Contemporary Hollywood Masculinities

Kord and Krimmer investigate the most common male types - cops, killers, fathers, cowboys, superheroes, spies, soldiers, rogues, lovers, and losers - by tracing changing concepts of masculinity in popular Hollywood blockbusters from 1992 to 2008 - the Clinton and Bush eras - against a backdrop of contemporary political events, social developments, and popular American myths. Their in-depth analysis of over sixty films, from The Matrix and Iron Man to Pirates of the Caribbean and The Lord of the Rings, shows that movies, far from being mere entertainment, respond directly to today's social and political realities, from consumerism to "family values" to the War on Terror.

In film, Men are good and Monsters are bad. In this book, Combe and Boyle consider the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body and regard gendered behavior as a matter of performativity. Taken together, these two identity positions, manliness and monsterliness, offer a window into the workings of current American society.

A collection of original essays focusing on masculinity and film, particularly the representation of European masculinity. Spilt into four sections -- stars, class and race, fathers and bodies -- areas covered include the Carmen films, Yiddish cinema, romantic comedy and beur cinema.

By analyzing the negotiation of femininities and masculinities within contemporary Hollywood cinema, Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema presents diverse interrogations of popular cinema and illustrates the need for a renewed scholarly focus on contemporary film production.

Men's Cinema offers a fresh theorisation of men in Hollywood cinema via a theoretical discussion of definitions of masculinity and the close textual analysis of classic and contemporary films. Through an examination of mise-en-scene, Men's Cinema moves beyond discussions of representation and narrative to an exploration of the physical or instinctive effects of cinema and how we are invited to engage with, desire or identify with Hollywood's vision of men and masculinity. By delineating how Hollywood has built up and refined the language of men's cinema through a series of recurrent, refined tropes, this book critically explores masculinity and the concept of a male aesthetic within film.Films discussed include: The Deer Hunter, Dirty Harry, Goodfellas, Inception, Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol, Once Upon a Time in the West, Point Break, Raging Bull, Rebel Without A Cause, Reservoir Dogs, Sherlock Holmes, There's Always Tomorrow, The Wild Bunch.

In film, Men are good and Monsters are bad. In this book, Combe and Boyle consider the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body and regard gendered behavior as a matter of performativity. Taken together, these two identity positions, manliness and monsterliness, offer a window into the workings of current American society.

Screening the male re-examines the problematic status of masculinity both in Hollywood cinema and feminist film theory. Classical Hollywood cinema has been theoretically established as a vast pleasure machine, manufacturing an idealized viewer through its phallocentric ideological apparatus. Feminist criticism has shown how difficult it is for the female viewer to resist becoming implicated in this representational system. But the theroies have overlooked the significance of the problem itself - of the masuline motivation at the core of the system. The essays here explore those male characters, spectators, and performers who occupy positions conventionally encoded as "feminine" in Hollywood narrative and questions just how secure that orthodox male position is. Screening the Male brings together an impressive group of both established and emerging scholars from Britain, the United States and Australia unified by a concern with issues that film theorists have exclusively inked to the femninie and not the masculne: spectacle, masochism, passivity, masquerade and, most of all, the body as it signifies gendered, racial, class and generatonal differences.

By analyzing the negotiation of femininities and masculinities within contemporary Hollywood cinema, Postfeminism and Contemporary Hollywood Cinema presents diverse interrogations of popular cinema and illustrates the need for a renewed scholarly focus on contemporary film production.