Poker Face: The Rise and Rise of Lady

GagaMaureen Callahan. New York: Hyperion, 2010.

Pulitzer-nominated journalist Maureen Callahan

delivers few surprises in Poker Face: The Rise and

Rise of Lady Gaga, her new biography of skyrocketingtwenty-four-year-old pop star Lady Gaga.

The enigmatic New York native, Stefani Germanottaturned fashion freak, hero to gays, and modern-day

Madonna literally in mere months, and now answersonly to her alias. Lady Gaga is a corporate media cre-

ation and cleverly marketed commodity, who has beenmore than happy to play this capitalist-love game. So

much so that when listening to Gaga’s own words, onegets the sense she has bought into her own lore.

Like an action-packed trailer for a summer block-buster, the quotations and blurbs used to promotePoker Face are, by far, the most interesting part of the

book, which includes fewer than two hundred pages oftext. Gaga fans will gain nothing of value, but scholars

may not be disappointed. Ironically, a book beingpromoted to a mainstream market has more value to

pop culture and marketing academics than it does tothe average ‘‘little monster’’ (Gaga’s affectionate name

for her fans, who in turn refer to her as ‘‘MamaMonster’’).

While Callahan did not interview Gaga for Poker

Face, she did interview more than fifty of Gaga’sfriends, enemies, employees, and music industry folks

to pull together the first comprehensive look at thisearly twenty-first-century cultural icon.

Comparisons to Madonna’s look, Michael Jackson’ssound and showmanship, and David Bowie’s freaky

flash are fair to some extent, but Callahan saidshe tackled the topic of Gaga because she is the first

digital-age superstar.Most significant to scholars is how Gaga used social

networking to emerge virtually out of nowhere to

become potentially the biggest pop star in history.Gaga has carefully crafted her creation story through

the use of Internet technology, which she uses to con-tinually update her fans with all the minutiae that is

Gaga. Callahan suggests that the pervasiveness of me-dia technology today makes what Gaga has been able

to accomplish quite remarkable. She has four millionTwitter followers and is the first musician ever to

generate one billion hits on YouTube, which she uses

to upload her videos free to viewers.Gaga went from nowhere to everywhere in a span

of eighteen months, selling fifteen million albums andposting six number-one hit singles, two Grammy

Awards, and numerous other awards. She was namedfourth ‘‘Most Powerful and Influential’’ celebrity by

Forbes in June 2010. Time named her one of the mostinfluential people in the world. Gaga is unavoidable.

Gaga is a study in Baudrillard’s theory of simulacraand simulation, where the image has replaced the orig-inal. Gaga, herself, is a contradiction, and her fashion

and mini-movie music videos all take on a pervertedversion of reality. Even in her seemingly ‘‘real’’ life,

Gaga has said she ‘‘faked it’’ so long that she actuallynow believes her own lies. She (Germanotta) has been

replaced by her simulated self (Lady Gaga). She hasliterally lost herself in her art, which like Warhol

before her, means whatever she can get away with. Sofar, that list includes a raw meat dress, a Kermit thefrog costume, a lobster hat, an outfit made of hair, and

a machine gun bra, to name a few.Poker Face is well-researched but dull in its deliv-

ery, quite unlike its subject matter. Callahan’s scoop ofthe competition on the singer that everyone is listening

to and talking about everywhere we turn is, at veryleast, something.

—Elizabeth Barfoot Christian

Louisiana Tech University

ShowSold Separately: Promos, Spoilers,

and other Media ParatextsJonathan Gray. New York: New York University Press,

2010.

JPC @director @fancommunity: New promomaterials for soon-to-be released [insert Film/TV se-

ries]: [include hyperlinks to] un/official trailers, fanv-ids, spoilers #paratexts. Since its inception in 2006,

Twitter has emerged as both a substantial social net-working tool and as an expansive micronews network,

making it an apt vehicle for the circulation of promo-tional materials and for the expansion of online com-

munities. The above tweet alludes to the constitutingpieces that underpin the complex environments created

209Book Reviews

by and for today’s media texts, many of which escape

easy categorization. In Show Sold Separately, JonathanGray explores the growing significance of paratexts

(promos, previews, trailers, pre/sequels, spin-offs, ad-aptations, spoilers), those areas of the culture indus-

tries all-too-often regarded by film, television, andmedia scholars as mere ‘‘add-ons’’ or ‘‘ancillary prod-

ucts’’ that lie well outside the more established con-fines of the primary text. As Gray explains, paratexts

now enjoy ‘‘considerable power to amplify, reduce,erase, or add meaning [to] much of the textuality thatexists in the world’’ (46); in other words, what were

once deemed peripheral elements in film and televisionculture now constitute important dimensions in both

the prefiguration and elaboration of textual meaning.Paratexts, Gray argues, occupy a privileged place in the

overall construction and reception of contemporarypopular culture, offering added incentive for scholars

to address the intersections between commercial andamateur modes of production.

Gray’s first task is to situate paratexts within the

larger arena of textual studies, arguing that these textsnot only play a constitutive role in establishing‘‘proper’’ or ‘‘preferred’’ interpretations, but also in

setting up genders, genres, styles, attitudes, andexpectations for a given text. Paratexts like previews,

trailers, and celebrity interviews (to name a few) im-mediately serve as the first outposts of interpretation,

providing a menu of sorts for consumption that may ormay not be at odds with the projected audience’s in-

terpretive strategies. Thus, in creating a pre-selected setof frames for viewing a film or television series,

paratexts play a key role in setting expectations and ingenerating an interpretive framework for the text(albeit with varying degrees of success). In certain

instances, paratexts play a determinative role in textualreception, ‘‘control[ling] our interactions with and

interpretations of texts’’ (36). One need only invokeJames Bond or Jaws to appreciate how paratexts

establish preliminary interpretive boundaries andperimeters. In his discussion of two independently

produced film trailers for Atom Egoyan’s The Sweet

Hereafter, Gray illustrates how paratexts can alsoencourage widely divergent readings within filmgoing

communities, all the while contributing to narrow(mis)readings of the actual text. In other instances,

paratexts can open up a text to greater scrutiny andadulation on the part of audiences and producers. As

Gray notes, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers

DVD collection produces well over thirty hours ofsupplementary materials, adding significant narrative

range and depth to the stand-alone feature film, invit-ing audiences to expand their understanding of both

the text and the franchise, often through the produc-tion of their own paratextual materials.

In the end, Show Sold Separately offers muchneeded insight into how hierarchies of taste and

value are fashioned by both consumers and producersof media texts. Gray’s engrossing study of anincreasingly elaborate textual ecosystem strikes at a

moment when paratexts no longer refer to crass com-mercialism, but to a growing set of transmedia narra-

tives designed to enhance the ways in which stories aretold, consumed, and recirculated. As key sites for the

construction of discourses of value, paratexts willfigure prominently in future research in the areas

of textual studies, convergence, fan culture, andoff-screen studies.

—Ian Reilly

University of Guelph

TheAmericanWorker on Film: ACritical

History,1909 1̂999Doyle Greene. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company, 2010.

In an era when many Americans seek to deny the

existence of social class conflict by emphasizing amonolithic middle class society, Doyle Greene, an

independent scholar residing in Minneapolis, remindsus that the working class is an essential element of the

nation’s past and present. Greene analyzes representa-tions of organized labor, workers, the workplace, and

the working class in twentieth-century American cin-ema. Employing both political and film theory, Greeneasserts that cinematic depictions of the American

worker focus upon the concept of the noble worker,shifting perceptions of the American dream, and the

embracing of reform rather than revolutionary changeto address working-class concerns. While touching

upon a number of films, Greene concentrates his anal-ysis upon ten films ranging from D. W. Griffith’s

A Corner in Wheat (1909) to Mike Judge’s Office

Space (1999). Although one may certainly express

210 The Journal of American Culture � Volume 34, Number 2 � June 2011