What is the Hollywood Star System? Through the lens of S Club Seeing Double

With the progression of the digital age, the definition of "celebrity" is stretching, warping and changing more than ever - who is a celebrity? Oscar winners, reality TV stars and social media influencers are now all lumped under the fame umbrella, so has it lost its meaning? Often we lament the loss of true Hollywood glitz and glamour, the timelessness of Marilyn Monroe or Bette Davis, but the real systems and structures of Golden Age Hollywood - namely, the star system - have never really left us. In fact, the star system has only really morphed, bleeding into everything we, as consumers of digital content, encounter daily. And I think the best way to make this clear is through the hit (it has a whole 4/10 on IMDB) 2003 movie S Club Seeing Double which is really all about the star system and the construction of "celebrity". It sounds ludicrous, but just follow for a moment. 

This is from Singin' in the Rain (1952) but you get the idea

The Hollywood star system seems to be understood as some sort of mythical cultural beast far beyond our comprehension, when all it ever was (and is!) is an economic and marketing strategy employed by movie studios to make more money. Put simply, an actor or actress would be employed by a studio - solely by that studio - and groomed to act in as many of that particular studio's films as possible. The stars were often slapped with complicated morality clauses within their contracts that forced particular behaviours within the public eye and, by further tailoring their acting credits, eventually created particular roles and personas for each star for audiences to identify with. In creating their own stars, studios had better control of their products and could bank on audiences turning up to see their favourite stars, who would fulfil audience desires by functioning like a stand-in for the audience. The star system was a system for a reason - like many film critics have noted, this system was like that of a factory which churned out a particular product for consumption over and over and over again. 

Evidently, the construction of the star system was never about the production of honest to goodness art. To this day, Hollywood continues to be about economic success and viability, which is so often the argument for recycling tired plots, concepts, actors, etc.  In functioning purely as economics rather than art, Hollywood also creates a strange fracturing of self within its stars. This video from Russell Brand sums up the dual experience of fame at the present moment, though it could easily marry up to Golden Age Hollywood: 'you know that you're still you [...] so he just thinks "this is absolutely berserk" and how is this man gonna marry together the phenomena, the inner life, of Kanye West with what's going on in the world?' (on his own experience of fame, and that of Kanye West). Brand goes on to summarise 'the disjunct between what you personally believe and what the world is telling you', the gap between your personal reality and the external reality of being a star, a celebrity, a product consumed by millions around the world. 

There is, then, a disjunction between your personal, moral and emotional life and that of the commodification of self as an external persona. For all Marilyn Monroe was a superstar and a symbol of her time, she was also a thinking, feeling human being with emotional and intellectual needs as much as any other person. The aim of the star system is not to produce art, and the numerous positive emotional or spiritual responses art can evoke, but rather about what Brand describes as 'the need to make everything about the external world, [the] need to make everything expendable, [the] need to make everything consumable, saleable, commodifiable, monetisable'. 

As this article for The New Yorker points out, the concept of the star isn't limited to the movies, but can also be found in sports and other media. Since actors and actresses are no longer contracted to a single studio, the star system has gradually deteriorated into nothing in Hollywood, and the amount of money paid to stars is no longer as financially viable as it used to be. This isn't true of musicians, however, who remain signed to a particular label for significant portions of their career - and usually until certain conditions are met. As such, the early noughties pop group S Club become the perfect example of the new star.

An example of a specific Hollywood studio

Though S Club Seeing Double only has a 4/10 IMDB rating, I think it's a far better film than people give it credit for, based purely on how strangely astute it is as criticising the Hollywood star system and the contrast between a star's existence as a real person and externalised commodity. To briefly inform: S Club were the noughties pop group of 7 members, later 6, who produced campy pop tracks expected of the time and consumed voraciously by all children born around the same time as myself. Their huge domestic fame in the UK brought about numerous television shows about their lives which brought about this precise same disjunction between their lived realities and their commodified personas. Generally set in some glamorous locale, the shows followed their personal and professional dramas as the band S Club - except they weren't reality shows, they were totally scripted, falsified and designed to sell their latest record, or explain away the departure of everyone's least favourite band member. S Club Seeing Double, however, really seems to undermine and challenge this to some extent - who'd have thought?

So the plot for S Club Seeing Double is fairly simple: the band wake up in their Barcelona hotel room to find that their manager has vanished with all means of paying the bill. Hijinks ensue, and the band find themselves destitute and totally cleared out of cash in a cafe/bar. Whilst sitting there, they see a live broadcast of themselves on the television airing from Los Angeles - which can't be possible, since the group are stranded in Spain. I transpire they've been cloned and various musical numbers occur, they head to Los Angeles to figure out what exactly is happening and fathom what Gaghan (the clone maker) is up to. His plot is as follows: create an army of cloned superstars to take over the world. Sounds ludicrous, right? But maybe not - he argues that celebrities have significantly more influence over the general populace than any political figure, and that they are far easier to control and manipulate. Though it seems a little outrageous to draw an immediate parallel between this film and the Hollywood star system, it's not as far fetched as it appears.

Firstly, the creation of the clones as replacements for the real human version of S Club demonstrates a clear separation between their commodified existences and their personal ones. The real band, left behind in Barcelona, all have flaws (sometimes criminal!), desires, habits and issues of their own which make them difficult to work with as commodities. This separation between their professional and personal lives is evident from the outset when their manager, Alistair, denies them some time off in Barcelona in order to reach the show in Los Angeles, which causes outrage and upset amongst the group. Their desire to enjoy their lives when the opportunity arises as individuals clashes with management's desire to exploit them for all they're worth at the present moment. By contrast, the clones are obedient, lack personal drives or desires and rarely diverge from their intended purpose - follow management's orders, practice and perform. This makes what Brand describes as 'the disjunct between what you personally believe and what the world is telling you' into a literal split, a step more extreme than a Jekyll/Hyde character.

Similarly, the clones are more easily categorised as distinct, separate identities with particular roles, quirks and qualities that they're supposed to abide by. This is particularly evident in the use of clothing - whilst the original group all have individual styles, there is a significant overlap that doesn't necessarily distinguish them as belonging to particular groups. Simply put, the band were a (somewhat) stylish group of young people at the time and so look fairly similar as a result. By contrast, the clones are always colour coded, usually in velour tracksuits, that marks each member as  a particular colour: Jo wears yellow, Rachel wears purple etc. This matches up to a lot of branding traditionally used by bands like S Club at this period, where particular styles or colours would be associated with particular members to sell merchandise in a way not dissimilar to sport team colours. This again highlights the contrast between an individual's own personal existence and their function as a commodity and cultural focus to the rest of the world as their means of self expression, fashion, becomes restricted to sell music, merchandise and themselves - not a far reach from what fashion bloggers do now by embodying a particular style niche. 

Colour coded for easy identification

The film also utilises a huge volume of tropes, archetypes and cliches throughout that feel too heavy handed to be lazy storytelling, but instead feel like a deliberate means of creating a kind of unreality - a reality constructed out of the unbelievably false. The cloning plot is hatched in a remote, creepy castle in Hollywood and a secret mountain laboratory exists for the purpose of cloning. 

S Club Seeing Double also utilises the celebrity lookalike in its final section, where the group infiltrate the castle and release the clones. Alongside the S Club clones, Gaghan has clones a whole host of celebrities. These include Michael Jackson, Madonna, Groucho Marx and Britney Spears, though not one of them is played by their real-world counterparts, unbalancing the real/not-real relationship between the multiple layers of S Club. None of them, that is, except Gareth Gates, because you should always take any and all work offered to you. These strange relationships between reality and fiction also go to highlight how difficult it is to clearly distinguish between the art produced by these people (music, film etc) and the narratives sold to us by their public relations and marketing teams. As with all of their television shows, the film also presents the same conundrum of casting: the real band S Club pretend to play a real version of their own lives, even though it couldn't be more plainly false. In an additional layer, they now play a cloned version of themselves in a false reality where they play themselves - talk about layers.

A Michael Jackson lookalike pretends to be a clone of Michael Jackson whilst sat next to Bradley from
S Club pretending to be a clone version of a fictional version of himself. I wish I was making this up.

Though the film undoubtedly explores and examines the group's relationship to the Hollywood star system model in a fairly critical way (cloning is bad, and treating celebrities like commodities is bad - the creepy laboratory and the eerie castle don't leave much to subtext), the film also functions as a vehicle for promoting the accompanying album, tour and merchandise. The film used music from and shared a name with an album and was used as a marketing ploy to try and boost the group after the departure of a member - the label feared the degradation of the group after their first member loss, which inevitably did happen. As such, it's hardly the radical critical vehicle we need to deconstruct the capitalism of Hollywood that plagues the ways in which we make and consume art. 

Saying that, the whole closing number of S Club Seeing Double is all about questioning identity and to what extent your sense of self can be guaranteed - pretty deep for a dumb movie about cloning a trivial pop group. Overall, the film highlights that there's a difference between your own sense of self and the way others perceive you, and that this divide becomes a chasm when you're famous. 

Overall, this isn't a movie to rush out and see - ever. What I'm suggesting here is an accessible way of understanding the concept of persona and self in fame industries, how the star system persists today and how you can revisit a silly little film from your childhood to understand it a little better. I'd also suggest that this film provides an example for why we should study trivial or low culture - you just never know when you're going to find an insightful little gem.