Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing men in popular genres, 1945-2000

186 Pages·2006·10.932 MB·English

by  Brian Baker

Masculinity in
Fiction and Film:
Representing Men in
Popular Genres 1945–2000
Brian Baker
Continuum
Masculinity in Fiction and Film
CONTINUUM LITERARY STUDIES SERIES
Also available in the series:
Character and Satire in Postwar Fiction by Ian Gregson
Fictions of Globalization by James Annesley
Joyce and Company by David Pierce
Women's fiction 1945-2000 by Deborah Philips
Forthcoming titles:
Beckett's Books by Matthew Feldman
English Fiction in the 1930s by Chris Hopkins
Novels of the Contemporary Extreme edited by Alain-Phillipe Durand and
Naomi Mandel
London Narratives by Lawrence Phillips
MASCULINITY IN
FICTION AND FILM
Representing Men in Popular
Genres 1945-2000
Brian Baker
continuum
LONDON NEW YORK
Continuum International Publishing Group
The Tower Building, 11 York Road, London SE1 7NX
80 Maiden Lane, Suite 704, New York, NY 10038
www.continuumbooks.com
© Brian Baker 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,
or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from
the publishers. Brian Baker has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act,
1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 0-8264-8652-5 (hardback)
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Aarontype Limited, Easton, Bristol
Printed and bound in Great Britain by MPG Books Ltd, Bodmin, Cornwall
Contents
Acknowledgements vi
Introduction vii
CHAPTER ONE Cold Warriors 1
CHAPTER TWO Soldier, Spy 29
CHAPTER THREE Operatives 49
CHAPTER FOUR The Psycho in the Grey Flannel Suit 65
CHAPTER FIVE Rogue Cops I: San Francisco 86
CHAPTER SIX Rogue Cops II: Los Angeles 105
CHAPTER SEVEN Old Age Westerns 124
CHAPTER EIGHT The Twilight Frontier 144
Bibliography 158
Index 169
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank my colleagues in the Department of English at the
University of Chester for providing study leave in 2004, which allowed me
to develop this long-standing project into a book and to write crucial
chapters. The staff at the libraries of the University of Chester and the
University of Liverpool have been diligent and accommodating in helping
source critical material. I would also like to thank Anna Sandeman and
Rebecca Simmonds at Continuum for their understanding and support.
Particular thanks must go to Ashley Chantler, who read several drafts of
work included here and always responded with positive and detailed
comments. I would also like to express my gratitude to Arthur Bradley,
friend and erstwhile colleague, for his consistent support and encourage-
ment for my work. Early versions of chapters and other work towards this
book were delivered at conferences held at the University of East Anglia,
John Moores University, St Anne's College Oxford, and Edge Hill College,
and in seminars held at the University of Chester and the North East Wales
Institute of Higher Education, Wrexham. My thanks to all who responded
to my papers and gave food for thought. More general thanks go to Simon
Lee, Ed Hill, Sebastian Groes, David James, John Bleasdale, Eliot Atkins, Joel
Petrie and Alison Platt for encouragement and discussion of some of the
films and novels in this book at different periods of my life. My thanks also
to students at the University of Chester, upon whom some of the ideas and
issues were tested, for their generous and positive responses. Finally, my
love and thanks go to Deniz, who put up with this project for five years
and saw things through to the very end, reading and proofing just days
before our baby was due.
While all books are, of necessity, collaborative projects in the broadest
sense — and without the input of those named above, this book would not
have taken the form it has — I must stress that any errors or omissions
herein are my own.
Introduction
What this book is about
Although this book is entitled Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing
Men in Popular Genres 1945—2000, it is, of necessity, selective. My argument
in this book concerns the ways in which representations of masculinity have
been bound up, in popular generic fiction and film, with the ideological
imperatives of the American (and British) nation-state since the end of
World War 2. Many of these imperatives are themselves bound up with the
Cold War, but the scope of this book ranges beyond the strictly geo-
political (and genres which explicitly engage with the Cold War, such as
espionage fiction). Though the masculinities discussed herein are selective,
not comprehensive, they have been chosen to be in some sense typical
of crucial historical and cultural moments: the late-1950s and early-1960s;
the early-1970s; the 1990s. It is in these moments, this book argues,
that key films encode the critical connection between the ideology of the
nation-state and the ideologically sanctioned (what I will call, following
Steven Cohan, the 'hegemonic') form of masculinity at the time. These
popular fictions and films negotiate, or more properly renegotiate, forms of
masculinity that express something about the cultural, social and political
formations of their period of production, and taken together, form a kind of
loose history of both representations of masculinity in Anglo-American
texts and in the postwar period as a whole.
This book is published into a burgeoning critical field of studies of
masculinities. Critical texts such as Berthold Schoene-Harwood's Writing
Men (2000) for twentieth-century British fiction, Lee Clark Mitchell's
Westerns: Making the Man in Fiction and Film (1996) for masculinities in a
particular genre, and more general texts like Peter Middleton's The Inward
Gaze (1992) and John Beynon's Masculinities and Culture (2002) indicate the
growing importance of masculinity as a field of investigation in both fiction
and film. In retrospect it seems like the period from 1992 to 1994 was a
kind of 'origin point' for the study of screen masculinities. Several books
were published on masculinities in film, indicating a critical reconsideration
of gender and masculinity on screen, perhaps responding to the increased
visibility of the male body in American and British culture. Among them
were Kaja Silverman's Male Subjectivity at the Margins (1992), Yvonne
Tasker's Spectacular Bodies (1993), Susan Jeffords's Hard Bodies (1994), and
viii Introduction
the collections Screening the Male (Cohan and Hark 1993) and The Sexual
Subject (Caughie et al. 1992).
The majority of this book concentrates on screen masculinities, though
the reader will find considerable material on fiction. The tradition of
theorization of gender in screen theory has been through Lacanian models
since Laura Mulvey's famous and discipline-transforming Visual Pleasure
and Narrative Cinema' (1975) suggested that the camera in classical
Hollywood cinema regulates the look of the audience, constituting an
identification with a male gaze. An active/passive binary mapped onto
masculine and feminine subject positions results in gendered spectator-
ship. The male looks, and the female is looked upon; this leads to the
obj edification and fetishization of the female body, and the negation of
female pleasure. Steve Neale's 'Masculinity as Spectacle' (1983) has been
almost as influential, and explored the spectatorial paradigm of the Mulvey
article to open a space for the investigation of screen masculinities. I will
work with these models, necessarily, but my own approach is historicist
rather than psychoanalytical.
I use the plural of 'masculinities' throughout this book to indicate that
there is not one single 'masculinity' analysed here, but a range of different
representations of masculinity. In analysing masculinities in film, I have
particularly found models worthy of emulation in Steven Cohan's Masked
Men (1997) and Robert Corber's In the Name of National Security (1993),
which look at Hollywood cinema in the 15 years following World War 2.
Both of these texts take a historicizing and contextual approach to
understanding film texts that I have sought to marry to close analytical
attention to the films themselves. Cohan, in his article The Spy in the Gray
Flannel Suit' (1995) and in Masked Men, uses Judith Butler's conception of
gender as performance (in Gender Trouble (1990)) to analyse Cary Grant's
performance in Hitchcock's North by Northwest, and a variety of other films
and star personae. Butler's performative notion of subjectivity is vital to
Cohan's, and my, argument. He explains its critical consequences thus:
From this perspective, 'masculinity' does not refer to a male nature but instead
imitates a dominant regulatory fiction authorizing the continued representation
of certain types of gender performances for men (like the breadwinner),
marginalizing others (like the momma's boy), and forbidding still others (like the
homosexual). (Cohan 1995:57)
Cohan argues that a 'hegemonic masculinity' (the male 'breadwinner' in the
1950s) organizes a range of subordinate masculinities in relation to this
dominant term. I have found this model persuasive and very useful for
my own investigations in this book. The forms of masculinity I analyse are
as follows: in Chapter 1, in relation to science fiction, the 'organization
man' and the 'citizen-soldier'; in Chapters 2 and 3 (on British and American
espionage fictions, respectively), the 'soldier/spy' and the 'double agent';
in Chapter 4, on masculinity in 'crisis', I analyse the 'psycho' and the 'man in
Introduction ix
the grey flannel suit'. Chapters 5 and 6 consider the 'rogue cop' and its
variants; Chapter 7 the 'superannuated shootist' in Westerns; and Chapter 8
the 'cowboy' and the 'astronaut'. In this book I am not concerned with
analysing what masculinity is; rather, I investigate a range of fictional and
filmic texts to try to reveal how the cultural production of masculinities is
central to the ideological structures of the contemporary nation-state.
This book explicitly connects representations of masculinity to the
ideological imperatives underpinning the nation-state, taking a cross-
generic (and interdisciplinary) approach to a political understanding of the
connection between masculinity, citizenship, law, community, and violence.
Masculinity in Fiction and Film takes a broad, multi-genre, interdisciplinary
approach to the study of masculinities in fiction and film, largely con-
sidering popular texts that have remained within the realm of popular
consumption, and that have generated relatively little critical interest. This
book determinedly concentrates on popular fictions. By this I mean literary
and filmic texts that are produced by mass entertainment industries (such as
Hollywood or mainstream imprints); that are generic texts, related to some
of the dominant genres of the twentieth century; and that are texts where
the ideological structures that frame the ways in which gender is repre-
sented are visible just below the surface. The ideological study of popular
fictions has a worthy critical heritage, and the reader will find the crucial
name of Tony Bennett among the critical texts I cite; this is also connected
to the study of popular culture, not to decry its commercialized crassness,
but to investigate the investment that readers have in popular fictions, and
also the investment the ideological structures of the British and American
nation-states have in the production of their own popular cultures and
fictions. In this context, it would be correct to mention Raymond Williams
and Richard Hoggart, and the Birmingham Centre for Cultural Studies (now
closed) as antecedents.
How this book is organized
This book is organized in several ways. Firstly, it takes a broadly
chronological structure in which to study representations of masculinity in
genre fictions, and how they connected to the ideological imperatives of
their time of production. Secondly, it emphasizes key spaces or places
which stand in relation to the male subject: the dystopia, the West of the
United States, the frontier (and New Frontier), and the cities of Berlin, San
Francisco and Los Angeles. Thirdly, it attempts to trace the significance of
different representations of masculinity with regard to genre fictions, which,
it is argued, are particularly invested with ideological or mythic significance
with regard to the nation-state: the Western, espionage fiction, dystopian
science fiction and crime narratives.
The book falls into two connected parts. The first four chapters are orga-
nized around the theme of fractured subjectivity; each chapter investigates a