Ageing Masculinities and “Muscle work” in Hollywood Action Film

Abstract

In August 2010, the sixty-four-year-old Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone premiered his latest project The Expendables, an action-adventure film starring a pantheon of “tough guys” from both past and present: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Bruce Willis. To understand the resurrection of this vintage Hollywood cast, we take up the title theme of “expendability” within the climate of the economic recession of 2008 and map its representation of masculinity, physical labor, and ageing. We do this by looking at The Expendables as essentially a labor text. In doing so, we find a smorgasbord of working bodies and types of physical labor that reveal multiple intersections among discourses of masculinity, class, ageing, and race that simultaneously reflect the divisions of (physical) labor in the industries in which the stars work—Hollywood film and professional sports.