Research

Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in the Hollywood Cinema (Steven Cohan) (1993)

Link: http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=XSogKipO3NYC&printsec=frontcover#v=onepage&q&f=false

This book offers detailed analysis with specific, recognisable examples. Also, well known theorists such as Richard Dyer, also feature. Masculinity in not only film but TV also, included which gives evidence of a 'changing nature' of masculinity over the years in various types of media.

Quote: "The status of masculinity within Hollywood's representational system is explored here through an analysis of four films and their stars: Bruce Willis in Die Hard (1988) and Die Hard 2 (1990), Sylvester Stallone in Lock Up (1989), Stallone and Kurt Russell in Tango and Cash (1989). These films and stars exemplify, in different ways, a tendency of the Hollywood action cinema toward the construction of the male body as spectacle, together with an awareness of masculinity as performance. Also evident in these films is the continuation and amplification of an established tradition of the Hollywood-play upon images of power powerlessness at the centre of which is the male hero." (page 230)

Quote: "It does seem important to ask what is the status of this performativity, a quality which some are keen to embrace and others to refute. How would we account, for example, for the undoubtable marketability of the male body in the 1980s? One context is offered by the changing definitions, within a shifting economy, of the roles that men and women have been called upon to perform, particularly in that crucial arena of gender definition, the world of work." (page 231)

Quote: "Richard Dyer notes the tendency of male stars such as Clint Eastwood and Harrison Ford 'either to give their films a send-up or tongue-in-cheek flavour...or else a hard, desolate, alienated quality.' Dyer speculates that in a world 'of  microchips and a large scale growth (in the USA) of women in traditionally male occupations' the adoption of such tones suggests that the 'values of masculine physicality  are harder to maintain straightfacedly and unproblematically." (Dyer 1987:12)." (page 231)

Quote: "Scott Benjamin King's analysis of the American cop show Miami Vice, a series which has attracted much critical attention and is perhaps the original 'Armani with a badge,' echoes Dyer;s comments on the world of work. King offers a critique of those who understood the stylized visual beauty of the show and its male protagonists, via postmodernism, as a narrative emptiness, seeing such perspectives as, at worst, a rather alarmingly literal interpretation of the 'end of narrative.' Instead of seeing the show as pure spectacle, as a refusal of narrative, King points out that Vice offered the repeated re-enactment of narratives of failure, the significance of which he locates within the context of contemporary articulations of masculinity." (page 232)

Quote: "The phenomenon of stardom provides a useful starting point for thinking about the performative aspects of masculinity in the cinema, perhaps because spectacle, performance and acting all function as both constitutive components of stardom and significant terms in those writings concerned with the sexual politics of representation. Within the action cinema the figure of the star as hero, larger than life in his physical abilities and pin-up good looks, operates as a key aspect of the more general visual excess that this particular form of Hollywood production offers to its audience." (page 233)