Author: Murray Pomerance Subject: Film Studies Paper ISBN 0-8135-3566-2 Pages: 304 pp. pp. 22 b&w illus. Description:
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Praise for Johnny Depp Starts Here
"Johnny Depp Starts Here offers an important
contribution to the field of star studies, not only for its unique
treatment of Depp's elusiveness, but also for its author's captivating
validation of the experience of watching and of discovering connections
that provide him with pleasure. Pomerance's passion is highly
contagious."-Michael DeAngelis, DePaul University
"Pomerance is the inimitable lyric poet of cinema scholars,
bringing the imagination of a creative artist and the rigor of an
exacting intellect to these masterly riffs on Depp's complexities and
conundrums. The protean actor could not have found a commentator more
in tune with his mercurial career and elusive, mesmerizing self."-David
Sterritt, author of Mad to Be Saved: The Beats, the '50s, and Film
From beloved bad-boy to cool and captivating maverick, Johnny
Depp has inspired media intrigue and has been the source of
international acclaim since the early 1990s. He has attracted attention
for his eccentric image, his accidental acting career, his beguiling
good looks, and his quirky charm. In Johnny Depp Starts Here, film
scholar Murray Pomerance explores our fascination with Depp, his
riddling complexity, and his meaning for our culture. Moving beyond the
actor's engaging and inscrutable private life, Pomerance focuses on his
enigmatic screen performances from A Nightmare on Elm Street to
Secret Window.
The actor's image is studied in terms of its ambiguities and
its many strange nuances: Depp's ethnicity, his smoking, his
tranquility, his unceasing motion, his links to the Gothic, the Beats,
Simone de Beauvoir, the history of rationality, Impressionist painting,
and more. In a series of treatments of his key roles, including Rafael
in The Brave, Bon Bon in Before Night Falls, Jack
Kerouac in The Source, and the long list of acclaimed
performances from Gilbert Grape to Cap'n Jack Sparrow, we learn of
Johnny onscreen in terms of male sexuality, space travel, optical
experience, nineteenth-century American capitalism, Orientalism, the
vulnerability of performance, the perils of sleep, comedy, the myth of
the West, Scrooge McDuck, François Truffaut, and more.
Johnny's face, Johnny's gaze, Johnny's aging, and Johnny's
understatement are shown to be inextricably linked to our own desperate
need to plumb performance, style, and screen for a grounding of reality
in this ever-accelerating world of fragmentation and insecurity. Both
deeply intriguing and perpetually elusive, Depp is revealed as the
central screen performer of the contemporary age, the symbol of
performance itself.
No thinker has meditated on Johnny Depp this way before-and
surely not in a manner worthy of the object of scrutiny.
Murray Pomerance, professor and chair in the
department of sociology at Ryerson University, is the author of An
Eye for Hitchcock and Magia D'Amore and the editor of BAD:
Infamy, Darkness, Evil, and Slime on Screen and American
Cinema of
the 1950s: Themes and Variations.
