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Masculinity in media
Masculinity in media
Hegemonic masculinity in movies
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Cinematic Representation of the British society in the years 1990-2010
Parzival, a new lad or a boy in crisis – representations of masculinities in British films.
In 1990s, British cinema intensified attention to men showing their needs and pain. Different images of men were presented in British films. This essay will investigate various representations of masculinities in two film productions : Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994) and About a Boy (Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz, 2002).
The first representation of masculinity is the figure of the ‘new man’. Sean Nixon in his text Resignifying Masculinity: From ‘New Man’ to ‘New Lad’ mentions three ‘looks’. One is the ‘Buffalo’ look associated with the stylist Ray Petri, in other terms, young-looking men with glossy hair and dark shining skin. The next one is an Italian-influenced look. Characteristics of this look are the following : a dark skin tone and strong features. The last one this is a version of Edwardian Englishness. Slightly dressed man with greasy hair. This conservative look can be associated to Charles played by Hugh Grant from Four Weddings and a Funeral. The main character of the film ‘is an archetypal hero found in every storytelling culture.’ To win his princess, he must learn courage. This motif is well-known from various fairy tales. Four Weddings is a romantic comedy, a story of growing up of Charles.
Charles is presented as a good-looking and very amusing young Englishman. However, he is also clumsy, disorganized and accident-prone person. He can be regarded also as a man who has no manners. It is not told in the film what he does for a living. Charles is popular as a best man. He has to attend wedding ceremonies very often. He has many f...
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...n Masculinity’ (www.academia.edu)
Nixon S., Resignifying Masculinity : From ‘New Man’ to ‘New Lad’
Brayfield C., He makes us nice enough for export, New Statesman, 5 July 1999New Statesman, 5 July 1999
Ibidem.
Maslin J., Reviews/Film: Four Weddings and a Funeral, 9 March 1994, The New York Times
Penguin Readers, Teacher’s notes, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pearson Education Limited 2008
Nixon S., Resignifying Masculinity : From ‘New Man’ to ‘New Lad’
Ibidem.
Gill R., Henwood K., Mclean C., A Genealogical Approach to Idealized Male Body Imagery, The London School of Economics and the University of East Anglia
Weitz Ch., Weitz P., About a Boy, 2002
Flowers Brashwell M., Sir Perceval of Galles, Kalamazoo, Michigan : Medieval Institute Publications, 1995
Penguin Readers, Teacher’s notes, About a Boy, Pearson Education Limited 2008
www.goodreads.com
Klumas, Amy L., and Thomas Marchant. “Images of Men in Popular Sitcoms”. Journal of Men’s Studies 2.3 (1994): 269. ProQuest. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema - Phil Powrie, Ann Davies and Bruce Babington.
Bordo, Susan. "Beauty (Re)discovers the male body." Bordo, Susan. Ways of Reading: An Anthology for Writers. Ed. David Bartholomae and Anthony Petrosky. Ninth Edition. Bedford/St.Martin's, 2011. 189-233.
In the classical Western and Noir films, narrative is driven by the action of a male protagonist towards a clearly defined, relatable goal. Any lack of motivation or action on the part of the protagonist problematizes the classical association between masculinity and action. Due to inherent genre expectations, this crisis of action is equivalent to a crisis of masculinity. Because these genres are structured around male action, the crises of action and masculinity impose a crisis of genre. In the absence of traditional narrative elements and character tropes, these films can only identify as members of their genres through saturation with otherwise empty genre symbols. The equivalency between the crises of genre and masculinity frames this symbol saturation as a sort of compensatory masculine posturing.
Mainstream movies are about men’s lives, and the few movies about women’s lives, at their core, still also revolve around men (Newsom, 2011). These female leads often have male love interests, looking to get married or get pregnant. Strong independent female leads are still exist for the male view, as they are hypersexualized, or the “fighting fuck toy,” (Newsom, 2011). This depiction has created a culture where women are insecure and waiting for a knight on a horse to come rescue and provide for her as well as the acceptance of women
While America was just in its infancy during the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, expanding and competing for its own national identity, there were ideals of manhood competing for dominance amidst the chaos. A couple of notions of masculinity were brought to the New World straight from Europe; the idea that men were to work hard for success and value family, while others maintained wealth and landownership as the characteristics of a man. However, the eminence of industrialization soon made these notions obsolete. Without these longstanding notions, American men were left in a crisis without an identity. It is within this framework that specific paintings serve as material expressions and vehicles for gendering beliefs and constructs.
In recent times, such stereotyped categorizations of films are becoming inapplicable. ‘Blockbusters’ with celebrity-studded casts may have plots in which characters explore the depths of the human psyche, or avant-garde film techniques. Titles like ‘American Beauty’ (1999), ‘Fight Club’ (1999) and ‘Kill Bill 2’ (2004) come readily into mind. Hollywood perhaps could be gradually losing its stigma as a money-hungry machine churning out predictable, unintelligent flicks for mass consumption. While whether this image of Hollywood is justified remains open to debate, earlier films in the 60’s and 70’s like ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967) and ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976) already revealed signs of depth and avant-garde film techniques. These films were successful as not only did they appeal to the mass audience, but they managed to communicate alternate messages to select groups who understood subtleties within them.
Mosse, L George. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Macmillan publishers, 1996.
“Queer Cinema is Back” – headlines the front page of the 2005 issue of the Advocate, signifying to a new flood of movies making way into theatres. Five years prior to this news release B. Ruby Rich, who coined the art as New Queer Cinema almost a decade earlier, declared that the cinema had co-opted into “just another niche market” dominated by popular culture (Morrison 135 & Rich 24). What had seemed to be a movement, turned out to be only a moment in the brief years between the late 1980s and early 1990s when the energies of queer theory, the furies of AIDS activism, the legacies of independent and avant-garde filmmaking, and the schisms of postmodern identity politics came together in a bluster of cultural production to form a cinema of its own (Morrison 136). In many ways Rich’s criticism of the cinema is correct, the queer aspect that so brightly shone in films like Poison, Swoon, Paris Is Burning, Tongues Untied, The Living End and Head On, was shifting as the new millennium was approaching and making more difficult for queer films to stay queer against the forces of Hollywood. However, Rich lacks in her analysis on New Queer Cinema because she does not consider the breadth to which queer operates as a concept within the cinema. For Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, the editors of Queer Cinema, queer is an umbrella term encompassing dissident sexualities through history and, indeed, nominating them more productively than they were ever named in their own time (Morrison 137). For Michele Aaron, queer is a specific product of exigencies of social activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s, “with AIDS accelerating its urgency” and New Queer Cinema arising as an “art-full manifestation” of i...
It compares and contrasts the “physical view on masculinity” as it has changed over the centuries in relation to society’s views on it. In her article, Bordo explains, “Attention to beauty was associated not with femininity but with a life that was both privileged and governed by exacting standards… By the end of the nineteenth century, older notions of manliness premised on altruism, self-restraint, and moral integrity – qualities that women could have too – began to be understood as vaguely ‘feminine’… ‘Homosexual’ came to be classified as a perverse personality type which the normal, heterosexual male have to prove himself distinct from.” (402) Bordo goes on to explain how in the twentieth century the homosexual community has greatly influenced social discourse through developing the way models pose. In turn, this discourse has shaped the way male bodies are portrayed both in advertisements and within our culture, and broken the idea that all male bodies need to be portrayed in a strong and masculine fashion. In her article, Bordo uses a surfeit of anecdotes to typify pathos, several accounts of logos, and ethos to show the adaption that has taken place in the masculine advertising
Film scholar and gender theorist Linda Williams begins her article “Film Bodies: Genre, Gender and Excess,” with an anecdote about a dispute between herself and her son, regarding what is considered “gross,” (727) in films. It is this anecdote that invites her readers to understand the motivations and implications of films that fall under the category of “body” genre, namely, horror films, melodramas, (henceforth referred to as “weepies”) and pornography. Williams explains that, in regards to excess, the constant attempts at “determining where to draw the line,” (727) has inspired her and other theorists alike to question the inspirations, motivations, and implications of these “body genre” films. After her own research and consideration, Williams explains that she believes there is “value in thinking about the form, function, and system of seemingly gratuitous excesses in these three genres,” (728) and she will attempt to prove that these films are excessive on purpose, in order to inspire a collective physical effect on the audience that cannot be experienced when watching other genres.
A great deal of this interesting comparison is encouraged by the introductory sections of Mulvey’s essay. She writes, “the paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (198). If phallocentrism depends on an image, is it inherently part of a modern, image-based culture? Long before Freud and psychoanalysis, phallocentrism certainly existed in oral and written texts (though without this specific term to identify it). Can the “image” that Mulvey refers to include an image described with words, or is she writing exclusively of a visual, dimensional imag...
The movie “This is England” was released in 2006, written and directed by Shane Meadows , a story taken, in part, from his life as a boy growing up in the Midlands of England. Mr. Meadows work presents to the viewer a representation of the cultural depiction of the street gang known as Skinheads, in a non-stereotypical light. This is England is a drama combining peer pressure, gangs and gang violence, social gatherings, loss and companionship of youths in a working class environment of a small town in England. This is England has been nominated and has also won multiple awards, according to IMDb.com, several nominations are from the British Academy of Film and Television (BAFTA), Golden Kinnaree Award for Best Film, Best Screenplay for British Independent Film Awards and won the Alexander Korda Award for Best British Film additionally won Best European Film from the Mons International Festival of Love Films. This film stars Thomas Turgoose as Shaun, the 12-year-old troubled youth whom this film revolves around, Stephen Graham as Combo and Joseph Gilgun as Woody. Shaun's troubles seem to begin with the loss of his father, an officer, killed during the Falkland War. Subject to bullying from other local gang types, Mods, New Romantics . . ., depression takes it toll on young Shaun. Seemingly, being a loner, Shaun happens upon a small group of older teenage kids, Skinheads, led by a charismatic boy named Woody. Woody takes an immediate liking to Shaun and invites him to join his group. Shaun finds camaraderie in being a part of this group, and they all enjoying the carefree life of being kids, although sometimes the play progresses into vandalism like where a small group of abandoned, derelict housing units meet further destruction a...
In Susan Bordo’s essay “Beauty Rediscovers the male body”, Bordo stresses the changes on the concern of the male body and how the male body is depicted in advertisements. Bordo demonstrates her stance on male advertising with graphic images of male bodies with intense descriptions. In the 1990s there was this emergence of male models depicted in a more sexual way. As Bordo states in her essay, the images of these
During the course of this essay it is my intention to discuss the differences between Classical Hollywood and post-Classical Hollywood. Although these terms refer to theoretical movements of which they are not definitive it is my goal to show that they are applicable in a broad way to a cinema tradition that dominated Hollywood production between 1916 and 1960 and which also pervaded Western Mainstream Cinema (Classical Hollywood or Classic Narrative Cinema) and to the movement and changes that came about following this time period (Post-Classical or New Hollywood). I intend to do this by first analysing and defining aspects of Classical Hollywood and having done that, examining post classical at which time the relationship between them will become evident. It is my intention to reference films from both movements and also published texts relative to the subject matter. In order to illustrate the structures involved I will be writing about the subjects of genre and genre transformation, the representation of gender, postmodernism and the relationship between style, form and content.