Page 470 - Battleground The Media Volume 1 and 2

Representat ons of Mascul n ty |

Notwithstanding this strict regulation of the screen, filmmakers found ways
around the code, incorporating into their films subtle (and sometimes not so
subtle) hints at homosexuality. Notable examples include Bringing up Baby
(1938), which contains a memorable scene in which Cary Grant, wearing wom-
en’s clothing, exclaims, “I just went gay all of a sudden!” and Rope (1948), in
which the relationship between the two central characters, Brandon Shaw (John
Dall) and Phillip Morgan (Farley Granger), two young men who share an apart-
ment and who together murder a third man for thrills, has been understood
by critics to be a thinly veiled depiction of homosexuality. Further well-known
examples of filmmakers’ efforts to evade the constraints of the Production Code
include Some Like It Hot (1959), in which Tony Curtis and Jack Lemmon spend
most of the movie passing as women, and Spartacus (1960), in which Tony
Curtis’s character, Antoninus, becomes the “body servant” of Laurence Olivier’s
character, Marcus Licinius Crassus.
Since the demise of the Production Code in the 1960s, filmmakers have
had greater scope for exploring the complexity of masculine identities. In Mid-
night Cowboy (1969), for example, the traditional rugged western tough-guy
figure, familiar from countless earlier movies featuring unambiguously het-
erosexual actors such as Gary Cooper and John Wayne, receives a rather dif-
ferent treatment when Joe Buck (Jon Voight) comes to New York and is drawn
into the world of male prostitution. In one exchange that tells us much about
changing attitudes toward masculinity in America between the western mov-
ie’s heyday in the 1950s, and the time of Midnight Cowboy’s release, Joe’s friend,
Ratzo Rizzo (Dustin Hoffman), tells Joe that his western clothing is “strictly
for fags,” to which Joe responds, “John Wayne! Are you tryin’ to tell me he’s a
fag?”

CasE sTuDy: ThE 1950s “Crisis oF masCuLiniTy”
It is common now to read about masculinity “in crisis,” or, alternatively, of
the “crisis of masculinity.” However, what this “crisis” amounts to, what caused
it, and where it came from are difficult to pin down. Indeed, it is probably more
accurate to talk about periodic crises that surface from time to time in response
to particular social circumstances rather than a singular crisis afflicting a mono-
lithic and transhistorical masculinity. The suggestion that masculinity is in crisis
belongs to the post–World War II period and predominantly to Anglophone
Western cultures. The origins of this idea can perhaps be attributed to the shifts
in gender roles that were brought about by World War II and the decades that
followed. In the 1950s, social changes brought about a perceived “crisis” con-
cerning masculine identity and the role of men in society.
During the 1950s, anxieties about masculinity arose from conflicts between
different conceptions of what a man should be. The tough, invulnerable mascu-
line type that had dominated representations of masculinity during the war was
less appropriate for a postwar world in which commerce and consumerism re-
placed combat and fear as the defining features of society. While more traditional
representations of men as rugged, tough individualists did not disappear—see
the films High Noon (1951), Shane (1953), or The Searchers (1956), for example—