Skyscraper Cinema: Architecture and Gender in American Film

Abstract

Any study that proposes to bring together architecture (in particular the skyscraper), gender and cinema is naturally going to have a linited pool of films to survey, but one which nevertheless can offer extraordinary glimpses of sexuality and identity in capitalism and modernity. This is the case with Merrill Schleier's often magisterial study of cinema as it places the skyscraper and gender within the frame. However, just as the dimensions of a skyscraper necessitate a foreshortening for the camera to take them in, so are some key discussions and analyses of gender roles necessarily compressed in Schleier's otherwise fascinating account. Schleier charts the simultaneous rise of the modern, iconic office block in Hollywood cinema and the emergent modern masculinity which accompanied it, and for which it was a barometer, theatrical stage, therapist's couch and much more. Masculinity here stands in for the discussion of gender more widely, even to a certain extent in the discussion of films such as the Barbara Stanwyck vehicle Baby Face (Alfred E. Green, 1933) or the Tracey/Hepburn two-hander Desk Set (Walter Lang, 1957), leading to a telescoping of the discussion.