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Contemporary Hollywood Masculinity and the Double-Protagonist Film
Abstract
In the double-protagonist film, a genre that has emerged in the past two decades, two male protagonists, each played by a film star, vie for narrative dominance. American manhood is depicted as fundamentally split, a split that can be understood as conflict between a narcissistic and a masochistic mode of masculine identity.
This paper investigates the competitive nature of masculinity as presented in Robert Egger’s film The Lighthouse . Applying gender theory, I examine three crucial scenes in the film that demonstrate the two protagonists’ pursuit of ascendance, which manifests as their lust to possess the lamp of the lighthouse. Borrowing from the works of sociologists, anthropologists, and historians, I was able to understand the naturally recurring crises of masculinity that circulate around a hegemonic model of the masculine ideal, ultimately leading to competition between men to achieve said hegemony. The Lighthouse proves this enduring phenomenon through Robert Pattinson and Willem Dafoe’s volatile relationship and their brutal demise. While the film might not propose a direct solution, I argue it serves as a bleak reminder of how misogyny and toxic masculinity harm men and their relationships with one another.
Christian Krug argues that the British ‘Social Problem film’ Violent Playground (1958) showcases competing but relational models of masculinity in its exploration of working-class juvenile delinquency. These include a performative model, tied to the material body and potentially transgressive, and a conformist one which is more aligned with the requirements of a larger social body and the object of social discipline. Scrutinizing Violent Playground’s ‘sentimental politics’, which works at the intersection of ideology and affective corporeality, Krug’s critical reading foregrounds the film’s attempts to emotionally interpellate the audience by teaching it to ‘feel right’ about its unruly males. Dominant masculinities are posited but remain ideological vanishing points, however, and the film also features other, contingent, bodies that complicate this ideological project.
This study examines the construction of the human-nature relationship in the Jungle (2017) movie. Jungle movie presents the mindset and behavior of men through four male characters (Yossi, Marcus, Kevin, and Karl) towards the wild (wilderness) as a masculinity framework. Using a qualitative method with an ecocriticism approach, especially related to ecological masculinity by Hultman and Pulé, this study shows how the construction of human-nature relationships through masculinity framework presents ecological masculinity as a form of hegemonic masculinity negotiation. The analysis focuses on two aspects of film studies: narrative and cinematographic by Bogss and Petrie. The results of this study indicate that in the depiction of nature through the Amazon Forest, nature is positioned as something dangerous, wild, scary, and capable of killing humans. Therefore, nature is represented as an entity that dominates humans. However, men's mindset and behavior towards nature present the illusion of a human versus nature dichotomy; in this case, the Jungle movie tries to present a critique of anthropocentrism. In addition, the mindset and behavior of male characters toward nature represent male masculinity models, especially ecological masculinity, as an alternative to hegemonic masculinity.
As an action star, Statham is a somewhat unusual performer. He is, as the other chapters in this volume explore, an extraordinary individual star who brings something new to the field with his visually stunning physical prowess, complex stunt work and ambiguous transnational persona. But he presents more than just that of the quick-fire lone wolf tradition. Much of Statham’s star presence has been formed by how he works as part of an ensemble cast where he supports and reacts to others, including Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, The Italian Job, Death Race, and later Fast and the Furious films and The Expendables. Many of his leading roles are well sustained by interaction with compelling secondary casts (such as the Crank and Transporter franchises), and even his comic turn in Spy works so effectively due to the fractious relationship created with other figures. Unlike many other action stars, his screen presence is often not the singularly extraordinary ‘best of the best’, but more akin to ‘[one of the] best of the best’. His acting reflects this stance. It forgoes the excessive knowingness of forces of nature like The Rock, Schwarzenegger or Van Damme, or the emotional action melodrama of Stallone and Willis. Alternatively he does not utilise the blank performance styles of Craig or Damon that convey a heroes’ search for meaningful identity. The precision of his physical stunts aligns him with Chan’s light touch, but their comic personas vary immensely. Charismatic as he may be, Statham’s performances are low-key, highly contained, responsive in nature, and therefore easily adaptable to different scenarios including his ability to ‘play well with others’. Therefore, this chapter will explore the landscape of Jason Statham’s performances in order to think about Statham’s own individual acting technique and how this functions across wider ensemble casts – from supporting players to other major icons of cinema.
Like the salty sweet of kettle corn or peanut butter and jelly, the contrast between trivial humor and critical danger is an irresistible combination. The emergence of action comedy as its own film subgenre was inevitable. This chapter explores why audiences love to watch comedy in action. Many scholars have suggested that action's appeal is based upon the enjoyment of the suspense that is generated by the violence or threats of violence and peril in the film. Drama theorists maintain that humor can help relieve stress created by tense and tragic moments. The theme of incongruity is perhaps most conspicuous in action buddy films. A buddy film portrays the pairing of two people of the same sex, historically men. Although drama and humor theories offer plausible explanations for the appeal and impact of comedy in action films, there is very little empirical research that has tested these theories.
The focus of this chapter is specifically on how researchers have studied and written about the portrayal of masculinities in US media. The chapter opens by tracing the evolution of academic study of masculinities in US media beginning with stereotypical representations that led into identifying three key types: hegemonic masculinity, hypermasculinity, and metrosexual masculinity. The chapter then reviews how scholars have written about the portrayals of masculinities in specific US media such as film, television, and print. While this literature review is by no means exhaustive, it demonstrates the range of research in the past four decades, illustrating media's increased portrayals of masculinities over time, and offers suggestions for future directions.
Back to the Future provides social and spatial landscapes through which characters display gendered hierarchies. A multiple-masculinities framework is applied through content analysis of the trilogy, showing that hegemonic masculinity is less valuable than a more nuanced masculinity; exercising self-control ensures both Marty and George make their futures successful.
In the middle of a ‘magically charged’ car chase in The Covenant (Renny Harlin 2006, USA), an excited teen boy witch yells ‘This isn’t Harry Potter!’ He’s right, of course, though the film does in fact share some important features with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Mike Newell 2005, UK). Though Goblet of Fire and The Covenant are widely divergent in style, tone and address, they are both dramas about teenage boys with magical powers. Both films include intense bonds between teenage male characters, and both attempt to displace, deny and contain any homoeroticism within these friendships. This chapter will use queer readings of these two films about ‘boy witches’ to indicate the ways that depictions of dyadic teen male friendships push against and complicate the heteronormative boundaries between homosociality and homosexual love. Remarkably, the heterosexuality of the primary dyadic friendship in each film is ‘protected’ with very similar devices of displacement and denial; but exposing these hetero safeguards also brings forward the queer possibilities they seek to deny. This chapter will frame the textually based queer readings within and against the teen film genre. It will also outline the strategies behind ‘reading against the grain’, particularly in the context of contemporary representations of masculinity in male-centred genres like ‘bromance’, buddy and action films.
1. See Mulvey, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," Screen 16, no. 3 (1975), 6-18, repr. in Visual and Other Pleasures (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1989), 14-27; "Afterthoughts on 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema' Inspired by King Vidor's Duel in the Sun," Framework 15/16/17 (1981), repr. in Visual and Other Pleasures (29-38). I do not mean to denigrate Mulvey's bold and revolutionary work; as much as anything, I am critiquing its continued hold on critical accounts of the gaze. Susan White charts the "almost hypnotically powerful effect on feminist film theorists" of Mulvey's work, and the ways in which recent critics, after many years of laboring over Mulvey's paradigms, have argued that female desire, so elusive in "Visual Pleasure," can erupt in the "gaps" and fissures" of dominant texts, and that, moreover, the image of universalized white, middle-or upper-class woman Mulvey deploys itself needs to be painstakingly problematized. See White, "Problems of Knowledge in Feminist Film Theory," Alfred Hitchcock: Centenary Essays, ed. Richard Allen and S. Ichii-Gonzales (London: BFI, 1999), 278-98.
2. "Although the gaze might be said to be 'the presence of others as such,' it is by no means coterminous with any individual viewer, or group of viewers. It issues 'from all sides,' whereas the eye '[sees] only from one point.'" Kaja Silverman differentiates the eye or the "look" from the gaze, making the analogy that the eye and the gaze are, in psychoanalytic theory, as distinct as penis and phallus. Drawing from Lacan, Silverman elaborates that, far from lending an air of mastery to the subject, voyeurism renders the looking subject "subordinated to the gaze," disturbed and overwhelmed, and overcome by shame. In Lacanian gaze theory, "the possibility of separating vision from the image" is called "radically into question," and along with it the presumed "position of detached mastery" of the voyeuristic subject. This clarification of Lacanian gaze-theory has bold implications for feminist film theory, whose proper interrogation of the male look has not "always been pushed far enough. We have at times assumed that dominant cinema's scopic regime could be overturned by 'giving' women the gaze, rather than by exposing the impossibility of anyone ever owning that visual agency, or of him or herself escaping specularity." See Silverman, Male Subjectivity at the Margins (New York: Routledge, 1992), 130, 146, 152. This view of the voyeuristic subject not as victim but as vulnerable and fragile insofar as he can never achieve the sense of mastery that fantasmatically impels his very voyeuristic project informs my reading of The Blithedale Romance.
3. Suzanne R. Stewart, Sublime Surrender: Male Masochism at the Fin-de-Siècle (Ithaca: Cornell Univ. Press, 1998), 10.
4. Ellen Langton's desiring appraisal of Fanshawe's troubled beauty, Hester's ardent desire for Dimmesdale, seemingly meek, wan, sweet Alice Pyncheon's frank physical appraisal of Matthew Maule are among the many examples of the female desiring gaze in Hawthorne's work. As I argue in Men Beyond Desire: Manhood, Sex, and Violation in American Literature (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005), the men of prominent nineteenth-century texts (such as Fansahwe, Natty Bumpo, Dimmesdale, Stowe's Tom) are often rendered as inviolate, opposed to both female and homosocial/homoerotic desire. Their inviolability makes them fields of erotic play through which female desirers, and queer desirers, acquire opportunities to gaze, a surprising agency to roam the inhospitable expanse of beautiful and undesiring men. In this essay, I am considering the implications for queer theory of a complicated male subjectivity, such as we find in Hawthorne, that oscillates between spectator and object positions, but the fuller understanding of these questions can only come through further work on the implications for feminist literary theory about Hawthorne's representation of manhood and the gaze. I focus on the queer implications of Hawthorne's work, especially in terms of the gaze, but this focus hardly exhausts the potentialities of Hawthorne gaze-theory. The feminist implications of the desiring gaze in Hawthorne's work are just as rich, complex, and tantalizing, and these, too, deserve further study.
5. The bachelor has been established as a powerfully interesting...