Cowboys, Postmodern Heroes, and Anti-Heroes: the Many Faces
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COWBOYS, POSTMODERN HEROES, AND ANTI-HEROES: THE MANY FACES OF THE ALTERIZED WHITE MAN Hyon Joo Yoo Murphree, B.A. Thesis Prepared for the Degree of MASTER OF ARTS UNIVERSITY OF NORTH TEXAS August 2000 APPROVED: Diane Negra, Major Professor Olaf Hoerschelmann, Committee Member Diana York Blaine, Committee Member C. Melinda Levin, Graduate Coordinator of the Department of Radio, TV and Film Steve Craig, Chair of the Department of Radio, TV and Film C. Neal Tate, Dean of the Robert B. Toulouse School of Graduate Studies Murphree, Hyon Joo Yoo, Cowboys, Postmodern Heroes, and Anti-heroes: The Many Faces of the Alterized White Man. Master of Arts (Radio, Television and Film), August 2000, 131 pp., references, 48 titles. This thesis investigates how hegemonic white masculinity adopts a new mode of material accumulation by entering into an ambivalent existence as a historical agent and metahistory at the same time and continues to function as a performative identity that offers a point of identification for the working class white man suggesting that bourgeois identity is obtainable through the performance of bourgeois ethics. The thesis postulates that the phenomenal transitions brought on by industrialization and deindustrialization of 50’s through 90’s coincide with the representational changes of white masculinity from paradigmatic cowboy incarnations to the postmodern action heroes, specifically as embodied by Bruce Willis. The thesis also examines how postmodern heroes’ “intero-alterity” is further problematized by antiheroes in Tim Burton’s films. TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION...........................................................................................................................................3 1. Reading a Dynamic Connection between the 1950’s and 1990’s..........................................................6 2. The Conditions of Alterity in White Masculinity..................................................................................9 The Case of Cowboys............................................................................................................................9 The Case of Postmodern Heroes..........................................................................................................14 3. Anti-heroes: Heroes in Drag................................................................................................................20 4. Organization ........................................................................................................................................23 THE BROTHERHOOD OF COWBOYS AND POSTMODERN HEROES: THE ALTERITY OF WHITE MASCULINITY ...........................................................................................................................................27 From Colony to Metropolis: The Condition of Alterity ...........................................................................27 Toward A Historicization of White Masculine Representation: From Cowboys to Postmodern Heroes.43 THE CASE OF COWBOYS.........................................................................................................................53 A Territory Contested...............................................................................................................................55 Economies of James Stewart’s Cowboys .................................................................................................67 THE CASE OF POSTMODERN HEROES .................................................................................................77 Bruce Willis: Man at Work.......................................................................................................................86 Bruce Willis and Liminal Body..............................................................................................................100 DRESSING UP, DRESSING DOWN: HEROES IN DRAG......................................................................103 The Economy of Male Masquerade........................................................................................................107 Men in Drag............................................................................................................................................115 WORKS CITED..........................................................................................................................................127 FILMOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................................................131 ii CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION Umberto Eco (1997) suggests that faced with an intrusive reality a historical entity becomes a metahistory or a symbol. (p.105) Yet, if in Eco’s example Hebrew receded to hieroglyphics, the white manhood of the American West in American cinema seems to have continued to accumulate identity properties and expand into a new field of representations. It seems that hegemonic white masculinity, when contested, adopts a new mode of material accumulation by entering into an ambivalent existence as a historical agent and a form of metahistory at the same time. And from that ambivalence hegemonic white masculinity draws power to reproduce its normalcy because its unequal purchase in material power enables it to monopolize the power to universalize itself as a category that transcends the particularity of class, race and gender identities. White masculinity, thus, begins to connote political power that prevents politicizing of other identities. My thesis investigates how hegemonic white masculinity functions as a performative identity that offers a point of identification for the working class white man suggesting that bourgeois identity is obtainable through the performance of bourgeois ethics. Under this construction working class identity becomes elided and working class white males are made to conform to the idea that they compete for the recovery of a normative whiteness endangered by the marginality of their class. Hollywood cinema 3 discourse textually offers the ideology of redemption through upward mobility and normative whiteness as a prerequisite. In my research, I hope to establish that hegemonic whiteness is an acquisitive identity that maintains its normalcy through co-optation. When confronted by the identities it seeks to contain, hegemonic whiteness broadens its borderlines to include them as part of its system of representations. When difference is addressed through hegemonic terms, it becomes part of a system of similarities, in other words, it is assimilated. As an example of this practice, I will examine how the body of Hollywood star Bruce Willis is ambivalently coded as middle class with a working class virility as an appropriated property of its white masculinity, enabling him to serve as a figure of identification for the working class white man in a vacuum of working class representations. For this purpose, I will analyze some of the action adventure films in which Willis has starred in the 1990’s, such as The Fifth Element (Luc Besson, 1997) and Armageddon (Michael Bay, 1998), which I will categorize as postmodern action adventure films. A similar project had been earlier carried out through James Stewart’s persona in the Westerns in which he appeared. Thus, I will also analyze some of the “string of hits during the 1950’s”(Schatz, 1989, p. 471) that I will term the Stewart-Mann project. These were the products of a deal between Universal Studios, Stewart and director Anthony Mann and they were as “ close to first-run releases as anything in Universal’s schedule.” (Schatz, 1989, p.471) In analyzing these two sets of films, I will postulate that the phenomenal transitions brought on by industrialization of the 1950’s and deindustrialization of the 1990’s in America coincide with the representational transformation of white masculinity 4 from a set of paradigmatic cowboy incarnations to the postmodern action heroes in Hollywood cinema. While the institutionalization of bourgeois identification has been the dominant historical project in Hollywood cinema, there are certain narrativizations of the lived experience of working class life albeit oblique and/or ambivalent ones. One such example may be found in On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954) in which unionism is a salvational move toward the legitimization of working class white manhood. In the Westerns and postmodern action adventure films I will examine, however, white manhood is represented as an archetype. Thus, apoliticized and ahistoricized, the identity of the working class white man is replaced outside of political contestations. In explaining how by the second century AD Latin and Greek languages began to lose their status as the only languages to express “harmoniously the totality of experience,” Eco (1997) suggests: By now, the classical rationalism elaborated and re-elaborated over centuries, had begun to show signs of age. With this, traditional religion entered a period of crisis…The imperial pagan religion had become a purely formal affair, no more than a simple expression of loyalty. Each people had been allowed to keep its own gods. (p.12) I believe a generic practice and consumption in film may tread a path similar to this “syncretism” that follows an awakening from a cultural practice as a ritual that represents a symbolic system. As 18th century German romanticist Novalis remarked, “the dreamer who dreams that he is dreaming is really very close to waking.”(Coates, 1985, p.33) And rituals, when well-rehearsed,