A few weeks ago, an interesting and provocative essay by David Denby appeared in the New Yorker that addressed one of the most important questions of our time: the fate of the movie star. Lower your eyebrows, I’m not being ironic. When Mr. Denby spoke, movingly in fact, about the death of the old-fashioned star, he was commenting on much more than cinematic artifice. He was making a general statement about the status of authority in American culture, and also about the status of the individual.

As Mr. Denby sees it, what made an old matinee idol a “star” was the actor’s mostly serendipitous ability to impose “a unifying temperament on his characters; he became the characters, they became him, and any given performance offered a palimpsest of his past performances.” The actor became a type, he wrote, and “it’s that larger-than-the-role mythic element that distinguishes a star.” That phenomenon, Mr. Denby believes, no longer exists. He argues that nowadays, actors no longer allow a moviegoer to “dream of their onscreen characters and their life as in some way unitary.” Today, he says, young actors aren’t given the chance to grow into a type, and thus into a star. “Instead,” Mr. Denby elegantly writes, “they are thrown into big roles in expensive movies and they’re forced to overdraw on themselves before their temperament has found the right shape.” The result is that “there are fewer stars than in the past, and they have come down in the world. They are paid more but valued less.”

Mr. Denby seems to think that this new situation on the silver screen is a result of the destruction of the old studio star-system and the rise of “a semi-chaotic free market,” in which actors operate like free agents in baseball, migrating from studio to studio, from production company to production company; unlike baseball players, however, celebrity actors often form their own companies and exercise control over every aspect of the movie. No doubt, the economics of new Hollywood have a lot to do with the death of the star. But social and cultural trends have been even more consequential.

To begin with, consider the camera. There’s just no way to know how good today’s actors are, for the simple reason that we never see them act. The camera does their acting for them.

The rise of Method acting after World War II sacralized the closeup. What you get in movies now is, with some important exceptions, one close-up after another. Part of the reason why stars became stars in the earlier era is that the camera didn’t jump from face to face, but remained steadily trained on the social situation. The glamorous authority of, say, Humphrey Bogart or Cary Grant was brought out through contrast with humbler screen presences. The magic was in the illusion of the single individual rising above society. It was like the American Dream compressed into a cinematic second — the triumph of merit, of excellence over the concrete givens of place and social class. But for this democratic catharsis to happen, the camera had to keep the social situation intractably real.

There were different versions of the Method, and one of them — expounded by Stella Adler — emphasized “playing the scene”: that is, being attentive not just to your character’s inner life, but to the outer circumstances in which he found himself. But the ideas of Adler’s chief rival, Lee Strasberg, prevailed. For Strasberg, the actor’s interiority was all that mattered. An actor had to use everything he ever felt, or remembered feeling, to fill up the role he was shaping. He poured the wine of his private store of emotion into the empty carafe of the character waiting on the page.

The principal vehicle for expressing emotion was the face, whose primal reality on the screen, over the years, began to dissolve external conditions and circumstances into something unreal. If the most popular movies of our time are extremely violent action movies, it’s not just because violence and action have a universal appeal on the world market, but because violence and action abolish social circumstances; because they turn all external circumstances into a blur. Which is a perfect correlative to the solipsistic primacy of the screen-filling face.

Indeed, the Method’s emphasis on the actor drawing so radically from his own life to play a role revolutionized the quality of being a star. Under the Method’s influence, rather than a star’s temperament fusing with his onscreen roles, the characters he played became submerged in his off-screen temperament. Everything we knew about Bogart came from what we saw of him on the screen. Yet no one would have confused the real Bogart — or the real James Cagney, or the real Edward G. Robinson — with the actual gangsters they routinely played. Marlon Brando changed all that. Until very recently, the generation of actors spawned by the Method, and by the Method-trained Brando, did actually seem to be the characters they played. Brando lived like a rebel, James Dean died like a rebel, Al Pacino is as distant and mysterious as Michael Corleone, Harvey Keitel is as louche in life as on film, Sean Penn is a tough guy with the entourage of a boxer — the list is almost endless.

In the past few years, however, the Method blew itself out. Perhaps magnified by all the other self-centric trends in the culture — emoting, expressing, outpouring selves everywhere — the Method’s intense focus on personality has created a backlash. You see it in all the nasty commentary on celebrated actors. You see it in clowns of Dostoevskian self-disgust such as Will Ferrell and Adam Sandler. But most of all, you see it in the displacement of the star by the character actor.

Unlike the star, the character actor doesn’t play himself at the same time as he’s playing his character. Unlike the star, the character actor utterly disappears in his role. The rise of the character actor has been sudden and swift: Kevin Spacey, Jeffrey Wright, Philip Seymour Hoffman, Matt Damon, John C. Reilly. To see Mr. Damon and that throwback to the stars of yore, George Clooney, together in “Syriana” — never in the same scene — was like watching the proverbial “paradigm shift” moving its templates before your very eyes.

Yet there are fewer and fewer Clooney-type presences in the movies. We are now living in the age of the anti-star. That is to say, we are now living in an age that is suspicious of glamorous authority, and of any type of private life that is feral and spontaneous — à la Brando, Mr. Pacino, et al. If the collective dream-life known as movies is any indication, we no longer admire individuals who rise above their social circumstances, the way the old-fashioned stars did, or individuals who devour their social circumstances, the way the Method actors did. Such larger-than-life persons either receive derisive treatment on the comedy news shows, or get burlesqued by Messrs. Ferrell, Sandler, or Owen Wilson.

In that collective dream, we prefer egos that stay buried in the social roles that have been assigned to them, which is what character actors do. Authentic voices we associate with puffed-up frauds; heroic gestures with self-promotion or “spin.” Ironically, the general narcissism has created a revulsion against originality of being. Maybe one day a great epic film will capture the effect such an atmosphere is having on actual private and public life.

Mr. Siegel is a senior editor at the New Republic and the author, most recently, of “Not Remotely Controlled: Notes on Television.” His “Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob” will be published in January.