TROUBLED MASCULINITY AND ABUSIVE FATHERS: DUALITY AND DUPLICITY IN THE GINGERBREAD MAN
2000; University of Illinois Press; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
1934-6018
AutoresRobert T. Self, Terry F. Robinson,
Tópico(s)Cultural Studies and Interdisciplinary Research
ResumoHe's a crook, a thief, a kidnaper, and a bad father and more! Olive Oyl, in Popeye (1980) Robert Altman calls his 1998 film The Gingerbread Man first thriller that I've ever (4). Its dark and moody narrative of mystery and resolution, in the middle of a hurricane in contemporary Savannah, he says, is set up to entrap this lawyer that [Kenneth] Branagh plays, to let him get sucked up into this plot and carried away with it. Indeed, Altman argues that once you find out who done it, doesn't stand up for third or fourth viewings because a certain tension is gone from it (29). Yet even as its narrative trajectory apparently works to close the ruptures opens in the social fabric, its dualities in story and discourse suggest a reversal of its ostensible closure that asks the victim, Rick Magruder, be read as a victimizer. The films of Robert Altman routinely examine the breakdown of masculine fidelity, sexuality, and authority. Efficacious male action in these films becomes precarious, threatened, doubtful, suspect in Brewster McCloud, John McCabe, Philip Marlowe, in Richard Nixon, Vincent Van Gogh, Griffin Mill, and here in Rick Magruder. Singularity of purpose is splintered, challenged, circumvented, impossible in Buffalo Bill, in McCabe and Mrs. Miller, in Fool for Love, in Short Cuts, in The Gingerbread Man. Duality and deception in the recent film document a desire to tell an effective thriller on one hand, but also reflect on the other hand a confusion of culprit and prey. Its traditional drive toward revelation of the facts, exposure of the truth, development of a public knowledge conceals a personal knowledge that cannot be expressed. Its interrogation of Mallory's (Embeth Davidtz) guilt suppresses a dark night of the soul that destabilizes surface reality, events, and personality. Behind the children's story of the Gingerbread Man stands the figure of the abusive father. Over the last thirty years the thirty-five Robert Altman films map a divergent route across the narrative landscape of Hollywood cinema. Beginning with That Cold Day in the Park and MASH in 1969, they divert the traffic of almost all the popular narrative genres-gangster, detective, thriller, combat, western, musical, biopic, science fiction. For viewers accustomed to the interstate speed and ease of travel toward a destination afforded by the causal logic and narrative economy of both old and new Hollywood, the Altman films challenge the viewer to straight-shift navigation across unfamiliar and unmapped terrain. In the 1970s that challenge derived from an active reconstruction of the semantics and syntax of popular genres. In the 1990s their challenge lies in the multi-layered textuality and reflexivity of films disconnected from the generic energy of the Hollywood freeways. The art-cinema aesthetic and narratives of Vincent and Theo (1990), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), Pret-a-Porter (1995), and Kansas City (1997) gained a popular audience and earned a profit only in The Player. Altman's negative reputation among Hollywood producers and the dramatic unpopularity of his films at the box office determined that The Gingerbread Man barely got national screening in the winter of 1997-98. Its brief release in New York and Los Angeles in 1997 occasioned a public clash between Altman and the production company. Unhappy with test audience reaction, PolyGram took the film back to re-edit and to develop a new musical track. Altman held a press conference to call his first loss of final authority since the beginning of his studio films with Countdown (1967) worst thing that has ever happened to me (Ryan). When test reactions to its cut of the film proved even more negative than to Altman's version, PolyGram finally released his film in the graveyard month of February, just before the 1998 Academy Awards, to single theaters in a small number of major cities around the United States for very short runs. …
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