MASCULINITY AS

SPECTACLE
REFLECTIONS ON MEN
AND MAINSTREAM CINEMA
BY STEVE NEALE

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

OVER T H E P A S T ten years or so, numerous books and articles
1
Laura Mulvey, have appeared discussing the images of women produced and circulated
'Visual Pleasure by the cinematic institution. Motivated politically by the development
and Narrative
Cinema', Screen of the Women's Movement, and concerned therefore with the political
Autumn 1975, vol and ideological implications of the representations of women offered by
16 no 3, pp 6-18. the cinema, a number of these books and articles have taken as their basis
Laura Mulvey's 'Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema', first published
in Screen in 1975'. Mulvey's article was highly influential in its linking
together of psychoanalytic perspectives on the cinema with a feminist
perspective on the ways in which images of women figure within main-
stream film. She sought to demonstrate the extent to which the psychic
mechanisms cinema has basically involved are profoundly patriarchal,
and the extent to which the images of women mainstream film has
produced lie at the heart of those mechanisms.
Inasmuch as there has been discussion of gender, sexuality, represen-
tation and the cinema over the past decade then, that discussion has
tended overwhelmingly to centre on the representation of women, and to
derive many of its basic tenets from Mulvey^'s article. Only within the
Gay Movement have there appeared specific discussions of the represen-
tation of men. Most of these, as far as I am aware, have centred on the
representations and stereotypes of gay men. Both within the Women's
Movement and the Gay Movement, there is an important sense in which
the images and functions of heterosexual masculinity within mainstream
cinema have been left undiscussed. Heterosexual masculinity has been
identified as a structuring norm in relation both to images of women and
gay men. It has to that extent been profoundly problematised, rendered
visible. But it has rarely been discussed and analysed as such. Outside
Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

'The more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego': HI Cid.
t r:
 these movements, it has been discussed even less. It is thus very rare to
2
Pam Cook, find analyses that seek to specify in detail, in relation to particular films
'Masculinity in
Crisis?', Screen . or groups of films, how heterosexual masculinity is inscribed and the
Sept/Oct 1982, vol mechanisms, pressures and contradictions that inscription may involve.
23 nos 3-4, pp Aside from a number of recent pieces in Screen2 and Framework1,
39-46; Steve
Neale, 'Chariots of
Raymond Bellour's article on North by Northwest is the only example
• Fire, Images of that springs readily to mind. Bellour's article follows in some detail the
Men', ibid, pp 47- Oedipal trajectory of Hitchcock's film, tracing the movement of its
53; John Caughie
and Gillian
protagonist, Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) from a position of infantile
Skirrow, 'Ahab dependence on the mother to a position of'adult', 'male', heterosexual
Ishmael...and masculinity, sealed by his marriage to Eve Kendall (Eva Marie Saint)
Mo', ibid, pp

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

54-59; Tania
and by his acceptance of the role and authority of the father. However,
Modleski, 'Film the article is concerned as much with the general workings of a classical
Theory's Detour', Hollywood film as it is with the specifics of a set of images of
Screen Nov/Dec
1982, Vol 23 no 5,
masculinity.4
pp 72-79. Although, then, there is a real need for more analyses of individual
films, I intend in this article to take another approach to some of the
3
Paul Willemen, issues involved. Using Laura Mulvey's article as a central, structuring
'Anthony Alann: reference point, I want to look in particular at identification, looking and
Looking at the spectacle as she has discussed them and to pose some questions as to how
Male', Framework
15/16/17, Summer her remarks apply directly or indirectly to images of men, on the one
1981. hand, and to the male spectator on the other. The aim is less to challenge
fundamentally the theses she puts forward, than to open a space within
Raymond Bellour, the framework of her arguments and remarks for a consideration of the
'Le Blocage representation of masculinity as it can be said to relate to the basic
Symbolique',
Communications no characteristics and conventions of the cinematic institution.
23, Paris 1975.

IDENTIFICATION
' John Ellis, Visible
Fictions, London
Routledge and To start with, I want to quote from John Ellis' book Visible Fictions'*.
Kegan Paul, 1982. Written very much in the light of Mulvey's article, Ellis is concerned
both to draw on her arguments and to extend and qualify some of the
theses she puts forward vis-a-vis gender and identification in the cinema.
Ellis argues that identification is never simply a matter of men identify-
ing with male figures on the screen and women identifying with female
figures. Cinema draws on and involves many desires, many forms of
desire. And desire itself is mobile, fluid, constantly transgressing
identities, positions and roles. Identifications are multiple, fluid, at
points even contradictory. Moreover, there are different forms of identi-
fication. Ellis points to two such forms, one associated with narcissism,
the other with phantasies and dreams. He sums up as follows:

Cinematic identification involves two different tendencies. First, there is

that of dreaming and phantasy that involve the multiple and contradictory
tendencies within the construction of the individual. Second, there is the
experience of narcissistic identification with the image of a human figure per-
ceived as other. Both these processes are invoked in the conditions of enter-
tainment cinema. The spectator does not therefore 'identify' with the hero or "~^~"~~"
6
heroine: an identification that would, if put in its conventional sense, involve 'bid, p 43.
socially constructed males identifying with male heroes, and socially con-
7
structed females identifying with women heroines. The situation is more Laura Mulvey, op
complex than this, as identification involves both the recognition of self in the cit, P 12.
image on the screen, a narcissistic identification, and the identification of self ~~^^^~~~^~~
with the various positions that are involved in the fictional narration: those
of hero and heroine, villain, bit-part player, active and passive character.
Identification is therefore multiple and fractured, a sense of seeing the con-
stituent parts of the spectator's own psyche paraded before her or him;''

A series of identifications are involved, then, each shifting and mobile.

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

Equally, though, there is constant work to channel and regulate identifi-
cation in relation to sexual division, in relation to the orders of gender,
sexuality and social identity and authority marking patriarchal society.
Every film tends both to assume and actively to work to renew those
orders, that division. Every film thus tends to specify identification in
accordance with the socially defined and constructed categories of male
and female.
In looking specifically at masculinity in this context, I want to examine
the process of narcissistic identification in more detail. Inasmuch as
films do involve gender identification, and inasmuch as current ideol-
ogies of masculinity involve so centrally notions and attitudes to do with
aggression, power and control, it seems to me that narcissism and narcis-
sistic identification may be especially significant.
Narcissism and narcissistic identification both involve phantasies of
power, omnipotence, mastery and control. Laura Mulvey makes the link
between such phantasies and patriarchal images of masculinity in the
following terms:

As the spectator identifies with the main male protagonist, he projects his
look on to that of his like, his screen surrogate, so that the power of the male
protagonist as he controls events coincides with the active power of the erotic
look, both giving a satisfying sense of omnipotence. A male movie star's
glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of his gaze,
but those of the more perfect, more complete, more powerful ideal ego con-
ceived in the original moment of recognition in front of the mirror.1

I want to turn to Mulvey's remarks about the glamorous male movie star
below. But first it is worth extending and illustrating her point about the
male protagonist and the extent to which his image is dependent upon
narcissistic phantasies, phantasies of the 'more perfect, more complete,
more powerful ideal ego'.
It is easy enough to find examples of films in which these phantasies
are heavily prevalent, in which the male hero is powerful and omni-
potent to an extraordinary degree: the Clint Eastwood character in A
Fistful of Dollars, For a Few Dollars More and The Good, the Bad and the
Ugly, the Tom Mix westerns, Charlton Heston in El Cid, the Mad Max
Extraordinary
potency: man as
Superman.

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

films, the Steve Reeves epics, Superman, Flash Gordon and so on. There
is generally, of course, a drama in which that power and omnipotence are
tested and qualified (Superman 2 is a particularly interesting example) as
are Howard Hawks' westerns and adventure films), but the Leone
trilogy, for example, is marked by the extent to which the hero's powers
are rendered almost godlike, hardly qualified at all. Hence, perhaps, the
extent to which they are built around ritualised scenes which in many
ways are devoid of genuine suspense. A film like Melville's Le Samoumi,
on the other hand, starts with the image of self-possessed, omnipotent
masculinity and traces its gradual and eventual disintegration. Alain
Delon plays a lone gangster, a hit-man. His own narcissism is stressed in
particular through his obsessive concern with his appearance, marked
notably by a repeated and ritualised gesture he makes when putting on
his hat, a sweep of the hand across the rim. Delon is sent on a job, but is
spotted by a black female singer in a club. There is an exchange of looks.
From that point on his omnipotence, silence and inviolability are all
under threat. He is shot and wounded; his room is broken into and
bugged; he is nearly trapped on the Metro. Eventually, he is gunned
down, having returned to the club to see the singer again. The film is by
no means a critique of the male image it draws upon. On the contrary, it
very much identifies (and invites us to identify) with Delon. Neverthe-
less, the elements both of that image and of that to which the image is
vulnerable are clearly laid out. It is no accident that Delon's downfall is
syrntornatically inaugurated in his encounter with the black woman. Dif-
ference (double difference) is the threat. An exchange of looks in which
Delon's cold commanding gaze is troubled, undermined and returned is

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

the mark of that threat.
The kind of image that Delon here embodies, and that Eastwood and
the others mentioned earlier embody too, is one marked not only by
emotional reticence, but also by silence, a reticence with language.
Theoretically, this silence, this absence of language can further be linked
to narcissism and to the construction of an ideal ego. The acquisition of
language is a process profoundly challenging to the narcissism of early
childhood. It is productive of what has been called 'symbolic castration'. For further
Language is a process (or set of processes) involving absence and lack, elaboration of
these two related
and these are what threaten any image of the self as totally enclosed, points see
self-sufficient, omnipotent. The construction of an ideal ego, mean- Moustapha
while, is a process involving profound contradictions. While the ideal Safouan, 'Is the
Oedipus Complex
ego may be a 'model' with which the subject identifies and to which it Universal?', m/f
aspires, it may also be a source of further images and feelings of castra- nos 5/6, 1981, pp
tion, inasmuch as that ideal is something to which the subject is never 85-87.
adequate.8

The cool gaze of the

lone gangster: Le
Samourai.
 9
If this is the case, there can be no simple and unproblematic identifica-
D N Rodowick, tion on the part of the spectator, male or female, with Mulvey's 'ideal
'The Difficulty of
Difference,' Wide ego' on the screen. In an article published in Wide Angle, D N Rodowick
Angle, vol 5 no 1, has made a similar point. He goes on to argue both that the narcissistic
p8. male image-the image of authority and omnipotence-can entail a con-
comitant masochism in the relations between the spectator and the
10
Paul Willemen, op image, and further that the male image can involve an eroticism, since
' cit. there is always a constant oscillation between that image as a source of
identification, and as an other, a source of contemplation. The image is a
ibid, p 16. source both of narcissistic processes and drives, and, inasmuch as it is
other, of object-oriented processes and drives:

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

12
ibid.
Mulvey discusses the male star as an object of the look but denies him the
ibid. function of an erotic object. Because Mulvey conceives the look to be essen-
tially active in its aims, identification with the male protagonist is only con-
sidered from a point of view which associates it with a sense of omnipotence,
of assuming control of the narrative. She makes no differentiation between
identification and object choice in which sexual aims may be directed towards
the male figure, nor does she consider the signification of authority in the
male figure from the point of view of an economy of masochism. 9

Given Rodowick's argument, it is not surprising either that 'male'

genres and films constantly involve sado-masochistic themes, scenes and
phantasies or that male heroes can at times be marked as the object of an
erotic gaze. These are both points I wish to discuss below. However, it is
worth mentioning here that they have also been discussed in Paul
Willemen's article 'Anthony Mann: Looking at the Male'.10
Willemen argues that spectacle and drama in Mann's films tend both
to be structured around the look at the male figure: 'The viewer's
experience is predicated on the pleasure of seeing the male "exist" (that
is walk, move, ride, fight) in or through cityscapes, landscapes or, more
abstractly, history. And on the unquiet pleasure of seeing the male
mutilated (often quite graphically in Mann) and restored through violent
brutality.'" These pleasures are founded upon a repressed homosexual
voyeurism, a voyeurism 'not without its problems: the look at the male
produces just as much anxiety as the look at the female, especially when
it's presented as directly as in the killing scenes in T-Men and Border
Incident.'*2 The (unstated) thesis behind these comments seems to be
that in a heterosexual and patriarchal society, the male body cannot be
marked explicitly as the erotic object of another male look: that look
must be motivated in some other way, its erotic component, repressed.
The mutilation and sadism so often involved in Mann's films are marks
both of the repression involved and of a means by which the male body
may be disqualified, so to speak, as an object of erotic contemplation and
desire. The repression and disavowal involved are figured crucially in
the scenes in T-Men and Border Incident to which Willemen refers, in
which 'an undercover agent must look on, impassively, while his close
(male) friend and partner is being killed'.13
 There is one final and important contradiction involved in the type of
14
narcissistic images of masculinity discussed above to which I'd like to Laura Mulvey,
'Afterthoughts...
refer. It is the contradiction between narcissism and the Law, between Inspired by Duel
an image of narcissistic authority on the one hand and an image of social in the Sun',
authority on the other. This tension or contradiction is discussed at some Framework'
15/16/17, Summer
length by Laura Mulvey in an article seeking to re-consider her 'Visual 1981.
Pleasure' piece with particular reference to Duel in the Sun.'* It is a
tension she sees as especially evident in the western. Using a narrative 15
Vladimir Propp,
model derived from Vladimir's Propp's analyses of folktales", Mulvey Morphology of the
points to two narrative functions, 'marriage' (and hence social integra- Folktale,
tion) and 'not marriage', a refusal by the hero to enter society, a refusal University of
Texas Press, 1968.

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

motivated by a nostalgic narcissism:
16
In the Proppian tale, an important aspect of narrative closure is 'marriage', Laura Mulvey,
a function characterised by the 'princess' or equivalent. This is the only 'Afterthoughts...
Inspired by Duel
function that is sex specific and thus essentially relates to the sex of the hero in the Sun', op cit,
and his marriageability. This function is very commonly reproduced in the p!4.
Western, where once again 'marriage' makes a crucial contribution to narra-
tive closure. However, the function's presence also has come to allow a com- 17
ibid, p 18.
plication in the Western, its complementary opposite 'not marriage'. Thus,
while the social integration represented by marriage is an essential aspect of
the folk-tale, in the Western it can be accepted... or not. A hero can gain in
stature by refusing the princess and remaining alone (Randolph Scott in the
Ranown series of movies). As the resolution of the Proppian tale can be seen
to represent the resolution of the Oedipus complex (integration into the sym-
bolic), the rejection of marriage personifies a nostalgic celebration of phallic,
narcissistic omnipotence.16

There are thus two diverging images of masculinity commonly at play in

the western:

The tension between two points of attraction, the symbolic (social integration
and marriage) and nostalgic narcissism, generates a common splitting of the
Western hero into two, something unknown in the Proppian tale. Here two
functions emerge, one celebrating integration into society through marriage,
the other celebrating resistance to social standards and responsibilities, above
all those of marriage and the family, the sphere represented by women."

Mulvey goes on to discuss John Ford's western The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance, noting the split there between Tom Doniphon, played
by John Wayne, who incarnates the narcissistic function of the
anachronistic social outsider, and Ranse Stoddart, played by James
Stewart, who incarnates the civilising functions of marriage, social
integration and social responsibility. The film's tone is increasingly
nostalgic, in keeping with its mourning for the loss of Doniphon and
what he represents. The nostalgia, then, is not just for an historical past,
for the Old West, but also for the masculine narcissism that Wayne
represents.
Taking a cue from Mulvey's remarks about nostalgia in Liberty
Valance, one could go on to discuss a number of nostalgic westerns in
 Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014
The outsider and the
civiliser: John Wayne
and James Stewart in
The Man Who Shot
Liberty Valance.

these terms, in terms of the theme of lost or doomed male narcissism.

The clearest examples would be Peckinpah's westerns: Guns in the After-
noon, Major Dundee (to a lesser extent), The Wild Bunch and, especially,
Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid. These films are shot through with nostal-
gia, with an obsession with images and definitions of masculinity and
masculine codes of behaviour, and with images of male narcissism and
the threats posed to it by women, society and the Law. The threat of
castration is figured in the wounds and injuries suffered by Joel McCrea
in Guns in the Afternoon, Charlton Heston in Major Dundee and William
Holden in The Wild Bunch. The famous slow-motion violence, bodies
splintered and torn apart, can be viewed at one level at least as the image
of narcissism in its moment of disintegration and destruction. Signifi-
cantly, Kris Kristofferson as Billy in Pat Garrett and Billy the Kid, the
ultimate incarnation of omnipotent male narcissism in Peckinpah's
films, is spared any bloody and splintered death. Shot by Pat Garrett, his
body shows no sign either of wounds or blood: narcissism transfigured
(rather than destroyed) by death.
 11

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

Male narcissism
transfigured by
death: Pat Garrett
and Billy the Kid.

I want now to move on from identification and narcissism to discuss in

relation to images of men and masculinity the two modes of looking
addressed by Mulvey in 'Visual Pleasure', voyeuristic looking, on the
one hand, and fetishistic looking on the other.

L O O K I N G AND S P E C T A C L E

In discussing these two types of looking, both fundamental to the

cinema, Mulvey locates them solely in relation to a structure of activity/
passivity in which the look is male and active and the object of the look
female and passive. Both are considered as distinct and variant means by
which male castration anxieties may be played out and allayed.
Voyeuristic looking is marked by the extent to which there is a distance
between spectator and spectacle, a gulf between the seer and the seen.
This structure is one which allows the spectator a degree of power over
what is seen. It hence tends constantly to involve sado-masochistic
12 phantasies and themes. Here is Mulvey's description:
18
Laura Mulvey,
'Visual Pleasure
voyeurism... has associations with sadism: pleasure lies in ascertaining
and Narrative
Cinema', op cit, p guilt (immediately associated with castration), asserting control and subject-
14. ing the guilty person through punishment and forgiveness. This sadistic side
Jits in well with narrative. Sadism demands a story, depends on making
something happen, forcing a change in another person, a battle of will and
strength, victory and defeat, all occurring in a linear time with a beginning
and an end.K

Mulvey goes on to discuss these characteristics of voyeuristic looking

in terms of the film noir and of Hitchcock's movies, where the hero is the

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

bearer of the voyeuristic look, engaged in a narrative in which the
woman is the object of its sadistic components. However, if we take some
of the terms used in her description- 'making something happen', 'forc-
ing a change in another person', 'a battle of will and strength', 'victory
and defeat'—they can immediately be applied to 'male' genres, to films
concerned largely or solely with the depiction of relations between men,
to any film, for example, in which there is a struggle between a hero and
a male villain. War films, westerns and gangster movies, for instance, are
all marked by 'action', by 'making something happen'. Battles, fights and
duels of all kinds are concerned with struggles of 'will and strength',
'victory and defeat', between individual men and/or groups of men. All
of which implies that male figures on the screen are subject to
voyeuristic looking, both on the part of the spectator and on the part of
other male characters.
Paul Willemen's thesis on the films of Anthony Mann is clearly rele-
vant here. The repession of any explicit avowal of eroticism in the act of
looking at the male seems structurally linked to a narrative content
marked by sado-masochistic phantasies and scenes. Hence both forms of
voyeuristic looking, intra- and extra-diegetic, are especially evident in
those moments of contest and combat referred to above, in those
moments at which a narrative outcome is determined through a fight or
gun-battle, at which male struggle becomes pure spectacle. Perhaps the
most extreme examples are to be found in Leone's westerns, where the
exchange of aggressive looks marking most western gun-duels is taken to
the point of fetishistic parody through the use of extreme and repetitive
close-ups. At which point the look begins to oscillate between voyeurism
and fetishism as the narrative starts to freeze and spectacle takes over.
The anxious 'aspects' of the look at the male to which Willemen refers are
here both embodied and allayed not just by playing out the sadism inher-
ent in voyeurism through scenes of'violence and combat, but also by
drawing upon the structures and processes of fetishistic looking, by
stopping the narrative in order to recognise the pleasure of display, but
displacing it from the male body as such and locating it more generally in
the overall components of a highly ritualised scene.
John Ellis has characterised fetishistic looking in the following terms:
 13
where voyeurism maintains (depends upon) a separation between the seer 9
John Ellis, op cit,
and the object seen, fetishism tries to abolish the gulf.. .. This process implies p 47.
a different position and attitude of the spectator to the image. It represents
the opposite tendency to that of voyeurism... . Fetishistic looking implies the
20
direct acknowledgement and participation of the object viewed... with the I.aura Mulvey,
'Visual Pleasure
feiishistic attitude, the look of the character towards the viewer... is a cent-
and Narrative
ral feature.... The voyeuristic look is curious, inquiring, demanding to Cinema', op cit, p
know. The fetishistic gaze is captivated by what it sees, does not wish to 14.
inquire further, to see more, to find out.... The fetishistic look has much to
do with display and the spectacular.'"

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

'Direct erotic rappor

with the spectator':
Dietrich in
Stcrnberg's Blonde

Mulvey again centrally discusses this form of looking in relation to the

female as object: 'This second avenue, fetishistic scopophilia, builds up
the physical beauty of the object, transforming it into something satisfy-
ing in itself.'20 'Physical beauty' is interpreted solely in terms of the
14 ^~~~"^~^~"" female body. It is specified through the example of the films of Stern-
21
ibid. berg:

While Hitchcock goes into the investigative side of voyeurism, Sternberg

produces the ultimate fetish, taking it to the point where the powerful look of
the male protagonist is broken in favour of the image in direct erotic rapport
with the spectator. The beauty of the woman as object and the screen space
coalesce; she is no longer the bearer of guilt but a perfect product, whose body,
stylised and fragmented by close-ups, is the content of the film and the direct
recipient of the spectator's look.2[

If we return to Leone's shoot-outs, we can see that some elements of

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

the fetishistic look as here described are present, others not. We are
offered the spectacle of male bodies, but bodies unmarked as objects of
erotic display. There is no trace of an acknowledgement or recognition of
those bodies as displayed solely for the gaze of the spectator. They are on
display, certainly, but there is no cultural or cinematic convention which
would allow the male body to be presented in the way that Dietrich so
often is in Sternberg's films. We see male bodies stylised and fragmented
by close-ups, but our look is not direct, it is heavily mediated by the looks
of the characters involved. And those looks are marked not by desire, but
rather by fear, or hatred, or aggression. The shoot-outs are moments of
spectacle, points at which the narrative hesitates, comes to a momentary
halt, but they are also points at which the drama is finally resolved, a
suspense in the culmination of the narrative drive. They thus involve an
imbrication of both forms of looking, their intertwining designed to
minimise and displace the eroticism they each tend to involve, to dis-
avow any explicitly erotic look at the male body.
There are other instances of male combat which seem to function in
this way. Aside from the western, one could point to the epic as a genre,
to the gladiatorial combat in Spartacus, to the fight between Christopher
Plummer and Stephen Boyd at the end of The Fall of the Roman Empire,
to the chariot race in Ben Hur. More direct displays of the male body can
be found, though they tend either to be fairly briefer else to occupy the
screen during credit sequences and the like (in which case the display is
mediated by another textual function). Examples of the former would
include the extraordinary shot of Gary Cooper lying under the hut
toward the end of Man of the West, his body momentarily filling the
Cinemascope screen. Or some of the images of Lee Marvin in Point
Blank, his body draped over a railing or framed in a doorway. Examples
of the latter would include the credit sequence of Man of the West again
(an example to which Willemen refers), and Junior Bonner.
The presentation of Rock Hudson in Sirk's melodramas is a particu-
larly interesting case. There are constantly moments in these films in
which Hudson is presented quite explicitly as the object of an erotic
look. The look is usually marked as female. But Hudson's body is femin-
ised in those moments, an indication of the strength of those conventions
which dictate that only women can function as the objects of an explicit-
ly erotic gaze. Such instances of 'feminisation' tend also to occur in the 15
musical, the only genre in which the male body has been unashamedly
put on display in mainstream cinema in any consistent way. (A particu-
larly clear and interesting example would be the presentation of John
Travolta in Saturday Night Fever.)

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

The displaced
eroticism of male
bodies in combat:
Spanacits.

It is a refusal to acknowledge or make explicit an eroticism that marks

all three of the psychic functions and processes discussed here in relation
to images of men: identification, voyeuristic looking and fetishistic look-
ing. It is this that tends above all to differentiate the cinematic repre-
sentation of images of men and women. Although I have sought to open
up a space within Laura Mulvey's arguments and 'theses, to argue that
the elements she considers in relation to images of women can and
should also be considered in relation to images of men, I would certainly
concur with her basic premise that the spectatorial look in mainstream
cinema is implicitly male: it is one of the fundamental reasons why the
erotic elements involved in the relations between the spectator and the
male image have constantly to be repressed and disavowed. Were this
not the case, mainstream cinema would have openly to come to terms
with the male homosexuality it so assiduously seeks either to denigrate or
deny. As it is, male homosexuality is constantly present as an under-
current, as a potentially troubling aspect of many films and genres, but
one that is dealt with obliquely, symptomaticaliy, and that has to be
repressed. While mainstream cinema, in its assumption of a male norm,
perspective and look, can constantly take women and the female image as
its object of investigation, it has rarely investigated men and the male
image in the same kind of way: women are a problem, a source of
 Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014
Unashamedly on
display: John
Travolta in Saturday
Night Fever.

anxiety, of obsessive enquiry; men are not. Where women are investi-
gated, men are tested. Masculinity, as an ideal, at least, is implicitly
known. Femininity is, by contrast, a mystery. This is one of the reasons
why the representation of masculinity, both inside and outside the
cinema, has been so rarely discussed. Hopefully, this article will contri-
bute towards such a discussion.

I would like to thank John Ellis and Andrew Higson for their comments on an earlier draft
of this article, which is based on a talk given during the course of a SEFT Day Kvent on
Masculinity held at Four Corners Film Workshop, London, March 19, 1983.
The ultimate aim of WFTVN is the positive, representative
and realistic portrayai of women in film, TV and video.

WFTVN believes that to achieve this aim women themselves

must be involved & employed at all stages of production.

Downloaded from http://screen.oxfordjournals.org/ at Illinois University on July 18, 2014

WFTVN is in the process of developing & running an effective
advice & information service which will encourage access, par-
ticipation & employment of women in these media.

WFTVN is producing Information Sheets on topics ranging

from Sympathetic Training Courses to Where To Hire Equip-
ment to Relevant Trade Unions.

WFTVN is writing familiarisation sheets describing exactly

what is involved in being a Camerawoman, Assistant Editor,
Production Manager etc.

WFTVN is sending out a Questionaire from which we will com-

pile a Register listing both women with and wanting skills & ex-
perience so people can no longer say 'didn't know there were
any women sound recordists/vision mixers e t c ' I t will also pro-
vide a network for women wishing to contact other women.

WFTVN is new and not rich. We would be pleased if people

would send us any material appropriate for our information
gathering (eg, about training courses, women's media groups,
equipment etc) & put us on relevant mailing lists.

Questionaire: Send SAE to address above if you want one to

fill in.

WFTVN Membership: Send £10 (group), £6 (waged), £4 (un-

waged) plus £3 extra for anyone wanting to receive monthly
minutes. Give name, address, phone, occupation etc.

AT PRESENT WFTVN OFFICE

ONLY OPEN MONDAYS &
TUESDAYS. •Tnii IU'I'II ma
ISUTC I urn.