Postmodern Affect and the Performance of Authenticity in A Star Is Born and Imitation of Life

초록

This article examines Douglas Sirk’s Imitation of Life (1959) and William Wellman’s A Star Is Born (1937) as Hollywood melodramas that anticipate postmodern cultural logic by transforming private emotion into public spectacle. Drawing on theories of postmodernism, adaptation, and the spectacle, I argue that both films foreground emotional authenticity while simultaneously exposing its artificiality, dramatizing the ways in which “real” feeling is aestheticized and commodified in postmodern culture. In both films, acting becomes a metaphor for private and personal relations outside show-business. For example, the star protagonists of each film enact private emotions such as love and grief in extremely public contexts that undermine their authenticity. In addition, both films frame their narratives with opening and closing images that emphasize their cinematic constructedness. In both cases, private emotion is staged, performed, and spectacularized in ways that become inseparable from audience consumption. By examining these films alongside each other, this article aims to show how melodrama’s heightened emotion not only conveys authenticity but also produces it as a continually renewable commodity. Ultimately, I argue, these films illuminate the paradox at the center of postmodern affect, in which the cultural appetite for emotional authenticity depends upon its continual artificial reproduction.

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