Masculinity
One advantage of intertextuality is that it allows for a number of different viewing lenses, all of which can be applied to looking at film from a variety of perspectives. For example, films may demand a psychoanalytical reading that applies ideas generated by Sigmund Freud, which helps reveal some of their characteristics. Others may require a sociological reading that considers films in light of their relationship to larger culture. Still others may benefit from historical readings that place the film in the context in which it was made or the era it that it comments on, if it is a period piece. We can also view films from the perspective of gender studies, reflecting on what movies have to say about dominant or subversive ideas about societal gender roles played by men, women, and non-binary people.
For example, many critics have considered various film genres and individual examples through what they have to say about masculinity—the accumulated collection of expectations and cultural stereotypes about the way that men are “supposed to behave” in American society. A perspective on masculinity can examine how men are portrayed on screen, and whether they successfully adhere to dominant cultural roles, fail to live up to them, or if they change the ways in which those roles are defined either through deliberate subversion or sheer dynamic power of their differences. A number of film genres are concerned explicitly with masculinity. Two clear examples include the Western and the war film.
First, let’s consider Westerns, which were among the most popular kinds of films produced in American cinema throughout much of the Classic Hollywood studio era for a period of about twenty-five to thirty years or so. Because Westerns foreground male characters, especially those that use violence to settle disputes, critics have often looked to them to define how our culture portrays ideal visions of men. Movies have tremendous cultural power because they are a mass art form that reaches a diverse audience. The kinds of behavior they depict on screen have an incredible amount of influence over collective cultural thinking. Western movie male characters have long been role models for others. Watch the clip below from the pilot episode of HBO’s landmark television series The Sopranos (1999-2007), in which gangster in therapy Tony Soprano (James Gandolfini) talks about his ideal man, Gary Cooper, star of numerous Hollywood Westerns.
Soprano privileges Gary Cooper’s stoic demeanor: “the strong, silent type,” he calls it. Soprano implicitly contrasts his own depression and anxiety, which have led him to seek treatment with a psychiatrist, with Cooper’s characters, who go about their business without getting in touch with their feelings. They, like many other Western characters, are men of action. When something needs doing, they do it. They pick up a gun and face off against the killers coming to town, as in High Noon (1952, Zinnemann), or ride out to get the woman kidnapped by Comanches, as in The Searchers (1956, Ford), both pictured below. High Noon, of course, stars Gary Cooper, and is the film that Soprano seems to be thinking of when he invokes him. Later in the series, Soprano will see visions of Gary Cooper in a scene from High Noon. The Searchers stars John Wayne, another paragon of idealized masculinity admired for his toughness.
Films with something to say about masculinity often don’t just comment on the behavior of an individual man, but groups of men together. Interpersonal dynamics are essential to understanding the ways in which American society considers definitions of masculinity. Male groups often build authoritative hierarchies that rely on structures of dominance. Groups have leaders, but they also fulfill other male roles that are subordinate to him. Westerns depict this clearly in multiple kinds of scenes, including the frequent appearance of late-night campfire talks, where groups of men gather around the flames to drink and tell stories. In these moments, they soften, letting their performative guard down, becoming more sensitive. You can see moments like this in the screenshots below from Sam Peckinpah’s The Wild Bunch (1968), a Western that has much to say about intergroup male dynamics.
According to Steven Cohan, this reflects the multiple roles society asks men to play: “the culture’s competing demands on men to be passive and aggressive, emotional and stoic, made masculinity a site of contradiction, with its incoherence felt in every area of a man’s life.” In other words, men are told on the one hand that they have to be like Soprano’s Gary Cooper, “the strong, silent type,” but they also need to be in touch with their emotions, like Soprano himself, seeking relief from panic attacks in therapy—with a female psychiatrist, no less. Dominant cultural stereotypes suggest that masculinity is most threatened when it becomes feminized; because emotion is associated with femininity, any acknowledgment of emotion makes one “less of a man.” These are all stereotypes, of course, that are built out of years of cultural product and collective agreement; cinema has played no small role in entrenching them.
Cohan argues that war films offer a unique proving ground for masculinity: “This war may have been remembered afterward as a great adventure, a premature climax to a man’s life, but it severely undermined conventional notions of masculinity, not only be revealing the performativity of courage, but by collapsing, in the barbarism of ordinary soldiers on both sides of the fighting, the line separating bravery from brutality as well.” However, it also has the capacity to throw men into a kind of crisis of masculinity that results from their perceived failures to live up to traditional definitions of maleness. War films also contain similar structures of masculinity, reinforced by the military’s reliance on rank and chain of command. Organizational structure creates group hierarchies, and men within the group either lead, follow, or disobey. Each of these group roles is associated with different kinds of masculinity: the leaders are often Soprano’s “strong, silent types,” while the followers are the “weaker,” more emotionally vulnerable men who need to be told what to do, especially in a combat zone, in order to survive. The rebellious men who disobey or buck authority are a different kind of outlaw masculinity that rejects command for its own sake, and see themselves outside traditional power structures. They may reject leadership and followership, preferring instead to go their own way: lone wolves, you might say. A war film like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan (1998) contains all three examples, pictured below: Captain Miller (Tom Hanks) is the strong, silent leader, whose background the men under his command speculate about; Corporal Upham (Jeremy Davies) is the follower, a translator with no combat experience who is repeatedly paralyzed by fear; Pvt. Reiben (Edward Burns) is the cynical outlaw who nearly walks away from the men’s mission late in the film when he has had enough of the military’s rules.
The film contains several other variations on masculinity, demonstrating that the term itself is somewhat of a misnomer; really, we ought to refer to “masculinities,” acknowledging that there is not one single definition, but many different ways to perform maleness. Influential scholars have increasingly drawn attention to the ways in which gender roles are not inherently prescribed by biology, but the reflections of tacitly agreed upon codes that make gender into a performance. According to Sally Robinson, “contradictory imperatives, to express or repress, are evidenced throughout the history of American masculinity, but came to the surface with particular force in the mid- to late 1970s, when questions about the future of straight, white masculinity became urgent following a full-scale critique of white and male privilege mounted by the liberation movements of that era.” Challenges to patriarchal authority over time have forced men to reckon with their behavior and, when necessary, endeavor to revise dominant definitions of masculinity to accommodate a changing society’s new definitions of acceptable actions. These periods of revision draw attention to the artificiality of masculinities: we say what they are, and have the power to change how we define and practice them.
The Grey (2011, Carnahan) stars Liam Neeson as a hunter who finds himself in a survival situation in the Canadian wilderness; the group Neeson leads runs into trouble when they must fight to stay alive while being hunted by a pack of wolves. It offers a number of points of comparison for different types of masculinity. In the video commentary at right, I examine the ways in which the film depicts those masculine definitions in competition and cooperation with one another during a crucial sequence midway through The Grey, set around the campfire.
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Survival films like The Grey force men to reckon with their definitions of masculinity. Extreme situations of life or death, not unlike those portrayed in war films, demand that men reconcile their emotions and their instinct to action.
clip quiz - intertextuality and masculinity
Review the following clips and answer the questions in Blackboard.
SERGEANT YORK (1941, Hawks)
Describe the kind of masculinity embodied by Alvin York (Gary Cooper) in this scene from Sergeant York. What are the character’s dominant characteristics? |
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SCARECROW (1973, Schatzberg)
What two different visions of masculinity do you see in this scene from Scarecrow between Max (Gene Hackman) and Lion (Al Pacino)? How do they perform their maleness differently? |
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BOYZ N THE HOOD (1991, Singleton)
While acknowledging that this scene from Boyz N The Hood does not represent the masculinity of all black men, what kinds of male characters do you see portrayed here? |
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BROS (2022, Stoller)
In the romantic comedy Bros, two gay men follow the basic plot we come to expect from the genre. How do these characters illustrate a different vision of masculinity? Differentiate between Bobby (Billy Eichner) and Aaron (Luke MacFarlane). |
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intertextuality and masculinity - first cow
While many male filmmakers have taken masculinity as their subject, including action directors like Walter Hill and Western filmmakers like Anthony Mann, some of the most interesting examinations of men on screen come when women step behind the camera and turn their point of view on male characters. They bring an outsider’s point of view, and can look at men with either a more critical perspective, or they can summon surprising empathy. Kelly Reichardt’s First Cow (2019) does a bit of both of these things, but tilts more towards the latter in its sensitive exploration of a frontier friendship between the mild-mannered Cookie (John Magaro) and a wayward Chinese immigrant named King Lu (Orion Lee), who is wanted for killing a man in a fight.
As an auteur director, Reichardt brings several of her regular collaborators with her, including co-writer Jon Raymond, upon whose novel First Cow is based, and cinematographer Christopher Blauvelt. Though many of Reichardt’s films focus on women (many of them played by Michelle Williams), First Cow has a nearly exclusively male cast (with the notable exception of Lily Gladstone in a small role). The subject of the film is a frontier America built by men with a primarily competitive mindset; to these men, there is only so much land, money, and power to go around, and they each have to grab their piece of all of them before the others do.
In the early scenes of First Cow, which is a semi-Western in its (typical for Reichardt) Pacific Northwest locations and temporal setting, Cookie is traveling with a group of very traditionally male fur trappers, who are rough and dirty and more than willing to threaten him with violence if he doesn’t make their food the way they like it. They make their living by killing animals and selling their furs at market, a violent assault on the land.
It is an act of cooperative kindness that brings Cookie and King Lu together; the former helps the immigrant escape detection by the men who are pursuing him. When they meet again by chance in the small camp that passes for a town, they stumble into a moneymaking scheme that requires them to steal milk in the middle of the night from the only cow in the territory, which is owned by the wealthy baron Chief Factor (Toby Jones). They’ll use the milk in making some sweet rolls that they’ll sell to men who don’t get to taste anything like it in the harsh environment of the frontier.
The film also offers other examples of men beyond Cookie and King Lu in Chief Factor and the military Captain (Scott Shepard) who comes to board with him and first gets the hunch that someone is stealing milk from Factor’s cow. Factor is a refined British gentleman who is trying to keep his lifestyle from England alive, pretending that nothing is different for him on the frontier; the nostalgic power of the sweet treats takes him back to his home country in his mind. The Captain, by contrast, is the most traditionally masculine (and Western) figure in the film; he is rough around the edges and willing to use violence to keep order.
King Lu has nothing but contempt for Factor. He eagerly sells him oily cakes in the marketplace, then impugns his masculinity in private. “What kind of woman is he?” he asks Cookie. To King Lu, Factor is weak, foolish, and unable to do anything for himself. He’s rich without having had to work for it, which, to King Lu, is one of the worst sins a man can commit.
To King Lu, and a lesser extent Cookie, defining their masculinity means building a business so they can earn enough money to be financially independent. That’s how these two, and a lot of the other men in the territory, see maleness: it’s equivalent to financial wealth. Whether the movie itself buys into that idea, of course, is another matter. Remember, the first image of the two men that the film shows is of their bones, dug up in contemporary America. The message is pretty clear—the pursuit of wealth only leads to one place.
Though a number of films can be read through their examination of masculinity, action films offer a particularly interesting example because they bring implicit questions about maleness to the forefront. Above all, however, taking a gender perspective can further demonstrate the value of seeing works through an intertextual lens.