Labor, Masculinity, and Shifting Gender Relations In
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Men and the Movies: Labor, Masculinity, and Shifting Gender Relations in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema A thesis presented to the faculty of the College of Fine Arts of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts Michael B. Carrier August 2015 © 2015 Michael B. Carrier. All Rights Reserved. 2 This thesis titled Men and the Movies: Labor, Masculinity, and Shifting Gender Relations in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema by MICHAEL B. CARRIER has been approved for the School of Film and the College of Fine Arts by Ofer Eliaz Assistant Professor of Film Margaret Kennedy-Dygas Dean, College of Fine Arts 3 ABSTRACT CARRIER, MICHAEL B., M.A., August 2015, Film Men and the Movies: Labor, Masculinity, and Shifting Gender Relations in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema Director of Thesis: Ofer Eliaz This thesis examines the shifting narrative strategies of Hollywood films for preserving patriarchal ideals within the context of changing social gender relations. Over the last thirty years, social progress and economic changes in the United States have left many white, heterosexual, middle-class men feeling anxious about the possible de- escalation of patriarchy. Read symptomatically, the films in this thesis demonstrate a shared desire to reinforce male privilege. Though my focus is contemporary depictions of masculinity in film, my analysis of men springs from an examination of gender relations. Whether white male privilege faces, or will ever face, a legitimate threat to structural advantages remains to be seen; however, this thesis demonstrates how the perception of a need to sustain male privilege guides three groups of films while exhibiting the importance of considering gender relations, not just men, when confronting topics of masculinity. 4 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank everyone at Ohio University who helped me reach this point in my education. I am grateful that I had the opportunity to learn from my Film Studies professors—Dr. Louis-Georges Schwartz, Dr. Michael Gillespie, and Dr. Ofer Eliaz— who challenged and shaped me as a scholar. I would like to thank my thesis committee, Dr. Kevin Mattson, Dr. Schwartz, and in particular Dr. Eliaz, my thesis chair. Dr. Eliaz helped me with this project every step of the way, from its inception to its conclusion. To say his support and assistance were invaluable would be an understatement. Of course I want to thank Steve Ross, Director of the Film Division, for everything he does, seen and unseen. Thank you to my colleagues at Ohio University who read countless pages of my work and, in formal and casual conversation alike, helped me develop as a critical thinker. Finally I would like to thank my friends and family for their support along the way. 5 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ............................................................................................................................... 3! Acknowledgments ............................................................................................................... 4! Introduction: Men, Labor, and Privilege in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema ................ 6! Chapter 1: Don’t Quit Your Day Job: Reaffirming the Validity of Gender Roles in the Nuclear Family .................................................................................................................. 18! 1.1 Women’s Labor in Hollywood Films ..................................................................... 22! 1.2 Sending in a Man’s Man to Do a Woman’s Job ..................................................... 26! 1.3 Reaffirming Domestic and Social Labor as Extensions of Gender ........................ 31! 1.4 Measured Success and Inconclusive Conclusions .................................................. 35! 1.5 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 41! Chapter 2: Combating the Crisis: Fight Club, American Beauty, and the Active Resistance to Progressive Gender Relations ..................................................................... 43! 2.1 The Crisis: Perception as Reality ............................................................................ 46! 2.2 Identifying With the Male in Crisis ........................................................................ 50! 2.3 Tyler Durden and His Protégé: Crisis Conquerors ................................................. 56! 2.4 More Than a Mid-Life Crisis: Lester Burnham’s Fight for Relevance .................. 63! 2.5 Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 69! Chapter 3: Figuring Male Utopia at the End of the World ............................................... 73! 3.1 Pushing the Boundaries of Late Capitalism ............................................................ 76! 3.2 Breaking Away From the End of History ............................................................... 81! 3.3 Pub Crawls and Alien Brawls: The End of the World as Male-Only Refuge ........ 85! 3.4 Dating and Social Convention in the End of Days ................................................. 98! 3.5 Conclusion ............................................................................................................ 104! Conclusion: The Last Man on Earth and the Future of Cinematic Masculinity ............. 108! Works Cited .................................................................................................................... 114 ! 6 INTRODUCTION: MEN, LABOR, AND PRIVILEGE IN CONTEMPORARY HOLLYWOOD CINEMA My thesis examines the representation of masculinity in Hollywood films from the mid-1980s to today within the context of changing social gender relations. I will demonstrate how three groups of films, each approximately a decade apart, respond to transformations in social and economic relations with generically and thematically similar movies. More broadly, I argue that, in different ways, these films try to resist and compensate for threats to a traditionally constructed patriarchal order that they imagine as an endangered ideal. The first group of films—Three Men and a Baby (Nimoy, 1987), Kindergarten Cop (Reitman, 1990), and Mr. Nanny (Gottlieb, 1993)—emphasizes the importance of traditional gender roles as they relate to labor and family. These films feature situations that require their male protagonists to assume tasks that traditionally fall to women such as child rearing and elementary education. The second pair, Fight Club (Fincher, 1999) and American Beauty (Mendes, 1999), revolves around male protagonists who restore their self-worth by rejecting consumerism, their jobs, and women. The final chapter focuses on a cluster of four recent “apocalypse comedies” that create a narrative space of male domination and exclusivity imagined in an end of the world scenario. My analysis focuses on gender relations as it relates to labor. The men in these films are white heterosexuals, almost all of whom are middle-aged and middle-to-upper class. In various ways these films symptomatically reinforce patriarchal ideals as a result 7 of anxieties concerning changing gender relations due to an increase of women in the workforce and the effects of late capitalism. Each of my chapters focuses on a different group of film texts from a historically specific era. In Chapter 1 I analyze three films I categorize as “labor role reversal films.” During the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of comedies addressed the topic of gendered work with stories in which protagonists disrupt the social expectations of jobs that the films mark as either masculine of feminine. For example, movies like Mr. Mom (Dragoti, 1983) and Mrs. Doubtfire (Columbus, 1993) feature men in domestic roles while Baby Boom (Shyer, 1987) follows a woman trying to find a fulfilling balance of career, family, and an active love life. The three films I dissect emphasize the perceived discrepancy between men and domestic labor by using actors with masculine personas. Three Men features Ted Danson, best known for his work as a womanizer on Cheers, and Tom Selleck, the handsome title character from the popular television program Magnum, P.I. Kindergarten Cop uses Arnold Schwarzenegger as a model of masculinity due to his chiseled body and his previous filmic roles as an action star. Mr. Nanny employs a similar strategy, wherein professional wrestler Hulk Hogan assumes the role of family nanny. Viewing these three films collectively allows common patterns and narrative strategies to emerge. At a time when the discourse around labor, gender, and family persisted in popular publications like The Wall Street Journal and The New York Times, these films assert gender 8 normality related to labor and then use those expectations as a source of comedy in an attempt to preserve male privilege.1 Fight Club and American Beauty, the Chapter 2 films on which the bulk of my analysis falls, are likely the most often cited filmic examples of the 1990s “crisis of masculinity.” These two films feature male characters—the Narrator (Edward Norton) and Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt) in Fight Club and Lester Burnham (Kevin Spacey) in American Beauty—who feel increasingly diminutive both at work and at home. The films frame the discontent of their protagonists as an extension of their consumption based labor. In order to recapture a sense of purpose and self-worth, the men quit their jobs and reject consumption, a problematic strategy as the films closely associate women with