Image via WikipediaThis week, I'm supposed to be doing a QHQ (Question-Hypothesis-Question) about my research project. Here goes.
Q: What's the deal with Dolarhyde, his son, and the other young males in Cowboys & Aliens? (yeah, it's not too elegant a question, but it's really my starting point)
H: Dolarhyde is looking for a more satisfying father-son relationship than he has with his son Percy. Percy is a bully, and it's pretty obvious that Dolarhyde has made him that way: he uses his clout to get Percy out of trouble, and Percy makes a lot of trouble. He does whatever he feels like doing, no matter how obnoxious or dangerous it is. In the scene where Percy (accidentally) shoots the deputy, he has already threatened everyone in town with his father's wrath, and there doesn't seem to be any doubt that his father will back him up. But when Dolarhyde shows up to get Percy out of jail, it's also clear that he doesn't think much of his son. He tells him to shut up, and ignores him while he tries to intimidate the sheriff into letting him go.
What I'd really like to know is how they got to this point, but the film doesn't offer any hints about that. So, my next question is . . .
Q: With all of Dolarhyde's more-or-less paternal interactions with the other men and the boy, what do we learn about his parenting style?
I sort of have a (or is it "an") hypothesis for that one, too, but I'll stop here for now.
Image via WikipediaWell, based on what I heard in class this last week, annotated bibliographies can be pretty hard to do. Dr. Toffee said that she's had students in the past who made so many mistakes that they wound up owing her points. So, I guess I'll have to be really careful with this one. One of my books has come into the library, but I can't get over there until Friday. The book is:
Brod, Harry. The Making of Masculinities: The New Men's Studies. Boston : Allen & Unwin, 1987. Print.
I'm almost sure that this citation is correct, but I'll check it again when I'm putting the whole thing together. From the contents listed in the catalog, this is a collection of articles about basic issues in men's studies, with the exception (of course) of the thing I'm most interested in, fatherhood (and "sonhood," which is not a word, I guess). More about it later.
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I haven't had much time to begin my real searching for articles and books yet, but I've been thinking a lot about the movie, sorry, the film, and I think I'm going to focus on fathers and sons. For a working thesis, I'm going with Colonel Dollarhyde's unsatisfying relationship with his son appears to lead him to looking for more worthwhile son material in other males. That would explain the way he treats the little boy and Lonergan, as well as the Native American guy who is his son's companion. This leaves me with four or five scenes to choose my two or three for analysis.
Now, to get to researching fathers and sons
Image via WikipediaI am told that it's okay for women to use a men's studies approach (and for men to use a women's studies approach), so that's what I'm going to do. I haven't gotten down to specifics in my searching yet. I've looked at as much of The Journal of Men's Studies as I can online, and I went to the website for AMSA, the American Men's Studies Association. Their motto seems to be "advancing the critical study of Men and Masculinities," which fits what I'm trying to do. There are a lot of academic journals that publish this stuff, according to the website, but now I need to start looking for a couple of things. I know I want to look for articles that have to do with fathers and sons, but I think I might also look for some on warrior codes, since there seems to be something going on once the fighting starts, and also because Dollarhyde (the Ford character) has a military background that the other characters keep referring to. So, I guess I'd better get going on this.
Image via WikipediaThis week, I'm supposed to be doing a QHQ (Question-Hypothesis-Question) about my research project. Here goes.
