Twilight of the Idols: Hollywood and the Human Sciences in 1920s America

by Mark Lynn Anderson

Overview

Twilight of the Idols revisits some of the sensational scandals of early Hollywood to evaluate their importance for our contemporary understanding of human deviance. By analyzing changes in the star system and by exploring the careers of individual stars—Wallace Reid, Rudolph Valentino, and Mabel Normand among them—Mark Lynn Anderson shows how the era’s celebrity culture shaped public ideas about personality and human conduct and played a pivotal role in the emergent human sciences of psychology, anthropology, and sociology. Anderson looks at motion picture stars who embodied various forms of deviance—narcotic addiction, criminality, sexual perversion, and racial indeterminacy. He considers how the studios profited from popularizing ideas about deviance, and how the debates generated by the early Hollywood scandals continue to affect our notions of personality, sexuality, and public morals.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780520237117
Publisher:	University of California Press
Publication date:	04/18/2011
Edition description:	First Edition
Pages:	238
Product dimensions:	6.20(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Mark Lynn Anderson is Associate Professor of Film Studies in the Department of English at the University of Pittsburgh.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations ix

Acknowledgments xi

Introduction 1

1 The Early Hollywood Scandals and the Death of Wallace Reid 15

2 Psychoanalysis and Fandom in the Leopold and Loeb Trial 49

3 Queer Valentino 70

4 Black Valentino 127

5 Mabel Normand and the Ends of Error 155

Notes 175

Bibliography 205

Index 215