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Anthony P. NcIntyie, Bepaitment of Film Stuuies, 0niveisity College Bublin, Belfielu,, Bublin 4,
Republic of Iielanu.
Email: anthony.mcintyiegmail.com
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It has been aigueu that cuteness is emeiging as one of the uominant aesthetic
categoiies of the twenty-fiist centuiy. In this essay, I analyze the stai text of
actiess anu singei Zooey Beschanel to tiace the impact of cuteness on the
political eneigies of "Nillenials," the geneiational cohoit aiguably most affecteu
by the ueleteiious afteishocks of the 2uu8 financial ciisis. Beschanel is a
paiticulaily multi-meuiateu celebiity with an extensive piesence in new meuia, a
hit sitcom, anu a numbei of commeicial enuoisements. I analyze how cuteness
facilitates Beschanel's appeal to both mainstieam anu alteinative moualities, anu
tiace the affective powei of a cute aesthetic to hainess commeicial impeiatives
anu aiu in the cieation of a juxtapolitical intimate public that utilizes a
"iestoiative nostalgia" to neutialize political eneigies amiu stiaiteneu economic
anu social conuitions.
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cuteness, celebiity, intimate publics, nostalgia, political neutialization, Zooey
Beschanel
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Cuteness is a powerful affective register whose social proliferation since the turn of
the millennium has been striking. Whether in the form of YouTube videos of kittens,
the increasing prevalence of cupcakes, or the emoticons that terminate many text
messages, the rise of the cute has left few areas of life untouched by its ebullient
reverberations. Indeed, Dylan E. Wittkower (2009) has argued that cuteness is one of
Television & New Neuia
1-17
The Authoi(s) 2u14
Repiints anu peimissions:
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tvnm.sagepub.com


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the dominant aesthetics of the twenty-first century. The actress and singer Zooey
Deschanel is particularly adept at leveraging cuteness, and this article shall employ her
as a case study to chart some implications of the current rise in representations of this
aesthetic, as well as other elements of her star text. As Richard Dyer (1979, 3) notes, a
star text is characterized by a structured polysemy, and there is always a struggle
over meaning involved: some meaning and affects are foregrounded and others are
masked or displaced. While there are certainly elements of Deschanels life and
career that compromise her construction of a cute persona (personal relationships,
attitudes toward maternity), the actress actively and, for the most part, successfully,
foregrounds aspects of her life and work that form a coherent star text in which the
aesthetics of cuteness play a central role. Utilizing Lauren Berlants (2008) concept of
an intimate public as one which is constructed through circulating texts that
foreground a shared sense of longing, I argue that Deschanels cute-inflected star text
contributes to the political neutralization Berlant sees as being a central feature of such
publics. While an intimate public registers collective experience as a feeling of vague
belonging (Berlant 2008, 5) through texts commonly imbued with sentiment and
complaint, such publics remain resolutely juxtapolitical (Berlant 2008, 10) and
ambivalent toward conventional politics.
Deschanels brand of quirky femininity, commonly termed adorkable, is embodied
across a range of convergent discourses, marking the performer as particularly suited
to the modern multi-mediated environment. Indeed, through the affective register the
actress has cultivated with its particular ideological valence to the recessionary
moment, she has attained a generational iconicity. I will trace the evolution of
Deschanels star text and, in the process, detail the aspects of it that had to be
jettisoned or attenuated to achieve her current ideological/affective impact. I will
further argue that this has been achieved in part through her star texts reconfiguration
of older features of stardom, particularly through her performance of cuteness and
evocation of a restorative nostalgia, as well as her ability to mediate between
mainstream and alternative modalities through ancillary projects such as her
promotional work for hair-care brand, Pantene, and her indie band, She and Him.
As the star and producer of New Girl (Fox, 2011), the hit sitcom for which she
received Emmy and Golden Globe nominations, and the face of Pantene, Deschanel
notably consolidated her stardom in the beginning of this decade. After a breakout role
in Cameron Crowes Almost Famous (2000), she played a number of supporting roles
in low-budget independent films, including The Good Girl (2002) and All the Real
Girls (2003). She then progressed to larger roles in Winter Passing (2005) and (500)
Days of Summer (2009) while steadily accruing supporting roles in mainstream larger
budget films such as Failure to Launch (2006) and Yes Man (2008). Yet, despite the
actresss casting in a number of mainstream Hollywood films, she is often identified
as a darling of the indie scene due in part to her sartorial style and musical output
(Moehringer 2012). Deschanels successful transition to television has considerably
boosted her standing, and she now regularly features at prestigious red carpet events in
Hollywood. As an accomplished singer and actress, Deschanel stands in marked
contrast to many of the post-talent celebrities vying for attention in the culture
1%4-#5"' S

industries, and by invoking discourses of classical stardom such as heredity and
versatility of talent, she lays claim to an authenticity that fortifies her celebrity and
secures a claim to personal agency.
1

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The character of Jess in New Girl is currently the primary locus of Deschanels brand
of cuteness. The sitcom portrays the lives of a group of three males in their late
twenties who come to share a flat with Jess, the new girl of the title. Of the males, we
are presented with Schmidt (Max Greenfield), a Jewish financier; Winston (Lamorne
Morris), a black former athlete; and Nick (Jake Johnson), a white downwardly mobile
former law student. In addition to the roommates, the other regular character is Cece
(Hannah Simone), a fashion model of Indian heritage and Jesss closest friend. This
core set of characters represents a wide cross-section of U.S. society in terms of the
racial groupings represented. Indeed, the official Fox Web site describes the group as a
dysfunctional family (fox.com), and I contend that one of the main discursive
functions of the show is to present an image of societal harmony at a time when U.S.
social and economic divisions are proliferating.
Renowned economist Joseph Stiglitz (2012, 16) details how, since the global
economic crash of 2008, the growing divide between rich and poor has come under
scrutiny, while the prevailing socioeconomic system has led to a degradation of
values where everything is acceptable and no-one is accountable. The resulting loss
of faith in political and economic systems, and widespread realization that America is
no longer the land of opportunity, is best illustrated by considering the situation
currently facing many twentysomethings: overburdened with student loans, facing a
dismal job market that pays so poorly that they are increasingly forced back into the
parental home (Stiglitz 2012, 347).
Despite this context, it is difficult to detect many commensurate popular media
depictions of the grim realities faced by young people. As Diane Negra and Yvonne
Tasker (2013, 348) have noted, media representations of the recession since 2008
when acknowledging the impact of economic crises primarily do so by portraying the
middle-aged, middle-class, white guy as sign, symptom and victim to the exclusion
of other affected groups, such as women and young people, who do not have the
media or cultural visibility that their situation warrants. Add to this a recent election
that illustrated extreme division within U.S. society along ethnic and class lines, and it
is clear that television series such as New Girl, with its portrayal of a racially diverse
group of striving Millenials
2
overcoming problems together and not being ground
down by straitened economical circumstances, serve an ideological function by
promoting a discourse of national cohesiveness and enacting a political neutralization
of contentious fracture points.
In addition, the sitcom can be situated within a wave of girl-centered programs,
including Girls (2012) and Two Broke Girls (2011) that emerged on U.S. television
within a twelve-month period. Significantly, girlishness has been defined as a
4 )'&'*$+$,- . /'0 1'2$3

central tenet of postfeminist culture that is imbued with a culturally ameliorating
energy. As Tasker and Negra (2007, 9) note, femininity in this context is posited as
a state of vitality in opposition to the symbolically deathly social and economic fields of
contemporary Western cultures, and the highest profile forms of postfeminist femininity
are empowered to recharge a culture defined by exhaustion, uncertainty and moral
ambiguity.
The irony is that while young people have arguably been the group most disillusioned
by the skewed values that led to the economic crash, it is the cachet of youthfulness
that is leveraged through the iconicity of figures such as Deschanel to fuel symbolic
renewal.
Just as the role of Jess is central to Deschanels particular iteration of cuteness,
within the text of New Girl, the eponymous character acts as the bonding mechanism
that unites the ensemble and helps to overcome the conflicts encountered by the
various characters in each episode. With the second season, there has been a little
more development of the secondary characters, but, overall, Jess remains the crux of
the program and her performance of cuteness its key motif. Press releases for the
program used the word adorkable (a blend word combining adorable with dork, a
slang term meaning socially inept) to describe the central character, and now the term
has become synonymous with Deschanel herself. The fact that dork is itself a word
mostly used by children further adds to a child/adult liminality that is central to the
concept.
As Daniel Harris (2000, 4) points out (s)omething becomes cute not necessarily
because of a quality it has but because of a quality it lacks, a certain neediness and
inability to stand alone. Throughout New Girl, the embarrassing spectacle of Jess
failing at a task (often in acts intended to impress a potential partner) is key to her
status as adorkable. These acts often result in action taken by one or more of the
male roommates to save her. The pilot episode sets this pattern with a plot that sees
Jess try to reenter the dating scene after a bad breakup. The episode ends with all of
her new roommates rushing to Jesss side as they realize she has been stood up at a
restaurant. Thus, the neediness and essential lack of the adorkable and
sentimentalized figure in their midst justifies the male figures placement in the role of
protector and symbolically reestablishes patriarchal norms, a central feature of much
postfeminist media culture.
Although New Girl includes some scenes that would on the surface indicate the
opposite, Jess is mainly coded as nonsexual, primarily through tropes of cuteness. Lori
Merish (1996) argues that the role of liminality is central to this process, with the
border between child/adult being problematized. With delayed adulthood being
identified as one of the defining features of Millennials (see, for example, Thompson
2012), the impact of recessionary conditions that have pushed back milestones of
adulthood such as marriage and financial independence can be detected in this
aesthetic. Jess is commonly characterized by a conflation of childhood and adulthood,
and this aspect of cuteness is often demonstrated through a disavowal of her sexuality.
1%4-#5"' S

In one episode (season 1, episode 4 Naked), Jess is unable to say the word penis
evincing a reluctance to participate in the linguistic discourse of adulthood and mature
sexuality. In a later episode (season 1, episode 8 Bad in Bed), Jess has begun a
relationship with a fellow teacher, Paul (Justin Long), who is depicted as similarly
nonsexual. The pairs attempts to have intercourse increasingly involve playacting and
the mimicry of more adult conventions while failing to grasp them thoroughly.
New Girl has not shied away from current political and societal issues, and these
became more pronounced in the second season when Jess loses her job as an
elementary school teacher. After an initial period of despondency marked by actions
that are out of keeping with her character, in episode 7 (Menzies), Jess is castigated
by Schmidt for being unable to pay the rent and is eventually moved to get a job
teaching adults. Such popular representations of the demographic constituencies
currently bearing the brunt of the economic downturn correspond to depictions of
youth identified in 1990s popular culture. Henry Giroux (2003, 158) notes that
through popular texts society reminds youth it neither needs or wants them and they
are only offered right wing homilies about relying on their own resources and
cunning. Within New Girl, Schmidt, a white-collar worker and the one financially
comfortable member of the household, is routinely the butt of jokes due to his elitist
views; however, the fact that in a moment of financial crisis within the apartment he is
coded as being wise and authoritative reveals the reactionary notions that undergird
the sitcom. As Giroux (2003, 158) puts it,
the dystopian notion that there are no alternatives to the present order reinforces the
message that young people should avoid at all costs the prospect of organising
collectively in order to address the social, political and economic basis of individually
suffered problems.
The function of nostalgia and the specific effect of Deschanels deployment of it
are worth considering in more detail at this point. In her book, The Future of
Nostalgia, Svetlana Boym (2001) distinguishes two types of nostalgia: restorative and
reflective. While reflective nostalgia is a mediation on the history and passage of
time (Boym 2001, 41) and the imperfect process of remembrance (Boym 2001,
49), restorative nostalgia reconstruct(s) emblems and rituals of home and homeland
(Boym 2001, 49). Within restorative nostalgia, Boym discerns two main narratives,
the return to origins and the conspiracy (Boym 2007, 13). Deschanels nostalgia is
an evocation of a pre-lapsarian past, which is no less symbolically powerful for its
lack of historic specificity. Whether through her polka-dot dresses, the sixties-era
vocal harmonies on She and Him records, or the cathartic dancing to 1980s rock that
closed the last season 1 episode of New Girl, Deschanels nostalgic performativity
evokes a time untainted by the economic and social woes of the present. In this sense,
Deschanels image can be read as particularly suited to the recession-era. Boym (2007,
14) notes that haphazard recombinations of past trends to create invented traditions
that hearken back to a pre-lapsarian past have been popular since the nineteenth
century and that they build on the sense of loss of community and cohesion and offer
6 )'&'*$+$,- . /'0 1'2$3

a comforting collective script for individual longing. Such nostalgia also facilitates
the energies of attachment essential to the development of an intimate public, one that
Berlant (2008, 11) claims often sees the political sphere more as a field of threat,
chaos, degradation, or retraumatization than a condition of possibility.
51$$1.*E% 2$%4-$&#$&
Through an analysis of Deschanels previous film roles, we can pinpoint many of the
affective elements the actress has had to slough off to achieve her current ideological
valence. Deschanels crossover roles in films such as Failure to Launch and (500)
Days of Summer show that she lost some elements of complexity en route to
mainstream success.
While Jesss childlike and sentimentalized features were also previously anticipated
in films such as Elf (2003), Failure to Launch was a prototype rendering of the quirky
elements of her later character. In the film, Sarah Jessica Parker plays Paula, a woman
hired by a late-middle-aged couple to persuade their son Tripp (Matthew
McConnaughey), through elements of seduction, to find his own place to live. In
accordance with the conventions of the romantic comedy Paula and Tripp eventually
connect, after some misunderstandings. Of interest for my purposes is the functioning
of the character of Paulas best friend, Kit (Deschanel). Portrayed as a free spirit in
contrast to her manipulative friend, Kit is a semi-goth bohemian type, prone to hard
drinking and following her own eccentric whims, as notably displayed in a scene set in
the gun section of a sporting goods shop where she wrests a shotgun from another
character and gives the attendant cause to think she is harboring suicidal thoughts.
While Kits instability is played for laughs in this film, her voracious sexuality and
implied mental imbalance are portrayed as ultimately too unruly for a lead role and
reside in what Judith Roof (2002, 18) has termed the middle: the sporadic fringes
where multiple possibilities co-exist . . . where fates are as yet uncertain.
Failure to Launch thus shows which aspects of the quirky character would need to
be tempered to mold it into suitable lead role material. In addition, her characterization
indicates how closely the terrain of cuteness comes to issues that threaten to
overwhelm the levity of the text, such as mental illness and violence. The border
between quirky and psychopathic is one that is negotiated in Deschanels later
comedic characterization of Jess as she makes the move from the middle space of
the sidekick into a more dominant position where regulation of unruliness is more
tightly policed.
A later film, (500) Days of Summer, has Deschanel playing Summer Finn, a variant
of the manic pixie dream girl (MPDG) type.
3
While the usual function of the MPDG is
to facilitate an increase in self-awareness in the central male character prior to the
establishment of the central couple, in (500) Days of Summer, this learning process is
rendered traumatic through the emotional turmoil Summer puts Tom Hanson (Joseph
Gordon-Levitt) through. In a marked departure from the conventions of the romcom,
the central couple of the film, Summer and Tom, do not end up together to provide the
1%4-#5"' 7

expected narrative closure. Deschanels portrayal of Summer veers emotionally


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between affection and (given the films privileging of Toms viewpoint) cruel
indifference. Deschanel plays the role in a melancholic register not usually
foregrounded in her other roles, and despite the actress at this point having achieved
her signature look (see Figure 1), the dark tone of her performance is remarkably
dissonant from her usual affective register, grounded in innocence and cuteness.
Nevertheless, Deschanel utilizes one of her ancillary projects to reestablish audience
empathy; in the video for the She and Him song Why Do You Let Me Stay Here
featuring Gordon-Levitt, the films couple is united.
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Deschanels career outside of television and film has also significantly contributed to
her star text and her cultural prominence. Through her position as member of a singer-
songwriter duo She and Him, Deschanel broadens her cultural impact and undergirds
her claims to a talent-based authentic stardom. The musical project features Deschanel
alongside collaborator M. Ward, and the pair write and perform songs that could best
be described as retro-pop. In Ward, Deschanel has a collaborator who, through his
fascination with and ability to reconstruct historical popular song structures, facilitates
her brand of retro-inflected stardom. She and Hims output fuses a combination of past
influences and, in the words of one reviewer, could have been written and recorded at
any point since 1965 (Murphy 2008). Through an eschewal of modern electronic
instrumentation in favor of traditional instruments, production values that evoke
musical trends of the 1950s and 1960s, and a songwriting style that commonly
portrays first-person narratives of heartbreak reminiscent of jazz standards of the
1940s and 1950s, She and Him creates a bricolage of the past repackaged to satisfy
nostalgic yearnings of the present. The songs (often written by Deschanel) are usually
first-person narratives that tell of unrequited love or past heartbreak, casting
Deschanel in a central role that has echoes of the actresss character in New Girl and
8 )'&'*$+$,- . /'0 1'2$3

which adds to the repertoire of circulating texts that help to constitute an intimate
public centered on disappointed love.
Deschanels ability to conflate the historical and the contemporary was evident in
her opening number when she hosted Saturday Night Live in February 2012. In a self-
effacing introduction to a song You Forgot about Valentines Day, Deschanel
acknowledges her cute, vintage-inflected sartorial style (As you may have noticed,
Im wearing a dress with little hearts on it. And even though I do this a lot . . .) in the
first of many knowing references to the stars trademark image. The song itself sounds
like a romantic jazz standard as would have been performed by an artist such as Peggy
Lee in which a girl bemoans the titular event, but the lyrics display a modern
inflection.
You Forgot it was Valentines Day
I bought you a sweater
and baked you some cupcakes
And put on some nice lingerie.
You gave me your iPod
And the cash in your pocket
And a USA Today
(And it wasnt even from today it was from an old hotel).
The song positions Deschanel in her (now) familiar role of the pitiable romantic while
vocalizing postfeminist tropes of hyper-domesticity (Negra 2009). These tropes are
often central to the storylines of New Girl, where Jesss girlishness is presented
favorably against depictions of more threatening modern women, coded as lacking in
femininity. The cuteness of the performance is also accentuated by her characteristic
choice of diminutive instrument (the ukulele) and a moment of making eyes at the
camera.
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Press and publicity materials on Deschanel invariably focus on the stars looks.
Deschanels image has gradually evolved over the last ten years, and she now has a
trademark physical style that integrates her acting, musical, online, and public
appearances (see Figure 1). Although she now regularly features on lists such as
FHMs annual Sexiest Women in the World, Deschanel is far from the typical sex-
bomb end of the beauty spectrum; more cute than sultry, she is closer to the gamine
beauty of past stars such as Audrey Hepburn. Indeed, Deschanels fashion sense
echoes the chic kookiness that Rachel Moseley (2002) identifies in Hepburns film
roles of the 1960s. Hepburns incorporation and recuperation of beatnik culture
within a cleaned-up notion of kookie femininity (Moseley 2002, 44) parallels
Deschanels appropriation and commodification of 2010s hipsterism.
Deschanels status as a style icon is indicated by her regular inclusion in fashion
sections of womens magazines and her popularity with young female fashion
bloggers. The key features of Deschanels visual brand are her large blue eyes and
1%4-#5"' 9

long, dark hair with bangs. The size and doll-like quality of Deschanels eyes are
routinely mentioned in press features and are crucial to the cuteness she evokes. In
keeping with her musical projects, Deschanels style relies on retro-aesthetics. This
form of sartorial nostalgia has been criticized by Angela McRobbie (2009, 71) for
undergirding a symbolic racial violence that negates the forms of style and beauty
associated with nonwhite ethnicities, leaving such groups only with the option of
mimicry, accommodation, adjustment and modification. Deschanels image
reinforces such hegemonic ideals of beauty central to postfeminist culture, with its
evocation of whiteness, youth, and heteronormative desire, a cultural trend further
exacerbated by the nostalgic turn witnessed since the 2008 recession.
Writing on fashion with regard to television actresses in the 1990s, Rebecca
Epstein (2000, 190) notes an absence of actresses conveying a uniquely personal, let
alone personalized style. She cites how the success of Friends led to the popularity of
a haircut named after the character Rachel rather than the actress playing her
(Jennifer Aniston). With Deschanel, however, the case is not so straightforward. There
is a noticeable convergence between the fashion style of Jess from New Girl and that
of Deschanel when she makes public appearances such as in the Saturday Night Live
episode, performs as part of She and Him, or posts home-made videos on YouTube.
Deschanels star text has also made an impact upon emerging new media formats
such as the celebrity fashion blog. The actress has inspired the Web sites
dresslikenewgirl.com and wwzdw.com (What Would Zooey Deschanel Wear?), which
focus on how to get Jesss/Deschanels look by showing where viewers can buy the
items she wears or more affordable alternatives. These Web sites are nonprofessional
and carry disclaimers to this effect, yet reflect a considerable amount of labor on the
part of the blogger. Such celebrity specific fashion blogs can be viewed as part of a
wider grouping of blogs identified by Elizabeth Nathanson (2014), such as everyday
girl blogs and YouTube video blogs (vlogs) that are usually set up and maintained by
young women. The celebrity-specific blogs inhabit a space where fan communities
and consumerism intersect and complement the aforementioned blogs, which reify
neoliberal and postfeminist logics that articulate the primacy of individual consumer
spending and the pleasures found in consumer identities and objectified femininity
(Nathanson 2014, 138). Deschanel is particularly suited to be the focus of such blogs
due to her aforementioned exemplification of Caucasian, Westernized beauty ideals,
and the fact that her look is easily facilitated through mainstream consumer outlets. In
addition, Deschanels agency and ambitiondisplayed through her prodigious work
rate and multiple roles as actress, producer, musician, brand ambassador, and Internet
entrepreneur, as well as the fact that she puts material out on media platforms heavily
utilized by young womenmark her out as a figure worthy of entrepreneurial
emulation.
Through the blogs that analyze and facilitate the easy reproduction of her style,
Deschanels reputation as queen of the hipsters is translated into mainstream
consumerism.
4
This demonstrates an evolution from previous iterations of hipster
stardom such as that of Chloe Sevigny in the 1990s and 2000s (Sexton 2013). Yet,
while Sevignys association with high fashion and avant garde American independent
1u )'&'*$+$,- . /'0 1'2$3

film coded her as elitist, Deschanels retro-chic is more in keeping with the exigencies
of recession-era consumerism. Indeed, this attribute is further bolstered by her
promotional work for Pantene, an affordable beauty brand that is highly accessible due
to its distribution in drugstores: two qualities that align it with Deschanels
democratic inflection of hipsterism. Deschanels image, with its evocations of
nostalgia and nation, is decidedly more populist than Sevignys masculine beauty. In
such ways, we can see how Deschanels star text functions as a nexus through which
subcultural tropes of fashion and identity (central to the bohemian hipster scene she
inhabits through her indie music and film roles) are channeled and, in effect, sanitized
for popular consumption.
The overlap between New Girls Jess and Deschanel in terms of sartorial choice is
clearly evident from the fashion blogs and can be seen as part of a wider strategy of
convergence on the part of the actress. Through her presence in a number of media,
Deschanel has developed a unique and resonant star text, and the relative consistency
between the actresss veridical self and her fictive character, Jess, not just through
fashion choice but also the topics discussed on her Twitter feed, for example, goes
some way to creating a coherent commercial identity. As recent scholarship has noted,
new media increasingly function as platforms where celebrities negotiate the need to
be accessible and authentic while facilitating promotional activities (Keller 2012;
Marwick and boyd 2011).
As alluded to earlier, Deschanel uses her talents as a singer to create short home
videos, which she then posts to video-sharing Web sites such as YouTube and the
Web site hellogiggles.com. These videos serve to link her with the stardom and
associated cultural capital of varied figures such as Sasha Spielberg (daughter of
director Steven), and actors Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Ben Schwartz, and they often
proliferate through the Internet via celebrity Web sites such as perez.com. In addition,
they enable Deschanel to perform her unique balancing act whereby she maintains a
level of low-fi authenticity as a corrective to her corporatized mainstream work on
primetime television and in advertising. In this way, Deschanel uses her star persona
as a staging ground for both mainstream and alternative modalities. For instance, in
her YouTube video with Gordon-Levitt, they duet on the song What Are You Doing
on New Years Eve? and the actress relates stories of how they bonded over a love of
soul music. Such production anecdotes enhance both performers authenticity. On
the YouTube page, there is also a link to hitrecord.org, the open collaborative
production company Gordon-Levitt set up. In this way, we see Deschanel establish her
professional connection with Gordon-Levitt and further link that to her musical career
through the taste cultures they share.
Such demonstrations of association contribute to what Elizabeth Ellcessor (2012,
66) terms a star text of connection whereby a celebrity can be linked into an
ecosystem that is formed through complicated interactions of media platforms,
texts, audiences, and industries, facilitated by digital and social media. Deschanel,
through her multi-mediated star persona, is particularly adept at integrating her
audience into her star text of connection and one of the main functions of such
YouTube videos is the establishment of an affective bond with her audience. The
1%4-#5"' 11

home-made quality of the YouTube videos places them within the genre of videos
of affinity (Lange 2009). Such videos are marked by a feeling of being connected
not to a video, but to a person who shares mutual beliefs or interests and are
characterized by a presentist focus that aims to transmit feelings of connection
(Lange 2009, 83). Deschanels tone of friendly conversation and relation of personal
anecdote contribute to such a focus. The lo-fi production quality (made using a web-
cam) affiliates Deschanel with the everyday posters of such content and furthers the
actresss claim to authenticity. A brief analysis of the comments to the What Are You
Doing on New Years Eve? video shows a range of affective responses on the part of
viewers spanning from antagonism to declarations of love. Most of the responses are
positive, though with a recurring theme being speculation as to the real relationship
between Deschanel and Gordon-Levitt, with many postings connecting the two stars
with their own lives. For instance, one poster writes, too cute. I know theyre not
married, but I hope that I will have this kind of relationship when I get married.
Several other posters comment on whether or not Gordon-Levitt has been friend-
zoned by Deschanel, that is, had his romantic intentions rebuffed and any
development beyond a platonic relationship foreclosed. A register of intimate
connection is evident in most of the postings, which complies with the wider sphere of
connection I argue Deschanels star text facilitates.
Deschanels use of her authentic self in a wide variety of promotional activities is
indicative of a wider shift within culture. In Authentic TM, Sarah Banet-Weiser (2012,
13) notes that (W)ithin contemporary brand culture the separation between the
authentic self and the commodity self not only is more blurred, but this blurring is
more expected and tolerated. In Deschanels advertisement for the Apple iPhone, we
can see a neat encapsulation of this concept, as the computing company marshals the
actresss physical and affective tropes in an effort to feminize its own image at a time
when the company is suffering from negative publicity due to a number of factors,
such as tax avoidance and concerns over the welfare conditions of subcontracted
workers.
Released in April 2012, Rainy Day shows Deschanel looking out a window,
wearing pajamas and talking to the Apple iPhone (through its speaking instruction
software, the anthropomorphized Siri). Over the course of the thirty-second advert,
she orders soup, sets a reminder to clean the next day, and ends by dancing. Through
setting (loft-apartment), clothing, and acting style, the character of Jess is referenced
here, although aspects of the mise-en-scene, such as the ukuleles in the apartment (see
Figure 2), allude to elements of crossover with Deschanels musical persona. The
stacks of books offset any fears that may be associated with advanced technological
change; indeed, the iPhone is the only piece of modern technology discernable in the
advertisement. At one point, we can see Siris written response calls the actress Zooey.
This personalization furthers the sense of intimacy the advertisement strives to
express. All these elements contribute to the conflation of Deschanel and her character
Jess, and in turn, the affective response from the spectator integrates Apple into this
relationship.
12 )'&'*$+$,- . /'0 1'2$3

By stressing signifiers of comfort (tomato soup, pajamas, being inside on a rainy
day), the advertisement makers are playing to Deschanels affective/ideological


F*+-$% J> "Rainy Bay"The Apple au iefeiences many aspects of Beschanel's stai image
in its mise-en-scene, such as hei physicality, the piominent musical instiuments, anu hei
pajamas.
strengths. The actresss recent work (both New Girl and her YouTube videos) is
marked by a retreat to the domestic sphere and the pleasures of the homely. Despite
her work as brand ambassador for Pantene, Deschanel posits the coziness of home as a
respite to the exhaustive demands of contemporary postfeminist glamor. Indicative of
this is the pilot episode of New Girl, which saw Jess self-indulgently retreating from
the world into her new apartment with ice-cream to watch the tear-jerker Dirty
Dancing on repeat and sit in her pajamas. Indeed, the amount of time Deschanel
spends in pajamas is worthy of note, this being in particular a recurring motif in New
Girl. As Harris (2000, 7) has pointed out, (c)uteness is also the aesthetic of sleep: a
positioning of the cute subject whereby their chief attraction lies in their dormant and
languorous postures (and) their defenceless immobility. Again, for spectators, this
display of vulnerability creates a putative discrepancy of power, and the concomitant
paternalistic/protective feelings this elicits will often inhibit any resistance we might
feel toward the overt commercialism of the content.
Deschanel commands an affective sentiment predicated on a combination of charm
and vulnerability. Not unlike Doris Day, described by Katherine Glitre (2006, 160) as
having a persona built on healthy, girl-next-door values yet who also could evoke
heartbreak beneath a bright exterior, Deschanel exudes a fragile ebullience. This
quality works to fulfill one of the main aims of brand cultures, to exceed the product
(represented) and, through this excess offer community to individuals that assures
affective connection with others as well as with themselves (Banet-Weiser 2012,
1%4-#5"' 1S

219). The Apple ad ends with Deschanel instructing the device to play Shake, Rattle
and Roll (by 1950s singer Big Joe Turner), whereupon she dances to the song. The
obscurity of this version of the song enables its ease of co-option by Apple without
clouding (most) consumers perceptions with an overlap of previous awareness, and it
fits in with Deschanels retro-aesthetics in a way that creates a perfect synthesis
between actress and brand. This ending is a reenactment of the final scene in the
season 1 finale of New Girl in which the roommates all dance (alone in their rooms) to
a nostalgic rock track. This recurring trope with its invocation of a paradoxical
collective solitude seems particularly suited to a recessionary context marked by
growing inequality, in that it further entrenches an ideology that privileges an
individualistic outlook that precludes collective engagement. This complies with
broader trends within brand culture where, as Banet-Weiser notes, individuals invest
in brands as authentic culture, (which) privileges individual relationships over
collective ones and helps to locate the individual, rather than the social, as a site for
political action (or inaction) and cultural change (or merely exchange) (Banet-Weiser
2012, 10). As a result, the Apple brand performs the feat of aligning the nostalgic
yearnings of contemporary youth culture with technological consumption.
This overt positing of consumption and nostalgia as solutions to the rainy day of
contemporary woes crystallizes the main ideological function of Deschanels star text
in contemporary culture: the promotion of a consolatory fiction that paradoxically
unites people in their solitude. The advertisement uses the tropes of insularism that are
common features of Deschanels prominent cultural textsfrom New Girl to the
lovesick ballads of She and Him, and even the videos of affinity on YouTubeto
create Berlants (2008, 5) intimate public, a community where participants feel as
though [relevant circulating texts] (express) what is common among them, a
subjective likeness that seems to emanate from their history and their ongoing
attachments and actions. Such intimate publics inhabit a juxtapolitical position:
domains
to one side of politics that flourish insofar as they can allow the circulation of the open
secrets of insecurity and instability without those relations and spectacles engendering
transformative or strongly resistant action in the idiom of political agency as it is usually
regarded. (Berlant 2008, 22)
The political neutralization I ascribe to Deschanel thus emanates from her affective
ability to engender a reciprocal feeling of belonging that forecloses political reaction
at a time of severe economic and social distress when such reactions would seem a
valid response.
5%+#.*1.*(+ ./% ,(.*K4-.% L14M31&/
A backlash to Deschanel is frequently mentioned in recent press coverage and
commentary regarding the actress. Of the more prominent critiques, comedienne Julie
Klausner (2011) had a posting from her blog picked up by Jezebel.com,
5
which
14 )'&'*$+$,- . /'0 1'2$3

decried the current trend of grown women who play ukulele, like crafts, and indulge in
reverse-striving, specifically citing a Deschanel tweet about kittens. With
Deschanels performance of cuteness utilizing many tropes prevalent within
postfeminist culture, the actress has become a focal point for a lot of such criticism
and has had to address it in interviews and within New Girl itself.
It seems to be the oversaturation of Deschanels star text with various forms of
cuteness that has led to the actress being pinpointed as emblematic of an excessive
girlishness that polarizes public reaction. Indeed, it is worth noting some of the cute
paraphernalia Deschanel utilizes. The ukuleles the performer often plays, a prominent
feature of a number of Deschanel texts, are characterized by their diminutive size, a
trait shared by many other Deschanel-associated accessories that connote cuteness,
such as the cupcakes Jess is often baking in New Girl or the two puppies the actress
publicly adopted in March 2013. While denoting traditionally feminine attributes,
the primary affective function of such cute accessories is to be nonthreatening.
Combined with such meanings, the resurgence of craft activities such as knitting and
home decoration mark a nostalgic yearning for a pre-feminist time of fixed gender
roles and the perceived intimacies of home life, noted by Negra (2009, 1546) to be
common features of the retreatist trend in many romcoms from the 1990s on. While
there has been some resistant politicization of these modes of feminine production
through entities such as the Stitch N Bitch knitting groups, such counter-hegemonic
tendencies are hard to detect in the hellogiggles online community for women
Deschanel cofounded, which serves as a distribution point for many of her home-
made videos. For Deschanel, the use of craft also corresponds with an overarching
element of her star text that posits the home-made as an alternative to monolithic
corporate culture, a feature she balances with her more mainstream output.
During one of Deschanels interviews, the contradictions between the actress and
her character, Jess, become particularly prominent, and the fragility of her star text is
revealed. Questioned about the Klausner piece, Deschanel responds, Im just being
myself . . . We cant be feminine and be feminists and be successful? I want to be a f--
king feminist and wear a Peter Pan collar. So f--cking what? (Hill 2013, 136). The
uncharacteristic recourse to expletives and similarity of the defense to that
incorporated into an episode of New Girl in which Jess is attacked for these same
tendencies suggest the response is a premeditated sound bite. However, the criticism
does highlight the disparity between the depiction of femininity on-screen, particularly
in New Girl with its reliance on postfeminist tropes of abject singlehood and time
crisis regarding maternity (season 1 episode 9, Eggs) and the views put forward by
Deschanel regarding her own life, including her refusal in the interview to talk about
her failed marriage. Indeed Deschanels work ethic and determination, as well as her
use of the word feminist (commonly avoided by prominent female stars), do trouble
any neat pigeon-holing of the star as postfeminist. Yet, the impression given in the
interview is of this foray into politics being forced in an effort to allay further attack
on her star persona to secure her image and career.
1%4-#5"' 1S

"#(43-&*#(
Deschanels cultural prominence has come at a time when U.S. society is reeling from
a series of early twenty-first-century convulsions. The actresss generational iconicity
is partly predicated on her ability to bridge a divide between the perceived
authenticity of indie taste cultures and a generic mainstream culture, enabling her to
secure grounds for empathy among a wide demographic grouping during this divisive
period. Deschanels activation of tropes of nostalgia with a sentimentalized
reformulation of female cuteness enables her to function as a figure who neutralizes
political fracture points of race and gender by evoking a paternal response or a sense
of belonging to a juxtapolitical intimate public. In addition, the connotations of
nostalgia that are channeled through Deschanels image are strongly inflected with the
idea of remedial consumerism. The performers star text is the nexus for a powerful
combination of restorative nostalgia, a consumerist imperative suggesting acquisition
as a means to happiness, and a form of cuteness that obfuscates contemporary cultural
exhaustion.
=%431$1.*#( #: "#(:3*4.*(+ @(.%$%&.&
The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship,
and/or publication of this article.
F-()*(+
The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of
this article.
5#.%&
1. The post-talent celebrity field has been characterized as marked by a shift from a culture
of stardom to one of craftless celebrity, a trend exacerbated by the proliferation of reality
television. In this recalibration of values, as Thomas Fisher (2012, 343) notes, stardom . . .
becomes blurred with celebrity and is dispossessed of its claims on craft and character
performance that had defined and distinguished it.
2. The term Millennials is used to describe the generational cohort that followed Generation
X. Although there is some debate over the precise dating of the cohort, most commentators
agree that Millennials are those born between the early 1980s and the early 2000s.
3. The manic pixie dream girl (MPDG) was a term coined by film critic Nathan Ruben to
describe a stock cinematic character characterized by an excessive quirkiness who facilitates
the self-discovery of a male character. He notes that such figures are particularly liable to
polarize audience response (Negra and Tasker 2013, 359n1).
4. The term hipster derogatively denotes a taste culture emanating from the indie scene often
judged to be pretentious and affected. Sevigny has had the term queen of the hipsters
ascribed to her retroactively, and it is often currently associated with Deschanel.
5. Blogger Tamara Winfrey Harris (2011) expanded upon Klausners views, noting the
underlying class and race assumptions embodied in the character of Jess and Deschanels
star text: the wide-eyed, girlish, take-care-of-me characters that Deschanel inhabits on film
are not open to many women of color.
16 )'&'*$+$,- . /'0 1'2$3

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,-./#$ L*#+$1'/<
Anthony P. McIntyre is a PhD student in Film Studies at University College, Dublin (UCD).
He is currently working on a thesis entitled Leaning towards The Horizontal?: Screen Culture,
Celebrity, and the Shaping of Political Subjectivities in Millennial Youth Cultures.
Anthonys research interests include the political impact of celebrity, representations of indie
culture on-screen, theorizations of cuteness, and representations of workplace affect.