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Ann Arbor, MI 48106 MALE SPECTATORSHIP AMD HOLLYWOOD STAR ACTING DISSERTATION Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of the Ohio State University By Dennis Bingham, B.A., M.A. * * * * * The Ohio State University 1990 Dissertation Committee: Approved by Morris Beja Judith Mayne ___ Advisor Anthony Libby Department of English Copyright by Dennis Bingham 1990 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This dissertation would not exist without the guidance and support of Morris Beja and Judith Mayne. Murray Beja encouraged me to return to graduate school at Ohio State, and has been most supportive and generous throughout my work in the doctoral program. Judith Mayne introduced me to feminist film theory and encouraged me in the directions I ’ve taken— sometimes helping me to see those directions when I wasn't so sure. Anthony Libby has been a helpful and enthusistic third reader. Several friends, colleagues and faculty members helped me to find my way through the thickets of my topic, of film and academe, and of life; these include Vicki Allen-Callahan, Carolyn Cutler, Frank Gabrenya, Terry Goodrick, Jean Gregorek, J. Ronald Green, Roseanne Hoefel, Jamie Barlowe Kayes, Marsha Keith, Jessica Prinz and Sloan Seale. Finally, thanks to my parents, Pat and Betty, brothers Brian and Chris, sister Beth, and niece and nephew Erin and B.J. for their unflagging support and willingness to listen endlessly to bad Jack Nicholson impressions. ii VITA April 30, 1954 ................ Born, Columbus, Ohio 1978 ............................ B.A., The Ohio State University 1984 ............................ M.A., New York University, New York, New York 1984-89 ....................... Graduate Teaching Associate, Department of English, The Ohio State University 1989-90 ....................... Adjunct Lecturer in English, The Ohio State University and Ohio University-Lancaster PUBLICATIONS "Jane Howell's First Tetralogy: Brechtian Break-Out or Just Good Television?" Shakespeare on TelevisLan. Eds. H. R. Coursen and J. C. Bulman. Hanover, N.H.: University Press of New England, 1988. 221-29.- FIELD OF STUDY Major Field: English iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................. i i VITA ..........................................................iii INTRODUCTION ............................................... 1 CHAPTER PAGE I. JAMES STEWART: PERSONA/PERFORMANCE, OR THE TWO JAMESES ........................................ 28 The Persistence of the Extra-Filmic P e r s o n a .............................. 28 Star/Character: "Mascullne"/Feminine . 36 Mr. Smith Grows to "Manhood" ....... 42 The West Without Guns: Destrv Rides Again and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance . 54 The Overcompensating Man: the Anthony Mann Westerns and a "Tough" Stewart . 82 Conclusion: the Hitchcock Stewart and a (sub) version of Male D e s i r e ........Ill II. CLINT EASTWOOD: FANTASY, VIOLENCE, AND THE REPRESSED .......................................... 119 Men with No Names-........................ 119 Authority of One:.the Dirty Harry films . 148 "That Buried World": Eastwood and S e x u a l i t y .............................173 III. PERFORMANCE ANXIETY: JACK NICHOLSON AND THE ACT OF MASCULINITY .......................... 218 Transitions: Nicholson's Acting Style and His Influences ................... 218 "A Staging of the Father": Nicholson and Oedipal Narrative ................ 247 The Shining: Masculinity and Hallucin­ ation ......................................275 Epilogue: Nicholson Recuperated? .... 299 iv CONCLUSION ............................................. 308 APPENDIX Filmographies ........................................ 322 LIST OF REFERENCES ..................................... 331 v INTRODUCTION •'Men have everything to say about their own sexuality" — Helene Cixous "And I know my life Would look all right If I could see it on the silver screen."— "James Dean" by The Eagles Since 1975, when Laura Mulvey's ground-breaking article, "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema," appeared in the journal Screen, feminist psychoanalytic film theory has proceeded from the premise, cast in Freud's dichotomy of active masculinity and passive femininity, that the cinematic "look" derives from a male subjectivity and is directed at a female object, who takes on the characteristics of a possession. What this means for narrative film is that "the split between spectacle and narrative supports the man's role as the active one of forwarding the story, making things happen" (310). By exposing the way in which the look and action in "classical" narrative film are organized, in terms of scopophilia (Freud's division of a perverse "pleasure in looking" into voyeurism, fetishism, and narcissism) and the Oedipus Complex, Mulvey determined the project of feminist film criticism— to find a screen identity for women that is not controlled by a male gaze. Feminist film study since Mulvey's article has pursued two parallel goals: to understand female representation and spectatorship in dominant cinema, and to find a new way in independent film, and occasionally in dominant cinemas as well, to film the female body and privilege a female spectator. Much of the work along these lines has pinpointed complications in a female subjectivity that Mulvey sees as excluded from dominant film. Interest has centered more slowly on Mulvey's imperturbable and nearly omnipotent male subject. Where Mulvey theorized a narrative driven by sadism ("Sadism demands a story, depends on making something happen, forcing a change in another person ..." [311]), writers such as Kaja Silverman and David Rodowick began probing its repressed opposite, masochism. Critics began debating some of the Freudian assumptions which Mulvey reproduced without question, such as castration anxiety and the castrated woman as the bases of fetishism. Susan Lurie, in an extension of Karen Horney's Neo-Freudian work in the 1930s, "Pornography and the Dread of Woman," suggested that man does not dread woman, as in the Freudian scenario, because she has been castrated and thus reminds him that the same could happen to him, but because she has not been castrated and yet can still function about the same as he can. Thus, the importance of the phallus is diminished and such Freudian doctrine as penis envy and the wounded, incomplete woman is exposed as phallocentric wishful thinking, in a way reminiscent of the doubts which Freud himself expressed about some of his gender formulations. In the first of her articles dealing with masochism and male subjectivity, Silverman asserted that "the writing of the history of the male subject ... constitutes an elaborate vernelnuna. an elaborate denial of passivity and masochism" ("Masochism and Subjectivity" 8). In other words, where Mulvey's ruling-out of a place for a female spectator in narrative film led critics to look for underground ways in which the apparatus inscribes female spectatorship in spite of itself, her monolithic "figure in a landscape" began to lead critics to find ways in which the male subject shows the ruptures to his mastery and reveals male subjectivity as a construction, one which organizes itself around the repression of those weaknesses, fears, and passivities which it defines as "feminine." Gender definitions themselves are, after all, posited in patriarchy as monoliths, and Mulvey's essay has been so influential partly because it traces the one-dimensional outlines of the monolith, leaving it for others to fill in gaps and find complications. In the early eighties came the first tentative calls for studies of the construction of what Steve Neale called "the images and functions of heterosexual masculinity within mainstream cinema" (8). These came in