Contemporary Masculinities in Fiction, Film and Television

Brian Baker

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781501320095
• eBook ISBN: 9781623567385
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

While masculinity has been an increasingly visible field of study within several disciplines (sociology, literary studies, cultural studies, film and tv) over the last two decades, it is surprising that analysis of contemporary representations of the first part of the century has yet to emerge. Professor Brian Baker, evolving from his previous work Masculinities in Fiction and Film: Representing Men in Popular Genres 1945-2000, intervenes to rectify the scholarship in the field to produce a wide-ranging, readable text that deals with films and other texts produced since the year 2000. Focusing on representations of masculinity in cinema, popular fiction and television from the period 2000-2010, he argues that dominant forms of masculinity in Britain and the United States have become increasingly informed by anxiety, trauma and loss, and this has resulted in both narratives that reflect that trauma and others which attempt to return to a more complete and heroic form of masculinity. While focusing on a range of popular genres, such as Bond films, war movies, science fiction and the Gothic, the work places close analyses of individual films and texts in their cultural and historical contexts, arguing for the importance of these popular fictions in diagnosing how contemporary Britain and the United States understand themselves and their changing role in the world through the representation of men, fully recognising the issues of race/ethnicity, class, sexuality, and age. Baker draws upon current work in mobility studies and in the study of masculinities to produce the first book-length comparative study of masculinity in popular culture of the first decade of the twenty-first century.

Part One

Narratives of Power

1

Gallivanting Around the World

A helicopter shot circles a crowd in a small arena. From a low angle, we see the crowd, predominantly African faces. A title indicates that we are in Madagascar. This is a snake pit, the crowd betting on snake or on mongoose. A man, a black African, is picked out in the crowd: betting, drinking from a bottle of beer, viewing a text on a cell phone. A cut to a medium shot of this man is disrupted by a white male face entering in the foreground from the right side, saying, ‘Looks like our man’. A whip pan reveals Bond standing high above the snake pit, arms folded, half-turned away from the action, leaning against a half-built wall. The film cuts again to snake and mongoose, to the African man on the phone. The white man in the foreground, who we learn is called ‘Carter’ and is an associate of Bond, touches his ear, and the man on the phone recognizes the gesture: he’s fiddling with an earpiece. He runs. Bond is still, watching the scene, as Carter falls into the snake pit, his handgun accidentally going off. The crowd flees, in a sequence of rapid edits, hand-held camera dominant, transmitting the energy of the dispersing crowd. The man with the phone (we now see he also has a small rucksack on his back) runs up some steps, and the camera pans up to find Bond still standing in the same pose. Bond runs.

This short scene begins one of the most exhilarating chase sequences in contemporary cinema, and certainly the most kinetic in the Bond film canon: the foot race between Bond (Daniel Craig) and the ‘bomb-maker’ (Sebastien Foucan) in Casino Royale. This chapter will analyse the sequence in some detail later, but we begin this chapter here to emphasize the contrast between stasis and mobility that is central to the film’s visual economy and to its politics of representation. Bond stands aloof, watching the snake pit; Bond runs. This chapter will take its critical cue from recent work done in the field of ‘mobilities’, particularly that of Tim Cresswell and John Urry, to investigate what I propose is Casino Royale’s aesthetic of total mobilization in terms of spectatorial gaze and free-running bodies in motion. This, I will argue, signals a rupture in the visual regime of the Bond series, embracing contemporary globalized capital’s emphasis upon free movement: of information, of resources and of the gaze, and, at the same time, the necessity to police this movement and maintain borders or erect barriers to restrict this fluidity. I will compare Casino Royale to the last of the Roger Moore Bond films, A View To A Kill (1985), which engages a modern spectatorial sensibility through the visual insistence upon panoramas seen from great height (the top of the Eiffel Tower, the top of the Golden Gate Bridge) and tourist spectacles. At this stage in the Bond production cycle, the tourist-location mise-en-scène which increasingly comes to characterize the films turns self-conscious: in A View To A Kill, at the bottom of the Eiffel Tower, in another chase sequence (markedly less kinetic than the one in Casino Royale) in which Bond engages his antagonist on foot, Bond knocks over stalls displaying the bric-a-brac of tourist consumption before stealing a Parisian taxi and launching it onto the roof of the ‘Paris–Istanbul’ coach, itself a relic from circa 1920. Abandoning the car, he dives off a bridge over the Seine and plunges through the glass roof of a large river cruiser containing a wedding party. Tourism and consumption become part of the very fabric of the world of A View To A Kill; its very title indicates its emphasis on seeing and spectatorship. I will return to this sequence later in this chapter.

First, I would like to outline the conceptual framework that I will utilize in the first half of this chapter with regard to movement and vision. Tim Cresswell, in On the Move (2006), revisits the way in which movement has been thought in Western culture, suggesting that ‘mobility’ enters the English language in the seventeenth century ‘when it was applied to persons, their bodies, limbs and organs’ (Cresswell 2006: 20). In the eighteenth century, the Latin term mobile vulgus is used to characterize the ‘moveable and excitable crowd’ (Cresswell 2006: 20), the Latin later shortened and anglicized to the ‘mob’. ‘Mobility’, as distinct from ‘movement’, is ‘thoroughly socialized and often threatening’ (Cresswell 2006: 20). However, it is modernity that is Cresswell’s true focus, a modernity that is fissured by mobility:

Modernity has been marked by time-space compression and staggering developments in communications and transportation. At the same time, it has seen the rise of moral panics ranging from the refugee to the global terrorist. The celebrated technologies of mobility simultaneously open up the possibility of an increasingly transgressive world marked by people out of place at all scales. (Cresswell 2006: 20–1)

We will return to the threatening figure of the global terrorist as a spectre that haunts mobile modernity in relation to Casino Royale later in this chapter. Cresswell’s critical intervention in the field of mobilities is organized in On The Move around two opposing principles that he sees as underpinning much social theory of movement and human geography: a sedentarist metaphysics is opposed to a nomadic metaphysics. The term sedentarist metaphysics Cresswell appropriates from the anthropologist Liisa Malkki, and by this Cresswell means, ‘ways of thinking about mobility in the Western world [that] see it as a threat, a disorder in the system, a thing to control’ (Cresswell 2006: 26). A sedentarist metaphysics privileges rootedness or locatedness, ‘the moral and logical primacy of fixity in space and place’ (Cresswell 2006: 26). This metaphysics ‘reaffirm[s] and enable[s] the commonsense segmentation of the world into things like nations, states, countries, and places’ (Cresswell 2006: 28). There is a tension between mobility and place in modernity, argues Cresswell, but it is not that between an inauthentic spatial flux and an authentic sense of locatedness; rather, modernity produces an irreducible tension between free flows of capital, labour, information and populations, and the need to restrict or control this mobility, as it may destabilize the geopolitical and economic structures than enable these flows. I will turn to the economic and political implications of this tension towards the end of this chapter, but here I would like to turn to what Cresswell places in opposition to the sedentarist metaphysics: the ‘nomadic metaphysics’.

The metaphysics of mobility

As Cresswell points out, in contemporary social theory, ‘words associated with mobility are unremittingly positive’ (Cresswell 2006: 25). Flux, fluidity, dynamic, mobile: all words that seem to offer the possibility of disrupting the ideological landscape, to resist or destabilize hegemonic forms of subjectivity, cultural representation or everyday life. ‘Mobility has become the ironic foundation for anti-essentialism, antifoundationalism and antirepresentationalism’ (Cresswell 2006: 46), he writes. The figure of mobility as resistance can be found in the work of Michel de Certeau, Guy Debord and contemporary psychogeographers, or the ‘nomadology’ of Felix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze and others. Cresswell is suspicious of ‘nomad thought’. In appropriating the figure of the ‘nomad’, such thought falls prey to ‘androcentric tendencies’ and ethnocentrism, if not a repeating of ‘centuries of Western romanticization of the non-Western other. . . . Insofar as nomadology looks to the representations of colonial anthropology for its conception of the nomad, it is a thoroughly Orientalist discourse’ (Cresswell 2006: 54). It is no coincidence that the free-running footrace in Casino Royale takes place in Madagascar, just as it is no coincidence that the dangerous ‘terrorist’ figure is represented as a black African (although he is played by Sebastien Foucan, the French exponent of parkour). The connection between the nomad, the mobile subject and the colonial subject is all too evident in Casino Royale. I will pick up on the implicit racialization of difference in the free-running sequence shortly.

Although the binary that Cresswell deploys between a sedentarist and nomadic metaphysics may, like all binaries, appear problematic, it does provide a framework for thinking through mobility and representation that does not fall into the trap of a crude moral or ideological coding: mobility good, fixity bad. In fact, in my understanding of Cresswell’s argument, modernity is characterized by an irreducible tension between mobility and fixity that insists upon their mutual implication rather than placing a final value upon one or the other. Where Cresswell attempts to deconstruct the informing premises of Western thinking about mobility, there is a long history of thought that connects mobility to vision and spectacle, and it is to this that I wish to now turn. Cresswell’s proposal of opposing metaphysics provides the overarching conceptual framework for this chapter, but it is crucial to historicize and (irony notwithstanding) locate my discussion of mobility, the gaze and modernity in specific historical and cultural contexts and the history of theorization of these concepts.

My argument in this chapter rests upon evidence that the nineteenth century experienced the development of a particular kind of visual culture which placed the consumption of spectacle at the centre of the experience of everyday (urban) life. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, in his book The Shock of the Real: Romanticism and Visual Culture 1760–1860 (2001), locates the rise of the ‘society of the spectacle’ not in the Second Empire Paris of the 1860s, but in London at the turn of the nineteenth century. Wood suggests that a growing economy of spectacular consumption, an identifiably modern visual culture, is a major motivating force behind the rise of Romanticism and its critique of industrial modernity. Wood notes that Wordsworth, in The Prelude, includes a section in which he visits a ‘panorama’ in London (a kind of large, artificial, painted vista, usually of a cityscape such as London or Paris) and then contrasts this to the real or unmediated experience of nature available to he or she who seeks it out – in the Lakes, for instance. In the Preface to the second edition of the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth contrasts a modern ‘degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation’ (Wordsworth 1970: 161), which would include panoramas, the theatre and other elements of visual spectacle, with ‘organic sensibility’ and poetry as the ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’ (Wordsworth 1970: 160). Panoramas and spectacle paintings were in enormous vogue in the early nineteenth century, particularly in Europe, and also in the paintings of Frederick Edwin Church in the United States. Church’s Niagara of 1857 was a huge success when exhibited, almost as huge as the canvas itself. Church frames the water thundering over the Niagara Falls as an awe-inspiring spectacle, devoid of human life and framing a moment of direct communion between spectator and Nature in its most powerful guise. The spectacle of Nature, the falls themselves, become in Church’s hands, a spectacle painting, complete unto itself as a kind of marvel or ‘event’. There is no Wordsworthian anxiety here.

I am not the first to note a connection between the rise of a nineteenth-century culture of spectacle and the forms of spectacular cinema at work in contemporary culture. Scott Bukatman, in ‘The Artificial Infinite’, writes:

The paintings of Frederick Church are particularly appropriately considered alongside [Douglas] Trumbull’s [special] effects [in the sequence that ends 2001: A Space Odyssey]. The astonishing, bold colour experiments (special effects) that Church unleashed in depicting his twilight skies and volcanic eruptions were the result of new technologies in cadmium-based pigment production. These effects were placed at the service of atmospheric and cosmological phenomena: not just the sky, but the sun and the moon, a meteor, and the aurora borealis. . . . Through slitscan technologies, Trumbull created a set of images that were little more than organized patterns of light – the very stuff of cinema. Light, with its implications of revelation and blinding power, is also the very stuff of the sublime. (Bukatman 1999: 263–4)

In slightly different terms, Gillen D’Arcy Wood also offers a connection between early nineteenth-century forms of spectacle and the cinema when he suggests that ‘the panorama anticipated the early twentieth-century newsreel. In commercial terms it operated more like the contemporary movie industry than the traditional art market’ (Wood 2001: 101). Although these continuities are important, I would like to suggest a complication here in the spectacular forms of modernity that I have outlined above. The panorama, the exhibition, the arcade, are mobile forms of the gaze that rest upon static displays; the forms of contemporary cinematic spectacle conform more to what Anne Friedberg suggests is a ‘virtual mobile gaze’. In Window Shopping, Friedberg proposes not a rupture between a modern and a postmodern visuality, but instead an ‘epistemological tear along the fabric of modernity, a change produced by the increasing cultural centrality of an integral feature of both cinematic and televisual apparatuses: a mobilized “virtual” gaze’ (Friedberg 1993: 2). The distinction Friedberg makes between the mobilized gaze and the mobilized ‘visual’ gaze is organized around the central term of cinema. The mobilized gaze is produced by ‘cultural activities that involve walking and travel’ (Friedberg 1993: 2), such as flânerie; tourism; mobility created by trains, bicycles, steamships, elevators, automobiles, airplanes; and cultural sites such as exhibition halls, winter gardens, arcades, department stores and museums. The gaze is mobilized because the spectating subject circulates around a fixed display of objects that are actually present (museum exhibits, tourist attractions); the gaze becomes ‘virtual’ when this experience is ‘but a received perception mediated through representation’ (Friedberg 1993: 2). Like Wood, Friedberg connects the panorama with cinema, suggesting that the panorama was a kind of ‘building machine . . . designed to transport . . . the spectator-subject’ (Friedberg 1993: 20) through the presentation of a vast cityscape that imitated (or perhaps ‘virtualized’) the experience of taking the whole of London or Paris from a great height. The cinema audience do not move themselves; their gaze is mobilized ‘virtually’ through what is shot and then presented on the cinema screen. The gaze is then dislocated from the actual movement of bodies in space. As a cinematic spectator, we occupy a de-realized subject-position that presents us with the illusion of corporeality through a point of view and the kind of immersive experience (and suppression of spectatorial self-consciousness) presented to us by the Hollywood continuity system.

The Tourist Gaze

The movement of bodies in space is crucial to what John Urry, in The Tourist Gaze (2002), argues to be a particular form of visuality produced by tourism and travel, the tourist gaze of his title. In fact, Urry’s tourist gaze is analogous to what Friedberg calls the mobilized gaze, in that it is a corporeal mobility. Urry makes a distinction between the ‘ “static” forms of the tourist gaze, such as that from a balcony vantage point’ (Urry 2002: 153), which he associates with still photography, and a ‘ “mobility of vision” [where] there are swiftly passing panorama, a sense of multidimensional rush and the fluid interconnections of places, peoples and possibilities’ (Urry 2002: 153), which is connected to the development of the railway and then the automobile. A kind of whirling, kaleidoscopic visuality implied by Urry’s second category has clear affinities with flânerie, the urban sensorium of shocks and energies analysed by Walter Benjamin. The ‘tourist gaze’ is still a mobilized gaze; however, virtuality has yet to enter the field.

The centrality of tourism and travel to Bond texts (Fleming’s and the films) needs little further emphasis from me, though it is important to note how Michael Denning’s analysis of Bond’s ‘heroic consumption’ of the tourist spectacle is echoed so s...

Table of contents

• Cover-Page
• Half-Title
• Title
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part 1 Narratives of Power
• Part 2 Science Fiction
• Part 3 Gothic/Horror/The Fantastic
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright