Johnny Depp Starts Here

Add to my list

Edited by Murray Pomerance

Type

Studies

Subject

Actor > Johnny Depp

Keywords

Johnny Depp

Publishing date

2005

Publisher

Rutgers University Press

Language

English

Relative size

Physical desc.

Paperback • 320 pages
6 ¼ x 9 ½ inches (16 x 24 cm)

ISBN-10
ISBN-13

0-8135-3566-2
978-0-8135-3566-1

User Ratings

(0 vote)

X

Average rating:

0	rating	= We can do without
0	rating	= Good book
0	rating	= Excellent book
0	rating	= Unique / a reference

Your rating: -

Book Presentation:
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, Frantois 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.

About the Author:
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.

Press Reviews:
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

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

See the publisher website: Rutgers University Press

See the complete filmography of Johnny Depp on the website: IMDB ...