(2016) and coauthor of Kelly Reichardt: Emergency and the Everyday (with Nicole Seymour, 2017).
Fusco applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Hollywood's Others: Love and Limitation in the Star System, and reported the following:
When you crack Hollywood’s Others open to page 99, you’ll meet Lon Chaney’s Erik the Phantom at his most optimistic, as he tells Christine Daaé that “your love will restore me.” I summarize this scene of The Phantom of The Opera (Julian 1925) in which the two characters converse for the first time, Christine accuses Erik of being the Phantom haunting the opera house, and he explains that if he is a monster, it is due to man’s hatred of him. He suggests to Christine that his “spirit” will overcome the fear produced by his mask. Poor Erik! As I argue on 99, everything about Daaé’s behavior and The Phantom of the Opera’s staging and editing will prove the opposite. I write, “as the film plays out, it exposes the limitations in the relations among viewing subject, viewed object, and such redemptive affects.” In the explanation that follows, I start explaining what this looks like, including the film’s habit of framing them in a two-shot, which she keeps fleeing. In contrast, I point out that when she is with her normate lover Raoul, they are framed together an exchange copious amounts of bodily fluids: kisses, tears, whatever is on an exchanged soggy handkerchief!Visit Katherine Fusco's website.
Though things don’t work out for the Phantom, it appears the Page 99 Test has worked out very nicely in my case. My book is about the limitations on feelings like sympathy or admiration in Hollywood films and fan magazine of the 1920s and 1930s. This chapter on Lon Chaney is all about how his stardom was discussed in terms of his impersonations of disability and disfigurement. While Chaney’s transformations were obviously appealing to his many fans, I argue that the star discourse—the talking about stars—that appeared in fan magazines warned against too much or too close identification with those framed as “other.” When Chaney died young, magazine articles (falsely) speculated about his suffering in imitation of disability as the cause of his death. Basically, a theory of sympathy for the other as fatal!
While other chapters of the book take up different cases—the marketing of Black child stars to white audiences, the disavowal of the pain of star suicides, a child star at a time child labor was being contested—the example of Chaney’s performance as the Phantom works very well to capture the skepticism I want us to have about what work commercialized or manufactured identification can do. As I see it, old fan magazines such as Photoplay acted as a kind of school for teaching Americans about the limits of feeling with and feeling for those positioned as other. Throughout the book I take up a series of stars who were limit cases, with whom white, able-bodied, hetero, or otherwise normative fans were encouraged to identify, but not too much. In the early movie magazines, fans were taught that sometimes their love should have a limit.
--Marshal Zeringue
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