march 2010 stanford university Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema christina carroll brad garcia erin graham yessica hernandez james johnson derek knowles tenyia lee nia-amina minor jeff norman will northup roxanne paul tatum payan rodrigo pena alfredo sabillón darienne turner introduction karla oeler 4 will northup Smoke and Mirrors in Body and Soul 6 nia-amina minor Fat City vs. Body and Soul : 11 A Look into the Deconstruction of Masculinity alfredo sabillón The Look Your Heart Can’t Disguise : 16 Oma and the Malaise of Masculinity in John Huston’s Fat City brad garcia Knocking the Boxer Down 21 roxanne paul Opportunity vs. Difference : 26 The Final Fights in Fat City and Body and Soul james johnson The Realism of Fat City 31 darienne turner “Clothes Make the Man” 36 derek knowles Hustonian Humanity : 41 Musings on the Human Condition in Fat City erin graham Reflections In Deep Space : 46 Visions of Urban Prostration and Anonymity In Fat City tatum payan Lifting the Veil : 53 Hidden Homosexuality in Scorsese’s Raging Bull yessica hernandez Raging Bull : Constructing Identification 59 christina carroll Raging Bull : Fighting the Performer Within 65 rodrigo pena Raging Cinema : Raging Bull’s Audience Aggression 72 tenyia lee The Shadow of De Niro : 79 Meta-cinema in Martin Scorsese’s Raging Bull jeffrey norman Challenging American Optimism : 85 Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema introduction This book consists of the work of Stanford undergraduates who took the course Fundamentals of Cinematic Analysis in the winter quarter of 2010. This was a Writing-in-the-Major (WIM) course, which means that it stressed the process of writing and revision using discipline-specific language and concepts. The course approached the practice of cinematic analysis through a focus on masculinity and violence in American cinema. Students brought many methodologies to bear on this theme, including genre criticism; auteur theory; feminist and psychoanalytic film theory; and ideological analysis. A glance at the table of contents will show that two foci of the course were the boxing film subgenre and the films of Martin Scorsese. Most importantly, the course, in keeping with its purpose, stressed attentiveness to film form. This attentiveness to form appears in Will Northup’s subtle analysis of the use of mirror reflections in Body and Soul (Robert Rossen, 1947). Nia-Amina Minor and Roxanne Paul contrast Rossen’s studio-era film with Huston’s “Hollywood renaissance” revision of the boxing subgenre, Fat City (1972). In this latter film, Erin Graham and Brad Garcia discover surprising visual rhymes that significantly, and paradoxically, tie together city and farm, bed and boxing ring. Also writing on Fat City, Alfredo Sabillón demonstrates the intricate structural function of the character of Oma (Susan Tyrrell), Derek Knowles explores the meaning of the surprising freeze frame in the final scene, Darienne Turner discusses costumes, and James Johnson examines the film’s realism. Turning their attention to Martin Scorsese’s boxing/art film hybrid Raging Bull (1980), Tatum Payan and Yessica Hernandez explore the film’s tricky gender politics; Rodrigo Pena shows how the film produces some of its disturbing effects through framing, editing, and sound; and Christina Carroll and Tenyia Lee emphasize the importance of performance, with Lee making the strong claim that the film’s 4 self-reflexivity cues us to give more attention to De Niro’s extreme method acting than to La Motta’s character. Finally, Jeffrey Norman’s paper shifts attention from the boxing film to Scorsese as auteur, with astute analyses of Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore and Taxi Driver, which place these very different films in dialogue with one another. The authors of these essays and I would like to thank James Thomas. As Teaching Assistant, he led section discussions, read and critiqued multiple drafts, graded final papers, and generously helped with the organization of the end-of-quarter conference, which gave contributors to this volume an opportunity publicly to present their work and receive feedback. This book would not exist without Davey Hubay, who first proposed it as a possibility and has taken responsibility for its final formatting, design, layout, and printing. We were able to engage Davey’s services (she designed our conference poster as well) thanks to the generous funds given to all instructors of WIM courses by the Vice Provost for Undergraduate Education. We are grateful to the Department of Art and Art History, especially to Rachel Isip, Events and PR Manager, who saw to it that we had sustenance for the film conference that led to this book. Our deep gratitude also goes to the Art and Architecture Library, specifically Reference Librarian Katie Keller, who led a section designed to help students become familiar with several useful databases. Finally, we would like to acknowledge the importance of the graduate students in the course, Darci L. Gardner, Derisa Grant and Jason Sussberg, who contributed their quickness and eloquence to class discussion and the conference. Karla Oeler Visiting Associate Professor Department of Art and Art History Stanford University 5 Masculinity and Violence in American Cinema Smoke and Mirrors in Body and Soul will northup The sport of professional boxing has always occupied a uniquely ambivalent place in the American psyche. It is both the manly art and a brutal blood sport, an opportunity for the meanest immigrant to earn wealth and fame through his physical prowess and an opportunity for organized crime to cheat thousands of working-class men out of their income through fixed fights. This ambivalence is mirrored in the genre of boxing films. The boxing hero is initially attracted to the world of prize fighting because of the opportunity for financial independence it presents him only to become embroiled in the inevitable underbelly of vice and corruption that accompanies such a morally ambiguous source of wealth. In his essay “Body and Soul,” Leger Grindon identifies four fundamental conflicts that operate throughout the genre: body against soul, opportunity against difference, market values against family values, and anger against justice (Grindon, 54). These can be further reduced into a single fundamental conflict between the illusory goals a character is led to believe he wants, such as virility, opulence, and the respect of his peers on the one hand, and the goals the character actually needs to fulfill to be happy such as love, stability, and respect for himself on the other. The 1947 boxing drama Body and Soul plays out this conflict by constructing pairs of diametrically opposed characters to mirror each other as they each play out one half of the opposing possibilities. The parallels between film and boxing go back to the creation of the medium of motion pictures. One of Edison’s most popular exhibitions shown on his kinetoscope was footage of a sparring match between two prize fighters (Streible, 236). Movie spectatorship and sports spectatorship are both forms of mass entertainment historically associated with the working class. Genre theorist Rick Altman writes of genre films that “critics increasingly recognize their role in a complex cultural system permitting viewers to consider and resolve (albeit fictively) contradictions that are not fully mastered by the society in which they live” (Altman, 24). As such, the genre film serves a social function similar to that of boxing itself. According to Elliot Gorn, “a good match focused [working class] conflicts through the transparent symbolism of two heroes meeting under equal terms and orderly conditions. Whereas the divisions of 6 will northup the streets were shifting and chaotic, the ring created meaning from the chaos of existence, and the outcome of a fight offered cathartic if temporary resolution of deep social problems” (Gorn, 136). Both the genre film and the boxing match serve as a venue through which the viewing public can vicariously enact the conflict between their individual ambition and aggression and the demands of polite society in a framework safely contained by familiar stories or rules and fair play. Perhaps it was inevitable that genre films about boxing would examine the very fictions and mechanisms of projection that fuel the audience experience of both venues. Both the narrative and the visual subtext of Body and Soul invite viewers to compare the myths of success surrounding the boxing industry, the misplaced aggression the boxers are encouraged to direct at each other, and the disparities between the original, pure motives of the boxer / hero Charlie Davis (John Garfield) and the incentives used by the gangster Roberts (Lloyd Gough) to subtly twist him into something corrupt. The primary narrative technique used to achieve this comparison is the trope of doubling, which is reinforced and counterpointed by the repeated use of the visual trope of reflecting objects and characters through mirrors. Establishing parallels between two characters on opposite sides of an ideological divide is a common device in genre films. Altman again: “Constantly opposing cultural values to counter-cultural values, genre films regularly depend on dual protagonists and dualistic structures” (Altman, 24). This device is especially appropriate for the boxing film as boxing revolves around a conflict between two men who have been selected specifically because of their physical resemblance to each other by means of the weigh-in process. Body and Soul employs doubling throughout the film but the effect is most pronounced with two pairs in particular: Peg and Alice, Charlie’s competing love interests, and Ben and Marlowe, his two opponents in the film’s championship bouts. The dynamic of mirroring is introduced in the same scene in which Peg (Lili Palmer) makes her first appearance. The scene begins with a medium shot of Charlie’s mother (Anne Revere) standing in front of the stove.