We’re Out of Movie Stars. Whose Fault Is That?

What, really, would we lose without that kind of longevity, without meaningful movie stardom? A mirror? A beacon? A road map? A portal? This isn’t a matter of discovering who we want to be but letting the movies show us who we think we are. Stars haven’t always had to pour themselves into playing superheroes. They’ve used that power to play us — people. Now, there could be a kind of justice in that power reaching its terminus. Good riddance to a system that imported the worst of this country’s prejudices and principles into its dream factory. Rampaging capitalism. Improbable whitenesses, indefensible Blacknesses. Few Asian or Mexican or Arab or Native American characters anyone had ever met, because, for starters, the actors playing those parts were often white. Our prolonged exposure let stars embed their glamour, their style and their managed perfection within our psyches, to forge the sort of warped identification that invites, say, a curious Black boy in Philadelphia to fancy himself an insufferable Southern belle on a wrecked Georgia plantation.
Which is to say that I can know all of this and still believe that half a century of Clint Eastwood movies (dozens of them) is as a good an explanation of the United States as any piece of public policy. He’s his own legislation. Of course, a young me watching him in “Sudden Impact” or “Pink Cadillac” or “A Perfect World” wouldn’t have known any of that. I would just have found the mere quarry of him absurdly watchable. And if what we’re also talking about is an energy of absurd watchability, maybe it migrates across time, from the silent era to the classical system of the 1930s and ’40s, to the ruination of the ’70s and the indulgent ’80s and reactionary, revisionist ’90s. Right now, it flourishes somewhere else entirely. On TikTok, a galaxy of starlings. Social media stardom runs on evanescence. You need attention for movie stardom. And we might have run out of patience for that.
Bad timing, I’d say, since, for more than a decade, we’ve been drowning in actors who could reward that attention, actors who, over the course of a hearty career, could also serve as good an explanation of this place as Eastwood. Consider this drought in a moment that has never felt richer with hands in want of batons: Teller, Alden Ehrenreich, Simu Liu, Issa Rae, Finn Wittrock, Hong Chau, Dane DeHaan, Zoë Kravitz, Raúl Castillo, Jay Ellis, Kumail Nanjiani, Tye Sheridan, Dave Bautista, Regé-Jean Page, Alia Shawkat, Yahya Abdul-Mateen II, Max Minghella, Rachel Zegler, Jake Lacy, Daisy Ridley, Kelvin Harrison Jr., O’Shea Jackson Jr., Tiffany Haddish, Quvenzhané Wallis, Marsai Martin, Jeremy Pope, John Boyega, Ariana DeBose, Teyonah Parris, Nicholas Hoult, Gina Rodriguez, Christopher Abbott, Jonathan Groff. The movies aren’t set up to keep them stars in 30 years. For more than one of these names, the movie-star ship has sailed.
This really does amount to a crisis. And the movies know it. In “Maverick,” the comedy is that no one’s as qualified as Cruise. For a couple of weeks in August, our No. 1 movie was “Bullet Train,” an intermittently funny, mostly tedious crime-thriller that requires Brad Pitt to fight younger prospects — Brian Tyree Henry and Aaron Taylor-Johnson, Zazie Beetz and Bad Bunny — ‌and casually kill most of them. They want what he’s got: a briefcase full of money, but his stature, too. Pitt’s low-stress, impervious-to-everything style needed 30 years and almost that many movies for him to achieve an ease with himself that can harmonize wisdom and vacancy. All the hand-to-hand combat stands in for Pitt’s self-preservation.
A star knows how to have a good time with a movie this disposable, by making the work seem like a vacation. Disposable movies are a star’s business. They help cement their status between tours de force (sometimes the tour de force is in something disposable). But they tend to hold up, anyway, because they’ve captured some thrilling, attractive, aspirational aspect of the person at its center. Without any middlebrow, non-superhero films — star vehicles, they were called — we’re facing the elimination of being as an art form, the death of tropes, tics and signatures; laughs and struts and accents and turns of phrase; a gallery of light bulbs going “ding” over some actor’s head.