The Celluloid Cubicle: Regressive Constructions of Masculinity in 1990s Office Movies

Abstract

Starstruck British boys under the spell of the film Billy Elliot have made history at the Royal Ballet by outnumbering girls for the first time in its 76-year history, according to Sunday Telegraph. Two years after the story of a miner's son who becomes a ballet dancer hit movie screens, this year's intake at the Royal Ballet's junior and senior schools includes 14 boys and 10 girls, the newspaper said. The film has certainly had some effect on the younger boys, said Gailene Stock, director of the Royal Ballet School. A number of boys at the school have said Billy Elliot made them feel more comfortable about telling people they are ballet dancers. Globe and Mail, 4/16/02 Mike's a junior at Beacon, a public high school; he asked not use his last name. He's a bodybuilder, likes to fight. used to go out I'd pray to get into a fight, he said. They liked Fight Club. Yeah, said James, who's a junior at Horace Mann School, we do shit. Ben and Dara are in Love Vanity Fair 9/01 Kozoll's 1980 script... still veered too close to the truth for any studio's comfort. You have to understand, Kozoll said, that this movie was done in an atmosphere where Warner Bros, said to us, 'Absolutely nobody wants to see a movie about the Vietnam War!' Kozoll finally washed his hands of the project and put it out of his mind. I don't even like war anyway. When Rombo came out, never even saw He would not think of the screenplay again until Halloween of 1985, the year Rombo: First Blood Part II was released. Kozoll lived on a street in Santa Monica was always inundated with trick-or-treatcrs. He opened his door night to a sea of identically dressed monsters. At first thought they were pirates, he said. Then realized, they were They were all Thousands of little Rambos. Susan Faludi Stiffed 1999 (394-395) Film is not just text. It is also cultural practice, and should be approached and studied as such. It is made under specific cultural circumstances, and yet it also influences the circumstances of culture. We allow, even crave, film to speak to us and for us. Even more importantly, film is aware of its influence, or at the very least tends to promote this idea and comment on it. For example: two scenes in Boiler Room (2000) indicate film has taught a generation of young businessmen how to do business. Seth, training at a stock brokerage, is told to remember ABC from Glengarry Glen Ross: Always Be Closing. Later, Seth visits the home of one of his co-workers. He and several other young male traders are watching Wall Street and reciting Gordon Greed is Good Gecko's lines from heart. They have committed his role to memory, and are attempting to live it. In each of the above incidents, boys and young men use film in a very direct way to explain or model their identities, their masculinities. These are males living in a time when their gender is often said to be in crisis, and, as ever, Hollywood has attempted to echo this. feeling. Much has been written on how Hollywood has responded to the contemporary social climate in order to shore up, reinforce, or shape our culture's perception of what it is to be a man. Post-war films tended to emphasize the role of the father at home (think Vincente Minelli's 1950 Father of the Bride) to solidify the traditional family after its disruption (dad at war, mom at the factory). uber-male action films of the 1980s (think Schwarzenegger and Stallone) can be read (and often are) as a corrective response to the feminist boom of the 1970s, or the sagging US economy. In the 1990s, an entirely new genre has come about to reflect the position of the disempowered middle-class white male: the drone of the new corporatized, managerial late capitalist culture. have come to call these films office movies, not because they all take place in an office, but because the films let us know the protagonists are caught in the mid-rungs of an increasingly corporate culture, usually somewhere in the cubicle class. …