Brian Baker. Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000
2008; University of Arkansas Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2374-6629
Autores Tópico(s)Media, Gender, and Advertising
ResumoBrian Baker. Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000. London: Continuum, 2006. Brian Baker's Masculinity in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000 explores a range of popular novels and films in terms of how their representations of masculinity have been bound up ... with ideological imperatives of American (and British) nation-state since end of World War 2 (vii). Following a path marked by Stephan Cohan's Masked Men: Masculinity and Movies in Fifties, Baker regards cultural field as a staging ground for contests between a hegemonic form of masculinity and other, subordinate forms. In postwar period, Cohan argues, masculinity underwent a significant reconfiguration, as licensed violence and homosocial bonds of wartime military life came to be looked upon with suspicion and concern, and warrior ideal gave way to more docile and domestic breadwinner or in grey flannel suit, gentle suburban patriarch familiar to viewers of countless films and television programmes of 1950s. Baker traces conflicts arising from this transition in several sources, beginning with two science-fiction novels of 1950s, Pohl and Kornbluth's Gladiator-at-Law (1955) and Heinlein's controversial Starship Troopers (1959). The more obscure earlier novel has not dated particularly well and yields perhaps a bit too easily to Baker's analysis of its representation of the male subject as a fragile and anxious entity, which is reconstructed through codes of aggressive and combative behaviour (8). The reading of Heinlein's famously troublesome novel is more interesting. Here, Baker considers Heinlein' s protagonist, Juan Rico, as type of citizen-soldier whose willingness to serve as state's instrument promises to harmonize potential for violence that is inseparable from heroic forms of masculinity with imperatives of nation-state whose ostensible aim is order and good government (21). In its most extreme form, struggle for this warrior form of masculinity to express itself in uncongenial surroundings yields dark pathologies of figures such as Norman Bates, boy apparently mothered into monstrosity in Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho (1960), or Patrick Batemen, psychotic yuppie consumer of Mary Harron's 1999 film American Psycho. To Cohan's principal emblem of new postwar the man in grey flannel suit, Baker adds another variation, the man, after title of William H. Whyte's famous treatise of 1956, which warned of threat posed by suffocating, corporate organization to a dynamic, implicitly masculine individualism. Heinlein's imagined marriage of citizen with soldier brings with it a threat to agency of individual who serves, subsumed under military discipline even as his merely human body is overwhelmed by military technology. A similar tension is in evidence in several recent space-themed films such as Philip Kaufman's The Right Stuff (1983), Michael Bay's Armageddon (1998), and Eastwood's Space Cowboys (2000), which bring into conflict bureaucratic organizations, advanced technologies and can-do masculinity. Turning to Cold War and Britain's rich crop of spy fictions, Baker finds in pervasive figure of double-agent a perfect embodiment of a fractured Cold War masculinity. The functioning of masculine warrior requires a confidence in an impermeable line separating heroic Self from enemy Other. However, revelations of Western double-agents--most notably during Cambridge spy scandal, which revealed Soviets' astonishingly deep penetration into Old Boy network and hence Britain's intelligence service--shattered any illusions of integrity of our side. Berlin, site of so much Cold War intrigue, is Baker's topographical analogue of a divided Cold War subjectivity (x). …
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