Richard Dyer's Star Image Theory

Richard Dyer is a British media theorist, who suggests that a star's narrative impacts on the consumption by the audience. He argues that the star is manufactured by institutions for financial gain and that individual stars have their own unique selling point in order to grab and hold our attention. For example, Justin Bieber's hair.

His theory has three parts:

Audience and Insitutions:
Stars are made only for money purposes and increasing the brand identity will benefit the institution as they increase sale in all of the media platforms in which they are in. The institution will then adapt the artist around their chosen target audience.

Constitutions:
The same as above

Hegemony:
The idea that the audience can relate to the star as they have a feature that they can share with or admire about the star and can attempt to replicate their behaviour.

Dyer's central idea was that a star image could be discussed using two key paradoxes and says that a star image simultaneously has two contradictory representations; being both ordinary and extraordinary. Dyer inferred that a star must be represented simultaneously as, just like us, but also at the same time possess something we do not have and something that makes them special, different and extraordinary. This might mean they are more talented, gifted, confident, passionate, etc. but also they are allowed to be rebellious, anti-social, or angry maybe. They are idealised version of humanity, both present and absent.

Dyer also said that the audience struggles with another paradox; and that is that the star is simultaneously present in our lives, be this in our social group chat, our style, our identity, and our consumption habits. However, they also absent, something that we perceive as out of reach, on a pedestal, and not actually there.

Dyer argued that as an audience, we strive to complete the star image through consuming their products, shows, merchandise etc. A star will strive to complicate things by constantly changing their image over their life career, this is essential if the artist is to have long term success as they need to continually strive to both keep their audience entertained and widen the audience as fans often get bored with repetition.