Richard Dyer and Star image

 Richard Dyer is an English academic who held a professorship in the Department of Film Studies at King’s College London. He is the one responsible for coming up with the Star Image theory.

There are four areas of this theory that I will be looking at in this blog post:

Star construction 

• Richard Dyer believes that a star is not a real person. The star is constructed by the artist themselves, their record label and other businesses that can make money off them.
• A star is created through movies, music videos, magazines etc.
• The image of the star is created and how they are shown to the world is controlled. For example the way they dress, the way they speak, the messages they put out into the world are all constructed to capture the audience.
• A stars public persona is not necessarily how they would act in the privacy if their own home for example Katy Perry wears extra gent costumes in her music videos but might not necessarily wear these types of clothes regularly in private.

Star as a commodity 

• Richard Dyer believes that stars are produced to create a profit from their image and off their audience with merchandise such as t shirts, posters etc.
• Record labels will create similar stars as they know that their image will generate certain trends and patterns that will increase their own profit 
• This is why a lot of boy bands were made to be very similar as record labels recognised that their image sells and that they can create as many as they need to to produce more profit.

Star as an ideology 

• Stars will represent certain parts of their audience and create similar views to their audience this allows them to amass a large following of people believing in everything the star does and believing that everything they do they have a right to do it.
• As a result fans of the specific star will begin to copy their style of clothing and try to act in the same way as them.
• For example fans of Beyonce will share her views on women and how they are independent and shouldn't be controlled.

Paradox of the Star

• The star must be both ordinary and extraordinary
• This means that the person must have some section of as normal enough life where then fans can relate to the star on a more personal level but must also be different enough from an average person that they can be idolised by their fans 
• The star must be present but also absent 
• This means that the star must have mystery surrounding them so that it keeps the audience of that star interested in their lives at all times but must also be revealing in that the fans know something about the person their idolising.