“I Married Rambo”: Action, Spectacle, and Melodrama

Abstract

The contemporary action film, the most profitable of global film genres, uses various formal and narrative strategies to respond to cul-tural crises about masculinity and male social roles. Since the codification of the action genre’s dominant narrative conflicts and conventions of visual style in the early 1980s, the action film has been the most visible site of male conflict and identity formation in popular global cinema. The genre’s visibility derives both from the widespread global distribution of U.S. action films and from the literal visibility of its films’ protagonists, usually solitary (or highly individualized), athletic, white men. As contemporary capitalist society severely limits and codifies the bourgeois male’s ability to establish his identity through physical activity, action cinema offers particular appeals to male filmgoers. Action films provide fantasies of heroic omnipotence and escape from, or transcendence of, cultural pressures. These escapes do not represent real solutions to the problems faced by members of capitalist societies, since action-film narratives necessarily displace the present-day contradictions of male identity into visual space, into spectacle. While violent spectacle has been a prominent feature of the genre since its inception, action films in the 1990s increasingly constructed stories around threats to domesticity, marriage, and the nuclear family. By presenting spectacular violence as the solution to domestic and familial conflicts, the genre displays the ideological contradictions between idealized masculinity and familial responsibility under contemporary capitalism.