Men to Boys: Masculinities in Postwar Hollywood Film

WOMGEN 1243 Subject & Catalog Number

Description

Men to Boys surveys changing images of masculinity in Hollywood films from 1950 to the present. We use the films themselves to chart the enormous changes in how post-World War II culture conceptualized “manhood” and “masculinity.” For instance, the later 1940s and 1950s introduced a softer, wounded American man in films such as The Men and Fear Strikes Out. These changed in the 1960s with the introduction of a “hip,” rebellious male image in popular counterculture films such as Easy Rider and The Graduate. The 1970s saw the rise of the new African American male in Shaft – and a rise in independent African American filmmaking – as well as the emergence of the angry, violent white male protagonist in Taxi Driver. The late 1970s and early 1980s saw this image morph into the conflicted, often working class, white man in Coming Home and Raging Bull, only to splinter into the violent action hero of Die Hard and the vulnerable sexy teenager of Risky Business. By the 1990s, the “Shaft" character had transformed into the more complicated, and human, African American characters in the films of Spike Lee, such as Jungle Fever, and other emerging African American directors. By the mid-1990s, white masculinity was re-defined as juvenile and self-centered by teen-sex comedies such as American Pie. This led directly to the wildly popular comedies celebrating male immaturity of Judd Apatow featuring actors such as Seth Rogin and Jonah Hill. Recently new images of men – morally conflicted heroes saving children, shady lawyers exposing government corruption, comic book super-heroes that have human flaws have emerged – all breaking from and drawing upon former film incarnations of masculinity.

The course proceeds chronologically through the films, which we will analyze in the economic, political, sociological, and psychological context in which they were created, and to which they were responding. This will include major historical events such as World War II, the Black Power Movement, Second Wave Feminism, the war in Vietnam, the war in Iraq, as well as the rise and fall of the Cold War. We will contextualize films in the emergence of the counterculture, the collapse of the American economy, the gradual de-stabilization of the middle and working class, and the weakening of the government's moral authority. All of which began with the Vietnam war and continued through Watergate and the Bush administration. Readings from feminist film theorists such as E. Ann Kaplan and from sociological and theoretical essays by Stephanie Coontz, Barbara Ehrenreich, Dorothy Dinnerstein, and Juliet B. Schor will also provide essential context and critique.