A Knight of the Realm vs. the Master of Magnetism: Sexuality, Stardom, and Character Branding

摘要

Since 2000, Sir Ian McKellen has transformed from Shakespearian thespian into a fixture of franchise film series like Lord of the Rings and X-Men. For the openly gay McKellen, participation in franchises - and particularly his portrayal of the oppressed minority and mutant radical Magneto in X-Men - presented a chance to position recognizable character brands within his star text and its ongoing engagement in gay politics. What results, however, was not perfect appropriation with the McKellen celebrity image but instead a more fraught tension between two competing forms of media marketing: stardom based in the management of personality and intellectual property networks based in content controlled directly by corporations. This article first contextualizes these tensions between intellectual property and stardom within a longer trajectory of filmic product differentiation and shifts between vertical and horizontal integration. Second, the article examines the branding of Magneto as an intellectual property, consistently constructed as a fascist villain across multiple media. Finally, the article explores how the management of Ian McKellen's star text worked to alternatively mobilize that property as a potential site of queer activism - a project ultimately confounded by the changing conditions of star representation and labor in the franchise systems of contemporary transmedia economies. Neither the McKellen persona nor the Magneto property could fully contain the other as sites of contested image and meaning, but they simultaneously and unevenly inflected one another as a result of that intertextual struggle.