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masculinity in media
masculinity in media
hegemonic masculinity in movies
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Cinematic Representation of the British society in the years 1990-2010
Parzival, a new lad or a boy in crisis – representations of masculinities in British films.
In 1990s, British cinema intensified attention to men showing their needs and pain. Different images of men were presented in British films. This essay will investigate various representations of masculinities in two film productions : Four Weddings and a Funeral (Mike Newell, 1994) and About a Boy (Chris Weitz and Paul Weitz, 2002).
The first representation of masculinity is the figure of the ‘new man’. Sean Nixon in his text Resignifying Masculinity: From ‘New Man’ to ‘New Lad’ mentions three ‘looks’. One is the ‘Buffalo’ look associated with the stylist Ray Petri, in other terms, young-looking men with glossy hair and dark shining skin. The next one is an Italian-influenced look. Characteristics of this look are the following : a dark skin tone and strong features. The last one this is a version of Edwardian Englishness. Slightly dressed man with greasy hair. This conservative look can be associated to Charles played by Hugh Grant from Four Weddings and a Funeral. The main character of the film ‘is an archetypal hero found in every storytelling culture.’ To win his princess, he must learn courage. This motif is well-known from various fairy tales. Four Weddings is a romantic comedy, a story of growing up of Charles.
Charles is presented as a good-looking and very amusing young Englishman. However, he is also clumsy, disorganized and accident-prone person. He can be regarded also as a man who has no manners. It is not told in the film what he does for a living. Charles is popular as a best man. He has to attend wedding ceremonies very often. He has many f...
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...n Masculinity’ (www.academia.edu)
Nixon S., Resignifying Masculinity : From ‘New Man’ to ‘New Lad’
Brayfield C., He makes us nice enough for export, New Statesman, 5 July 1999New Statesman, 5 July 1999
Ibidem.
Maslin J., Reviews/Film: Four Weddings and a Funeral, 9 March 1994, The New York Times
Penguin Readers, Teacher’s notes, Four Weddings and a Funeral, Pearson Education Limited 2008
Nixon S., Resignifying Masculinity : From ‘New Man’ to ‘New Lad’
Ibidem.
Gill R., Henwood K., Mclean C., A Genealogical Approach to Idealized Male Body Imagery, The London School of Economics and the University of East Anglia
Weitz Ch., Weitz P., About a Boy, 2002
Flowers Brashwell M., Sir Perceval of Galles, Kalamazoo, Michigan : Medieval Institute Publications, 1995
Penguin Readers, Teacher’s notes, About a Boy, Pearson Education Limited 2008
www.goodreads.com
Klumas, Amy L., and Thomas Marchant. “Images of Men in Popular Sitcoms”. Journal of Men’s Studies 2.3 (1994): 269. ProQuest. Web. 27 Jan. 2014.
In the classical Western and Noir films, narrative is driven by the action of a male protagonist towards a clearly defined, relatable goal. Any lack of motivation or action on the part of the protagonist problematizes the classical association between masculinity and action. Due to inherent genre expectations, this crisis of action is equivalent to a crisis of masculinity. Because these genres are structured around male action, the crises of action and masculinity impose a crisis of genre. In the absence of traditional narrative elements and character tropes, these films can only identify as members of their genres through saturation with otherwise empty genre symbols. The equivalency between the crises of genre and masculinity frames this symbol saturation as a sort of compensatory masculine posturing.
While America was just in its infancy during the late eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century, expanding and competing for its own national identity, there were ideals of manhood competing for dominance amidst the chaos. A couple of notions of masculinity were brought to the New World straight from Europe; the idea that men were to work hard for success and value family, while others maintained wealth and landownership as the characteristics of a man. However, the eminence of industrialization soon made these notions obsolete. Without these longstanding notions, American men were left in a crisis without an identity. It is within this framework that specific paintings serve as material expressions and vehicles for gendering beliefs and constructs.
Examining different scenarios, such as toy proportions, outlook from inmates in jail, and the ideas portrayed of what the ideal man consist from the viewpoint of man, the movie depicts these things to show how pop culture, social constructs, and masculine identities influence their opinions. Consequently, men believe they can gain respect and admiration from others from their use of violence and threats. Katz asked inmates about their ideology of masculinity; they said that masculinity is about having power and respect. Furthermore, they showed concerned about what the other inmates thought of them and their masculinity. Boys and men have to carefully shape their persona to fit the ideal standard of masculinity, no matter the cost. Katz and Earp break down the social constructs of masculinity by looking at the ideas of the “ideal man,” violence leading to masculinity, and degradation of masculinity by attacking individuals with the notion that they are acting
This essay sets out to distinguish how male characters can be portrayed in the same fashion as their female counterparts, and therefore become subjected to the same erotic objectification. This will be researched under the circumstances that the production revolves around gay characters and the assumed audience is exchanged from a homogenous crowd of heterosexual spectators, to a homogenous crowd of homosexual spectators. To support this claim there will be references to a segment from the American remake of the television series Queer as Folk (USA, dev. Ron Cowen, Daniel Lipman, 2000-2005) where Brian Kinney (Gale Harold) and Justin Taylor (Randy Harris) first meet.
In recent times, such stereotyped categorizations of films are becoming inapplicable. ‘Blockbusters’ with celebrity-studded casts may have plots in which characters explore the depths of the human psyche, or avant-garde film techniques. Titles like ‘American Beauty’ (1999), ‘Fight Club’ (1999) and ‘Kill Bill 2’ (2004) come readily into mind. Hollywood perhaps could be gradually losing its stigma as a money-hungry machine churning out predictable, unintelligent flicks for mass consumption. While whether this image of Hollywood is justified remains open to debate, earlier films in the 60’s and 70’s like ‘Bonnie and Clyde’ (1967) and ‘Taxi Driver’ (1976) already revealed signs of depth and avant-garde film techniques. These films were successful as not only did they appeal to the mass audience, but they managed to communicate alternate messages to select groups who understood subtleties within them.
In Susan Bordo’s essay “Beauty Rediscovers the male body”, Bordo stresses the changes on the concern of the male body and how the male body is depicted in advertisements. Bordo demonstrates her stance on male advertising with graphic images of male bodies with intense descriptions. In the 1990s there was this emergence of male models depicted in a more sexual way. As Bordo states in her essay, the images of these
Mosse, L George. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Macmillan publishers, 1996.
“Queer Cinema is Back” – headlines the front page of the 2005 issue of the Advocate, signifying to a new flood of movies making way into theatres. Five years prior to this news release B. Ruby Rich, who coined the art as New Queer Cinema almost a decade earlier, declared that the cinema had co-opted into “just another niche market” dominated by popular culture (Morrison 135 & Rich 24). What had seemed to be a movement, turned out to be only a moment in the brief years between the late 1980s and early 1990s when the energies of queer theory, the furies of AIDS activism, the legacies of independent and avant-garde filmmaking, and the schisms of postmodern identity politics came together in a bluster of cultural production to form a cinema of its own (Morrison 136). In many ways Rich’s criticism of the cinema is correct, the queer aspect that so brightly shone in films like Poison, Swoon, Paris Is Burning, Tongues Untied, The Living End and Head On, was shifting as the new millennium was approaching and making more difficult for queer films to stay queer against the forces of Hollywood. However, Rich lacks in her analysis on New Queer Cinema because she does not consider the breadth to which queer operates as a concept within the cinema. For Harry Benshoff and Sean Griffin, the editors of Queer Cinema, queer is an umbrella term encompassing dissident sexualities through history and, indeed, nominating them more productively than they were ever named in their own time (Morrison 137). For Michele Aaron, queer is a specific product of exigencies of social activism of the late 1980s and early 1990s, “with AIDS accelerating its urgency” and New Queer Cinema arising as an “art-full manifestation” of i...
Classic narrative cinema is what Bordwell, Staiger and Thompson (The classic Hollywood Cinema, Columbia University press 1985) 1, calls “an excessively obvious cinema”1 in which cinematic style serves to explain and not to obscure the narrative. In this way it is made up of motivated events that lead the spectator to its inevitable conclusion. It causes the spectator to have an emotional investment in this conclusion coming to pass which in turn makes the predictable the most desirable outcome. The films are structured to create an atmosphere of verisimilitude, which is to give a perception of reality. On closer inspection it they are often far from realistic in a social sense but possibly portray a realism desired by the patriarchal and family value orientated society of the time. I feel that it is often the black and white representation of good and evil that creates such an atmosphere of predic...
Gender and the portrayal of gender roles in a film is an intriguing topic. It is interesting to uncover the way women have been idealized in our films, which mirrors the sentiments of the society of that period in time. Consequently, the thesis of this essay is a feminist approach that seeks to compare and contrast the gender roles of two films. The selected films are A few Good Men and Some Like it Hot.
The Trouble with Men: Masculinities in European and Hollywood Cinema - Phil Powrie, Ann Davies and Bruce Babington.
...s often the stubborn majority, as it is difficult to simply change a characteristic so widely embedded in the framework of cinema. Therefore, it is not my objective to say that all movies must pass the radical Bechdel test or include the presence of a strong, independent female character; rather, we as a society must recognize that we are inherently biased in the topic of gender and must make an effort to exhibit a more conscientious and sympathetic portrayal of women in cinematic media. The simplest resolution can begin with clothing, where an audience’s viewing is not diverted by the lack of clothing from either male or female characters. The task of reinventing cinema is to reinvent a century of subconscious thinking, and only by taking one step at a time can both men and women watch a movie where all characters, both male and female, can be represented equally.
In conclusion, Charles Dickens, a social critic of humble origins himself, has conveyed his conception of a true gentleman, which is such a good conception that it is commonly used in our society today. He shows that you can only be a true gentleman at heart and if you are not it will be revealed. Matthew Pocket’s metaphor that ‘No varnish can hide the grain of the wood; and that the more varnish you put on, the more the grain will express itself’ very successfully delivers and summarises Dickens’ message, that no matter how much you try to, your true identity will always be revealed. It also effectively reinforces Dickens’ treatment of the Victorian preconception of a gentleman as misconstrued and mistakenly engrossed with social status, wealth, birth, and apparel.
A great deal of this interesting comparison is encouraged by the introductory sections of Mulvey’s essay. She writes, “the paradox of phallocentrism in all its manifestations is that it depends on the image of the castrated woman to give order and meaning to its world” (198). If phallocentrism depends on an image, is it inherently part of a modern, image-based culture? Long before Freud and psychoanalysis, phallocentrism certainly existed in oral and written texts (though without this specific term to identify it). Can the “image” that Mulvey refers to include an image described with words, or is she writing exclusively of a visual, dimensional imag...