon of celebrity that underpins the star is in some fundamental way compensatory, speaking to various anxieties and/or voids in an individual's or a collective's social and psychic life, then how do we interpret the various television and film roles of Dupuis and Bussieres, as well as the equally various audience identifications they provoke? How, in turn, do those roles and identifications necessarily comment on the cultural/national nexus at the heart of the Quebec entertainment industry's surprisingly successful battle against a North American media universe saturated with American content? And how, finally, do those roles and identifications signify differently nationally and internationally? For, unlike many of their Quebec acting contemporaries, Dupuis's and Bussieres's recognizability as stars transcends the hothouse environment of the province's local media culture. This has to do, on the one hand, with the successful exporting and showcasing of their talent to the English-speaking world via Bussieres's high-profile roles in films by English-Canadian auteurs Patricia Rozema, Guy Maddin, and Jeremy Podeswa, and via Dupuis's long-running stint as Michael on the popular syndicated television series Nikita. But, as I will conclude by arguing, each actor's international appeal owes as much to their status as queer film icons, an aspect of their star personae that was arguably established at the very outset of their respective careers, and then solidified with Dupuis's role as the gay hustler Yves in Jean Beaudin's Being at Home with Claude and Bussieres's as the newly liberated Camille in Rozema's When Night is Falling--films which both enjoyed great popularity on the international film festival circuit. This, then, is the system behind my own star analysis in this essay: I begin first with a general discussion of celebrity media in Quebec, before moving on to comment briefly on the particular medium of transmission (i.e. television vs. film) of Dupuis's and Bussieres's evolving star images. Next, I offer a few observations about genre, focusing on the role played by the costume drama and the biopic in solidifying each star as both a movie celebrity and a national icon. And, finally, I conclude with some remarks on gender and sexuality as they relate to theories of (queer) spectatorship and transnational audience identification. Media In addition to having a more robust film industry than its English-Canadian counterpart, Quebec's star operates at a more fevered pitch, fueled by television talk shows like Toute le monde en parle (which attracts audiences of close to one million every Sunday evening when it airs on Radio-Canada), and by celebrity gossip magazines like Echos vedettes, 7 Jours, and Star Systeme (all owned by Pierre Peladeau fils's Quebecor Inc. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.019 | 0.007 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.012 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".