A Queer Way of Feeling by Diana W. Anselmo;

Author:Diana W. Anselmo;
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780520299641
Publisher: University of California Press

FIGURE 15. Snapped: Eleanor Fulton’s scrapbooked collage and self-produced Kodak of Jack W. Kerrigan, October 12, 1915.

Both reproductions are remarkable, not only for their singularity but also as poignant testaments to the lengths a well-off movie lover would go to alleviate the anxiety of loss conjured by both the moviegoing experience and film fandom. Surrounded by mass-produced facsimiles, the amateur Kodak condenses the overlapping longings to be serially intimate with a star and to safekeep one-of-a-kind live encounters with him, to stretch temporality beyond a face-to-face instant, and to guarantee an embodied afterlife that moviegoing actively precluded. As Christian Metz observes, unlike cinema, “the photographic lexis [i.e., the socialized unit of reading, of reception] has no fixed duration ( = temporal size): it depends, rather, on the spectator, who is the master of the look.”65 In its visual fixity and libidinal fluidity, Kerrigan’s snapshot invested Fulton with rare mastery over a star’s body. Twice arrested by the girl fan’s hand (the mechanical click and the manual pasting), the male player goes from a larger-than-life projection on the big screen to a butterfly pinned down with loving care in the fan’s private scrapbook. Reduced to pocket-size, the personalized star photograph becomes a simulacrum of intimacy and a measure of control, affording an unknown admirer the sensation of collaborative authorship when rewriting their—star, fan, cinema—intersecting life-narratives.

The material tactility of printed paper, being an amateur snapshot or an autographed mass reproduction, galvanizes spectatorial cathexis, the portable representation of film stars nearing and endearing female fans who favored alternatives to normative gender performances. The possibility of alienation and otherness threads through nonetheless, for the act of photographing a star, like that of clipping and gluing their commercial likeness, is imbued with the watermark of loss. “An instantaneous abduction,” photography constantly reminds subject and creator of the relentless march of time.66 Film ephemera, as a result, affords intimacy by foregrounding distance, and remembrance by evincing transience, possibly throwing an ardent fan into a queer loop of yearning, where temporality refuses to follow teleological linearity but instead keeps snaking back to a fixed attachment.

It is relevant then, that the only other Kodak included in this scrapbook is half-ripped from the page; all that survives is a residual street-view and a small disembodied head, presumably Fulton’s, if the stylish headgear and California landscape is anything to go by.67 Read as companions, this photograph and the one Fulton took of Kerrigan comment upon the power asymmetries sustaining film fandom. The violence exacted against her self-portrait, its near obliteration, contrasts deeply with the care deployed in every clipped ephemera dedicated to the actor. The white scars on photographic paper where the surface image was scraped off, as the negative space delineated by glue remnants, tell a story of fan self-erasure both parallel and essential to the enshrinement of movie celebrity (figure 16).

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