Abstract
Film and cultural theorists have long been preoccupied with the figure of masculine crisis, a concept premised on lost authority, whether this is judged to be a nostalgic illusion or an acknowledgement of changing social patterns of work, education, income, family life and so on. There is undoubtedly a sense in which some (though by no means all) American films and stars have expressed fundamental uncertainties as to what it means to be a man within contemporary culture. How consistent or extensive these uncertainties are in the American cinema more broadly, or what relationship they might bear to actual social change, are more open questions. There is a tendency in cultural commentary towards rather bold generalizations about the state of men and masculinity; feminist criticism and theory has frequently responded with scepticism, suggesting that masculinity is constituted through crises, defined by a need for male assertion which crisis naturalizes. Whichever perspective one adopts, both point to a pervasive sense of instability about gender identity, and the need for more precise and careful accounts in response to that instability.
Donna Peberdy is intent on reframing debates on male crisis; against the pervasive crisis discourse of the 1990s and 2000s, she postulates an instability of the male image, most particularly as expressed in cinema. Peberdy identifies and interrogates some of the key themes and tropes which express this instability; for her, American films articulate contradictory images rather than falling into clear-cut categories or eras as some critics have claimed – from hard-bodied to sensitive fathers, for instance. Many of the films considered in Masculinity and Film Performance – Magnolia, Broken Flowers, Glengarry Glen Ross – are clearly conflicted as to what makes a man; their power is to articulate that conflict with complexity – as sentimental, comic, even tragic. And, as Peberdy’s nuanced attention to stars’ work as actors and images demonstrates, the central male performances are crucial here. The exploration of performance style through figures such as Michael Douglas, Bill Murray and William H. Macy excavates quite precisely how the elements of film style, acting and direction contribute to the evocation of angst (against easy assertions of zeitgeist which Peberdy tackles rather well, most notably in relation to Douglas). The book’s exploration of diverse themes and tropes – from an opposition of wimps and wild men, to constructions of fatherhood and of male aging – underlines above all the range and uneasy coexistence of unstable male images.
Peberdy avoids aligning herself with feminism, contesting the view that the performance of masculinity is always bound up in an expression of power. Instead, she centres her analysis on a figure of male angst which she regards as pervasive within American cinema of the 1990s and 2000s. For Peberdy, angst allows a sidestepping of the thorny question of crisis – a response to external factors of one kind or another – in favour of the interiority of an individual characterized by emotional uncertainty. The figure of male angst, understood as ‘internal and individual’ (p. 8), allows the book’s (extremely productive) emphasis on performance. Performance emerges as a nuanced site for interrogating gender, derived in part from Butler’s sense of the performative, in part from Goffman’s model of the social actor and most significantly from theorizations of film performance, of acting. Clearly these different nuances of the concept performance suggest different ways of reading films and indeed performances of manliness.
Angst suggests the presence of an insight as to the limits of prescribed social roles, opening up rich terrain for writers and performers. The sidestepping of more overt questions of power feels unfamiliar within studies of masculinity. While she insists on the importance of historical and cultural context, Peberdy asks us rather to consider the cost of instability for men as it is performed through these films, rather than mapping social change onto film performance. The model of ongoing instability is more resonant than the unnecessary drama of the language of ‘crisis’ and is certainly more effective for dealing with the internal struggles dramatized in many movies. In turn, one wonders whether angst might be open to women as well as men, why American cinema tends to suggest otherwise, and why the characteristic presentation of male uncertainty suggests not an alliance with women but either blank incomprehension or outright hostility. Though these are not questions with which Peberdy’s book is centrally concerned, her achievement is to require us to ask these questions in a way that takes account of performance, in all its registers. In a developing area of critical work, she offers a fresh and rich perspective, one which acknowledges the cinema as a medium bound by history but which insists on the complexities of filmmaking and film performance.