A Star is Born (2018)

directed by Bradley Cooper

Sophia Stewart

I have this thing for beards. Since I first gained sexual consciousness, I’ve been attracted to not just facial hair but what I’d call good facial hair: thick, full, free of gaps. Over drinks, a friend—a man—wants to understand my fixation. I mull it over. What is it really about the beard that draws me in? It’s not just an aesthetic preference, it’s something else, something more—

“It’s something that I can’t do,” I say. “I can’t grow a beard.”

My friend and I sit with that for a moment. He can tell I’m trying to turn over my sexuailty like a stone, to see what’s on its underside. My body has limits, I say, and I know my body and its limits, in fact they are all I know, I can’t imagine any other way, so I want different, I want other. I want someone as not-me as possible. I am short, slight, shrill, smooth-skinned, so I want a body that possesses powers mine doesn’t: to grow tall, to lift loads, to produce low-pitched sounds, to cover itself with hair denser than mine in places where I have none. And I will marvel at these exotic abilities that are beyond my reach. I don’t know that this is revelatory, I tell my friend, I think this is one of the bases of heterosexual attraction.

You can imagine, then, that I went something like feral when the trailer for A Star is Born was released in June of 2018. Bradley Cooper’s character, Jackson Maine, is a rough-around-the-edges rockstar, bearded and scruffy, with chest hair peeking from his collar. He speaks with a gruffness that took Cooper 18 months of vocal training to achieve. The trailer ends with Jackson and Lady Gaga’s character, Ally, walking in tandem: broad-shouldered and towering, he slings a heavy arm around her narrow body. It was all catnip to me.

I saw A Star is Born on opening day, October 5, 2018. It was the first of 10 trips that I would eventually make to see it in theaters. I went with my then-boyfriend of three years, an exceedingly kind, compassionate, and clean-shaven person with whom I shared few common interests, least of all the impulse to create. I was devoted to my writing and my music and so considered myself, in the loosest and most generous sense of the word, an artist. He had many passions, and making art was not one of them.

He’d been worried ever since I started obsessing over the trailer that my expectations for the movie were impossibly high. “I’m scared you’re setting yourself up for disappointment,” he said. He thought I should prepare to have my hopes dashed, just in case, so when the theater lights dimmed, I told myself that whatever happened, it was just a movie. For those first few minutes, I was alert to A Star is Born’s movieness, to the mechanisms of its exposition and the rhythms of its dialogue, to the way we see Jackson in one place then Ally in another and wait for them to converge.

But A Star is Born becomes something else when Jackson, itching for a drink after playing a show, walks into a drag bar and orders a gin on the rocks with a twist. He’s rugged and leathery and out of place among the bar’s mirrors and tinsel and sequins. Onstage, across the room, a drag queen introduces the evening’s entertainment, a singer who will be sharing with the audience “some fabulous French live vocals.” Applause erupts as Ally, dressed in a black satin slip, peels back the shimmering red curtain. She starts to croon Edith Piaf’s “La Vie En Rose.” With total command and confidence, her voice, a rich alto, spills from her body.

She first sings to us in tight closeups. Then we see her as Jackson does, from afar, on the other side of the room. The height of the stage makes it look like she’s floating above the crowd. She steps offstage and into the audience, handing out roses to bargoers. Soaked in hot red light, Jackson follows her with his gaze. There’s this look on his face: desire, reverence, awe. Everyone around him is laughing, cheering. He’s silent and rapt. Something in him is shifting and we are seeing it in real time. All he can do is watch her.

The one-sidedness of the scene—that’s what I remember moved me. That the moment isn’t mutual. That it’s not Tony and Maria, locking eyes across a crowded gym. That Jackson is Ally’s spectator, passive while she is active, watching while she is doing. I wanted her power. As a musician, Jackson understands the extent of her gift, but their abilities are distinct: he can’t do what she does. Can’t make music like hers, can’t sing or perform or enthrall the way she can. And he wants her all the more for it.

After the performance, Jackson introduces himself to Ally in her dressing room. She’s made up like Piaf, complete with skinny stick-on eyebrows. He’s fascinated by them. “Is that your real eyebrow?” he asks. No, she says, amused by the question. He asks to take it off of her face. “It’s incredible what they do,” he says, gently lifting a brow from her skin. “Look at that.” He marvels at her makeup, at how she adorns herself in ways he doesn’t even understand.

Maybe you know what happens next: they get a drink, write a song, and fall in love. Ally joins Jackson onstage at his next show, and then on his next tour. For Jackson, the allure of Ally’s otherness pertains only to the body, the voice, the facade. Eventually he finds that, offstage, she can do a lot of other things that he cannot, like focus, adapt, work hard, show up, commit to something, get through the day sober. She soon snaps up a record deal, and her success starts to overshadow his. Threatened, he hardens toward her. He absorbs the news of her first Grammy nomination by berating her while she lies naked in the bathtub. Her songs are trivial, he says, and she is ugly. What drew him to the amateur lounge singer, her novelty, now scares him. Beside her, his lack has never been more evident.

Because Jackson first sees Ally from afar, he loves her that way too. He likes the concept of her, the fruits of her talent, but can’t handle her up close. He wants Ally the verb—Ally singing, Ally performing, Ally enthralling—but not Ally the noun, the person, with ambitions and achievements. I was embarrassed that I’d thought their first encounter foretold love. Attraction, I realized, was nothing without true admiration.

I was struck, in the theater, beside my then-boyfriend, by another thought—that the kind of envy that Jackson felt toward Ally could only be aimed at one artist by another. He resented her powers because he understood their gravity, as only a musician could. What would it be like to be with another artist? Would competition be inevitable? Or would he understand me in ways I’d never known? And could I understand him in return? I wanted to find out. I couldn’t as long as I was where I was.

When we left the theater, my then-boyfriend was quiet, tense. For several blocks we walked in silence. Finally he spoke: it was difficult for him, he said, to see how much I wanted what was on screen and to know he could not be that. His intuition surprised me. He was right. He was, superficially, not Jackson Maine, neither bearded nor artistic. And he’d never looked at me the way Jackson looked at Ally singing “La Vie En Rose.” It was hard to imagine I would ever achieve anything that he would truly understand, let alone anything that would make him jealous.

I suspected his insecurity went even deeper: he understood that I did not admire him. He knew he had no powers that I coveted, no abilities I revered. Watching me watch this movie, he saw I not only wanted to be with another artist, but I wanted someone whose body and mind amazed me by doing things mine could not. Within a month, we’d broken up.

In the years after, I struggled to distinguish between lust, idolatry, and genuine respect. Sometimes I was no better than Jackson: he liked the idea of Ally but not Ally, I liked the idea of Jackson but not Jackson, and in my own life I have liked the idea of some men far more than I liked the men themselves. I’m working on that. But A Star is Born gave me, at a formative juncture, a template for both my desires and their pitfalls. There were things that Jackson had that I realized I wanted, and there were things that Jackson lacked that I realized I needed. When my friend—the man from drinks—eventually saw A Star is Born, he said he didn’t pay very close attention, stepped out for a smoke in the middle of it, but thought Jackson was “really cool.” This is why he and I could never be together, I told him. That, and he can’t grow a beard.

Sophia Stewart is an editor and writer from Los Angeles. She lives in Brooklyn and tweets @smswrites.