MASCULINITY AND HEROISM IN THE HOLLYWOOD 'BLOCKBUSTER': The Culture Industry and Contemporary Images of Crime and Law Enforcement

Abstract

This article considers the connections between masculinity and heroic agency in certain versions of popular film. It proposes that how films dignify and celebrate the suffering and striving of their leading men may be quite centrally indicative of durable sensibilities regarding the qualities and virtues seen as defining manliness; and, moreover, that some of the more drastic reaffirmations of rugged masculinity in recent films starring Schwarzennegger, Stallone, and others are in reaction against instabilities in current notions of masculine gender identities. It is in such aspects of representatio n, and in what they suggest about the appeal of such films to their audiences, that we should now locate discussions of the social influences of screen 'violence'. Linguists speak of terms as displaying 'marked' or 'unmarked' forms. Until very recently 'he' was in general use as an unmarked personal pronoun: one had to mark departures from a presumed male reader or company of male subjects. Nouns too have marked and unmarked forms. The unmarked cases of'nurse', 'nanny', and 'secretary' would seem to be feminine, as in a different vein is 'prostitute': they can all be qualified by adding the prefix 'male-', but otherwise they take feminine pronouns automatically. By contrast the unmarked cases of 'prisoner', 'criminal', 'defendant', 'offender', and 'delinquent' (not to mention those of'judge', 'detective', 'Superintendent', and so on) remain masculine. If this is so, what follows for the understanding of the positions of crime and law enforcement in popular culture from the initial realization that the unmarked case of all the following terms is masculine: 'hero', 'villain', 'cop', 'killer', 'psycho', 'hood', 'private eye', 'con', 'gangster? And surely more abstract terms are also gendered in their unmarked forms: 'heroism', 'violence', 'action'? It has by now been pointed out many times that criminology traditionally fails to consider fully the implications of the unmarked gender of its key topics and terms (so often in fact that one might dare to hope that it were no longer true). The doings of boys and men have been so overwhelmingly at the forefront of the discipline's concerns that it has neglected to note clearly just how centrally their boyishness or manhood is constitutive of the activity itself. Something of this sort has also long been true of discussions of media 'violence', in a number of respects. First, we have rarely spoken with sufficient clarity about the startlingly evident fact that historically the heroic agents of popular film and television have, predominantly, been men. Secondly, in discussions of the 'effects' of media 'violence' there is the largely unexamined, but no less overwhelming, point that really it is the 'effects' on the behaviour of males (and more particularly boys) that underlies the social anxiety and animates the research. It is