Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema

Cyborgs, Troopers and Other Men of the Future

Marianne Kac-Vergne

• Publisher: I.B. Tauris
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN:
  9781780767482
• eBook ISBN:
  9781786723154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Historia y crítica cinematográficas

If science fiction stages the battle between humans and non-humans, whether alien or machine, who is elected to fight for us? In the classics of science fiction cinema, humanity is nearly always represented by a male, and until recently, a white male. Spanning landmark American films from Blade Runner to Avatar, this major new study offers the first ever analysis of masculinity in science fiction cinema. It uncovers the evolution of masculine heroes from the 1980s until the present day, and the roles played by their feminine counterparts. Considering gender alongside racial and class politics, Masculinity in Contemporary Science Fiction Cinema also situates filmic examples within the broader culture. It is indispensable for understanding science fiction and its role in contemporary cultural politics.

1

Vulnerable Hypermasculinity

American society in the 1980s witnessed an important shift in the representations and significance of masculinity in both politics and Hollywood. Indeed, the emergence and popularity of extremely masculine heroes embodied by the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger can be traced back to a wider political drive, starting in the late 1970s, to bring back traditional values based on a patriarchal system where hegemonic masculinity had pride of place. Ronald Reagan’s election in 1980 coalesced interest groups with different objectives but at least one common goal: shoring up hegemonic masculinity, that is to say restoring the power of white men at the expense of minority groups. White blue-collar workers, disgruntled by Democratic policies of affirmative action or what they saw as ‘reverse discrimination’, turned to Reagan, while former southern Democrats also joined the Republican Party in reaction to the Democratic Party’s support of the Civil Rights Movement. Furthermore, Reagan was elected thanks to a powerful new force, the Religious Right, comprised of organisations like Moral Majority and Concerned Women for America (CWA), both founded in 1979, which, Susan Faludi argues,¹ strongly contributed to a ‘backlash’ against women’s liberation and feminism. Jerry Falwell, the founder of Moral Majority, maintained that the Bible commanded women to submit to their husbands, while CWA vigorously opposed the Equal Rights Amendment and abortion rights, advocating ‘pro-family’ values and the return of the patriarchal family.² Finally, Reagan appealed to Republican hawks because his staunch anticommunism contrasted with what they saw as Carter’s weakness on the international front. Carter was accused of being ‘soft’, connoting femininity, while Reagan appeared tough and ‘hard’,³ favouring military action over diplomacy, promoting military rearmament and calling for American world hegemony.

Reagan’s election and leadership were thus built on the celebration of hegemonic masculinity. His aggressive foreign policy confirmed his virility as well as the nation’s, leaving the spectre of Vietnam far behind and heralding a future where a confident America would be invulnerable and omnipotent through, for instance, the Strategic Defense Initiative, Reagan’s project of building a space-based nuclear shield to protect the United States. As John Orman remarks when defining Reagan as the ‘quintessential macho president’,⁴ Reagan himself embodied a virile masculinity, photographed chopping wood or breaking horses,⁵ and threatening the Soviet Union as an ‘Evil Empire’ that must be destroyed. This was reinforced when Reagan miraculously survived an assassination attempt on 30 March 1981, to which he reacted with courage and equanimity, joking to his wife that ‘[he] forgot to duck’. The attempt on his life and Reagan’s response resulted in the highest popularity ratings for a president in polling history.⁶ After the Watergate scandal and the ‘malaise’ of the Carter era, the 1980s saw the return of a strong presidency, which had a significant impact on the representations of masculinity. Based largely on film heroes and plots, Reagan’s constructed masculinity, in turn, had a strong influence on the filmic representations of his time, as audiences yearned for narratives of heroism and strength both on the political scene and at the cinema. These narratives were embodied by what Susan Jeffords calls ‘hard bodies’ that ‘enveloped strength, labor, determination and courage’ and were, ‘as Reagan’s own, male and white’, as well as staunchly heterosexual,⁷ in opposition to the feminised or racialised ‘soft bodies’ linked to ‘what Reagan’s public relations workers characterised as the “weakened” years of the Carter administration’.⁸

Hollywood responded to, and participated in, this drive to reassert the central and dominant position of white men in a revalidated patriarchal system. More than any other genre, the flourishing genre of science fiction contributed to the shoring-up of white masculinity by resorting to the hallmarks of hypermasculinity, that is to say the extreme glorification of masculine attributes, including an emphasis on physical strength and aggression.⁹ However, hypermasculinity has negative connotations for many psychologists, such as Donald Mosher and Mark Sirkin, who devised, as early as 1984, a Hypermasculinity Inventory to ‘measure the macho personality constellation’, comprised of three elements: ‘Calloused Sex Attitudes’; ‘Danger as Exciting’; and ‘Violence as Manly’.¹⁰ As Erica Scharrer has stated:

the hyper-masculine male eschews and even ridicules ‘soft-hearted’ emotions, celebrates and views as inevitable male physical aggression, blocks attempts by women or others to appeal to emotions by belittling sexual relations or women in general, and exhibits sensation-seeking behaviors that bring a welcome sense of vigor and thrill.¹¹

Analysing science fiction films through the lens of hypermasculinity can reveal a more complex and nuanced portrayal of masculinity than the more manichean and univocal hard body. This chapter insists on the complexity of hypermasculinity in 1980s science fiction films. If films like The Terminator (James Cameron, 1984), the RoboCop trilogy (RoboCop, Paul Verhoeven, 1987; RoboCop 2, Irvin Kershner, 1990; RoboCop 3, Fred Dekker, 1993), Predator (John McTiernan, 1987),¹² Total Recall (Paul Verhoeven, 1990), Terminator 2 (James Cameron, 1991), Universal Soldier (Roland Emmerich, 1992) or even The Fly (David Cronenberg, 1986) seem, at first, to present an enhanced masculinity especially in terms of bodily strength, which could therefore be seen as the masculinist realisation of the hypermasculine ideal, the male bodies in these films often experience a process of transformation that presents them as vulnerable because penetrable by an Other, whether it be a machine or an animal as small as a fly. The films are actually built on a tension between the need to restore hegemonic masculinity through the showcasing of the ‘hard body’, that is to say the hypermasculine built-up male body, and what can be seen as a strategy of victimisation, which insists on the suffering and vulnerability of the male body. Many of the hypermasculine heroes of American science fiction movies of the 1980s paradoxically derive their power from a fundamental traumatic experience, legitimising them as victims. However, this paradoxical masculinity, apparently invulnerable yet penetrable, transformed and fragmented, can also be seen as a questioning of the hypermasculine ideal and the drive to impose a normative hegemonic masculinity which, pushed to the extreme, reveals itself as an unnatural construction or even a monstrosity.

Reclaiming Hegemony Through Hypermasculinity

Displaying the male body

The most striking aspect of the big blockbuster science fiction films of the 1980s is the visibility of the male body. This can be explained in part by the context, described by Jeffords as ‘an era of bodies’,¹³ when even such politicised and countercultural figures as Jane Fonda turned away from political battles to focus, in fitness exercise videos, for example, on the individual body. Yet given the possible homoerotic overtones associated with the spectacle of masculinity, as underlined by Steve Neale,¹⁴ the extent to which male bodies appear naked or half-naked on screen remains a surprising fact. Total Recall, for example, begins its narration with a shot of Arnold Schwarzenegger waking from a bad dream and sitting up in bed, his bare torso progressively revealed and enhanced by light streaming in (his wife – played by Sharon Stone – conveniently opens the blinds), by a change in camera position that cuts from a frontal close shot of his shoulders to a medium-long shot of his whole body shown in profile, muscular arms extended, pectorals bulging, and finally by his wife’s titillating playfulness, pulling the sheets so as to offer a glimpse of Schwarzenegger’s buttocks (Figure 1.1). In fact, Schwarzenegger had already appeared au naturel a few years earlier, in the opening scene of The Terminator showing the arrival of a cyborg sent back in the past unarmed and unclothed, a scene paralleled within the film by the arrival of his human opponent, played by Michael Biehn, also presented stark naked. As we shall see, this seminal scene had further ramifications in The Fly, where Jeff Goldblum is revealed in the nude, and of course in Terminator 2, where the arrival scene is reprised and Schwarzenegger’s nudity commented on humorously by a reverse shot of a waitress nodding appreciatively when the disrobed Terminator walks into her bar.

Figure 1.1Doug wakes up in Total Recall

Why are there so many scenes of male nudity in science fiction films of the 1980s? Male nudity in the previously mentioned scenes is always heavily loaded, with a strong emphasis on muscles, especially biceps and pectorals, seen as more specifically male. A synecdoche for the display and control of the male body, muscles function as visible and natural male attributes, connoting physical strength and activity, and are as such central to the construction of hypermasculinity. Muscles are constantly foregrounded, even in the simple handshake between Dutch (Schwarzenegger) and Dillon (Carl Weathers) in Predator, which immediately turns into an arm-wrestling match framed in close-up, biceps bulging out of the two men’s short-sleeved shirts, or in RoboCop, which showcases sculpted titanium pectorals in Robocop’s metallic armour, reproducing a bodybuilt torso. Within an ideology that associates masculinity with activity, the emphasis on bodybuilding as a process of physical training and transformation allows male stars to display their bodies without being feminised, since, as Richard Dyer puts it, ‘[t]‌he muscle man is the end product of his own activity of muscle-building’.¹⁵ Hypermasculinity thus appears as the net result of the male actors’ often highly publicised bodybuilding and physical training efforts, especially in Schwarzenegger’s case, but also in those of Carl Weathers and Jean-Claude Van Damme, even though the process itself is never shown onscreen. Thus, the heroes’ physical strength remains ‘natural’. Despite its constructedness through bodybuilding, hypermasculinity paradoxically goes back to an essentialist definition of masculinity as both active and naturally powerful. Furthermore, according to Dyer, muscles are read as signs of male power, hence naturalising male hegemony:

The potential for muscularity in men is seen as a biological given, and is also the means of dominating both women and other men who are in competition for the spoils of the earth. The point is that muscles are biological, hence ‘natural’ … The ‘naturalness’ of muscles legitimises male power and domination.¹⁶

The visibility of the male body in hypermasculine science fiction films can be seen as reinforcing and justifying male hegemony, which is something men have actively strived for and therefore somehow ‘deserve’. In this way, hegemonic masculinity is praised for being ‘hard’, both resistant and difficult to attain.

Scenes of male nudity are also often used to stage a rebirth. In The Fly, Seth Brundle (Jeff Goldblum) is first seen naked when he enters the telepod that will fuse him with a fly, creating a new mutant creature. It is interesting to see how this teleportation scene echoes in many ways the arrival of the Terminator in the 1984 film. Both scenes are filmed as fantastical and even mystical events, with lightning and mist announcing and delaying the revelation of the transformed male body. The latter is finally revealed by a cold white light contrasting with the surrounding darkness, creating a chiaroscuro effect that makes the male body stand out. Most striking is the similarity between the positions of the male body and the camera movements used in both scenes. The naked body is first shown crouching in a foetal position, then slowly deploys itself while the camera zooms in and tilts to end on a magnifying low-angle close shot underlining the protagonists’ torsos, especially their well-defined pectorals (Figure 1.2). These echoes from The Terminator – Seth’s foetal position in the womb-like telepod and the final low-angle shot – all contribute to announce the arrival of a new, more masculine hero who can meet the standards of hypermasculinity.

Figure 1.2Low-angle shots of the naked Goldblum and Schwarzenegger in The Fly and The Terminator

Indeed, Seth’s rebirth initially appears as a hegemonic regeneration and masculinisation, underlined by the enhancement and display of the male body. Goldblum worked out intensively before being ‘exposed’, as he puts it himself,¹⁷ after the teleportation, thus giving the impression of a suddenly beefed-up body. And exposed he is, appearing repeatedly unclothed in the scenes following the teleportation: in bed with Ronnie (Geena Davis), performing incredible acrobatics half-naked, wandering around in his underwear after lengthy intercourse. In fact, the teleportation initially transforms Seth into the man he always wanted to be, as he remarks when he grows coarse hair on his back: ‘I’ve never been hairy enough, always too boyish. I’m looking forward to a hairy body.’ His costumes also reflect this masculinisation, with the film utilising a leather jacket which functions as a fetishistic expression of virility, again in an interesting echo of The Terminator’s famous ‘I’ll be back’ scene, where the Terminator ‘mans up’, putting on a leather jacket and sun glasses before attacking the police station. In The Fly, the jacket is repeatedly associated with virile sexual performance: Ronnie buys the jacket for Seth after their first night together; she is followed in the shop by her ex-boyfriend who snatches it from her in a jealous rage and comments sarcastically on Seth’s ‘big cock’. After his teleportation, Seth always wears the jacket to go out, most visibly when he leaves Ronnie in search of a new female partner, ranting on about ‘penetration beyond the veil of the flesh’ while putting on the jacket over his bare chest.

These films, especially those featuring a transformation, show the protagonists’ ‘hypermasculinisation’ through the display of masculine attributes and a special emphasis on the male body. This is central and quite specific to the 1980s, even though displays of the male body can be found in a few science fiction films of the 1960s and 1970s, especially those with Charlton Heston, such as Planet of the Apes (Franklin Schaffner, 1968) or The Omega Man (Boris Sagal, 1971). Comparing The Fly to its original, directed by Kurt Neumann and released in 1958, is particularly relevant in this respect. Whereas Cronenberg’s film is centred on the male body, its transformations and wonderful/terrifying abilities – the scene where Seth shows off his acrobatics is centrally positioned in the narrative as a purple patch of masculinity – the original film hardly shows the male body at all. Indeed, the main character in Neumann’s film is not the male scientist, André (David Hedison), but his wife, Hélène (Patricia Owens), who is also the narrator of the central flashback explaining her husband’s misadventure. Hélène’s emotions, traumatic experience and possible guilt are the driving force of the narrative, and she is thus onscreen for most of the time: the film repetitively uses close-ups of her expressive face, and her beauty is highlighted thanks to make-up, elegant dresses and revealing negligees. As for André, he only appears onscreen after 27 minutes, emerging in the upstairs light from his dark laboratory in the basement of his home, where he will remain for the rest of the film. Far from being on display, the male body is hidden and shielded from sight; confined in the dark, it is constantly covered, first by a scientist’s long coat later used to hide his fly claw, to which is added a black cloth draped over his fly head. Apart from one three-minute episode of destructive rage in full sight, the mutant body appears only briefly and rarely, helpless under its black sheet and lacking a voice, forced to ask for his wife’s help even to commit suicide. The body can only be glimpsed in death: a black claw hangs from the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Author Bio
• Endorsement
• Series Information
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Series Editors’ Foreword
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Vulnerable Hypermasculinity
• 2 Dystopia and Class War
• 3 Sidelining Women
• 4 ‘White Folks Ain’t Planning for Us to be Here’
• 5 Redefining Masculinity in Times of ‘Crisis’
• Afterword: The Gender Politics of Science Fiction Blockbusters
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Filmography