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3. Omega Men: Late 1960s and Early 1970s Action Heroes

This chapter examines films of the late 1960s and early 1970s that reconstruct cinematic masculinity in response to the cultural destabilizations set in motion by the Vietnam War, the 1960s women’s movement, and the 1960s critiques of managerial capitalism. The films call attention to the contradictions of heroic masculinity within this shifting cultural context. They also suggest, however, that men can navigate the changing cultural landscape with only minor adjustments to the violent behavior and laconic mien that characterize traditional U.S. masculinity. Many films of the period pursue this strategic realignment of traditional masculinity. I offer here close cultural readings of three in particular: John Boorman’s Point Blank (1967), Boris Sagal’s The Omega Man (1971), and Sam Peckinpah’s The Getaway (1972). These films do not function immediately as signposts of the Vietnam War era in the ways that Rambo and Terminator 2 brazenly signify 1980s and early-1990s cultural values. Still, these three films bear consideration because of their distillation of particular qualities of male activity and comportment during a volatile era in U.S. culture. With civil rights legislation, feminist activism, and popular opposition to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam eroding faith in traditional social and cultural institutions, Hollywood films struggled to construct characters and narratives that both mirrored the era’s shifting values and preserved time-honored ethical codes and models of interpersonal relations. Films of the late 1960s and early 1970s repeatedly depicted masculinity through stoic, physically or emotionally isolated figures who combined slow-burning aggressiveness with an innate suspicion of authority, thus appealing interchangeably to militant, prosocial, and antiauthoritarian tendencies among viewers. Point Blank, based on a 1962 novel by Richard Stark (aka prolific thriller author Donald Westlake), identifiable in many ways as a gangster film or 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 81 film noir, features Lee Marvin as a surly but principled outlaw who exacts revenge on a group of corporate-style criminals. The Getaway, based on Jim Thompson’s 1959 novel of the same title and working within the crime or heist genre, presents Steve McQueen and Ali MacGraw as a bickering criminal couple in conflict with police, corrupt prison officials, and dishonorable thieves. The Omega Man, based on Richard Matheson’s short story “I Am Legend,” depicts Charlton Heston as a gun-toting scientist who battles technophobic zombies after a deadly plague kills most of the Earth’s population. In all three films, a conservatively styled, middle-aged white man—both Marvin and McQueen were in their early forties when their respective films were made, and Heston was approaching fifty—pits himself against conformist, amoral representatives of modern capitalism. Point Blank and The Getaway explicitly present white businessmen as murderous villains, while The Omega Man’s narrative sleight-of-hand recasts black militants as a repressive, organizational mass, led by a former television newscaster, who attempt to eradicate the new community fostered by Heston’s Christ-like protagonist. Although the three films’ emphases and appeals differ, all construct prototypes for the contemporary action hero, particularly in their relative positioning of men and women. Of the three, The Getaway was the greatest commercial success, relying largely on the star power of McQueen and MacGraw. One of few Peckinpah-directed films set in the present, The Getaway merits close attention for its depictions of gender relations, its conflation of sex and violence, and its montage aesthetic. This combination of attributes occurs with some regularity in early-1970s filmmaking and U.S. culture, and anticipates as well the sensibility of subsequent films such as Pulp Fiction. Similarly, Point Blank, with its modernist narrative, pronounced visual style, and revision of the structures and motifs of 1940s and 1950s film noir, reflects prevailing attitudes toward gender and genre in its own era while prefiguring developments in contemporary Hollywood film. The Charlton Heston vehicle The Omega Man memorably foregrounds spectacular violence and destruction, features that most other action films of the era, including Bullitt, Dirty Harry, and The French Connection (1971), subordinate to elaborate narrative development, character psychology, and technical operations such as police investigations and medical procedures. Analysis of late-1960s and early-1970s Hollywood film poses some methodological problems for the contemporary scholar. With the breakdown of the Production Code and filmmakers’ increasing experimentation with film form, narrative, and genre, we might designate many films of this period as “Art Hollywood” productions (the term “New Hollywood” once referred to films of this period, but critics later began to apply it to the 82 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 82 blockbuster era that Jaws initiates).1 Because many significant late-1960s and early-1970s films operate at the margins of traditional genre schema and other broad classification methods, they elude critics’ efforts to identify them as markers of cultural and industrial change. Gender-based critiques present a particular challenge, given the changing or inconsistent paradigms of masculinity that appear in Hollywood films of this period. The haziness of genre boundaries during this era, combined with films’ appropriations of models of masculinity prevalent in the European art cinema, further complicates analysis of male representation. Still, we can clarify the particular strategies of gendered behavior through comparison to the more rigidly codified genre films of previous and subsequent eras. The generic frameworks of the gangster film, the crime film, and the action film—all genres originating in or developing to prominence in the United States—allow for a culturally specific analysis of U.S. films of the Vietnam era. Their borrowings from Europe aside, Hollywood films remained principally directed at U.S. audiences through the early 1970s. This chapter strives to understand Art Hollywood films—in particular, Point Blank and The Getaway—and less self-conscious texts such as The Omega Man in their particular social and historical contexts as well as in relation to contemporary cultural environments, both in film studies and in the U.S. film industry. Experimentation in late-1960s and early-1970s Hollywood films derives less from studios’ deliberate encouragement of creativity than from attempts to capitalize on the unanticipated success of films such as Bonnie and Clyde (1967) and Easy Rider (1969).2 When aging studio executives found themselves at an increasingly greater remove from the emerging youth market, studios looked to young directors or those whose departures from established formulas could appeal to younger audiences.3 Studios made further appeals to youth markets through the casting of young or nontraditional actors, men such as Warren Beatty, Al Pacino, Dustin Hoffman, Elliott Gould, and George Segal. Films also paid attention to counterculture or youth-culture interests, including popular music, fashion, sexuality, and drug use. Corporate-controlled film studios’ appeals to “hip” sensibilities in the late 1960s paralleled a larger trend in U.S. business and advertising of the period: the construction of mass-produced consumer products as signifiers of nonconformity.4 Similarly, many mainstream Hollywood films openly represented antisocial or antiauthoritarian impulses narratively and thematically. In addition to the films noted above, the works of directors such as Arthur Penn, Sam Peckinpah, and Bob Rafelson undercut prevailing notions of heroism, justice, and morality. Similarly, blaxploitation films such as Shaft (1971) and Superfly (1972) gave voice to marginalized groups and viewpoints. Such impulses would OMEGA MEN 83 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 83 eventually be reduced to conventional devices, but in the late 1960s and early 1970s they still connoted discontent, fatalism, and rebellion. Antiauthoritarian appeals served as a lure to disaffected youth and, particularly in the case of blaxploitation, to largely unacknowledged groups such as the urban, African American working poor. In addition, such appeals distilled widespread cultural confusion and cynicism related to U.S. involvement in Vietnam and to associated popular dissatisfaction with political and corporate institutions. Nevertheless, the films of the period, and the studios responsible for them, ultimately posed few challenges to established authority. Countercultural appeals in late-1960s and early-1970s film typify the industry’s efforts to exploit images of dissent for profit. Indeed, the era of putatively radical filmmaking coincided with studios’ growing reliance on major international banks and the widespread purchase of film studios by major corporations such as Gulf & Western and the Transamerica Corporation. Still, even in films produced by an industry increasingly under the sway of multinational corporations, the deployment of countercultural signifiers promotes a breadth of viewing positions. However cynical their producers’ motives, the films of the marginal Art Hollywood and the emerging New Hollywood offer a remarkably indeterminate range of meanings for viewers. As numerous film historians have noted, U.S. film form and narrative from the mid-1960s onward showed the influence of the imported films from Western Europe (and to a lesser extent from Japan and Soviet countries) that attracted growing art-house audiences. Foreign films such as Blow-Up (1966), A Man and a Woman (1966), and The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie (1972) were box-office successes in the United States. In contrast to the classical-Hollywood model of linear causality, muted sexuality, and unobtrusive visual style, European films—from directors such as Bergman, Truffaut, Bertolucci, and Fassbinder—privileged character psychology, disjunctive editing, self-conscious camerawork, and often explicit sexual behavior. European films offered models for Hollywood studios hoping to halt declines in attendance. Buoyed by these models, many major U.S. films explicitly challenged long-standing genre conventions or resuscitated supposedly exhausted genres. Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H (1970) and Arthur Penn’s Little Big Man (1970) updated the war film and the western, respectively, while Francis Ford Coppola’s The Godfather (1972) revived the long-ignored gangster genre. While each of these films achieved commercial and critical success, each also occupies a genre principally invested in male experiences. Despite the ostensible sexual liberation of the late 1960s and the visibility of the feminist movement, Hollywood’s experimentalism offered new possibilities mostly for male characters, filmmakers, and audiences. The woman’s film did not undergo 84 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 84 a substantive rebirth in the late 1960s and early 1970s. Instead, such films as The Graduate (1967) and Shampoo (1975) repeatedly figured female power and sexual freedom as emblematic of duplicity, treachery, and manipulativeness. U.S. films, like many of their European counterparts, continued to regard woman principally as complements or barriers to consummate masculinity. While the gender politics of Vietnam-era films appear objectionable by the somewhat more progressive standards of the new millennium, these films’ male heroes remain a point of reference for contemporary cinema culture. Tough vigilante and outsider heroes were a staple of Vietnam-era cinema, and studios retrofitted these figures for the 1990s and the following decade. The populist vigilante of Walking Tall (1973) was revamped for a 2004 film starring Dwayne Johnson (aka The Rock). In the 1990s, both The Getaway and Point Blank were remade, the former in 1994 with the same title and the latter in 1999 as Payback, a commercially if not critically successful Mel Gibson vehicle. At least among film producers, nostalgia exists too for the avowedly hardened, authentic male stars of the 1960s. Prominent talent agent Robert Newman observed in 2004: We have a lot of pretty guys running around with six-pack abs, but they lack authenticity and credibility. [. . .] In the 1950s a lot of men had been in the war; some of them became actors. They lived hard lives. There was a weight that came out of it. [. . .] When Steve McQueen took his shirt off, he’s thin, he’s not ripped. There’s a hardness and danger about him because of who he was.5 By the early 1970s, of course, there were no young veterans of World War II or Korea, so Hollywood necessarily modeled male stars’ personas on different attributes. Yet popular cinema remains in dialogue with this earlier, iconic brand of masculinity. None of the three films studied here poses substantial challenges to prevailing cultural and cinematic models of heroic masculinity. Instead, each film, while modifying genre conventions in ways that threaten their protagonists’ command of narrative space, shows the adaptability of hegemonic formations of idealized masculinity. Point Blank, which intimates that its protagonist is basically dead for the entire film, presents aggressive, antisocial masculinity as simultaneously timeless and anachronistic, out of step with the modern world yet still able to overcome obstacles and attract women. The Getaway, while acknowledging that male taciturnity and noncommunicativeness pose problems for heterosexual relationships, nevertheless privileges such qualities in other contexts, particularly in the male-on-male conflicts on which action-oriented genres depend. Finally, OMEGA MEN 85 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 85 The Omega Man constructs its protagonist, a virile scientist, as both the cause of and solution to global suffering. Set against a postapocalyptic backdrop, the film anticipates the structure of futuristic action narratives of the 1980s and 1990s—from the initial Star Wars trilogy (1977, 1980, 1983) to Terminator 2, The Fifth Element (1997), and the Matrix series (1999, 2003)—in which the fate of humanity depends on the successful adventure of one white male. The Omega Man foregrounds racial conflict, but does so largely in terms of a narrative struggle between two white men, following patterns of racial discourse articulated in mainstream U.S. cinema since its inception. Each film preserves and revitalizes paradigms of masculinity that might otherwise appear incompatible with the conditions and values of contemporary Western society. Point Blank: Modernist Noir and the Hard-Boiled Hero Point Blank illustrates many of the characteristic features of the mainstream art cinema that develops in Hollywood from 1967 onward, a category that includes films such as Bonnie and Clyde, Easy Rider, Five Easy Pieces (1970), Straw Dogs (1971), and Deliverance (1973). Like many films that follow it, Point Blank dispenses with or self-consciously refigures genre conventions, displays considerable directorial autonomy relative to classical-Hollywood style or the highly market-conscious films of the blockbuster era, and shows the influence of the European art cinema in its unconventional narration and editing. Each of these factors accounts for the growing appeal of Art Hollywood films among younger audiences, who Hollywood recognizes as a profitable market during this period. Similarly, Point Blank’s defining features contribute to shifting cinematic representations of masculinity and screen violence. In its attention to genre elements and its preoccupation with codes of male behavior, Point Blank exemplifies the alternately stagnant and fluctuating cultural preferences surrounding the attributes of exemplary masculinity. Point Blank features a protagonist, Walker (Lee Marvin), whose selfassured, heterosexual masculinity offers viewers a stable position from which to experience the film’s substantial visual, temporal, and narrative disjunctions. The film deals with Walker’s attempt to retrieve his share of the profits from a robbery in which his partners betray him by shooting him in the chest (“point blank,” as the title denotes). The story, which begins in disjunctive fashion before settling into a principally linear narrative, follows Walker as he is shot and left for dead by his erstwhile partners, his wife and best friend, in a robbery at the decommissioned Alcatraz prison. With the aid of the enigmatic benefactor Yost (Keenan Wynn), 86 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 86 Walker is an accessory to the death of those with connections to the robbery, and during his campaign of vengeance, he becomes romantically involved with his dead wife’s sister. At the film’s conclusion, Walker learns that he has served merely as an unwitting henchman for his benefactor, who reveals himself as Fairfax, a member of the criminal organization who has schemed to eliminate his rivals. Instabilities abound in the film, even at the plot level: Walker’s wife abandons him for his best friend, the wife’s sister makes herself available sexually to both Walker and his nemesis, the film reveals Walker’s benefactor to be the story’s enigmatic villain, and perhaps most significantly, the film does not explain how Walker survives an apparently fatal gunshot wound. The film consistently undermines categories such as love, romance, villainy, loyalty, and morality. Nevertheless, in narrating Walker’s determination to retrieve his money, the film depicts masculine will as an unflagging, inviolable condition. His single-mindedness appears also to account for his presumed immortality. The film reminds viewers of Walker’s state by having many characters, upon meeting him, express astonishment that he remains alive. The film delays Walker’s relentless forward momentum through flashbacks and frequent repetition of individual shots, both of which signify Walker’s reminiscences. Still, the film presents the viewer with reliable narrative schema: whether dead or alive, in past or present, Walker’s actions and motivations never diverge from their initial trajectory. The viewer largely shares Walker’s point of view in the film, with few scenes occurring outside his immediate perspective. His steadfastness assures viewers of the film’s ultimate coherence. Unyielding determination and deathless detachment have long been hallmarks of heroic masculinity. U.S. culture—in military, corporate, political, and other realms—lionizes tenacity, endurance, and intractability as means to overcome adversity and achieve greatness. In Point Blank, such qualities carry Walker through his mission and render him threatening to men and alluring to women. While the silent, animated corpse would logically be neither a powerful figure nor a love object, popular cinema often figures ideal masculinity as taciturn and deathlike. Iconic figures such as Clint Eastwood’s Harry Callahan character in films from Dirty Harry to Sudden Impact (1983)—and this character’s many variants in Eastwood’s other police films—and Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo character of the 1980s embody these characteristics.6 In each case, silent, aggressive individualism appears as a means to combat deviant behavior—whether urban crime or Third World Communist occupation—in the name of the weak and oppressed. Taciturnity similarly accounts for the ruggedly blank appeal of stars such as McQueen, whose laconic persona serves as a tabula rasa onto which male viewers can project themselves and female viewers can imprint the desirable qualities of their choice. Similarly, the notion of OMEGA MEN 87 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 87 the walking corpse as male icon simultaneously mobilizes authoritarian and antiauthoritarian impulses.7 In Point Blank, the undead male appears as an autonomous, dissident figure, in ambivalent relation to social order and authority. Its hero embodies mature, white male privilege while attacking white maleness in its corporate trappings. This ambivalence recalls the power dynamics of the western genre, in which (almost without exception) white male heroes mediate between the “savage” frontier and a feminized or feminizing civilization. In Point Blank, Walker’s apparently natural combination of silent authority and visible defiance marks him as both a personification of traditional U.S. masculinity and a figure worthy of emulation by young members of the emerging counterculture (to use again the phrase coined by Theodore Roszak in 1968).8 This latter appeal, like Eastwood’s popularity among younger audiences, indicates an apparently contradictory celebration of middle-aged, aggressive masculinity as a legitimate alternative to “the system” of patriarchal capitalism. Although Walker’s stolidity and relentlessness make him a useful signpost for the viewer, such qualities do not lead to his ultimate triumph in narrative terms. Instead, in accord with the pessimistic worldview of 1940s and 1950s film noir, Walker’s ascription to conventional tenets of masculinity leads only to the deaths of those he encounters. The real victor, the film suggests, is “the Organization,” a diffuse body with a corporate structure and surroundings (the amorphous name of the “Multiplex Products Company,” respectable offices in a downtown L.A. high-rise, limousines and private jets, and a vacation retreat for group meetings). Significantly, the film labels the modern corporation as the enemy—a familiar theme of late-1960s and early-1970s films, deployed to different effect in films such as The President’s Analyst (1967), Zabriskie Point (1970), and The Parallax View (1974). Point Blank simultaneously imbues its protagonist with the same ethic of individual perseverance encouraged by corporate structure. Indeed, the film depicts the Organization’s directors as self-interested and amoral, characteristics Walker possesses as well. The film legitimates Walker’s pursuit of money by repeatedly emphasizing his personal and psychological motivation. Similarly, the film grants Walker a perverse set of ethics: the money in question belongs to him, viewers understand, because of his role in its theft. The film thus champions individual selfinterest outside capitalism, designating such interest as a valid (if still extralegal) pursuit in a democratic society. Comparatively, the film identifies individual self-interest within capitalism—that is, the power plays among the Organization’s leaders—as emblematic of greed and treachery. In this respect, the film again allows viewers to channel frustrations about “the system” while supporting capitalism’s founding principles. The film’s conflict between entrepreneurial capitalism, which Walker represents, and 88 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 88 the Organization’s unsavory organizational capitalism further denotes the absence of alternatives to the dominant economic system, both within the film and in the culture at large. The opposition between the strong-willed individual and the decentralized Organization, like many of the film’s oppositions, demonstrates a fundamental confusion about definitions of masculinity. The film defines Walker’s masculinity as distinct from the duplicitous and mysterious world of corporations, technology, and women, yet his masculine behavior works only in relation to these other categories.9 While iconographically he embodies the conventional role of the taciturn loner, visually and narratively the film connects him with other characters in virtually every scene. Even the rare moments in which he appears alone highlight his movement toward other characters (his ex-wife, his former friend, or the representatives of the Organization) with whom he must interact to achieve his goal. Moreover, even his monomaniacal goal requires the assistance of others—his wife’s sister and his intermittently appearing benefactor, in particular—so he is repeatedly linked to other social agents. Sharon Willis, in her discussion of 1980s and 1990s action films, argues that “these contemporary representations have anxiously and unconsciously realized that masculinity never exists as such. Rather, it is constructed within relations of and to race, class, and sexuality. What these films put forward as the central figure of masculinity in crisis is really white heterosexual masculinity desperately seeking to reconstruct itself within a web of social differences.”10 Walker’s crisis, betrayal by his wife and criminal partner, differs from that of the policemen protagonists of films such as Die Hard and Lethal Weapon, the subjects of Willis’s study. Nonetheless, Point Blank’s construction of its central character similarly denotes the anxiety surrounding definitions of masculinity in a changing social world. The film defines Walker’s masculinity through his ghostlike detachment, but his undead quality is itself a consequence of his involvement with other social agents. Lynn (Sharon Acker) and Reese (John Vernon), his wife and partner, conspire to kill Walker, so in the film’s causal logic, they produce his masculinity. (Indeed, in flashbacks, Walker hugs Reese at a class reunion and cavorts playfully with Lynn on a beach, suggesting a different inflection of masculinity prior to his betrayal.) Thus, the film simultaneously regards masculinity as a fixed, determinate category and as a free-floating abstraction: Walker’s apparent invulnerability, a mark of stability, removes him from contact with the social world, rendering him isolated and insubstantial. The configuration of Walker’s masculinity in Point Blank also indicates tensions between film noir’s conventional schema of masculinity and the operations of masculinity in the social world. Film noir bears a long OMEGA MEN 89 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 89 history of sepulchral protagonists, including protagonists who appear dead at the beginning of films such as D.O.A. (1949) and Sunset Boulevard (1950), and the gaunt, fatalistic characters often played by actors such as Humphrey Bogart and Richard Widmark. Whereas the dead female figure in noirs such as Rebecca (1940) and Laura (1944) operates as a locus for (usually male) obsession and objectification, the dead or deathlike male protagonist appears as a legitimate if terminal alternative to the traditional Western male hero. Principles such as world-weariness, nonconformity, and internalized violence develop in film noir as responses to hegemonic formations of idealized masculinity. In his study of classical noir, Frank Krutnik identifies these and other formations of conflicted masculinity: “Masochism, paranoia, psychosis, homosexuality, [and] various forms of ‘corruptive’ sexuality [are] some of the principal ways in which this crisis of confidence in the possibilities of masculine identity is articulated within the noir ‘tough’ thrillers.”11 Popular films sometimes channel such signifiers of troubled or oppositional masculinity into explicit physical violence. With great frequency, though, cinema figures contestatory manhood in terms of misogyny or misanthropy, akin to the “corruptive sexuality” that Krutnik notes. Character traits that originally signify opposition to prosocial forms of masculinity themselves become conventional attributes of iconoclastic loners, recognizable by their challenges to authority. In archetypal noir narratives, such figures appear wary of social connection and powerless to effect substantial changes in corporate or social institutions. Nevertheless, the personal style, charisma, and controlled sexuality of many film noir protagonists make them objects of male emulation (in terms of spectator response) and female desire (at least the desire of women characters, if not always that of women viewers). Film noir constructs a putatively antiauthoritarian version of masculinity that appears no less “natural” than the prosocial or authoritarian male heroes who populate the western genre. In Point Blank, Walker’s lack of human emotion somehow renders him both threatening and sensual. As part of his mission to retrieve his money, he enlists the aid of his wife’s sister, Chris (Angie Dickinson). While her initial response to him is largely unemotional, his detachment later arouses her ire, and she futilely pounds him with her fists to elicit a reaction. Though he does not respond, Chris retains a sexual interest in him, and the pair eventually have sex, despite no manifestation of romantic interest on his part (the implied sex occurs offscreen, though the two appear kissing in bed). While the film shows little interest in conventional displays of love or romance, the inclusion of the sex episode within the narrative reminds viewers that Walker’s masculinity includes a sort of deathless virility, a way to attract women without affection or emotions. The film thus offers viewers a fantasy of wholly 90 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 90 autonomous male sexuality. Walker’s distance from the social world leaves him without obligation, responsibility, or a need to compromise his aggressive nature. The figure of the surly male who somehow attracts women appears with some frequency in action films of the period, including Prime Cut (1972) and The French Connection (as well as The Getaway and The Omega Man, to be discussed later). While this figure implicitly rejects emerging countercultural imperatives of group solidarity and cheerfulness, he does cash in on the superficial promise of “free love” promoted in mainstream discourses about the counterculture. Point Blank consciously imports the worldview and social relationships of 1940s and 1950s film noir into the tumultuous social climate of the late 1960s. Like much 1940s and 1950s film noir, Point Blank simultaneously represents women and capitalism as threats to its male protagonists. The post–World War II era and the Vietnam War era align somewhat in their perceptions of working women. Feminist demands for women’s equality in the late 1960s paralleled the World War II era integration of women into the U.S. workplace. Correspondingly, just as women were dismissed from many public roles at the end of the War, 1960s feminists were widely demonized for their perceived antagonism to traditional social structures. Both eras’ representations of diminished male power reflected anxieties about expanded women’s roles in U.S. society. Though the business world of the late 1960s remained an overwhelmingly male province, both in sheer numbers and in preferred codes of behavior and style, postwar models of organizational capitalism encouraged a mode of interpersonal conduct in which traits long connoted as feminine replaced or stood alongside traditionally masculine attributes. Corporate management style promoted qualities such as cooperation and diplomacy—social attributes that, even in the late 1990s, are usually associated with women rather than men—over or in tandem with putatively masculine virtues such as individualism and aggression. Such a redefinition of normative gender roles under capitalism, coupled with the reduced utility of physical strength thanks to the growth of white-collar occupations, facilitates the conception of corporate institutions as inherently emasculating. Point Blank, reviving a persistent theme of film noir, depicts its protagonist’s ineffectualness in the face of monolithic, capitalistic institutions. The film represents the Organization as omnipresent and cryptic, led by quarreling, ambitious men yet filled with compromising, subservient (and thus inadequately masculine) aides. In the logic of Point Blank, the modern, capitalist world appears cold and mechanical as well as feminized. For example, when Walker visits the Organization’s offices, he first encounters a female receptionist, who hampers his mission with business-world protocol. The receptionist occupies the traditional role of woman as OMEGA MEN 91 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 91 emblem of corporate friendliness, acting both as a welcoming receiver of guests and as a gatekeeper, a boundary through which others must pass to reach the men who control the company. Walker asserts his physical dominance over women and weak men—the receptionist and a host of unarmed, unintimidating bureaucrats—but his presence does not substantially alter the practices of the institution he challenges. Walker repeatedly overpowers the Organization’s underlings to gain entrance into homes and offices, yet no one in the Organization capitulates to his demands for money, and at the film’s denouement, Walker learns that he has been unwittingly aiding one of the group’s leaders throughout the film. The film contrasts Walker’s futile attempts to exert control over his world with Chris’s successful efforts in related areas. In a scene in which Chris expresses her frustration at Walker by turning on all the appliances, lights, and other mechanical devices in the Organization’s meeting compound, she appears to have a near-magical control over capitalist consumer products. She leaves Walker’s side for only a few seconds of screen time, after which all of the house’s appliances begin to operate in noisy synchronicity. Like the presentation of the receptionist as corporate sentry, the cacophonous-appliance scene conflates female power and capitalist technology and presents both as challenges to secure masculinity. Point Blank, like many other films of its era, offers masculine authority as a means to forestall the challenges posed by feminism and capitalism. Throughout the film, Walker appears at odds with the modern, urban world in which he operates: he refuses to die or to accept corporate doctrine, and he does not participate in the domestic or consumer economy. The film rarely shows Walker driving a car—in cinema, usually an essential accouterment of the contemporary, autonomous, mobile, virile man— and he never appears in an apartment of his own. He is usually transported in other peoples’ cars or simply appears at his destinations, and he occupies only other peoples’ houses or apartments (Lynn’s, Chris’s, Reese’s, and the Organization’s, in turn). Representationally, the film offers him as able and self-assured in these situations, not as passive or dispossessed; he is neither obliging guest nor compliant passenger. Unburdened by domesticity or material possessions, Walker acquires a timeless, ahistorical quality. Marvin’s other roles in mid- to late-1960s films demonstrate a star persona that moves fluidly among historical periods: he appears in westerns such as Cat Ballou (1965) and The Professionals (1966), World War II films such as The Dirty Dozen (1967) and Hell in the Pacific (1968), and modern crime films such as The Killers (1964). Other “tough-guy” stars of the era, including McQueen, Eastwood, and Charles Bronson, played a similar range of roles. The relative portability of the tough-guy character suggests that such a figure operates with equal potency across generic and historical 92 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 92 categories. Though Point Blank reveals the inefficacy of such a type through Walker’s ultimate failure to achieve his goal, the film nevertheless presents Marvin’s masculinity as a model worthy of emulation. Implicitly, then, feminism’s and capitalism’s common refusal to accommodate such masculinity distinguishes both systems as opponents rather than allies of aspiring men.12 At the level of visual style, Point Blank privileges Marvin’s masculine comportment even as it depicts an unbalanced, disorienting physical world. The film includes many arresting and unconventional frame compositions, and the frequent violation of continuity-editing principles intensifies the effect of the film’s visual irregularity. Despite this destabilization, Walker as a figure continues to provide viewers a stable reference point. The film’s opening scene, against which the title credits appear, shows his apparent death, with him lying on a concrete floor in the shadows of a dingy prison cell. However, a sequence shortly after his “resurrection” puts him in long shot, striding purposefully and alone down a long airport corridor. A montage of other brief shots follows, with multiple cuts back to the walking sequence, in which Walker, now in a medium shot, gazes head-on into the camera. During this period of rapid crosscutting, Walker’s continuing, metronomic footsteps dominate the soundtrack, granting him a presence even in shots in which he is not visible. The interruption of Walker’s movements diminishes his visual authority: just as the film surrounds him with modern technology, it literally truncates his actions through editing. Still, the film continuously depicts Walker in dominant or aggressive positions. In a sequence late in the film, a lowangle shot shows Chris, frustrated by Walker’s stoicism, pounding on his chest until she collapses at his feet. The film then cuts to a high-angle shot of Walker standing motionless over her crumpled body, calling to mind cinematic and classical-art images of statuesque conquerors towering over defenseless maidens (or in retrospect, similar views in artist Frank Frazetta’s fantasy poster art of the 1970s and 1980s). Earlier, in depicting Walker’s attempt to gain revenge for his wife and friend’s betrayal, the film demonstrates the sexual connotations of his aggression. Following the walking sequence, Walker drives to his wife’s apartment, where he bursts through the front door with gun in hand, grabbing her violently and looking for his nemesis Reese. He then races to the bedroom, where he unloads a series of bullets into the empty bed. In the wake of this violent episode, Walker slumps into a living-room couch, where Lynn then calmly relates the story of her growing affection for Reese (leading into a flashback sequence that shows Walker romancing Lynn, then the couple interacting with Reese). Walker then falls asleep on the couch, and the film replays, in slow motion and with slightly varied camera OMEGA MEN 93 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 93 placement, multiple shots of him entering the apartment and firing his gun. This flashback, representing Walker’s interiority, shows the film’s preoccupation with his actions. In another representation of this interiority, the film repeats parts of the opening scene, in which Reese shoots Walker. While these flashbacks establish the dominance of Walker’s perspective in the film, they also reenact his failures. The repetition of Walker’s bedroom attack underlines the failure of his aggression, which the film represents as a deficiency of the sexual component of his masculinity. His return to the bedroom, the literal site of his sexual failure, also proves fruitless. Walker discharges his revolver—which throughout the film functions almost as an extra limb, used both as a shooting weapon and to perform manual tasks such as pointing and bludgeoning—and harms only a mattress, in a display of ineffectually “spent” masculinity. To compound the futility of this effort, the damaged mattress is shortly replaced with a pristine one (the film does not show this exchange, performed apparently by unseen emissaries of the Organization), removing the evidence of Walker’s visit. Meanwhile, Walker sleeps on the couch, denoting his ouster from the conjugal bed. In the same episode, Lynn dies from an overdose of pills, and her body then disappears, doubly indicating Walker’s inability to perform the role of protective husband. The film’s simultaneous emphasis on the figure of the male hero and on his repeated failures coincides with classical film noir’s interest in the embattled, desperate male hero. Visually, though, Point Blank presents a world far afield from the nocturnal chiaroscuro that characterizes the visual style of film noir. The film lacks film noir’s signature emphasis on nighttime settings, instead focusing on outdoor scenes amid sterile, colorless Los Angeles commercial sprawl—apartment blocks, car dealerships, airports, and other unmythical, quotidian settings. In place of traditional film noir darkness and shadow, Point Blank presents a world of distorted, antirealist color. In contrast to the highly saturated color of contemporary thrillers, Point Blank deliberately employs a desaturation process that, according to Boorman, results in a nearly black-and-white effect.13 Often eschewing primary colors and emphasizing instead a wide variety of midtones, the film offers a world lacking in absolutes. The scene of Walker’s violent intrusion into Lynn’s apartment, for example, occurs literally in a gray area. Though an invader, Walker, in a slate-gray suit, blends completely with the setting, which features couches, chairs, carpeting, and wallpaper all in virtually identical shades of gray. In another scene, set in an Organization office, all the characters—including Walker and an assortment of his adversaries—wear jackets, shirts, and ties in slightly different shades of green. Other elements of the scene’s mise-en-scène—curtains, walls, decorative objects, a desk phone—also appear in shades of green. 94 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 94 The visual world thus appears both highly regularized and impossibly distorted. Walker’s chromatic harmony with his enemies both underscores the warped order of his surroundings and identifies him as partially complicit with the systematic masculine world that bedevils him. Significantly, the film envisions women differently, particularly in its adornment of Angie Dickinson’s character with clothing in shades of yellow, gold, and red, colors that also permeate the settings in which she appears. Point Blank, like traditional film noir, depicts the damage done to human relationships by impersonal social forces and institutions. The film also recalls film noir’s fusion of female sexuality and male violence. In films such as Double Indemnity (1944) and Kiss Me Deadly (1955), women’s calculated or cynical choices of sexual partners provoke male-onmale violence. Point Blank emphasizes a similar causality by locating its betraying women amid scenes of male violence, often as the sexual prizes around which men orbit. To facilitate his entry into Reese’s guarded penthouse apartment, Walker asks Chris to create a distraction by initiating a bedroom rendezvous with Reese. The scene accords with the conventional pattern (in film noir, the spy thriller, and later the action film) of offering women as sexual bait to snare a predatory male villain. In Point Blank, men then retaliate against the women they have forced into sexually compromised situations (The Getaway, considered next, follows the same trajectory). The film connotes Chris’s behavior both as an act of selfless courage—she disparages Reese repeatedly in dialogue, and her facial expressions and body language during her feigned seduction convey further disgust—and as a display of women’s facility with sexual activity. The film’s objectification of Chris is modest in comparison with other films of the period: only her bare back is shown, while Reese, bare-chested and wrapped only in a bedsheet, appears far more sexually vulnerable in subsequent shots. Still, the film invites viewers to take pleasure in her brief tryst as it foregrounds her body as an erotic commodity. Once Walker arrives to menace Reese, Chris disappears from the frame of action. She returns minutes later, long after Reese has fallen, naked, to his death. The film makes Chris partially culpable for this death, though, as her action lures him into a vulnerable condition. In a scene that follows shortly thereafter, another Organization leader chides Reese’s guards for allowing Chris into the penthouse, further indicating her responsibility for Reese’s death. Walker’s culpability is presented ambiguously, because while he manhandles and threatens the vulnerable Reese, the latter appears to stumble from his penthouse balcony without being pushed by Walker, who reaches out for his cuckolder as if trying to prevent his fall. The film’s emphasis on the influence of female sexuality corresponds to rising popular anxieties about waning male power. Second-wave OMEGA MEN 95 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 95 feminism, alternate models of masculinity developed by the nascent hippie and student-activist movements, and U.S. men’s continued, unsuccessful engagement in Vietnam all contributed to public apprehension about the utility of traditional male roles in the late 1960s. Films often manifest such apprehension through insistence on the efficacy of traditional sex roles as well as through displacement of blame for men’s shortcomings onto women. In Point Blank, just as Chris’s sexual performance precedes Reese’s death, Lynn’s earlier affair leads to Walker’s apparent demise. In film noir and the gangster film, women—prostititutes, gun molls, gold-digging mistresses, and the like—repeatedly orchestrate betrayals of men. Point Blank updates the concept by giving women instrumental roles in the formerly homosocial criminal world. In the flashback sequence that encapsulates her role in the story, Lynn appears first as Walker’s domestic companion, then as a partner to both Walker and Reese, then as a participant in the Alcatraz robbery in which Reese shoots Walker. Walker and Reese’s friendship bridges the worlds of work and leisure: the film depicts them as old friends who meet at a reunion and subsequently plan a crime. The inclusion of a woman in the men’s private and public worlds disrupts both spheres. Notably, the film also insists upon exaggerated male bonding as a precedent to betrayal. Walker’s memories of Reese include repeated scenes of the two men embracing, while the film never shows Walker embracing his wife. One repeated shot from their reunion scene shows Walker and Reese lying on a floor in a drunken clinch, while a crowd of other men step over and around them. The shot highlights the incongruity between male camaraderie and public intimacy. In one interpretation of such a dynamic, the social autonomy that women gain during the 1960s precipitates the dissolution of traditional male relationships, giving way to enmity and distrust. The film does suggest that overdetermined male bonds, rather than explicit female manipulativeness, result in male discord. Men’s volatile social relations with each other, however, correspond to women’s rising autonomy, their presence in both private and public spheres. The film represents triangulated desire as a condition that inevitably leads to betrayal and violence, and women play an active, if unprofitable, role in this equation. Women’s infidelity initiates male-on-male conflict in many texts throughout history, from Homer’s Iliad to Claude Chabrol’s La femme infidèle (1960) and Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1961). In late-1960s and early- 1970s films, female infidelity gives rise to particular anxieties about male social roles. The birth-control pill, approved by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration in 1960 and in wide usage by the mid-1960s, grants women a measure of control and safety in sexual relations, eliminating the high risk of pregnancy that multiple sexual encounters previously posed. 96 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 96 Nevertheless, the so-called sexual revolution of the 1960s weighed more heavily on women, who still face moral and social condemnation for choosing multiple sexual partners, than on men, for whom promiscuity remains a mark of virility rather than a stigma. In The Getaway as well as Point Blank, women who use sex to achieve particular goals face enduring stigmatization, even if they act out of allegiance to male protagonists rather than for personal gain. For men, though, breaching ethical codes through violence, or failing in their implicit roles as protectors of women, represents only a partial, impermanent blemish on the masculine character. The Getaway: Cathartic Violence and the Resuscitation of Masculinity Like Point Blank, The Getaway foregrounds issues of male protectiveness and female infidelity, placing these issues amid a generic bank-robbery narrative. The Getaway begins by depicting its protagonist’s internment in a sterile, impersonal penal system. Following opening shots of animals grazing outside a prison, the film’s first scenes depict prison life, in which mostly white men in their thirties and forties clad in clean white shirts and pants perform moderate labor (working in a machine shop and clearing brush). For the present-day viewer, such scenes connote tedium and sterility rather than grim repression. In 1972, though, many years before the public awareness of prisons as violent, nonrehabilitative detention facilities for young men of color, scenes of white men working listlessly at menial tasks could still convey distressing impressions of servitude. The opening scene visually emphasizes confinement, displaying the prison’s multiple gates and bars, bare walls, and noninteracting inmates and guards. These images contrast with brief, intercut shots of the protagonist, Doc McCoy (Steve McQueen), in a tender embrace with a woman, who is soon identified as his wife, Carol (Ali MacGraw); but in the film’s early moments these shots represent an unattainable freedom and intimacy. The extended opening sequence alternates chronological narratives in a montage fashion. Shots of Doc’s parole-board hearing, routine prison labor, and the flashback sequence involving Doc and his wife provide overlapping areas of engagement for viewers. The disordered montage, however, disrupts viewers’ integration into any discrete episode. As in Point Blank, self-conscious montage editing makes viewers aware of the film’s technical operations, creates narrative enigmas, and distances viewers from screen characters. Also like Point Blank, The Getaway narratively presents social institutions such as the prison system and corporate capitalism as deeply estranging. OMEGA MEN 97 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 97 The Getaway follows Doc and Carol, who reunite when Doc leaves prison. Doc gains release upon two conditions: unbeknownst to him, Carol must have sex with corrupt businessman and parole-board member Benyon (Ben Johnson), and Doc must help perform a bank robbery that Benyon plans. The robbery takes place, but another participant betrays the group; Doc and Carol escape with the robbery money, and Carol kills Benyon. The film’s third act depicts the couple’s flight from their accomplices in the robbery, from Benyon’s corrupt-businessmen associates, and from the police. Doc and Carol work together during the robbery and the subsequent pursuit, but his discovery that Carol has slept with Benyon strains their relationship. Ultimately, Doc accepts his wife’s devotion, and the outlaw couple escapes to Mexico. The film combines multiple car chases and gun battles with continuous narration of the couple’s attempted reconciliation. Their marriage appears troubled even when the two first reunite, with Doc remaining aloof and Carol making small talk about a visit to the hairdresser. After an idyllic swim, the two return home, where they strip off their clothes, preparing for sex. To Doc’s dismay, he is unable to become sexually aroused, as euphemistic dialogue informs us. The scene does not follow cinematic conventions for sex or seduction, even the perfunctory displays characteristic of the genre. Action films, both during the late 1960s–early 1970s period and the 1990s, tend to restrict sex episodes to brief sequences of disrobing and embracing, proving the male’s sexual prowess but not diverting substantially from overarching narrative concerns or demonstrations of aggressive masculinity. (However, an action subgenre, the 1970s blaxploitation film, often devotes considerable screen time to the hero’s sexual interludes.) Sex scenes in male-oriented genres such as the cop film or the crime film tend to emphasize the male participant’s virility and also his tenderness (in contrast to the aggression he can display publicly), alongside the woman’s desirability and willingness. The Getaway, however, highlights Doc’s sexual dysfunction, and attributes his awkwardness to the dehumanizing—or specifically, demasculinizing—conditions of prison life. Doc explains his lack of arousal by stating, “It does something to you in there,” and Carol, in turn, plays the role of a patient and accepting partner. This exchange in some ways reverses conventional patterns of gender representation and partially destabilizes the notion of effortless male sexuality. Still, the scene concludes with the suggestion of sexual fulfillment, as the two appear in a happy romantic embrace before the cut to the next scene occurs. The Getaway presents male decisions and prerogatives as the primary determinants of the couple’s relationship. Doc’s discovery of his wife’s extramarital encounter provides the principal stress on their relationship, 98 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 98 a stress that adds to the difficulty of their extended getaway. As such, Doc’s response—rather than Carol’s act or her own response to it—becomes the standard by which the film judges their situation. While the film represents Carol consistently as a believer in the relationship, it implies that only Doc’s forgiveness will restore the bond between the two. In terms of a sexual economy based on conquest, Carol ostensibly “wins” the sexual battle by gaining an additional sexual partner, Benyon. (Only in the most perverse sense is this true, of course; objectively, the rapacious Benyon wins.) Doc, the cuckolded husband and sexually inactive prison inmate, loses. At the bodily level, though, Carol loses by prostituting herself, giving up her body to an undesirable sexual partner who has the power to free her husband. Though the imprisoned Doc is powerless to gain his own release, he also faces no bodily risk. His own body remains untainted by nonconsensual sex. Instead, the terms of his release degrade Carol. Notably, the film depicts Doc as initially unaware of the sacrifice his wife will have to make. Following his failed parole-board hearing, he meets with Carol during a visiting period, where he instructs her curtly, “Get to Benyon. Tell him I’m for sale—his price. Do it now.” The conversation appears to display Doc’s directness, his angry capitulation to Benyon’s unstated job offer. The viewer soon learns, however, that the barter includes Carol. In effect, Doc’s brusque instructions to Carol transform her into a unit of exchange. In this respect, the film implicitly critiques notions of male self-sufficiency. Doc’s selfish belief that only he will have to compromise himself for Benyon results in Carol’s fall from marital grace. The film later refers back to Doc’s oversight when Carol accuses him of initiating her meeting with Benyon. Except for the scene in which Carol shoots Benyon as he prepares to tell Doc of her infidelity, the film generally presents Carol’s concerns about the encounter as secondary to Doc’s wounded ego. The film mirrors Doc and Carol’s troubled relationship with its depiction of another sordid, triangulated affair. After the robbery, the other surviving participant, Rudy (Al Lettieri), whom Doc has wounded and left for dead, kidnaps a married couple and uses their car to pursue Doc. The film portrays this relationship in an unusually misogynist fashion, even in comparison to the explicit antipathy to women shown in other Peckinpah films such as The Wild Bunch and Straw Dogs and other well-regarded films of the period such as Five Easy Pieces. In The Getaway, the kidnapped wife, Fran (Sally Struthers), appears as a dim sex object bored with her straitlaced husband, Harold (Jack Dodson), and fascinated by the crude, aggressive Rudy. Fran begins an affair with Rudy, to which the cuckolded Harold responds by hanging himself. In this episode, unchecked female sexuality proves lethal for the inadequate husband. The grim parallels to Doc and Carol’s own predicament make the two protagonists appear OMEGA MEN 99 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 99 considerably more deserving of the viewer’s sympathies. Fran acts impulsively, or at best, out of self-preservation. Her affair with Rudy, unlike Carol’s encounter with Benyon, appears unmotivated by concern for her husband’s safety. Similarly, Rudy’s physical violence against Fran (he assaults her both before and after she flirts with him) contrasts substantially with Doc’s treatment of Carol, in which abuse occurs principally at the verbal level. Moreover, the film permits Carol to respond to Doc with insults of her own, granting her a degree of agency unavailable to Fran. Contrasts among the criminals similarly establish Doc’s authoritative presence as a laudable model of masculinity. Between Doc’s reunion with Carol and the execution of the bank robbery, a short but detailed planning sequence distinguishes Doc’s professionalism from his cohorts’ wholesale wickedness. In this sequence, Benyon introduces Doc to the two other participants in the robbery, Rudy and Frank (Bo Hopkins), and the assembled participants later meet in a storeroom to discuss the logistics of the operation. The film presents the two other men as seasoned, untrustworthy criminals. Meanwhile, Doc appears as an outsider, not aligned with his partners or with Benyon, and he operates as a professional, efficient manager during the storeroom conference. Doc wears a formfitting black sweater (a conventional, utilitarian uniform for a bank robber or safecracker) and glasses (indicating a cerebral nature that marks him as the ideal organizer of this group; he does not wear glasses in any other scene) as he pores over blueprints and timetables and gives orders to the other men. Rudy and Frank, in contrast, appear tackily dressed and poorly groomed, with long, unkempt hair and gaudy shirts and coats. (In short, they look like 1972 heist-film thugs, while McQueen takes on a more traditional style, of mid-1960s vintage.) The other men also appear inattentive, overconfident, and vain: Doc chides Frank for not paying attention while Frank casually runs a comb through his hair, and Rudy scornfully rebuffs Doc’s suggestion that he wear a bulletproof vest. Consequently, while the film denotes Rudy and Frank as willing participants in Benyon’s enterprise, the individualized Doc exhibits behavior most in accord with codes of managerial efficiency. As in Point Blank, the male iconoclast appears best suited for the work of organizational capitalism, the system he explicitly opposes. Doc’s management of the robbery anchors the film’s narrative in realworld logistical minutiae: timetables, electrical and alarm systems, transportation, tools, and personnel. The complicated logistics bear only on the robbery itself and lose significance immediately thereafter. In the manner of contemporaneous films such as The French Connection and Charley Varrick (1973), the intricacies of police or criminal procedure provide viewers a measure of cerebral involvement, followed by the cathartic 100 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 100 release of a spectacular chase or gun battle. Such details help to ground the film in conventional generic terrain. Whereas earlier sequences disrupt linear causality, the robbery planning returns viewers to the level generic ground of crime procedure. Once the narrative turns to the planning of the robbery, the film’s editing assumes a consistent pattern of linear causality. With crosscutting among various characters’ activities, the men and Carol visit the bank, meet to plan the crime, disperse to acquire supplies, rejoin for the robbery itself, split into pairs for the getaway, and finally, meet again to consolidate the stolen money. Doc supervises this series of activities either personally or by prior instruction until the getaway, when he crashes a getaway car, and Rudy, in another vehicle, shoots Frank. The shooting displays Rudy’s insubordination, whereas Doc’s crash provides the film’s first incident of kinetic, chaotic spectacle. Rather than appearing as a failure of Doc’s driving abilities, the crash grants viewers a moment of spectacular fulfillment. Slow-motion photography of the car crashing into a residential porch dilates the event and heightens its visual impact. The robbery and subsequent escape represent a fantasy of managerial aptitude that occupies viewers cognitively and viscerally. The violent shooting and the crash transform the otherwise straightforward exercise of the robbery into an active, arresting display. The participants receive both financial reward and the danger and thrill of pursuit, a thrill viewers experience vicariously. Like other action narratives of the period, The Getaway uses technical and logistical elements to suspend resolution. In its depiction of the robbery planning, the film presents a limited number of variables that viewers can reasonably apprehend. The film thus constructs viewers as, like Doc, experts on the impending robbery. The Getaway rewards viewers’ engagement in narrative complexities, and the final presentation of the nearly successful event satisfies viewers who have followed the intricate plan closely. Informed viewers can identify the mistakes made during the robbery and anticipate upcoming narrative developments. Similarly, crosscutting during the getaway includes shots both of narrative relevance and of principally visual interest. The film grants access to Doc and Carol’s perspective through point-of-view shots of the getaway car’s interior, and shots of Frank’s killing appear from two angles, an inside-thecar shot and a long shot showing his dead body rolling from the car. The sequence returns repeatedly to shots of a burning building and car, reminding viewers of the destruction the robbery causes. As in other action narratives, such images foreground pyrotechnic spectacle rather than essential story information. The entire robbery sequence follows a generic pattern that is also closely aligned with capitalist principles of organized, directed work: deliberation, planning, performance of a task, and resolution. Rudy’s treachery partly OMEGA MEN 101 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 101 undermines this efficient labor. A greater source of conflict, though, and a larger area of the film’s investment, is Carol herself. Her sexuality, her mindset, and her mere presence—in short, her femininity—deform and reshape the male heist narrative. Doc performs his appointed tasks without error or delay, while women and less competent men make mistakes: Frank shoots a guard, and Carol stalls a getaway van. The film uses such errors as evidence of character predilections. The devious Rudy soon murders the unwitting Frank, and Carol later loses the robbery money to another thief, an event Doc disparagingly refers to as “the oldest con in the book.” Displaying his partners’ explicit failures, the film by default acclaims Doc’s worldliness and skill. Carol herself participates in Doc’s public, work life, implicitly as a subordinate, since he leads the operation. The film thus frames Doc’s admonishment of Carol’s mistakes as the justifiable prerogative of a demanding manager, though viewers might also regard it as the vindictive bullying of an insecure husband. The film provokes this second view later as well, when Doc slaps Carol repeatedly after learning of her liaison with Benyon. Even when Carol places the responsibility for her tryst on Doc, saying “You sent me to him, you know,” Doc does not respond. By never requiring Doc to acknowledge his own guilt overtly, the film permits his character to remain virtuous, diminished only by Carol’s actions and accusations. The film indicates Doc’s contrition only through the gradual return of his affection for Carol, never obliging him to compromise his masculine ethic of silence and reproach. Instead, his ability to work through his internal crisis silently and invisibly codes him as, if anything, more masculinely self-possessed. The outward signs of Doc’s masculinity—his stern expression, his conservatively stylish clothing, his aggressive driving—remain constant, as does his aptitude for violence. Unlike Point Blank, in which Walker’s failed marriage leads to his physical vulnerability, The Getaway does not translate Doc’s failings as a husband into a failure at aggression. Though cuckolded, and though he and Carol experience repeated setbacks in their attempts to escape their pursuers, Doc ultimately retains his wife’s devotion and successfully eludes or overcomes his adversaries. Although The Getaway presents Doc’s stubbornness and anger as the basis for a predominant narrative conflict, ultimately the film validates a model of aggressive, emotionally suppressed masculinity. The psychological travails of the couple’s relationship coincide with their physical distress. Carol loses the money during a period of physical and emotional vulnerability, just after Doc assaults her. Similarly, at the nadir of their relationship, the pair must leap into a passing garbage truck that deposits them at a large trash dump. By this point, the film’s action plot has metaphorically bullied its romance elements into submission. Of course, 102 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 102 Hollywood films of many genres link action and romance narratives. By virtually fusing those two plotlines, though, The Getaway requires that the romance ascribe to the conventions of a male-oriented genre narrative. (Using a formulation from Steve Neale, we could say that the film is generically modeled as action, while it bears only the generic markings of a romantic melodrama.14) The couple’s perseverance through action defines their relationship. Largely foregoing displays of intimacy between the couple, the film presents their mere togetherness as a sign of love and fealty, thus according with a familiar belief in a man’s sheer physical presence as a sign of commitment. Inflections of femininity do not bear on the story’s outcome. The couple’s physical triumph over Rudy and Benyon’s accomplices occurs through Doc’s skill and good fortune, not Carol’s own agency. The film’s closing episode similarly views heterosexual relationships from an exclusively male perspective. Doc and Carol hitch a ride in the pickup truck of an elderly cowboy (Slim Pickens), who voices his approval of their marriage and the marital institution generally, although his own wife does not appear in the scene. By rewarding this cowboy with a portion of the stolen money, the film reinforces a traditional, patriarchal version of marriage in which women function as material support for male activity or hallowed but invisible objects of esteem. The Omega Man: The Future of Embattled Manhood Steve McQueen’s dispassionate masculine presence accounts substantially for his enormous popularity in the 1960s and 1970s. In films such as The Great Escape (1963), Bullitt, and The Towering Inferno (1974), McQueen appears as a highly competent Everyman who exudes charisma despite lacking any particular verbal flair or captivating mannerisms. With McQueen, the introverted, undemonstrative man becomes a celebrated man of action. Aspects of his offscreen persona testify to the supposed authenticity of this masculinity: in addition to performing many of his own film stunts, he was an accomplished automobile and motorcycle racer.15 McQueen’s casual masculinity contrasts sharply with the more deliberate masculinity embodied by Charlton Heston, popular hero of mainstream religious epics such as The Ten Commandments (1956), Ben-Hur (1959), and El Cid (1961) as well as the more fantastic Planet of the Apes. Heston’s epic, active masculinity serves as a prototype for the nearly invulnerable action heroes of the 1980s, including characters played by actors such as Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Schwarzenegger. In The Omega Man, Heston’s bravura monologues, his air of unflagging selfassurance, and his ability to ward off a mob of assailants single-handedly OMEGA MEN 103 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 103 all construct a form of heroic masculinity that films such as Rambo and Commando (1985) refine still further. As in the two 1980s films, The Omega Man presents militant masculinity as both the cause of and solution to international and local conflicts. Compared to expensive, elaborately produced science-fiction films such as Planet of the Apes and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), Warner Brothers’s The Omega Man is a relatively modest affair, with special effects limited to small fires and explosions, brief car and motorcycle pursuits, stuntmen’s acrobatics, and fanciful makeup. The film’s premise, that a biological virus has killed most of Earth’s population, results in a “less is more” approach toward visual spectacle. The film’s opening scenes, for example, consist of shots of Heston’s character, Robert Neville, driving around deserted downtown Los Angeles, and these shots achieve visual impact through the sheer absence of people and movement. Neville is an Army scientist trying to develop a vaccine to counteract the germ-warfare virus, which kills its victims or transforms them into nocturnal albinos. Neville faces an antitechnology cult of mutants led by the charismatic Matthias (Anthony Zerbe), who appears as a television newscaster in flashbacks to the pre-plague era. As the film progresses, Neville locates a hidden group of unharmed human survivors, romances one of their leaders, Lisa (Rosalind Cash), and ultimately dies a martyr after successfully concocting a serum that can defeat the virus. The film’s fantastic, apocalyptic narrative uses conventional linear storytelling, diverging from linearity only for a few expository flashbacks presented as Neville’s memories. The Omega Man’s fanciful narrative, inexpensive spectacle, and images of a shirtless Heston—forty-seven years old during the film’s production, and looking no younger—patrolling Los Angeles can appear unintentionally humorous by contemporary standards. Nevertheless, its depiction of a super-heroic white man as the savior of humanity anticipates many later science-fiction and action narratives, including Star Wars, Blade Runner (1981), The Terminator (1984), and Total Recall (1990). The Omega Man defines Neville as global savior through multiple plot conceits: he develops the experimental vaccine, he tests the vaccine on himself (thus making his blood the source of antibodies), he uses a transfusion of his own blood to save a plague victim, and immediately prior to his death, he turns over a jar of his curative blood to another scientist. In addition, in presenting Neville as an Army scientist who abandons his military affiliation to save humanity, the film enters the familiar narrative territory of male redemption, albeit on a public and fantastic, rather than a personal, scale. The overdetermination of Heston’s agency within the narrative testifies to the film’s anxieties about masculinity (particularly white masculinity), anxieties that later films continue to manipulate profitably. The Omega Man further 104 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 104 constructs Heston’s character as a fantasy of autonomous masculinity through its attention to material possessions and sartorial style. Neville drives a series of sporty convertibles, alternates among various conventional hero outfits (a safari jacket, a zip-up track suit, and a military jumpsuit, with dark sunglasses accompanying each), and lives in a fortified brownstone filled with video monitors and museum-quality artworks. Heston’s character thus embodies both a Playboy or James Bond lifestyle of bachelor luxury and a more retrograded male fantasy of violent self-preservation in a postapocalyptic setting. By narrating the villains’ repeated assaults on Neville’s home, the film represents heroic, cultivated Western masculinity literally under siege. The film represents Neville not only as “the last man alive” (a slogan used in the film’s advertising) but also as an amalgamation of masculine ideals. Neville is scientist, physician, mechanic (he operates numerous generators that he has installed around the city), scholar (at one point, he quotes T.S. Eliot), fine-art connoisseur (his apartment contains familiar paintings from the Renaissance to the twentieth century), athlete (during a reconnaissance dash around town, he proclaims in monologue that he has broken the world record for the mile run), and indefatigable warrior. The film implies that Neville’s masculinity belongs to overlapping, universal categories that transcends history. His shifting wardrobe reflects his apparent embodiment of multiple historical paradigms of masculine bearing. In one of his many bizarre costumes, for example, Neville wears a vaguely Edwardian outfit of ruffled shirt and velvet coat. Similarly, he engages in both mass and elite cultural pursuits: muscle-car driving and art appreciation, marksmanship and chess, athletics and Scotch-drinking. Through his diverse activities, Neville appears as both a classical gentleman and a willing participant in popular recreational culture. The Omega Man offers its protagonist as the standard-bearer of simultaneously conservative and progressive ideologies. Neville’s material possessions and predilections link him to both traditional U.S. values and shifting youth-culture attitudes. His bachelor lifestyle and his use of a series of cars and motorcycles signify both youthful rebellion and conventional, masculine material power. Tipping the balance, his frequent use of guns and his ideology of self-preservation make him a model of libertarianism. To temper the presentation of Neville as an anachronistic conservative, the film shows him entering a movie theater to watch Woodstock (1970; conveniently, another Warner Brothers release), during which he recites the film’s dialogue to give the impression that he has viewed it repeatedly. Apparently he seeks solace in the documentary’s images of huge crowds of sun-drenched adolescents, a sharp contrast to The Omega Man’s repeated shots of barren urban areas. Hence the film suggests that, OMEGA MEN 105 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 105 rather than reveling in his life as a solo supermale, Neville would prefer the hierarchy-free social utopia that Woodstock connotes. This sequence includes shots of Neville turning on a generator and operating the film projector, constructing him as the deus ex machina who preserves the film document of youth culture. The film presents this ideologically ironic gesture straightforwardly, making the traditional, conservative male responsible for the resuscitation of an exterminated counterculture. Along with its protagonist who adheres to both progressive and conservative models of male behavior, the film presents a distorted and contradictory view of early-1970s race relations, framing racial conflict in terms of black characters’ sympathy or antagonism toward the film’s two white leaders. The film contrasts Neville’s ostensible liberalism with a paranoid, racist nightmare of militant blacks who rise up to persecute a white hero. Characters appear both as advocates of racial equality and as simplistic, racialized types. While Neville visibly embraces white culture—in his clothing, artistic tastes, and scientific and military pursuits—he also appears as a friend or lover to the film’s virtuous (i.e., trustworthy and compliant) black characters. For example, he seduces Lisa, a virtuous black character and the only woman in the film, and consummates the relationship immediately after killing a black male intruder. Heston’s screen affair with Cash recalls similar pairings of aging white men with younger black women in 1970s films. As in Clint Eastwood’s Play Misty For Me (1971) and The Eiger Sanction (1975), the introduction of a black woman as a sexual partner connotes the progressiveness of an otherwise conservative star persona. Lisa later succumbs to the virus herself, an incident the film codes as a betrayal, albeit a passive one (rather than taking action against Neville, she simply leaves his side, and when she later recovers from the virus, she is contrite). Neville also saves Lisa’s teenage brother, Richie, from the plague through a blood transfusion, an act the boy repays by criticizing Neville’s militancy, observing: “You’re hostile—you just don’t belong.” Through this interaction, the film briefly interrogates Neville’s characteristic white male isolation. His penchant for violent action locates him on the side of the antisocial, but ultimately, his altruistic tendencies threaten his own survival. Neville hastens his own death by granting autonomy to Lisa and her brother: Richie leaves to negotiate with Matthias, and Lisa’s abandonment of Neville leads to his mortal wounding. While Neville’s willingness to share his bodily fluids with black women and children apparently denotes his liberalism, the film uses the black characters’ subsequent betrayals to remind viewers of the limitations of racial equality. Furthering the film’s confusion about race, the plague-ridden cult that persecutes Heston appears both outside racial categories and hyperconscious of such categories. The film’s plague transforms its victims’ skin 106 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 106 into a uniform pale white. However, while most of the cult’s white members remain hooded throughout the film, a key black lieutenant usually appears unhooded, showing off his bleached-white face and hair. Similarly, Lisa and Richie also appear in various stages of the disease, with their skin, hair, and eyes turning white. The film’s makeup and costuming thus foreground the spectacle of transformed blackness. At the same time, the film presents a cartoonish version of racial solidarity. When Matthias’s lieutenant decries Neville’s home as a “honky paradise,” Matthias chides him for recalling “the old ways” of racial antagonism. Nevertheless, the film codes the lieutenant as a subversive, violent militant—an angry black-power stereotype—despite his bleached complexion. Although a member of Matthias’s antitechnology “Family,” the lieutenant carries a hidden pistol, showing his lack of solidarity with the Family’s agenda.16 While The Omega Man includes heavy doses of gun violence and features many shots of a grinning Heston wielding a machine gun, the film still manages to present a black man’s mere possession of a firearm as illegitimate. In the film’s logic, the black lieutenant both betrays his associates and poses a threat to Neville. Through its depiction of Lisa, Richie, and the unnamed black lieutenant, the film presents assimilated blacks—in this case, blacks who are literally bleached white—as threats to legitimate white masculinity. The film clouds the Family’s racial associations through the group’s articulation of an aggressive antitechnology stance. Rejecting the implications of black liberation’s “by any means necessary” stance, the integrated group here pursues a primitive agenda of siege warfare. Unlike Point Blank and The Getaway, The Omega Man aligns its protagonist explicitly with contemporary technology (as well as with luxury and sophistication). In this film, critics of technology pose a threat to heroic masculinity. The Family battles Neville because he represents military uses of science and technology. In his hyperbolic rhetoric, Matthias refers to Neville as the “creature of the wheel,” a “lord of the infernal engines,” and so forth. Neville appears somewhat conflicted by his association with destructive institutions, as killing contradicts his mission to save humanity. The film implies that Neville kills only in self-defense, though his choice of exclusively lethal weaponry belies any humanitarian impulses. The Family’s arsenal, by comparison, appears infantile and silly: they wield clubs, torches, and archaic siege machines such as flaming catapults. Their chosen Luddite stance, rather than aligning them with peace-loving or environmentalist sensibilities, codes them as more violent and destructive than the trigger-happy Neville. The film allows Matthias to articulate a fairly coherent antitechnology position, but his exaggerated rhetoric, his clear connotations as a grotesque villain, and the Family’s barbarity and inhumanity render such a position entirely unsympathetic. Contrastingly, OMEGA MEN 107 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 107 the film presents Neville’s final act, the transfer of power to a fellow white male scientist, as unproblematic and socially beneficial. Although Neville dies at the film’s conclusion, a younger white male protagonist emerges to carry on Neville’s patriarchal, scientific mission. Through this character, The Omega Man reconstructs science as countercultural and even revolutionary. At its midway point, the film introduces Dutch (Paul Koslo), a young ex–medical student who rides a motorcycle and dresses in worn-out jeans and leather jacket, with no shirt beneath. Dutch’s outlaw-biker look, wild hair, and alternative lifestyle (he cares for a group of scruffy children in a commune-like outpost outside the city) identify him as a representative of the young counterculture. The film even presents Dutch as a critic of science; he blames scientists like Neville for the global cataclysm. At the same time, he idolizes Neville, reciting the title of one of Neville’s medical-journal articles when they first meet. Similarly, visual cues present Dutch as a caring patriarch, as when he is shown repeatedly with a band of white children. Meanwhile, his ostensible partner Lisa never appears alongside this group in shot compositions. At the film’s end, when Dutch receives the serum that will cure the plague, he becomes a new white hope, a man capable of thwarting Matthias’s false revolution with a prosocial counterprogram. Just as the film transforms the era’s real oppositional voices—including black militants and critics of science—into caricatures of intolerance, it reimagines hegemonic science as countercultural and hip. Feminism is absent altogether, with the possible exception of a brief scene in which Neville and Lisa share a laugh about the impracticality of birth-control products in a depopulated world. The doctrine of free love is ironically validated, but with its intent reversed. Through this moment of nostalgia, the film implies that conservative attitudes toward sex—the use of sex explicitly for procreation—offer security for an uncertain future. Conservative, masculine survival skills gain new relevance as well, as Neville’s technical aptitude and physical endurance allow him to function unimpaired in the postapocalyptic world. The film’s ultimate validation of male militancy and technology also sustains conservative conventions of the science-fiction film genre. Whereas the crime film and film noir show interest in criminal protagonists, men overtly at odds with traditional social institutions, science-fiction films’ dystopian environments often result in the explicit affirmation of or nostalgic longing for traditional values and institutions. The Omega Man affirms the value of biological science, for example, even while admitting the dangers of misuse of scientific knowledge. The film’s recurrent connotations of Neville as a Christ-like martyr indicate the versatility of conservative notions of epic, heroic masculinity. Even excluding his religious epics, many of Heston’s roles not only mythologize 108 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 108 him but often feature explicitly Christian themes. In The Naked Jungle (1954), Heston plays a South American plantation owner who loses but perseveres, Job-like, in a protracted battle against a huge ant colony. Planet of the Apes offers Heston as a future Adam, ready to rekindle the fallen human race with a mute, sexually attractive consort. The Omega Man identifies Heston’s character as a Christ figure both narratively and visually. In one scene, a young girl asks him, “Are you God?” a question to which he does not reply. Neville’s persecution by the Family and its Pontius Pilate–like leader Matthias also recalls the travails of the biblical Christ. The film’s most heavy-handed symbolism occurs in its closing shot, in which the dying Neville reclines against a cross-like column in a shallow pool reddened with his blood, his legs bent and arms floating outstretched in a crucifixion pose. The film ends with a solarized version of this shot, lending the conventional religious image a contemporary, vaguely psychedelic sheen. As we have seen, the film substantially overdetermines Neville’s signification, presenting him simultaneously as a GQ-style superbachelor, a rebel advocate of countercultural values, and finally a martyr of biblical proportions. Consequently, attacks on his swaggering masculinity represent assaults on an unimpeachable piety and devotion. The adaptability of Heston’s star persona to both religious epics and science-fiction films testifies to both genres’ interest in forms of masculinity that transcend ordinary physical limitations and social conflicts. Frequent shots in both The Omega Man and Planet of the Apes show Heston bare-chested and glistening with sweat, recalling his similar appearance as Christian heroes in Ben-Hur and El Cid. While displays of the partially naked male body occur with great frequency in films that depict male physical prowess, the visual connection between Heston’s religious and science-fiction roles indicates a preoccupation with classical, epic visions of masculinity. With biblical and gladiatorial epics out of favor in the late 1960s and early 1970s, Heston’s characters advance classical and Christianity-based images of male power into future-oriented narratives. Conservative ideologies accompany such representations. The Omega Man conflates women’s movements, antiwar sentiments, environmentalism, and critiques of corporate capitalism into a broad-based threat to heroic masculinity. Neville’s exaggerated virtue and proficiency, which the film code as essential to the proper functioning of democratic society, counter these corrosive, dissenting perspectives. The Omega Man’s conflation of progressive ideologies into a monolithic threat to male autonomy accords with the representations of masculinity in Point Blank and The Getaway. All three films, whether overtly supportive of capitalism or not, offer male protagonists whose managerial efficiency and coolness under pressure identify them as ideal OMEGA MEN 109 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 109 capitalist functionaries. Meanwhile, their antagonists take on aspects of capitalism in negative ways; The Omega Man depicts its villainous Family as an organized group that conducts meetings and trials and has a clear hierarchy of leadership and established headquarters. Characters that might otherwise appear as revolutionaries thus become unquestioning agents of a misguided authority figure, while the solitary, righteous hero’s allegiances to the former state power go largely unexamined. Notably, all three films also portray male protagonists threatened by their sexual partners’ encounters with other men. The heroes of Point Blank and The Getaway are explicitly cuckolded by their wives, and these affairs predicate violence against the wives and others. The Omega Man represents its heroine’s betrayal metaphorically. When Lisa journeys alone for food and clothing, she hastily succumbs to the plague. Her physical transformation appears immediate rather than protracted (as for the other case shown), and thereafter, entranced by Matthias, she wears a mischievous smile and tells him,“I want you.” Basically, then, Lisa willfully rejects Neville’s human companionship to join Matthias’s side, with the film coding her choice in terms of vacillating female desire. Like the two other films, The Omega Man shows interest in female transgression predominantly for its effects on male agency. In all three, men are undone or undermined by women’s sexual weakness and untrustworthiness. Consequently, the women who stray from their rightful men receive punishment—physical assault or death—which the films depict as legitimate or at least unexceptional. Such a dynamic parallels prevailing Vietnam-era ideologies of male privilege: women still implicitly represent male property, and men’s assertions of sovereignty ostensibly justify whatever treatment women receive. In these three films, women enjoy more substantive roles than in the majority of action films of the 1980s, yet they exist on screen largely to illuminate issues in masculinity. In their attempts to address and reconcile threats to male power, the films offer the possibility of broad-based audience appeal but also risk fundamental damage to narrative or thematic coherence. Point Blank represents the vengeful loner as the ideal worker, tireless and goal-oriented. The Getaway depicts patriarchal oppression through an unjust penal system and rapacious villains but nonetheless withholds authority from its female protagonist. Finally, The Omega Man fuses conservative and countercultural tastes and behaviors. After the onset of the blockbuster era in the mid-1970s, studio films often fit into narrow genre categories and marginalized ongoing cultural conflicts. The superficial ideological coherence of 1980s action films occurs partly through the exscription of women or their assignment to largely ornamental roles. Overall, then, the cultural battles waged in male-oriented action films of the late 1960s and early 1970s end in stalemate, with 110 ACTION FIGURES 05_Markher_03.qxd 13/10/05 3:18 PM Page 110 unresolved issues set aside for reconsideration by later filmmakers and critics. Mature male heroes are a fixture of the films discussed in this chapter, and later, by the end of the 1990s, action cinema again grants considerable attention to aging men. In the intervening years, such figures recede from view; action-based cinema of the late 1970s and 1980s makes little allowance for middle-aged male heroes. Corresponding with the period’s blockbuster mentality, popular films in the late 1970s and early 1980s construct masculinity in ways meant to appeal to young viewers: in Jaws’s narrative of men who leave community ties behind to fight an exaggerated menace, in First Blood’s displays of Stallone’s hypermuscular masculinity and solitary survival in the jungle-like terrain of the Pacific Northwest, and in Star Wars’s vision of boyish heroes mobilizing fantastic, toylike weaponry to save the universe. While these films make appeals to older viewers as well—through Jaws’s presentation of Robert Shaw as a conventional male avenger in the mold of Melville’s Ahab, First Blood’s appeal to disenfranchised Vietnam veterans, and Star Wars’s resuscitation of 1930s and 1940s Flash Gordon and Buck Rogers serials—they move far afield from the putatively realist environments of previous male-centered films such as Bullitt and The French Connection. Still, the figure of the mature male hero in a contemporary, pseudorealist setting did not altogether disappear. Instead, he rose to exceptional prominence in popular novels, novels in which iconic presences such as Marvin, McQueen, and Heston loom large.