2. “I Married Rambo”: Action, Spectacle, and Melodrama
The contemporary action film, the most profitable of global film
genres, uses various formal and narrative strategies to respond to cultural
crises about masculinity and male social roles. Since the codification
of the action genre’s dominant narrative conflicts and conventions of
visual style in the early 1980s, the action film has been the most visible site
of male conflict and identity formation in popular global cinema. The
genre’s visibility derives both from the widespread global distribution of
U.S. action films and from the literal visibility of its films’ protagonists,
usually solitary (or highly individualized), athletic, white men. As contemporary
capitalist society severely limits and codifies the bourgeois
male’s ability to establish his identity through physical activity, action
cinema offers particular appeals to male filmgoers. Action films provide
fantasies of heroic omnipotence and escape from, or transcendence of,
cultural pressures. These escapes do not represent real solutions to the
problems faced by members of capitalist societies, since action-film
narratives necessarily displace the present-day contradictions of male
identity into visual space, into spectacle. While violent spectacle has been
a prominent feature of the genre since its inception, action films in the
1990s increasingly constructed stories around threats to domesticity,
marriage, and the nuclear family. By presenting spectacular violence as
the solution to domestic and familial conflicts, the genre displays the ideological
contradictions between idealized masculinity and familial
responsibility under contemporary capitalism.
The action film has historically been a “male” genre, dealing with stories
of male heroism, produced by male filmmakers for principally male audiences.
The genre’s most intriguing development in the 1990s was the
incorporation of formal elements associated with the “female” genre of
melodrama.1 This development is linked to crises of authority associated
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with contemporary capitalism and postmodernity: challenges to male
power in both public and private spheres, the privileging of simulation
over authenticity, and the corresponding distance between fictional texts
and the social reality in which they appear. In response to these crises, the
Hollywood action film proffers conventional narratives of male mastery,
but modifies these narratives through reliance on other generic languages,
particularly those central to film comedy and melodrama. This process of
genre hybridization accomplishes the ideological work of male-dominated,
multinational capitalism: 1990s action films celebrate the ingenuity and
physical prowess of individual heroes, while also depicting such heroes as
champions of women, children, and capitalism itself. At the same time,
these films more often address women audiences narratively and formally.
Action films in the 1990s and early 2000s present women characters in
more substantive and less decorative roles than in previous decades.
Relatedly, action films increasingly utilize a melodramatic mode of address,
structuring narratives around a logic of spectacle and excess emblematic of
the classical-Hollywood melodrama.
The action film’s significance for film and cultural-studies critics lies in
the ways the genre articulates prevailing ideological positions. By means of
its hyperbolic genre conventions and its codified narratives, the action film
displays the instability of cultural paradigms of race, gender, politics, and
capitalist ideology. Action films, like Hollywood blockbusters in general,
tend to present conservative narratives and prosocial iconography for a
target audience of adolescent males. While action films occasionally display
progressive overtones, the surface narratives of such films appear to
reinforce patriarchal structures of white male authority, privilege, and
omnipotence. At the level of plot, the vast majority of action films of the
1980s and early 1990s support conservative formations of militant, heterosexual,
white masculinity.2 To advance their preferred ideological positions,
though, generic texts regularly invoke the competing ideological
frameworks they seek to disavow.3 Action films’ use of exaggeration, parody,
irony, and self-reflexivity indicates the anxiety that accompanies
the insistence on preferred readings. At the same time, these strategic
devices allow the engagement of different viewing positions and the texts’
repudiation of their explicit, narrative meanings. Despite their masculinist
overtones, contemporary action films formally and narratively follow patterns
developed in popular media geared toward women rather than men.
Such a cultural positioning indicates a shift in the rhetorical strategies of
popular texts: whereas cultural discourses and texts of the 1980s promote
militant masculinity as an explicit alternative to feminine or liberal weakness,
1990s discourses synthesize categories of feminine domesticity and
sentiment with those of masculine discipline and strength. Evidence of this
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shift appears in the action film at the level of visual style, in narrative
linkages of active and domestic spaces, and in the genre’s contextualization
of violence.
Action films present violence as a component of a spectacular visual
style, using images of violence to thrill or excite rather than to shock. 1990s
action films present graphic violence and pyrotechnic spectacle as exaggerated
simulations of real violence and destruction rather than as credible,
discomfiting representations of these phenomena, despite ongoing
debates about the relationship between fictional and real violence, especially
with regard to children. Throughout the 1990s, critics referred
increasingly to action films’ “cartoon violence” to suggest that viewers—
especially younger viewers—would not find that violence objectionable.
The phrase connotes the perceptible distance between cinematic representation
and its social referent—in this case, a distance substantial enough
that a child could recognize it. With screen violence distanced from reality
by elaborate special effects and fantasy narratives, action-film violence
appears legible and comprehensible to viewers. In his analysis of the social
function of popular texts, John Fiske suggests that violent media images
and texts appear as cultural responses to perceived social pressures.4 The
visibility of real violence in news media, inequitable distribution of wealth,
and the diminished utility of physical strength for bourgeois males under
multinational capitalism all indicate complex social conditions disadvantageous
to many members of society. In the face of these social and cultural
crises, action films, like other popular texts, retain their currency because
they offer conventional, definitive solutions to otherwise insurmountable
problems.
James Cameron’s 1994 film True Lies, which serves as the basis for this
chapter’s arguments about the contemporary Hollywood action film,
combines an action narrative involving terrorists with a romantic narrative
about the action hero’s marriage and family life. This combination
allows the film to make extensive use of melodramatic formal elements
and narrative situations.5 Late in the film, following the resolution of the
marital conflict and just prior to the climactic action sequence, the romantic
leads embrace passionately while a nuclear bomb detonates in the background.
The mushroom cloud offers a spectacular display of phallic power
and a metonym for the sexual fulfillment the pair never achieve during the
film. The scene aestheticizes destructive weaponry, as the kissing couple in
the foreground lends a lyrical quality to the image. The excessive visual
display also punctuates a rather unspectacular moment in the romantic
narrative, an intimate exchange between husband and wife. In addition,
the image announces the linkage of the film’s romantic/domestic elements
to its action environment while simultaneously heralding the demise of
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the domestic sphere. When the understanding wife tells her super-spy
husband to “go to work,” ceding to him the provider/protector role, the
film sets aside its domestic plot in favor of an extended action sequence.
The kiss scene locates the couple at the site of action but also necessitates
the woman’s departure from that space. The film’s linkage of active and
domestic realms follows a pattern established in Hollywood melodramas:
as in melodrama, this action-film episode derives its impact from stylistic
excess and from its conflation of social and personal spaces.
As True Lies demonstrates, the combination, through melodrama, of
traditionally male spaces of action and female spaces of romance and
domesticity makes the contemporary action film a synthesis of historically
male and female cultural forms. The explosion scene transforms a display
of nuclear weaponry into a sentimental framing device. Elsewhere in the
film, spectacular representations of violence and destruction induce affective
responses of excitement, fear, and, occasionally, anger. In complementary
fashion, the film, like action cinema as a whole, transforms emotional
situations into episodes of public violence. Action films consistently channel
sexual and romantic conflict into physical, performative, and violent
displays, transforming or displacing emotion into sensation.6 Meanwhile,
the genre’s corresponding over-representation of active, masculine space,
far beyond the physical or experiential capacities of men or women in
postindustrial society, suggests that the cinematic spectacle of masculinity
in the contemporary action film conceals real crises of male identity. True
Lies uses a melodramatic plot and mode of address to work through issues
understood in popular media as central to men in the 1990s: paternal
responsibility, male anxiety surrounding female infidelity, the moral and
civic value of white-collar or managerial occupations, and concerns about
the banality of middle-class suburban life and the consequent demasculinization
of those within it. Tellingly, True Lies, like the action film in general,
proffers violence as the universal solution to contemporary sex-role and
work-based anxieties.
Melodrama, long recognized as a women’s genre in cinema, provides
the operative mode of contemporary action cinema, by most standards an
overwhelmingly male genre. Not only do action films periodically venture
into the narrative and thematic space of melodrama, melodrama forms an
essential formal component of the action genre, particularly in the spectacleoriented
mode of action cinema prevalent since the early 1980s. Action
films’ melodramatic elements—including moral legibility of plots and
characters and spectacular, excessive mise-en-scène—link the action genre
structurally to melodrama, in particular to the domestic-melodrama genre
that has historically appealed predominantly to women audiences. Action
films in the 1990s increasingly featured melodramatic narratives involving
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the home and family. Films such as True Lies, Terminator 2: Judgment Day
(1991), The Long Kiss Goodnight (1996), Face/Off, and Deep Impact (1998)
built stories around threats to family and domesticity while also presenting
the action genre’s traditional narratives of global terrorism or other threats
to the human race. Like melodrama, the action film emphasizes archetypal
characters and the nonpsychological development of those characters, displacement
of conflict through hysteria and excess, unambiguous moral
oppositions, and accessibility of meaning.
The action film’s invocation of the domestic sphere represents a significant
development in a genre that has largely set its conflicts against the
backdrop of expansive public spaces such as large cities or exoticized
foreign settings. The genre, traditionally a utopian space of action and
individual freedom, incorporates melodrama’s personal and social crises
by making those crises reparable on the genre’s terms. What a traditional
melodrama might present as a problem of capitalism or family structure,
an action film presents as a matter of action and inaction. Armageddon, for
example, includes the subplot of a father–daughter relationship (Bruce
Willis and Liv Tyler comprise the motherless family), in which the emergence
of a young suitor (Ben Affleck) challenges the father’s monopoly on
his daughter’s affections. The film resolves this conflict of triangulated
desire when the father embarks on a solo suicide mission to save the
planet. The incompatibility of familial and social roles, foregrounded in
the melodrama genre, erupts throughout action films as decisive violence.
Alternately, the action film uses violence, motion, and action to stave off
the resolution of ideological problems. By incorporating family into cinematic
narratives of ritualized heroism and combat, action films sustain the
illusion that viewers may attend to pressing social concerns—that is, they
may be good parents, spouses, or citizens—within the conventional terrain
of a master narrative that puts a premium on individual autonomy and
dominance.
The action genre uses melodrama’s structures to repackage an anachronistic
master narrative in a postmodern guise of accessible, viewer-friendly
entertainment. Melodrama makes essential contributions to this rehabilitation
project, particularly when coupled with comedy. Postmodern selfreflexivity
and generic irony assure action-film viewers that they are “in on
the joke,” that the genre’s distortions of gender, race, politics, and so forth
are whimsical devices intended to gratify audiences. Visual or verbal references
to star personas, action choreography that calls to mind sequences in
previous films, and other citations of prior films position action films as
metacommentaries on genre rather than as reactionary depictions of social
reality. The subtle disavowal of the genre’s overt ideological agenda allows
action films to rely continually on master-narrative tropes. Significantly, the
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comic tone of many contemporary action films permits a recapitulation of
familiar narratives of male mastery. Action films proffer male mastery as a
necessary component of their generic narratives: the ability to assert control
over threatening situations virtually defines the action hero. Yet 1990s
action films often show men facing threats in areas previously outside their
sphere of responsibility. This new generic category of “action fathering”
locates the durable male-mastery narrative in a popular form that, historically,
has disproportionately appealed to women audiences. This adaptation
successfully reinforces patriarchal ideology (by assuring the reproduction
of patriarchal narratives), but it also renders that ideology unstable. If
narratives of male mastery can be transmitted only through texts structurally
similar to those constructed for women audiences, the social order
underpinning such narratives may also be under siege.
Ideological contradictions, though displaced, play a decisive role in most
contemporary action films. So-called buddy films—such as the Lethal
Weapon series (1987, 1989, 1991, 1998) and Tango & Cash (1989)—
compensate for the threat of homosexuality with heavy doses of homophobic
humor masked as male camaraderie. Films that include spies, terrorists,
mercenaries, or other international figures pit iconoclastic (though idealized)
heroes against stereotypical villains in interminable battles for
cultural and national identity. With remarkable consistency, action films
either exclude women from their narratives or soften their protagonists’
misogyny by depicting villains as even more objectionable sexual sadists.
True Lies makes each of these volatile elements particularly evident.
Through its relatively complex treatment of a female character (though by
no means making her equal to the male hero) and its emphasis on domestic
relations and conflicts, the film highlights the functions of melodrama
and comedy. In action films of the 1990s, invocations of these other generic
discourses allow screen characters to move between the domestic realm,
which corresponds loosely to the viewers’ familiar real-life experiences, and
the utopian space of action, where social limitations and the laws of physics
only occasionally apply.
Action Violence, Male Bodies, and Racial Difference
Like many genre texts, action films tend to engage in dialogue most
cogently with other genre texts rather than with social reality; to use Steve
Neale’s terms, they privilege generic verisimilitude over cultural verisimilitude.7
Nonetheless, action films remain popular amid different cultural
climates. Shifting social ideologies help determine what such films will or
will not represent, although the principal cultural referents for action films
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are the stars, plots, fight sequences, stunts, and special effects (and to a
lesser extent, dialogue) that appear in other films. While the action film
constitutes a genre of its own, it draws from a variety of other established
film genres. Its images of masculine authority and violence follow from
earlier representations in the gangster film, the western, and the war film.
The malleability of the form derives not only from the need to retain
audience interest but also from a tendency to elide or displace the genre’s
ideological conflicts ever more spectacularly and decisively.
Increasingly graphic depictions of violence are a key site of elision and
displacement. Spectacularly destructive hand-to-hand combat, gun battles,
and explosions appeal to audiences familiar with the genre’s existing formal
conventions and special effects. Displays of violence also transfer violence’s
narrative and social meanings into the purely aesthetic sphere. Viewers
learn to enjoy displays of violence as displays rather than as violence. Even
films awash in violence need not necessarily represent conservative or
nihilistic worldviews. Viewers may interpret action films as commentaries
on violence or on cinema’s propensity for violence, rather than as glorifications
of social violence. Many Hollywood films that develop or reference
action-film conventions surrounding violence, including the western The
Wild Bunch (1969) and the blackly comic crime films Natural Born Killers
(1992) and Pulp Fiction (1994), ostensibly represent ultraviolence to show
its inimicality to social order.8 The Schwarzenegger vehicles Terminator 2
and The Last Action Hero (1993) use comic irony for a similar purpose.
Terminator 2 offers the narrative conceit of a “no killing” parameter for its
robot hero, which results in his shooting an innocent man in the kneecaps,
an event depicted as humorous. The Last Action Hero represents the gulf
between fantasy violence and its real-world consequences, when an action
hero finds himself in a “real” world where he is physically vulnerable.
Setting benchmarks for representations of violence and other subjects,
many action-film conventions refer more closely to previous cinematic
representations than to corresponding developments in the material
world. With this in mind, the genre’s anachronistic depictions of women,
nonwhite ethnicities, and domestic and global politics become more comprehensible,
though not more excusable. Action films’ narrative conflicts
are often not so much anachronistic as merely unreal: in the late 1990s,
Hollywood action heroes were called upon to battle volcanoes (in Dante’s
Peak [1996] and Volcano [1997]), asteroids (in Deep Impact and
Armageddon [both 1998]), aliens (in Independence Day [1996] and Men in
Black [1997]), zombie legions (in The Mummy [1999] and its sequels), and
Godzilla (in the eponymous 1998 U.S. revamping of the low-budget
Japanese series). Even in films with contemporary, urban settings, an
identifiable historical reality provides only a perfunctorily staged backdrop
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for spectacles of the impossible. This ever-increasing gap between actionfilm
narratives and their referents in reality suggests, among other things,
the estrangement that viewers feel from both normative institutions and
mechanisms of social change.
Comic, stylized, or otherwise exaggerated treatments of violence in
action films displace screen violence’s obvious meaning: that it represents
horrific pain and suffering and should repulse the viewer. Similarly, action
films repress and displace other factors—paradoxes of masculinity and
homoeroticism, and social and political ideology—through comedy, visual
excess, and emphases on performativity or artificiality. In an essay on
popular-film ideology, Robin Wood notes the difficulty of assigning discrete
boundaries to film genres. According to Wood, different genres “represent
different strategies for dealing with the same ideological tensions.”9
Privileging tempo and spectacle, the action film admits a vast array of settings
and conflicts, and a correspondingly wide canvas for the articulation
of ideological positions.
Action films use their suitability to hybridization to cope with contemporary
crises of gender, race, political conflict, and social behavior. The
genre addresses these conflicts by assimilating elements of melodrama,
comedy, the western, the martial-arts film, and other genres. Still, like
other genres, action films raise issues they cannot satisfactorily resolve,
particularly issues surrounding male identity and gender construction.
Action films negotiate their logical gaps and inconsistencies through visual
spectacle, narrative excess, and the application of melodramatic and comic
elements to existing genre conventions. Comedy, particularly, allows for
discussion of gender and sexuality, if not resolution of conflicts involving
those categories. Analyzing comic action heroes such as Bruce Willis and
Kurt Russell, Yvonne Tasker argues that “comedy opens up a space for male
and female drag, allowing a play with the ‘boundaries’ of gendered
identity, with jokes about the male image and sexuality which are not
permissible within the more earnest dramas of the action tradition.”10
Meanwhile, earnest action films such as First Blood (1982) and Rambo cast
male predicaments in melodramatic terms, with emotion serving as a
pretext for violent release.
The prevailing elements of contemporary action film merit definition
despite their apparent self-evidence. On-screen action—particularly physical
combat and gunplay, fast-moving bodies or vehicles, and destruction
of property or landscape features—constitutes the genre’s principal
feature. Contemporary settings and urban locations also distinguish the
genre; however, in hybrid form, action films overlap with war films, westerns,
and gangster films, which situate their violent action in other culturally
sanctioned or ritualized spaces (wartime, the historical past, and the
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underworld, respectively). The action film’s generic hybridity depends on
selective emphasis; action films with military or science-fiction settings,
for example, often downplay the thematic appeals of these other genres.
Predator (1987) deals less with military codes of group interaction or
science-fiction questions of the limits of human knowledge than with
muscle-flexing, bloodletting, and Arnold Schwarzenegger’s monster-fighting
credentials; in short, the action genre’s fundamental tests of heroic
masculinity. Even when located in familiar, contemporary settings, action
typically occurs at a distance from or as an embellishment of events that
might occur in lived, everyday reality. For example, audiences can see
speeding cars on racetracks and highways, but only in action films can they
regularly witness unsanctioned, destructive pursuits through city streets.
Similarly, while most viewers observe real physical violence at some point
in their lives, action films both locate viewers at a safe remove from conflict
and choreograph action in a lyrical or spectacular style. Multiple camera
positions and rapid cutting transform action from an approximate representation
of reality into a rhythmic spectacle, appealing to viewers at a
visual and physical rather than an intellectual or sentimental level. The
use of extreme close-ups and computer-enhanced special effects further
heightens the sensory appeal of action over its narrative or social relevance.
The representation of action and motion is a fundamental component
of the film medium, and so, the birth of action film effectively coincides
with the birth of cinema. Cinematic reproductions of action began with
films such as Auguste and Louis Lumière’s Demolition d’un mur (1896)
and Arriveé d’un train en gare (1896). During the same period, actuality
films of boxing matches also helped draw audiences to the new leisure
attraction of Kinetoscope parlors and contributed to the growth of producers
such as the Biograph and Edison companies. (Also, as many film
historians have noted, boxing films often could be shown in cities that
prohibited live boxing matches. Even in the earliest years of the medium,
social groups treated the representation of violence differently than real
violence.) Historical epics such as Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915),
Eisenstein’s Battleship Potemkin (1925) and October (1928), and Abel
Gance’s Napoleon (1927) used overtly political narratives and melodramatic
codes of performance, spectacle, and stylistic excess to frame their
representations of small- and large-scale action. In the classical Hollywood
era, the gangster film, the war film, and the western consistently provided
screen action featuring male heroes and directed toward predominantly
male viewers. Of these forms, only the western evolved substantially as a
genre. The gangster film wilted under the threat of the Hays Production
Code and opposition from religious groups, and the war film largely
retained its prosocial function throughout the studio era (with some
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darker notes struck by films such as John Ford’s They Were Expendable
[1945] and Sam Fuller’s The Steel Helmet [1951]). In both cases, extracinematic
discourses surrounding representation of violence dictated the
genres’ dissipation or stasis. After World War II, cinematic action and violence
appeared most prominently in other genres or modes: in westerns; in
film noir, with its internalized, psychological violence; in youth-oriented
swashbuckler films such as The Crimson Pirate (1952); and in spectacular
male epics such as Ben-Hur (1959) and Spartacus (1960).
By the mid-1960s, themes of the western—including tensions between
civilization and savagery, sanctioned authority versus vigilantism, and
regeneration through violence—traveled to contemporary settings in criminal
and police dramas such as Bullitt and Dirty Harry. While driven by dramatic,
putatively realist narratives, these films also featured constructions of
alternately prosocial and antisocial masculinity and extended sequences of
spectacular action and violence. These latter elements achieved greater
prominence in male-centered narratives such as Jaws (1975) and Rocky
(1976). In the 1980s, films such as First Blood and its sequels signaled an
emphasis on the solitary, muscular male hero, sending the Western male
around the globe in search of spectacular violence. In the 1990s, the rise of
directors familiar with the visual conventions and editing of music videos
and television commercials led to entire films constructed around perpetual
visual spectacle. Mid-1990s films such as Strange Days (1995), The Rock,
and Heat (1996) choreograph even transitions and plot developments in
the manner of action sequences, via performativity, an abundance of
extreme close-ups, and terse dialogue. In the late 1990s, calculated blockbusters
such as Armageddon and Star Wars Episode I: The Phantom Menace
(1999) relied on brief shot durations and rapid edits to generate the
sensation of persistent activity.
Accelerated films with close proximity to screen subjects correspondingly
privilege particular viewing strategies. They reward immediate
engagement but discourage depth of involvement. Armageddon, despite its
two-and-a-half-hour running time, maintains the approximate rhythm of
a thirty-second car commercial for much of its length. The film’s prolonged
astronaut-training sequence, for example, is composed of a multitude
of very brief scenes, subordinating narrative progression to a series of
snapshot-like moments of activity. Throughout the film, conventionally
“American” images of rural children, as well as images of plaintive children
in an indistinct Third World setting, serve as transitions between narrative
events. The Star Wars series similarly maintains visual appeal through
frequent changes in camera position and setting. Exposition often occurs
in scenes of less than ten seconds’ duration, with characters exchanging a
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few lines of dialogue in shot/reaction shot form, followed by abrupt cuts to
different locations. Such editing, combined with the film’s frequent use of
swift wipe transitions, borrows conventions of fast-paced visual spectacle
originating in the silent era and refined in the economical style of 1930s
Republic serials. At the same time, the late-1990s films accelerate the pace
of editing considerably. Brief shot durations, coupled with long running
times, produce a sort of epic-length montage. In place of character interiority
or the kind of linear narrative that requires viewers to connect disparate
events, they offer a perpetual present, a space in which decisive
action produces immediate consequences.
1990s action-film narratives, which usually focus upon a solitary hero
or pair of heroes, often function simply to advance the protagonists from
one dangerous predicament to another. These narratives generate suspense
not by prolonging viewers’ anticipation of upcoming action
sequences, but by delivering a continuous flow of action as the narrative
itself. Speed (1994), for example, extends a speeding-bus sequence over
more than half the film’s running time, and related action set-pieces comprise
the film’s opening and climactic sequences. The film pares down its
story and the interactions among characters to the absolute minimum
required to suture viewers into the rhythm of the action. Contemporary
action films often reshape the familiar narrative pattern of stasis/conflict/resolution,
bypassing the period of stasis almost entirely to focus on
conflict that spreads across an entire film. Many 1990s action films commence
in action, beginning with a modestly scaled conflict that introduces
the lead players and provides cursory character development. An opening
elevator-crash sequence in Speed, for example, establishes the virility and
resourcefulness of an L.A.P.D. officer (Keanu Reeves) and the ruthlessness
and vindictiveness of his mad-bomber adversary (Dennis Hopper).
Similarly, the opening sequence of Cliffhanger (1993), in which Sylvester
Stallone leads a failed rescue operation that results in a woman’s death,
establishes Stallone as a flawed male whose desire to regain control over his
body and his physical environment motivates his confrontation with the
film’s villains. In both cases, male protagonists’ actions are raised to a level
of absolute significance; the films’ conflicts train their male heroes for
entry into or return to a pantheon of super-active masculinity.
The conventional action-film narrative deals with a solitary hero’s tests
of masculine identity. The struggles usually unfold across the male body or
shift onto the body’s typically phallic extensions in weaponry, machinery
or larger symbols of power, authority or physical mass (from tanks and
airplanes to large buildings to mountains or entire cities). Describing
1980s Hollywood action films, Susan Jeffords suggests that displays of the
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male body and complementary images of masculine spaces and events
construct a visibly male narrative world:
[T]he male body—principally the white male body—became increasingly a
vehicle of display—of musculature, of beauty, of physical feats, and of a gritty
toughness. External spectacle—weaponry, explosions, infernos, crashes,
high-speed chases, ostentatious luxuries—offered companion evidence of
both the sufficiency and the volatility of this display. That externality itself
confirmed that the outer parameters of the male body were to be the focus of
audience attention, desire, and politics.11
Writing in the early 1990s, Jeffords suggests that 1990s films, in contrast,
provide a space for more interiorized and emotive male heroes. With the
decade now complete, it seems that 1990s action films more frequently did
narrate the exploits of psychologically and emotionally complex males but
still privileged the exteriorized male body. Male characters and viewers
continue to enjoy dominion over physical as well as emotional spaces.
The prevalence of the white male in action films highlights the genre’s
construction of stable, unassailable identities for its heroes. Action films
routinely subject masculinity—through its metonymic representation as a
male body, itself an approximation of the phallus—to rituals of combat
and suffering. The triumph of masculinity occurs only when the screen
male exhibits mastery over his own body. To generate conflict around the
idealized space of the male body—and to discourage erotic contemplation
of static or rigid bodies—action films threaten, test, and punish their
heroes. The films subject their heroes to ritual or conventional obstacles
that, once overcome, demonstrate the fantasy omnipotence of the action
hero, usually a white male. Action films tend to present white maleness as
sufficient evidence of stable self-identity, in opposition to other gender or
racial formations. Jeffords notes in Hollywood films “a pattern of masculinity
that necessitates defining men not by content but by opposition
to an other.”12 Viewers recognize a male hero not entirely through a perception
of the character’s positive traits, but also in his opposition to representative
villains, who often appear as characters of different races or
ethnicities.
The almost complete absence of black or female protagonists from
action films before the late 1990s appears partly to be a consequence of
Hollywood’s—and more broadly U.S. culture’s—definition of blacks and
women as already oppositional figures, counterparts or complements to
the male ideal. Although stars such as Wesley Snipes, Will Smith, and Chris
Tucker made inroads into the action genre in the 1990s, filmmakers routinely
paired them with partners or mentors who were white (or Asian, for
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Tucker in the Rush Hour series [1998, 2001]).13 Mixed-race duos populated
many successful action “buddy movies” of the 1980s and 1990s, and the
films regularly defined the white male hero in relation to his black counterpart.
In an analysis of racial pairs in buddy movies, Cynthia Fuchs notes
a pretext of avowedly race-blind masculinity that transforms racial difference
into male camaraderie. In such films, she traces “a narrative continuum
which contains initial axes of racial, generational, political, and
ethnic difference under a collective performance of extraordinary virility.”14
Nevertheless, in most cases only the white male partner gains access
to real, that is, visible and narrated, virility.
Throughout mixed-race buddy films, such as the Lethal Weapon series
and Die Hard with a Vengeance (1995), the black partner’s pragmatic
skepticism and caution render him a comic foil for white male heroics. The
Lethal Weapon series establishes a dynamic between the reckless—and in
the first film, suicidal—Riggs (Mel Gibson) and the sensible, aging
Murtaugh (Danny Glover). The films transfer the symptoms of midlife
crisis, a common enough anxiety among white males, onto the body of
Murtaugh, leaving Riggs free to demonstrate a version of masculinity that
consists of physical autonomy, lack of inhibition, and freedom from the
burdens of women and family. The series underscores the childish nature
of this masculinity by showing Riggs moving into Murtaugh’s home and
flirting with his partner’s teenage daughter. Riggs’s youthful masculinity,
though, repeatedly proves superior to his partner’s mature but diminished
gender identity. Riggs performs many acrobatic feats and fights in a showy
martial-arts style, while Murtaugh displays little agility and minimal
prowess in hand-to-hand combat. Riggs also possesses a reservoir of
knowledge about policing and science that Murtaugh lacks. Finally, Riggs’s
sexuality is defined and glamorized in lovemaking scenes (in the second
and third films) that show his nearly naked body, while the display of
Murtaugh’s exposed body occasions the black character’s mockery or
humiliation. The series successfully defuses the stereotype of the wholly
physical, hypersexual black male, but only by parceling out those traits to
the white hero and leaving the black counterpart inept and impotent. The
Lethal Weapon series, like numerous other black/white pairings in action
films and in other genres and media, displaces crises of masculine identity
from the white hero onto his perpetually suffering black partner, who
becomes a degraded mirror or a negative image of the white lead.
Action films consistently naturalize racial, ethnic, and gender differences
through self-reflexive comedy. Late-1980s and 1990s action films
used comedy simultaneously to retain and critique conventions of heroic
masculinity. Die Hard and its sequels combine Bruce Willis’s comic timing
with the genre’s solemn tests of masculinity. Arnold Schwarzenegger’s
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tongue-in-cheek persona gives free rein to his many roles as phallic
superman. His character in True Lies, for example, conceals his identity by
pretending to be a computer salesman. This conceit permits the film to
contrast the character’s masquerade as an ordinary husband and father
with the fantasy representation of his “real,” heroic identity. Even stereotypically
masculine performers like Stallone manage to gain comic mileage
by tweaking their previous images: His character in Tango & Cash declares
early in the film that “Rambo is a pussy,” mocking the ultraconservative
Rambo character in sexist and homophobic terms.15 In these and other
cases, action films rely on postmodern self-reflexivity, or what Jim Collins
calls “hyperconsciousness”: “[A] hyperawareness on the part of the text
itself of its cultural status, function, and history, as well as of the conditions
of its circulation and reception.”16 By presuming to offer audiences a metacommentary
on media culture, action films can rearticulate conservative
ideologies that other contemporary texts and discourses have challenged.
At the same time, such intertextual references offer the possibility that the
conservative discourses they invoke can only function in this intertextual
relay, and are correspondingly inoperable in social reality.
The genre’s codes of visual style complement male heroes’ comic selfaggrandizement.
Action films consistently foreground their protagonists
as the camera follows the hero’s movements through space and frames him
at the center of the visual spectacle. In action sequences, cameras track
the protagonist, whether he is the pursuer or the pursued, the attacker or
the defender. Multiple camera positions during fight sequences present a
variety of male selves that converge toward a singular masculine ideal.
Fragmented shots of the hero’s body in action and multiple-angle views of
the same body signify the hero’s threatened or fractured masculinity. These
films visually represent a hero’s successful combat by reviewing the image
of the solitary, whole male. Such a presentation adheres generally to principles
of classical cinematic narrativity. Conventions of analytical editing
call for fragmented close-ups to draw attention to significant components
of a larger image. In action films, though, close-ups of male heroes’ limbs
and muscles often emphasize these body parts’ contributions to a functional
male whole rather than their relevance to a particular scene (just as
fragmented shots of the female body typically highlight the object status of
that body over its narrative relevance). The centrality of the protagonist
in shot compositions both activates the viewer’s voyeuristic gaze and
promotes identification with the screen protagonist.
Action films’ consistent incorporation of visual spectacle also fetishizes
the male hero, not as an object of erotic contemplation, but as a component
of a full-screen spectacle.17 Steve Neale observes that repetitive closeups
of the male body and its extensions in weaponry encourage fetishistic
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looking, “by stopping the narrative in order to recognize the pleasure of
display, but displacing [the display] from the male body as such and locating
it more generally in the overall components of a highly ritualized
scene.”18 In addition to offering their heroes as objects of voyeuristic admiration,
action films diffuse the boundaries of their protagonists’ bodies so
that the figures transcend the physical specificity of their representations.
The male body becomes a connotative visual element in the genre’s presentation
of spectacular action. In turn, action-film spectacle serves as a
bombastic representation of masculinity, a representation that can exist
only in visual abstractions. The spectacle of action, and the fantasy of masculinity
it represents, finds no parallel in the domestic or personal sphere.
Action films, through their overemphasis on the terrain of action, suggest
the threat to male dominance that lurks at the edges of spectacle-oriented
narratives.
Digital effects further dilute the boundaries between the male body
and the surrounding spectacle. Terminator 2 offers a paradigmatic case
through its presentation of a villainous, shape-changing man/machine.
This creature, dubbed the T-1000 (Robert Patrick), uses its powers to
blend into the film’s physical environment (e.g., by “morphing” into a
checkerboard floor pattern) and to bypass physical barriers (as it does by
partially liquefying to slip through prison bars). Later films also substitute
digital reproductions of characters’ bodies during action sequences.
Mission: Impossible (1996) achieves its most stunning effects with a digitally
composited scene with its hero in midair between an exploding
helicopter and a speeding train. Similarly, in True Lies, the airborne hero’s
effects-enhanced battles with terrorists excite viewers through sheer visual
excess, disengaging the viewer’s desire for credibility or realism. As in other
1990s films, some of True Lies’s action sequences locate filmed characters
in environments that include digitally generated elements.19 (In True Lies’s
climactic battle, long shots of Tasker piloting a Harrier jet amid downtown
skyscrapers use filmed backgrounds, but the jet itself is a computergraphic
effect.) More recent films, including the later Schwarzenegger
vehicle The 6th Day (2000) and the disaster film The Day after Tomorrow
(2004), digitally superimpose film footage of characters onto computergenerated
backgrounds. Action scenes that once highlighted the virtuoso
performances of stunt people now acquire their chief appeal through the
technical sophistication of the images themselves. Ironically, contemporary
action films’ exaggerated narratives of male activity include physical
feats that can no longer be staged before the camera. Digital visual effects
privilege arresting simulation over profilmic reality, and the human body
becomes another manipulable element in digitally enhanced representations
of scenographic space.20 Images of the literal body of the actor—usually
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male—lend scale to the simulated world and establish narrative continuity.
Just as spectacle and the visual landscape define the hero, the hero’s presence
defines the landscape, reconfiguring it into a grandiose emblem of
masculinity and control.
Action Cinema as a Melodramatic Mode
The action film’s emphasis on spectacle, rhythm of action, spatial properties,
performance, and music links the genre to melodrama, both in its narrative
structure and its formal properties. The action genre’s association
with masculinity and male audiences parallels the melodrama’s linkage to
female audiences and femininity. Such gender associations have resulted in
critical disparagement for both genres: the contemporary action film,
like nineteenth-century stage melodrama and the classical-Hollywood
melodrama, is regularly pilloried for its visual and performative excesses and
lack of narrative realism. Moreover, 1970s feminist critics’ recuperation of
the melodrama—challenging its denigrated status as a vehicle for low
pleasures and artificial evocations of sentiment—parallels the 1990s (and
ongoing) feminist project of revisiting traditionally male genres for representations
of conflicted masculinities. Feminist analyses of the melodrama
identify the social conflicts the genre exaggerates or displaces into personal
space. Theorists of melodrama also examine the spectatorial pleasures that
coincide with affective entertainment—in melodrama, usually pathos
rather than elation. Contemporary feminist analyses of “masculine” genre
films have also recognized the ideological conflicts that these films generate
or elide. However, analysis of this sort often fails to account for the
spectatorial pleasures associated with such texts. Action films present
physical strength and dexterity as the solution to social conflicts, an attractive
proposition for male viewers socialized to rely on physical force
despite increasingly limited opportunities to make use of such force.
Mechanisms of disavowal notwithstanding, action films also showcase the
eroticized, objectified male body, offering straightforward or ironic pleasures
to men and women across categories of sexual preference. For both
male and female viewers, action films also offer uncomplicated oppositions
between good and evil in a morally lucid world.
The term melodrama designates particular film genres and subgenres
as well as an aesthetic mode popular since the eighteenth century. Linda
Williams begins her article “Melodrama Revised” with the statement,
“[m]elodrama is the fundamental mode of popular American moving pictures”
(42). She argues that melodramatic codes of moral legibility, as well
as combinations of pathos and action, are not the province of specific genres
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such as the family melodrama or the action film. Instead, she identifies
melodrama not as a discrete genre but as “a modality of narrative with a
high quotient of pathos and action” (51). Supporting her historical
argument, she cites exhibitors’ categories of film genres—including
western melodrama, crime melodrama, action melodrama, and romantic
melodrama—that use the term melodrama to refer to “a form of exciting,
sensational, and above all, moving story that can be further differentiated
by specifications of setting or milieu” (50–51).21 Williams’s goal is partly to
align previous understanding of the melodrama genre with a broader conception
of melodrama as an aesthetic mode, a conception based on the
term’s use in the U.S. trade press in the 1920s and later.22 Williams does
admit the legitimacy of generic categories such as the family melodrama
and maternal melodrama but argues that many male-oriented genres, for
example, the western and the crime film, have been defined apart from or
in opposition to the category of melodrama, despite their reliance on
melodramatic principles. Christine Gledhill extends Williams’s argument,
observing as well that “[i]f male-oriented action movies are persistently
termed ‘melodrama’ in the trade, long after the term is more widely disgraced,
this should alert us to something from the past that is alive in the
present and circulating around the masculine.”23 Both Williams and
Gledhill effectively challenge the earlier critical equation of action with
realism (as other commentators on the action genre have done). Affirming
the compatibility of action and emotion, Williams argues: “If emotional
and moral registers are sounded, if a work invites us to feel sympathy for
the virtues of beset victims, if the narrative trajectory is ultimately more
concerned with a retrieval and staging of innocence than with the psychological
causes of motives and action, then the operative mode is melodrama”
(42). (Despite her carefully argued if sweeping reassessment of
melodrama’s significance in popular cinema, Williams cites as contemporary
examples a range of films that fits previous critical understandings of
the melodrama genre, including Philadelphia [1993], Schindler’s List
[1993], Malcolm X [1992], Silkwood [1983], and Norma Rae [1979].)
Williams, like Gledhill, identifies melodrama as a mode rather than a
genre, though her most detailed contemporary examples concern melodramatic
codes in a discrete body of films recognizable as part of the
action genre. She observes, “we have only to look at what’s playing at the
local multiplex to realize that the familiar Hollywood feature of prolonged
climactic action is, and I would argue has always been, a melodramatic
spectacle” (57). She continues: “Nothing is more sensational in American
cinema than the infinite varieties of rescues, accidents, chases, and fights.
These ‘masculine’ action-centered multiple climaxes may be scrupulously
motivated or wildly implausible depending on the film” (57). Williams
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does not define the action film as a genre itself, but she clearly invokes the
conventionally male world of action cinema. She defines First Blood and
Rambo as “male action melodramas,” noting both films’ emphasis on their
protagonist’s victimhood and pathos. While such elements support
Williams’s argument about the melodramatic mode, genre differences do
exist, and attention to those differences illuminates the significance of
emotional displays in the action genre. Whereas domestic, affect-centered
melodramas—for example, the maternal melodrama Stella Dallas (1937)
or the male melodrama Written on the Wind (1956)—represent pathos and
suffering in order to maintain and satisfy viewer expectations, action films
such as Rambo use pathos as a pretext for cathartic, explosive violence. In
action cinema, suffering is a catalyst for action, not its endpoint. For my
purposes, melodrama’s relevance to the action film lies not only in the
action genre’s general use of the melodramatic narrative mode (and a correspondingly
spectacular visual style) but also in its increasing turn to
melodrama’s domestic settings and conflicts in the late 1980s and 1990s. At
work is a process of genre hybridity, or in other terms, what Gledhill calls
“boundary encounters and category mixing” (225). This intersection, she
continues, “permits the exploration of one social gender in the body of
another,” precisely the effect of the contemporary collision of action and
melodrama (225).
Action-film violence, like the genre’s other predominant elements,
operates according to melodramatic codes of representational excess.
Mary Ann Doane argues that generic prescriptions in U.S. film situate violence
and emotion in correspondingly “male” and “female” spheres, adding
that “[i]n the Western [sic] and detective film aggressivity or violence is
internalized as narrative content. In maternal melodrama, the violence is
displaced onto affect.”24 By synthesizing traditionally male and female
genres, contemporary action films shape violence into affect and reconfigure
emotional displays as violent spectacles. Action films, traditionally
addressed to male viewers, produce emotion through violent rather than
sentimental images. Sharon Willis’s reading of To Live and Die in L.A.
(1985) traces the convergence of violence and affect: “By its very excessive
violence, To Live and Die manages to maintain both levels of intensity; it
thematizes violence and it produces bursts of affect channeled as spectator
horror.”25 The relation between violence and affective intensity constitutes
a prevailing convention in contemporary action films. With each passing
year, technical developments in the action cinema permit increasingly
graphic displays of violence and trauma inflicted on the body. To temper
the affective power of such images, action films typically surround
episodes of graphic violence with comic dialogue or plot elements. Thus,
the films generally offer viewers an escape valve, a means to engage with
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the narrative at a different level if certain images or situations become too
unsettling, or in other words, if viewers respond too emotionally.
Melodramatic codes also determine the action film’s available content
and its manner of presentation. Thomas Elsaesser notes that in melodrama,“significance
lies in the structure and articulation of the action, not
in any psychologically motivated correspondence with individualised
experience.”26 Since the experience of action films—shootouts, chases,
international intrigue—bears little relevance to viewers’ everyday realities,
the films promote viewer engagement based on performative and gestural
codes, and on motion, rhythm, and visual excess. Genre conventions
situate action-film characters and narratives outside lived reality. This disjunction
liberates characters and plots from encroachments of “real” social
and political conditions while limiting the available range of narrative
responses to particular situations.
Melodramatic excess engages the viewer both formally and at the level of
visceral appeal. In the action genre, excess also signals the failures, limitations,
or contradictions of films’ manifest ideologies. 1970s commentators
regarded the classical-Hollywood melodrama as producing ideological
contradictions through stylistic excess and narrative discontinuity, disrupting
the ideological positions that films might appear to enforce.27 In action
films, pyrotechnic or violent excess substitutes for pragmatic solutions to
real-world problems. Combat replaces diplomacy, solitude and alienation
replace personal bonds, muteness and stock phrases preclude communication,
and ritualized male camaraderie stands in for dialogue between the
sexes. Action films regularly recode male anxieties or traumas as hysterical
symptoms, displaced from the active male persona.
As noted above, the audiovisual qualities of action sequences often subsume
the sequences’ logical narrative function. Geoffrey Nowell-Smith
argues that in melodrama, “music and mise-en-scène do not just heighten
the emotionality of an element of action: to some extent they substitute for
it.”28 He links this stylistic device to the psychopathology of hysteria, in
which repressed ideas or emotions reappear on the body as displaced
symptoms. For Nowell-Smith, melodrama’s manifestation of inexpressible
ideas through visual or performative devices indicates the genre’s resistance
to normative ideologies. Melodrama operates according to social
norms, but exaggerates social conventions to expose the artifice and limitations
of prevailing codes of behavior. Action films, through a similar use
of visual excess in place of logical resolution, may share this resistance to
social repression. Visual excess transforms otherwise logical actions—that
is, logical within the framework of an action-film narrative—into absurd
posturing or impossible physical feats. Moreover, the notion of action-film
spectacle as hysterical symptom problematizes the genre’s distinct
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associations with masculinist ideologies. The action film thus situates itself
in an already feminized mass-cultural space.29
Action films’ distance from realism also situates the genre outside historically
male—and thus esteemed—categories of cultural expression. In
classical-Hollywood cinema, the visual, narrative, and thematic conventions
of male-dominated genres such as the gangster film and the western
contributed to associations between male action and the critical category
of realism. Notwithstanding the pulp-fiction qualities of their plots and
dialogue, gangster films and westerns often featured restrained acting, the
pictorial realism of open landscapes or characteristically gritty urban
locales, and, for gangster films, ostensible attention to social context. In
their depictions of violent action, classical westerns, war films, and gangster
films also tended toward realism rather than exaggeration, with violence
reduced to frequent but emotionally understated displays (i.e., swift
and bloodless episodes, not protracted and anguished ones). Since at least
the 1980s, though, action cinema has been marked by an overt and
increasing disruption of realist codes. Appeals to adolescent viewers partly
motivate such disruptions. Youth appeals motivate too the genre’s creation
of utopian or fantasy settings such as outer space or the supernatural
world. Similarly, action films based on video games provide adolescents
with fantasy narratives removed from the contested familial, educational,
or social spheres. In the mid-1990s, a wave of such films appeared, including
Super Mario Bros (1993), Street Fighter (1994), and Mortal Kombat
(1995). The early twenty-first century has seen a second wave with two
Tomb Raider films (2001, 2003), two Resident Evil films (2002, 2004), and
Alien vs. Predator (2004), among others. These newer films mix codes of
action and horror, but in place of horror cinema’s abiding interest in sexuality,
these texts emphasize their protagonists’ ability to ward off bodily
threats through physical action.
The contemporary action cinema’s relationship to realism bears
additional scrutiny. This relationship is not one of opposition but of selective
engagement. Selective critical reception also plays a role, as a further
comparison with the classical gangster film makes clear. During the early
sound era, the gangster film, a genre invested in male action and violence
as well as male relationships, appealed to proponents of realism on multiple
levels. It offered photographic realism in the form of urban, often
working-class settings (albeit settings represented by studio sets rather
than location shooting) and featured characters dressed in contemporary
and often shabby clothing. Also at the formal level, synchronous dialogue
and sound effects constructed a dense, coherent aural world. With its often
bleak stories and unhappy endings, the genre fulfilled accepted narrative
criteria for realism. Its actors typically eschewed the broad gestures and
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visible emotions of earlier silent films and of other sound-film genres such
as maternal melodrama, comedy, and the musical. (These performative
codes had already become more understated than in early cinema, which
owed more to stage-acting styles such as pantomime.) In addition, the
gangster film usually supplied both psychological and social motivations
(e.g., insanity or greed, and poverty or class hatred) for its characters’ misdeeds.
For all these historically realist attributes, though, the gangster film,
like the action cinema of the 1980s and thereafter, also departed from realism
in many ways. These departures were characteristic of popular genre
cinema: circumscribed narrative worlds, rigid causality, ritualized and
performative interactions among men, exaggerated sound recorded in
postproduction, and sensational depictions of violence and destruction.
Julia Hallam and Margaret Marshment refer to this latter tendency as
“realisation”: “in the sense of reality stimulation, of ‘making realistic’ the
fantastic, spectacular effects of storytelling through visualization and auditory
effects.”30 “Real-isation” provides the foundation for expressive spectacle
by anchoring viewers to a coherent visible and audible world. Even
films adapted from comic books or fantasy video games ground their
so-called alternate realities in an unstated logic of physical laws, behavioral
codes, and spoken language. In particular, films’ constructions of gendered
identities refer to the gender biases of their producing cultures. Male
psychological pain, for example, underwrites countless texts ranging from
the unflinchingly realist to the utterly fantastic.
Action heroes embody generic and melodramatic attributes, attributes
that are wholly fabricated, the products of intertextuality and a history of
mediated performance. Narrative excesses and disjuctures characterize the
action genre. The genre also depends upon performative, excessive masculinity,
further eroding the long-standing equation of male texts with
realism. Spectacular displays of the male body and exaggerated male
behaviors extend beyond narrative requirements and beyond the limits of
realist convention. Incoherence and ambiguity often results from this
exaggeration. For Nowell-Smith, “the ‘hysterical’ moment of a text can be
identified as the point at which the realist representative convention breaks
down” (74). Regarded in this fashion, the contemporary action film consists
of a nearly uninterrupted series of hysterical moments. Redundant
footage of spectacular destruction—for example, the replaying of the
bus/train collision in The Fugitive (1993) or the repeated long shots of
the climactic explosion of a Russian attack helicopter in Rambo from multiple
camera positions—supersedes the essential requirements of narrative
and encourages viewers’ differing interpretations of the sequences and the
films in which they appear. Also applying the notion of hysteria to film,
Chris Holmlund locates similar pathological symptoms in two Stallone
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vehicles, Lock Up (1989) and Tango & Cash, which she interprets as
displays of male masquerade. The two films, she argues, exalt masculinity
through the pairing of Stallone with “the Stallone clone,” a virtual copy of
the hero who may safely idealize (through behavioral similarities) and
challenge (through verbal barbs) the original.31 This sort of pairing
demands recurrent homophobic disclaimers on the part of the characters,
which they combine with deliberately stunted assertions of their own
physical superiority. As Holmlund suggests, this nervousness suggests a
corresponding uneasiness about gender norms. The action hero’s overstated
masculinity denotes the constructedness of conventional gender
paradigms. Viewers’ pleasure in such performative displays suggests a
further contradiction between action-film narratives and the genre’s
aesthetic excess. Though at some level action films require viewers to take
male performance seriously (seriously enough to generate suspense or
promote superficial identification), at another the films allow viewers to
enjoy the artifice of men masquerading as supermen.
By presenting male performance and visual spectacle as hysterical excess,
action films promote negotiated viewing positions for both male and female
viewers. Tania Modleski argues that conventional melodramas may appeal
to men “because these films provide them with a vicarious, hysterical,
experience of femininity which can be more definitively laid to rest for having
been ‘worked through.’ ”32Action films, through their exaggerated representations
of heroic masculinity, offer this vicarious, hysterical experience to
viewers of both sexes. Though films periodically offer cinematic masculinity
as an ideal toward which male viewers might strive, the excessive nature of
this masculinity mediates viewer involvement with the screen image.
Because of their representational distance from reality, contemporary action
films do not call upon their male viewers to enact the fantasies of masculinity
that appear onscreen.33 Similarly, female spectators may use experiences
of hysterical masculinity to negotiate their own positions within patriarchal
power structures, aided by the awareness that sufficiently exaggerated masculinity
is indistinguishable from the female pathology of hysteria. Action
films transform masculinity into spectacular abstractions and performative
exhibitions. Such presentations may neutralize the threat that hegemonic
masculinity poses for male viewers, who face social pressure to live up to the
masculine ideal, and female viewers, who must live in its long shadow.
True Lies and the Struggle between Activity and Domesticity
Film, literature, historical texts, and other media typically represent male
activity occurring in public or open spaces. Such spaces offer a privileged
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setting for autonomous male action or visually arresting male conflict.34
Through the mid-1980s, most action films chose settings far removed from
domestic space. Homes, wives, and children, if represented at all, usually
were entirely separate from violent action. The lone-hero focus of films
such as Rambo and Predator could not accommodate romantic interests or
family narratives. However, in the late 1980s and 1990s, many action films
dramatized domestic space and transformed it into a setting for action.
Domestic settings may appeal to aging male viewers who, through marriage
and fatherhood, play more central roles in the domestic economy and for
whom domesticity heightens anxieties about masculinity. These viewers
may take pleasure in paternal heroes’ resolution of domestic conflicts.
Emphasis on home and family also indicates Hollywood’s attempts to draw
female viewers to action films. Action films centered around families and
the home attractively domesticate the aggressive male action hero, rendering
him an object of romantic fantasy rather than a threatening supermale.
Typically in domestic action films, a male hero or a hero and his partner
defend the domestic space against an outside threat, and this defense partially
defines their masculine identities. In each of the first three films in the
Lethal Weapon series, for example, killers attack the heroes in their respective
homes. Throughout the series, domestic space is foregrounded. The
first film stages its climactic battle on the front lawn of Murtaugh’s home.
The second features the destruction of Riggs’s home and a near-fatal
explosion in Murtaugh’s. In the third film, domestic tragedy ensues when
Murtaugh kills his son’s friend, a gang member. The third film concludes
with an extended shootout in an unfinished domestic space, a housing
development under construction that serves as a front for arms dealers. The
action genre previously demonstrated its protagonists’ heroism in public
spaces—such as cities, the jungles of South America and Southeast Asia,
and outer space—and often characterized these men as iconoclastic loners
with no connections to family. By the late 1980s, though, many films presented
male action as essential to the preservation of bucolic, suburban
settings and the families inhabiting them.
Moving away from the Rambo-era convention of the solitary male with
no social or familial ties, films such as those in the Lethal Weapon series
reposition the male hero as the protector of domestic space.35 (In the
Lethal Weapon and Terminator series, the white male protagonist is both a
protector of domestic space and an iconoclastic loner, defending a family
of which he has become a surrogate member.) Conversely, threats to
domestic space occur because of preoccupied or inattentive patriarchs. In
this respect, True Lies and other films anticipate the rhetoric of groups
such as Promise Keepers, suggesting that the father is both cause of and
solution to intrafamily conflict. In True Lies, for example, the hero’s
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neglectful parenting leads to his daughter’s kidnapping by terrorists.
(Curiously, it is his earlier kidnapping of his own wife, in an attempt to
repair his failing marriage, that leaves the daughter alone.) In rescuing the
child, the male hero usurps the parental care-giving role traditionally
assigned to women. The apparent violation of the action-film convention
of the heroic loner occurs through a framework that Jeffords calls “individualism
as fathering” (258). When paternal duties beckon, the male hero
does not abandon his dominion over public space. Instead, the family,
represented by the endangered woman or child, intrudes into the space of
action. In many cases, an inadequate family structure suffices to generate
narrative conflict: poor parenting literally endangers children’s lives.
Jeffords argues that, given challenges to male power in the workplace and
the U.S. political system, paternal heroes work to reclaim the world of the
family as a realm of male authority:
[T]he Terminator films are offering male viewers an alternative realm to that
of the declining workplace and national structure as sources of masculine
authority and power—the world of the family. It is here, this logic suggests,
that men can regain a sense of their expected masculine power, without
having to confront or suggest alterations in the economic or social system
that has led to their feelings of deprivation. (258)
Action-film fatherhood thus offers a fantasy of autonomy, requiring no
substantial behavioral change from men.
In an examination of the prevalence of families in action films, Karen
Schneider notes the genre’s tendency in the late 1990s to “introduce the
family as the central narrative concern in a genre that previously had
focused on the isolated individual—often an outsider—and/or on simple
heterosexual romance.”36 Additionally, she argues, such films “effect a coalescence
of the ‘natural’ elements of the traditional family—heroic father,
supportive mother, vulnerable children—again and again” (4). These narrative
shifts partly represent studios’ attempts to lure families and younger
viewers to theaters, offering mothers and children as supplementary,
though subordinate, points of identification alongside the films’ male
heroes. Films such as Lost in Space (1998), Batman & Robin (1997), The
Lost World (1997), and Independence Day (1996) locate families amid
comic-book or science-fiction scenarios: the ostensible realism of the family
structure anchors the films’ extensive fantasy elements. In other films, such
as Air Force One and Dante’s Peak, the male protagonists’ family connections
denote their integrity while offering active, life-saving roles to male
characters who may appear past their physical prime. In the films she analyzes,
Schneider finds “a lack of faith in the rearticulation [the films]
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worked so hard to achieve” (5). Schneider notes the contradictions of
using violent, public activity—the action film’s principal convention—as a
means for maintaining or repairing family ties.“Violence,” she observes,“is
the catalyst for and the means of rearticulation” of the family (11). She
notes as well that, with the exception of The Long Kiss Goodnight, the films
she analyzes present traditional formations of male patriarchs defending
their wives and children. At one level, the incorporation of threats to the
family expands the genre’s narrative possibilities to include subject matter
previously relegated to the private, domestic world—a sphere the genre
historically neglects. At the same time, the inclusion of families facilitates
the transmission of conservative principles of family structure alongside
the genre’s largely conservative representations of male agency. Only the
Spy Kids trilogy (2001, 2002, 2003) upsets this arrangement, granting
agency to both parents and children, and distributing this agency roughly
equally among male and female characters.
Threats to children usually allow solitary, male heroes to act as guardians
of the family while they engage in destructive violence. Schwarzenegger’s
characters in both Terminator 2 and The Last Action Hero function not
only as autonomous heroes but also as compelling father figures, providing
fantasy alternatives to absent or inadequate parents. The two films
justify their male heroes’ emergency fathering by placing the threatened
children in splintered families. In Terminator 2, young John Conner’s
mother first appears in a mental asylum, and when released, she devotes
her energies to the film’s action plot, leaving Schwarzenegger’s Terminator
character to spend quality time with her son. The Last Action Hero
teams Schwarzenegger with another young waif who lives with a negligent
single mother. The films combine a father–son dynamic with familiar
buddy-movie conventions, making the boys both comic foils and dispensers
of precocious wisdom. The adult male protagonists of Terminator
2 and The Last Action Hero learn rudimentary fathering skills in their
relationships with their young cohorts, but this learning occurs in public
space and amid narrative action rather than in the contained domestic
environment. Similarly, in True Lies, Harry’s rescue of his daughter
redeems him as a father without requiring him to deviate from his public,
physical role.
Most action films negotiate domestic and family concerns by mapping
these issues cursorily onto the active, public, male sphere. In True Lies,
which begins with the domestic and the active spaces rigidly separated, the
active sphere eventually subsumes the domestic. While the domestic world
recedes from the narrative, its representatives, the hero’s wife and teenage
daughter, cross into the active sphere. The film enforces the separation of
the familial and active spheres by presenting its few female characters as
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traditional melodramatic types: the dissatisfied wife, the wholesome but
quietly rebellious daughter, and the greedy temptress. Meanwhile, male
characters operate according to melodramatic, nonpsychological principles
of action, and the film repeatedly substitutes visual spectacle for emotional
outbursts. Notably, though, the film’s interplay between the active
and familial realms includes some seepage between the two spaces, which
occurs because of the hero’s marital crisis and because of the intrusive
behavior of his misogynist partner. The partner stresses the importance of
events in the active sphere (regularly citing national defense and presidential
authority) while zealously monitoring and constraining the hero’s
domestic conduct.
The action narrative of True Lies concerns a dashing super-spy, Harry
Tasker (Schwarzenegger), and his battle against a group of Middle Eastern
terrorists. This plot is relatively conventional, but the film integrates the
story of Harry’s wife, Helen (Jamie Lee Curtis), who is unaware of her
husband’s secret identity. The film’s first act comically juxtaposes Harry’s
spectacular exploits against his banal home life, in which he fabricates an
identity as an exceptionally dull computer salesman. The couple’s relationship
is threatened when a used-car salesman (Bill Paxton) tries to seduce
Helen by masquerading as a gallant secret agent. Harry mobilizes government
forces to prevent her possible infidelity, and shortly thereafter,
Harry’s enemies kidnap him and his wife, at which point she discovers his
real identity. Following the couple’s hasty reconciliation, Harry flies off to
rescue their kidnapped daughter and to prevent nuclear war. At the film’s
conclusion, the family appears briefly to exude domestic bliss—though the
film foregrounds the relationship between the married couple rather than
the family threesome—and Helen joins Harry as a secret agent.
Melodrama informs the narrative through comic references to domesticity
during action sequences and through spectacular displacement of
psychological crises. The film’s opening sequence, in which Harry infiltrates
a party at an enormous villa, places action in a melodramatic context.
Harry’s first line of dialogue is “Honey, I’m home,” a code phrase he
whispers to his nearby support team through a hidden microphone.37 To
accomplish his mission, he maneuvers through a crowded reception area,
then proceeds upstairs to a bedroom, where he begins stealing computer
files. As in a traditional melodramatic narrative, the sequence uses the
home as a site of conflict and recognizes the residence’s public/private
boundaries. The notion that a male hero needs a team of hidden associates
to guide him through social space recurs throughout the film: Harry’s
partner Al “Gib” Gibson (Tom Arnold) provides him with a cover story to
explain Harry’s absence to his wife and daughter, and in a later sequence,
Gib phones Helen to account for Harry’s late working hours as the hero
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sets out to pursue his foes. This later episode prevents Harry from attending
the birthday party his wife and daughter have prepared for him. The film
briefly shows his family’s disappointment, then abandons the domestic
conflict entirely by cutting away to an extended chase sequence. At the
thematic level, Harry’s choice of work and action over family duties exemplifies
his paternal shortcomings, but the film’s maintenance of viewer
interest depends on such character traits. The film’s adherence to genre
conventions such as fast-paced narrative events, visual spectacle, and
violence requires evasion of visually static domestic space. Later, the film
literally activates (i.e., makes active) another domestic space, when Harry
musters a commando team to intrude upon his wife at the car salesman’s
home, which is destroyed in the process.
The possibility of Helen’s infidelity produces further opportunities for
the convergence of the active and domestic spheres, figured around melodramatic
representations of personal intimacy and male hysteria. In place
of the heterosexual couple, the film’s first third foregrounds Harry’s partnership
with Gib, who is a conspicuous presence in Harry’s personal life.
Gib appears throughout as a surrogate mate for Harry, sharing his confidences
and narrating his exploits. In addition, the film thoroughly emasculates
Gib’s character: he rarely uses a gun or participates in action; he
complains frequently about his passive, subordinate role; he chides Harry
about his bravura (i.e., hypermasculine) behavior; and at one point he
dances an impromptu tango with another of Harry’s male cohorts. Gib’s
character embodies the hysterical residue of Harry’s oversufficient masculinity.
Harry is largely silent when he learns of Helen’s possible affair, but
Gib uses the situation to discourse at length about his own marital failures
and his misogynist attitude toward Helen and women generally. The film
presents each of these situations as comedy, relying on Tom Arnold’s comic
persona to soften its displays of sexism, homophobia, male hysteria, and
fear of impotence. Gib verbalizes the conflicts that Harry’s position—
locked into conventions of action-hero autonomy—tries to conceal.
True Lies makes clear the contradictions between domestic melodrama,
with its emphasis on conflicts in the personal sphere, and the action film’s
spectacular appropriation of melodrama. Domestic melodramas bring
sublimated social and personal conflicts to the surface. Conventions of
action-film heroism, however, make no allowance for family crises. The
genre’s emphasis on taciturnity and action leaves few options for intimate
communication, a problem that informs True Lies’s most disturbing
sequence. After removing Helen from the car salesman’s clutches, Harry
and Gib imprison her in a windowless room and interrogate her through a
voice synthesizer that transforms their voices into a bass-heavy monotone
(notably too, Harry’s and Gib’s voices become indistinguishable, blending
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into a singularly oppressive patriarchal timbre). Only with this chilling
mediating device can Harry discern his wife’s feelings. Immediately following
this episode, Harry adopts the guise of a shadowy voyeur who
forces Helen to perform an erotic dance. Here Harry again becomes voiceless,
masking his identity with tape-recorded phrases spoken in a soft
French accent. This scene, the only erotic interlude between Harry and
Helen, appears more perverse than tender on-screen. The scene exaggerates
familiar cultural conventions of gender, presenting a silent, enigmatic
man, and a woman who displays her body for the male onlooker and the
camera. In the scene, Helen performs a masquerade of sultry femininity
to a non-diegetic rock-guitar accompaniment that stresses melodrama’s
musical component (and the action film’s reliance on bombastic music to
create intensity). The scene’s narrative justification as Helen’s secret-agent
debut situates her in the action film’s compulsory role for active women,
that of the erotic but physically capable sex object (a staple of the James
Bond series, for example). Significantly, Helen is mobile in the scene,
dancing around the hotel room, while Harry remains static, sitting in the
shadows. His inactivity sanctions her movements, as ostensibly, her dance
is intended to arouse him to sexual passion. At the same time, Harry’s
immobility indicates his abrogation of the preferred, active male role,
which results in his and Helen’s subsequent capture by the film’s villains.
Consequently, the film calls attention to the action-hero persona’s incompatibility
with the responsibilities of domestic life, whether parental or
sexual. In another scene, Gib temporarily dispenses with his misogynist
diatribes to observe that “Helen’s a flesh-and-blood woman and you’re
never there.”
True Lies demonstrates the fallacy of omnipotent masculinity, observing
that men of action make unreliable husbands and fathers. Still, the film
recuperates the ideal of active masculinity by narrating domestic, usually
female, characters’ halting aspirations to the active realm. Comparatively,
Terminator 2 and The Last Action Hero both depict ideal masculinity’s connection
to ideal fatherhood but elide issues of paternity. The heroes of
these two films serve as exemplary father figures but lack blood ties to the
children they protect.38 True Lies resolves the dilemma of men’s lack
of control over the domestic realm by subjecting Helen to action-film
conventions, altering her character’s previous affiliation with domesticity.
During the interrogation scene, Helen exhibits traditional melodramatic
characteristics, displaying an intense rage about her predicament that elicits
the viewer’s sympathy. Here the film operates in the melodramatic
mode of recasting an overarching social problem onto an individual
character. Helen’s desire for adventure and excitement, manifest by her
own quotidian office job and her susceptibility to the “false” secret agent’s
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advances, mirrors the concerns of women generally relegated to subordinate
or undervalued roles in patriarchal society. Notably, the film—more
specifically, Helen’s husband—sanctions her entry into the active realm by
invoking her duty to her family, not by capitulating to her plea for a more
vibrant life. (With his disguised interrogator voice, Harry tells Helen that
her family will be killed if she does not become a secret agent.) When
Helen finally witnesses her husband in action, she realizes that “I married
Rambo” and decides to become a suitable action-hero spouse. Since the
action-film structure cannot accommodate conventional marital or familial
relations, True Lies shows Helen acquiescing to her husband’s active role
and eventually stepping into this role herself.
If the melodramatic mode relies on what Peter Brooks calls “moral
polarization,” a Manichaean distinction between personified good and
evil, True Lies’s action milieu represents a slightly different moral universe.39
The film identifies its villains as anti-family because of the immediate,
physical threat they pose to the hero’s wife and daughter. Most of the
film’s characters are removed from the domestic economy; like most
action films, True Lies does not represent their personal lives. Character
development functions principally to delineate characters as good or evil.
Although the action film strongly associates principles of good and evil
with specific characters, its moral oppositions do not bear the sharp relation
to real social conditions that family-centered melodramas offer. In
True Lies, the moral frameworks of the melodrama and the action film
initially compete but are ultimately reconciled. The film first depicts Harry
as a distant father and inattentive husband, but a good spy and a staunch
defender of “national security.” Just as Helen is oblivious to her husband’s
achievements, Harry cannot perceive Helen’s fidelity from his position
within the active sphere. Relying on surveillance technology and spymovie
logic, he interprets clandestine phone calls and secret meetings as
adulterous deception (never mind that he regularly practices a similar
deception), so Helen’s real motives become unclear. The film’s middle
sequence, featuring Helen’s kidnapping, interrogation and erotic dance,
enters a moral gray area, representing Harry’s obsessive concern with his
wife’s fidelity as a character flaw but also presenting viewers with the spectacle
of a terrorized female protagonist. Nevertheless, at the film’s conclusion,
when Harry rescues his kidnapped daughter and subdues the
terrorists, the film unambiguously conflates protection of the family and
service to the nation.
Elements of the film’s active sphere that do not engage the domestic
space are clearly coded as either good or evil. The prosocial trappings of
Harry’s organization—the insignia carved into a marble floor reads
“Omega Sector: The Last Line of Defense”—and the dutiful technocrats
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who appear at its headquarters connote goodness and incorruptibility. The
broadly sketched characterizations of supporting characters adhere to
Brooks’s dictum that “melodramatic good and evil are highly personalized:
they are assigned to, they inhabit persons who indeed have no psychological
complexity but who are strongly characterized” (61). The iconic presence
of Charlton Heston as the organization’s leader and the film’s
recurrent displays of military pageantry similarly locate the heroes on the
side of virtue. Meanwhile, the film’s villains appear in luxurious settings
revealed as nefarious terrorist fronts: the sexual, duplicitous villainess
works in an antiquities import–export firm, but lurking in the rear of the
modish office space is her sadistic male leader, clad in army fatigues. The
villainess also favors evening gowns and dies in a limousine crash. As in
the melodrama genre, the film scorns ostentatious wealth while displaying
it extensively.
Just as True Lies unambiguously presents the fictional “Omega Sector”
as an essential government agency, the film, like most of its generic counterparts,
divorces political ideology from its complex relation to issues of
race, history, and imperialism. True Lies recasts global political conflicts as
challenges to the male hero, challenges that obscure questions of gender
and domesticity. Foreign cultures and politics are relevant only as proof of
the hero’s omnipotence. In an article on reporter films set in the Third
World, Claudia Springer suggests that the real project of such films is the
construction of white male subjectivity, defined in opposition to the exoticized
Other: “[W]hat the Western protagonist sees around him is often a
metaphor for qualities he must confront and deal with in himself. [. . .]
[T]he reporter will find himself when he understands the confusion surrounding
him.”40 In True Lies, the hero’s task is simpler still: rather than
attempting to understand his enemies, he need only exterminate them,
clearing away the residue of disorderly, non-Western masculinity that the
terrorists represent.
By defining the hero in relation to stereotypical foreign villains, the film
denotes the righteousness of his cause and neutralizes the threat of the
encroaching, unstable domestic sphere. Harry’s inability to communicate
with his wife contrasts with the multiple languages and epigrammatic wit
he brings to the active sphere. Similarly, the physical power, fluidity, and
kineticism he demonstrates in combat with his Middle Eastern foes compensates
for his lack of control in the domestic sphere.41 The terrorists,
particularly their leader, Saleem Abu Aziz (the only male villain the film
actually names, played by Art Malik), appear as brutal fanatics, more visibly
misogynist than the heroes and adherent to an unintelligible political
cause. The film denies the villains any substantial historical or political
foundations and presents them merely as unsympathetic killers. Their
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largely untranslated Arabic—Harry translates part of one speech for
Helen, then reduces the rest to “blah, blah, blah”—also promotes the
superficial clarity of the active sphere’s moral world. Viewers need not look
beyond the hero for an understanding of the alien culture. The film confirms
Ella Shohat and Robert Stam’s observations about the colonizing
impulses of Western cinema. In Unthinking Eurocentrism, they argue that
“the spectator, identified with the gaze of the West [. . .] comes to master,
in a remarkably telescoped period of time, the codes of a foreign culture
shown as simple, unself-conscious, and susceptible to facile apprehension.”42
Further support for this idea occurs in a later scene in the film in
which Aziz is videotaped expressing his demands, condensing his entire
political history and position into a brief, high-pitched statement. Even
this episode degenerates into comedy, as a failing camera battery prevents
Aziz from completing his polemic. Since the film does not allow viewers to
grapple with the political conditions that motivate international terrorism,
the villains’ malevolence never need be questioned. The decorative (and
unmistakably pejorative) application of Middle Eastern politics and ethnicity
clarifies the film’s moral dimension but obscures the real-world
significance of politics and ethnic identity.
The film’s climactic focus on the utopian space of action transforms
both political and domestic conflict into visual spectacle. Viewers may take
pleasure in computer-enhanced images of Harry piloting an Air Force jet
and machine-gunning terrorists in a downtown office building without
troubling over the scene’s consequences. By foregrounding spectacular
action, the sequence displaces concerns about the disproportionate use of
force, property destruction, and loss of life. The scene also plays on the fantasy
of demolishing the corporate infrastructure, appealing to viewers disenchanted
with multinational capitalism. True Lies’s spectacular episodes
produce substantial contradictions as well. The climactic battle sequence
both validates the prosocial uses of military weaponry and celebrates mass
destruction. Harry’s appropriation of the fighter jet reinforces the action
genre’s masculinist fantasies (through his skillful operation of the jet in
downtown Miami and his familiarity with its weapons systems) and lampoons
those fantasies (through his clumsy takeoff, which damages a police
car, another icon of authority). Another spectacular image, the nuclear
blast noted earlier, celebrates reconciliation in the domestic arena but
punctuates the couple’s embrace with a disconcerting icon of militant
male aggression.
The film’s combination of the fantasy space of action with the familiar
sphere of marriage and domesticity makes apparent the multiple contradictions
between the two realms, even within the conventional territory of
the action film. Structurally, the film makes viewers long for the realm of
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action by periodically depicting its bland antithesis. Despite the novelty of
seeing Arnold Schwarzenegger and Jamie Lee Curtis masquerade as an
ordinary couple, the scenes of domestic relations are relatively static, visually
and narratively. Compositions and color choices are routine, motion is
limited, and dialogue is less memorable than in action scenes (even the
screwball husband–wife repartee flourishes in active rather than domestic
space). To avoid an overrepresentation of middle-class monotony, the film
refines the spectacular and performative qualities of melodrama while
limiting melodrama’s presentation of domestic life. In Richard Dyer’s formulation
of generic pleasures (developed in relation to the film musical),
the utopian promise of intensity—which he defines as “excitement, drama,
affectivity of living”—overcomes the real social experience of dreariness or
monotony.43 The presentation in True Lies of both dimensions, the dreary
and the intense, makes evident the difficulty of negotiating between them.
While the film is deeply misogynist and clearly valorizes the active sphere
over the domestic, it also recognizes the masculine sphere’s inability or
unwillingness to accommodate domestic rituals.
Nevertheless, the domestic sphere remains here as a cherished ideal,
albeit one defined through crises within it and through its vilification by
the film’s antagonists. The terrorists’ threat to Tasker’s wife and daughter
indicates the nuclear family’s fragility and importance. The strongest
denunciation of domesticity comes from the greedy Asian American villainess,
Juno Skinner (Tia Carrere), who dubs Helen “Suzy Homemaker.”44
In the action film’s binary logic, villains conventionally damn the virtues
that the film extols. The film’s conclusion shows that women need access
to the active space to achieve satisfaction and, implicitly, to prevent their
husbands’ flirtations with non-Western women. With the heroine’s accession
to a space previously reserved for men, the film synthesizes the traditional
melodrama’s moral clarity and the action film’s logic of spectacle.
Action Cinema at the Turn of the Millennium
The masculine utopia of the action film is fraught with contradictions that
become more apparent as filmmakers seek new territory onto which to
graft its basic structures. Genre narratives offer a means of compartmentalizing
and ordering cultural experiences, providing accessible maps of
social conflicts and ideological tensions. Action films in the 1990s resolved
conflicts surrounding gender in multiple ways, each of which reveals the
genre’s adaptability as well as the underlying repressions and evasions it
practices. The genre’s continued investment in paradigms of masculinity
helped shape its representations of women. One approach was to remove
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women entirely from the narrative, as in The Rock or Armageddon. In an
all-male world, gradations of masculinity appear prominent, and characters
are defined through their relations to offscreen women or to feminized
male characters, whether partners or villains.45 Alternately, women sometimes
retained their anachronistic function as decorative objects or impediments
to masculine freedom, roles already conventionalized in gangster
films and westerns as early as the second decade of the twenty-first century.
Finally, action films such as True Lies have responded to gender issues by
situating women as both heroes and villains, allowing gender conflicts to
erupt into narrative. In later 1990s films with female protagonists, including
The Long Kiss Goodnight and G.I. Jane (1997), women’s assumption of
conventionally masculine roles appears as the central narrative conflict,
emphasizing gender imbalances but also limiting the narrative autonomy
of women characters. The Long Kiss Goodnight connects the sexy assassin,
a type iconized in the French thriller La Femme Nikita (1990), to an exaggerated
version of a detective-film femme fatale. G.I. Jane, as its title suggests,
is largely an issue film built around the subject of women’s suitability
for combat roles in the military. In both films, female protagonists’
assumption of active roles leads to scenarios in which they are threatened
with or subjected to sexual violence. Geena Davis’s character in The Long
Kiss Goodnight endures a water-torture sequence in which she is stripped
to her lingerie, and in G.I. Jane, fellow Navy SEAL trainees sexually assault
Demi Moore’s character during a training exercise. In both films, women’s
ability to succeed in the violent, male world is measured partly through
their responses to sexual threats. Action films with male protagonists,
in comparison, routinely subject their heroes to torture or beatings, but
without the overt threat of sexual violation. (The more female-targeted
Charlie’s Angels [2000], in contrast, presents male villains as poor romantic
choices rather than sexual aggressors.) The genre’s orientation toward
male viewers continues to produce conflations of violent activity and
sexual threats.
Another way to integrate women into action narratives is to locate them
in the more traditional role of the romance heroine, with a love story situated
amid explosive historical conflict. The Chinese martial-arts romances
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000), Hero (U.S. release 2004; originally
2002), and House of Flying Daggers (2004) have attracted large audiences in
the United States and globally through such hybridity. In Hollywood cinema,
the 1997 film Titanic uses this combination as an alternative to the
action genre’s polarization between muscular, active men and hypersexualized
women, offering a marginally feminist variation on the classical
damsel-in-distress narrative. Titanic, director James Cameron’s first feature
after True Lies, operates in the narrative mode of melodrama while
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importing the spectacular action and visual effects germane to the action
genre. Earning comparisons to Gone with the Wind through the marriage
of star-crossed romance and spectacular destruction, but surpassing even
that 1939 film’s great popularity, Titanic became the most successful international
release of all time.46 Through its combination of a female protagonist
who faces romantic and family conflicts, the presence of teen idol
Leonardo DiCaprio, a historical narrative about stalwart men of honor,
and elaborate production design and visual effects, the film drew huge
audiences across age and demographic categories. While the film’s extravagant
merger of period melodrama and the action subgenre of the disaster
film has not yet been replicated memorably, popular response to Titanic,
particularly the phenomenon of repeat viewings by preadolescent girls,
indicates the malleability of the action form.47 Similar to True Lies, Titanic
grants agency to a female protagonist and represents spectacular destruction
as an obstacle to romantic fulfillment. The film foregrounds the
emotions and experiences of its female protagonist and reimagines conventional
action-film themes such as male honor and treachery in terms of
their relevance to its romance plot. Similarly, formal conventions of the
contemporary action blockbuster, particularly computer animation, function
in Titanic to enhance the scope and tone of its romantic narrative. The
film’s kinetic visual style and lavish mise-en-scène enhance its sweeping
romance as well as its propulsive action. Significantly, the film’s historical
setting justifies the inclusion of hoary stereotypes of male virtue: the noble
captain, the sentimental but steadfast band members, the selfless workingclass
hero. Though none of the film’s male characters fit the action-hero
persona—DiCaprio’s protagonist, a scrawny artist and romantic, engages
in modest boy-adventurer antics but shows no exceptional physical
prowess—the film supplies sufficient evidence of upright patriarchs to
promote identification among male viewers less committed to the film’s
romance narrative. Interestingly, the film’s representation of spectacular
action—the sinking of a mammoth ocean liner and the corresponding
human calamity—is not linked specifically to the actions of particular
heroes or villains. Destructive spectacle thus proves compelling even without
an identifiable human agent to set that spectacle in motion or to resolve
the conflict it represents. Titanic suggests that the spectacular destruction
characteristic of the action cinema can also punctuate romance narratives,
providing emotional weight in addition to visceral pleasures.
In a decade of both superficial and real movements toward gender
equality, Titanic used its romance-plot adornments to introduce legions of
preadolescent girls to the pleasures of spectacular destruction. Action
films’ shifting narrative emphases may represent ideological containment
strategies manifest in textual form: while G.I. Jane, for example, challenges
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the action genre’s conventions of female representation, the film requires
women—both as viewers and as screen subjects—to subscribe to masculine
models of behavior. Heroine Demi Moore’s quotable “suck my dick” taunt
in the film strikes a weak blow for feminism, as it tethers her character to
the legions of screen males who have used the same phrase in countless
sexist and homophobic ways. G.I. Jane also shackles its heroine to highly
conventional conflicts for women in film, including the rape threat and the
need to choose between career and heterosexual romance, but represents
her too in terms of the often-empowering “musculinity” Yvonne Tasker
finds in many action films with women protagonists. In comparison,
action films’ increasingly unstable figurations of heroic masculinity in the
1990s denote texts’ and viewers’ growing receptivity to perspectives that do
not correspond to dominant ideologies. Contemporary action films,
unable to contain representations of masculinity within actors’ physical
bodies, channel excess masculinity into visual spectacle. If both male and
female spectators recognize combat sequences, pyrotechnics, chases, and
other forms of spectacular action as the hysterical residue of unstable
masculinities, viewers and scholars can reclaim the action genre as a
progressive cinematic form that reveals the transparent operations of the
patriarchal system. Even viewers inclined to understand action films as
validating conservative fantasies of male behavior may acknowledge the
films’ precarious logics. Ultimately, these popular texts can encourage
viewers to question rather than merely celebrate conservative masculinity.
Superficially, action cinema displays no visible crisis of masculinity.
Its narratives and images are overwhelmingly triumphalist, apparently
signaling the unimpeded power of traditional, heroic masculinity. These
triumphs are rather transparent, though; they are staged postures of utility
that scarcely conceal their obsolescence. They depend upon the manufacture
of a host of adversaries displaced from existing, systemic conflicts.
Neither male nor female viewers can directly confront the structures of
class inequity, capitalism, or the political system. Action cinema offers only
avatars of these systems—wealthy terrorists, megalomaniac businessmen,
malevolent politicians—and fabricates other enemies whose defeat validates
traditional masculinity. Conservative male action heroes succeed
most gloriously against impossible foes such as invading monsters, statistically
unlikely natural disasters, and those post-Soviet Eurovillains who
are inevitably bent on world domination. Antirealist Hollywood action
films superficially ignore challenges to traditional constructions of manhood,
but the genre’s shifting narrative and thematic interests represent
defensive strategies. For every action narrative claiming unsurpassed
realism—Saving Private Ryan and Black Hawk Down are prominent
examples—another achieves greater popularity with the antithesis of
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realist claims. For every Saving Private Ryan there are many X-Men (2000);
for every Black Hawk Down there is a Spider-Man or XXX (both 2002).
Realist claims and nostalgia offer powerful appeals, but so do forwardlooking
and fantastic screen worlds populated by correspondingly weird,
wondrous, or absurd men and women.
Still, action-film narratives’ artifice and exaggeration can tacitly assure
viewers that “real,” immutable masculinity exists somewhere beneath the
gunplay and pyrotechnics. This putatively authentic masculinity is made
evident through a network of narrative conventions, particularly surrounding
the spaces apportioned to male and female characters. As actionfilm
narratives adapt to incorporate the spheres of home and family, they
consequently grant less conditional access to female viewers, who have historically
managed those spheres. Even when patriarchal norms dominate
at the narrative level, visual evidence regularly contradicts the familiar
logic of action-film plots. To displace the challenges and contradictions
of hysterical imagery, action films showcase militaristic pageantry and
weaponry and deploy a nostalgic rhetoric of male pride and agency. In
asserting patriotic or militaristic power, though, the films produce further
spectacle, further hysterical disavowals of lived reality.
Early in the twenty-first century, filmmakers continue to supply viewers
with nostalgic constructions of masculinity, however distant such constructions
might be from prevailing social behavior. Frequently, media
discourses frame commercial revisitations of the past as necessary examinations,
attempts to recall historical conflicts for a productive, didactic,
or cathartic purpose. The flurry of military and war films released in
the months following the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the United States set
mostly amid earlier military conflicts—including Black Hawk Down,
Behind Enemy Lines, The Last Castle(2002), Windtalkers (2002), Hart’s War
(2002), and We Were Soldiers (2002)—can be understood as a relevant
interrogation of military culture and the nature of warfare. However, these
releases also allow viewers to evade the complexities of the present and give
themselves up to a global culture of militancy and aggression rather than
envisioning one of diplomacy and peace. In hindsight, the promotion in
1998 of Saving Private Ryan and in spring 2001 of Pearl Harbor now
resembles a media culture in search of a popular war. At the turn of the
millennium, melodramatic action films and a body of related commercial
discourses helped mobilize nationalistic sentiment well in advance of the
9/11 outpourings of patriotism. Even in the pre-9/11 cultural climate,
popular media clearly envisioned the prosecution of a protracted war, and
action films were central to this vision.
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