Image via WikipediaBelieve it or not, I'm still not happy with my research question, but I have to move on. My annotated bibliography is due on Wednesday, and I still need a couple more articles and a book review. Added to that, the draft of the paper is due the following week, so I'm swamped. I've actually learned a lot about men's studies since I started working on this project, which is good, as far as it goes. One of the things I'm finding is that some of the Bond characteristics are problematic in terms of current American men's culture (I can't speak for the UK on them, though), which seems to regard dressing well, for just one example, as unmanly.
I've been working my way through the Tasker book (Tasker, Yvonne, Ed. Action and Adventure Cinema. London: Routledge, 2004.), and it's really interesting. I can already see that there are ideas I can apply to my project, even though -- of course -- they are writing about different movies. One of those ideas has to do with bodies. Apparently Tasker previously wrote a book about what she calls "muscular cinema" (she's a Brit), talking about the action films of the 1980s, when Stallone and Schwarzenegger were the big stars. It's easy to see where she's coming from; just think of Rambo, and you can see a picture of Stallone where he's all sweaty and bulging with muscles. Things changed when Die Hard was released, since Bruce Willis is obviously not of the same physical type.
About half the authors of the articles in this book refer to the body issue. One of the articles I like so far is by Steve Neale, titled "Maximus Melodramaticus: Masculinity, Masochism and White Male Paranoia in Contemporary Hollywood Cinema."
Unfortunately, Neale writes in a pretty dense style, from my point of view, at least. Here's an example:
"This distinctly fetishistic adulation surrounding Maximus/Crowe's quasi-bestial masculine persona belies a return of the repressed: a nostalgic longing for a mythic masculine essence, a phallic presence rather than a bricolage of 'decorative' and commodified signifiers. Of course, this is exacerbated by the generic throwback to the 1950s epic and the national masculine certitude it worked to represent" (Neale 244).
See what I mean? Quasi-bestial? Bricolage?
Anyway, I'm trying to figure out where Robert Downey Jr. fits in the grand scheme of things in the action hero timeline. My problem has to do with a movie of his that I saw a long time ago, Restoration. There's a scene in that film where RD is naked -- with feathers -- and at one point he is walking away from the camera. Far from being a hard body (even as hard as Willis), he's pretty flabby. Not fat, but completely untoned, if you know what I mean. And every time I see him in a film nowadays, I have that mental picture. I wish I'd never seen it.
Image via WikipediaBelieve it or not, I'm still not happy with my research question, but I have to move on. My annotated bibliography is due on Wednesday, and I still need a couple more articles and a book review. Added to that, the draft of the paper is due the following week, so I'm swamped. I've actually learned a lot about men's studies since I started working on this project, which is good, as far as it goes. One of the things I'm finding is that some of the Bond characteristics are problematic in terms of current American men's culture (I can't speak for the UK on them, though), which seems to regard dressing well, for just one example, as unmanly.
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