RILEY Masculinity

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Screen Education I ©ATOM I No. 92

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TALKING SOCIETY

Distressed Damsels, Expendable Men

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SCREEN VIOLENCE AND MASCULINITY

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n the climactic sequence of Commando (Mark L Lester, 1985), the schlocky action-movie romp that helped cement Arnold Schwarzenegger’s status as the undisputed action hero of the 1980s, John Matrix (Schwarzenegger) arrives at the island hide-out of the film’s villain, armed to the teeth. On his way to take out the bad guy, Matrix proceeds to slaughter his way across the island, killing scores of nameless male goons in the process. The film packs a lot of violence into less than ten minutes, as henchmen die at first from stealthy knife wounds, then hails of bullets and grenade explosions as Matrix reaches the island’s central compound.

In his final approach to the building, Matrix shoots down and blows up literally dozens more henchmen, remaining completely unscathed as he heads to the final showdown. The hero’s motivation for his assault on the island? To save the life of his daughter, Jenny (Alyssa Milano). While Jenny manages to

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Depending on the gender of its recipient, violence in film can have fundamentally different connotations: while violence against women is often depicted to maximise emotional affect, violence against men is, in many cases, shrugged off. As BENJAMIN RILEY argues, this representational disparity not only reinforces hegemonic discourses about disposable men and weak women, but also helps perpetuate violent masculinity in the real world.

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PREVIOUS SPREAD, L–R: The dichotomised gender representation of Commando; unnamed male characters lie dead in Star Wars: Episode IV – A New Hope ABOVE: Commando

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survive the film, ostensibly making the massacre ‘worthwhile’, it is difficult not to be left with the sense that we have just watched a murderer face no moral consequences for systematically and brutally killing a very large number of people.

The ‘faceless goon’ trope in action cinema is a common one, particularly in the genre’s over-the-top golden age from the mid 1980s through to the early 1990s. A moral disparity abounds in these films between the ‘disposable’ lives of henchmen and the ‘valuable’ lives of our protagonists and their loved ones. Of course, the idea that we as viewers should care more about violence against those in whom we have an emotional investment is logical – what stands out about the trope, however, is its gendered nature. These emotionally and narratively disposable victims of on-screen violence are almost always men.

We are in a moment in which gendered readings of popular culture are more relevant than ever. As #MeToo galvanises people worldwide into recognising men’s violence against women as a global crisis, many have turned to masculinity as a source of – and, potentially, solution to – the problem. While some authorities continue to police women’s behaviour in an attempt to reduce gendered violence, it is difficult to disagree that men and masculinity are what needs to change. Boys are taught to be men in particular ways not only through modelled behaviour in their day-to-day lives, but also through society’s ability to shape how we think and feel about one another and the world.

It is important, therefore, that we critically examine the role cultural products play in shaping discourses that contribute to gendered violence.

But why examine violence against men’s bodies in media as a way to think about masculinity and violence against women?

It seems a little counterintuitive: at first glance, it makes more sense to imagine that depictions of men’s violence against women on screen would do more to normalise such behaviour.

However, violent images can’t simply be analysed in terms of

modelled behaviour – the nature of these cultural images as spectacle means we must also examine this on-screen violence in terms of affect. While it’s true that violence against disposable victims across decades of action cinema and television skews significantly towards men, what is much more interesting than any simple ratio of gendered violence is the fact that violence against differently gendered characters produces very different affects.

Any close reading is going to fail to produce a coherent narrative to explain the cultural production of phenomena as complex as masculinity or gendered violence. Instead, I will follow a number of different threads that run throughout popular culture to sketch a picture of how affectless male victims of violence on screen might inform constructions of masculinity.

HARD BODIES, SOFT BODIES Before we get into specific tropes that play out around the kinds of affect produced by depictions of violence against differently gendered bodies, it is worth taking a moment to think about how those bodies are read on screen.

Critical analyses of gendered bodies have often noted the ways that Western ideals of masculinity and femininity relate ‘inherent’ qualities of men and women to the rigidity and permeability of their bodies. Action movies of the 1980s like First Blood (Ted Kotcheff, 1982), Predator (John McTiernan, 1987), Bloodsport (Newt Arnold, 1988) and numerous Schwarzenegger vehicles (including Commando) have been direct objects of this kind of analysis. In her book Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, academic Susan Jeffords reads the literal ‘hard bodies’ of these films’ protagonists as a response to then–US president Ronald Reagan’s valorisation of a new, more masculine America. As Reagan was instilling the nation with the desire to assert its agency and power in the world,

THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: ‘Hard’ masculine bodies in Bloodsport and First Blood

Jeffords argues, US cinema threw up heroes who were, literally and bodily, rigid, powerful and impenetrable.1 The coding of certain physical traits as masculine or feminine goes back millennia and changes over time and space, but certain tropes persist in visual culture. To be masculine is to be hard, forceful, impermeable, while to be feminine is to be soft, curved and penetrable.

Examples from 1980s action cinema are particularly direct, but it’s hard not to see the same trends recurring in popular culture, particularly with the rise and rise of the superhero movie genre over the past fifteen years. Take a team of superheroes like the Avengers, stars of the titular film series and tentpole of media giant Marvel’s ‘cinematic universe’. When promotional material for 2012’s The Avengers (Joss Whedon) began to whip the fandom into a frenzy, many noticed the overtly sexualised ways in which Scarlett Johansson’s character Black Widow, at that time the only woman on the team, was posed. The male characters on the

team certainly don’t lack sex appeal (both Chris Evans’ Captain America and Chris Hemsworth’s Thor have become sex symbols in their own right), but the affective quality of that sexualisation is markedly different. In a promotional poster for the first Avengers film, the muscled, hard bodies of the men are presented in powerful poses emphasising their strength and agency. Johansson’s Widow, in contrast, is awkwardly posed to present the viewer with both her backside and her breasts, as she peeks back at us coquettishly over her shoulder.2 This example is a useful illustration of the ways gendered bodies in media reveal dominant discourses of masculinity and femininity, but it also serves as a convenient metaphor. In coding masculine bodies as hard and invulnerable and feminine bodies as passive and vulnerable, we begin to see how this landscape of the physical presentation of bodies is intertwined with the emotional, affective gendering of bodies on screen, particularly when it comes to violence.

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The coding of certain physical traits as masculine or feminine goes back millennia and changes over time and space, but certain tropes persist in visual culture. To be masculine is to be hard, forceful, impermeable, while to be feminine is to be soft, curved and penetrable.

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THIS PAGE, FROM TOP: Andrea Anders (Maud Adams) as sexual partner for James Bond (Roger Moore) and later murder victim in The Man with the Golden Gun; Stacey Sutton (Tanya Roberts) in peril in A View to a Kill OPPOSITE PAGE, FROM TOP: Comedic violence in Mouse Hunt; a male-dominated crowd scene in Perfume: The Story of a Murderer

BOND GIRLS IN REFRIGERATORS

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Staying with the world of superheroes for a moment, few tropes about gendered violence in media have been as clearly articulated as ‘women in refrigerators’. The term originates with a website of the same name founded by comic-book legend Gail Simone in 1999, which documented examples from comics in which female characters had been ‘killed, maimed or depowered’ solely for the purposes of advancing the arc of a male character.3 The specific incident that inspired the title took place in a 1994 Green Lantern comic by writer Ron Marz. Superhero Kyle Rayner comes home to find his girlfriend Alexandra DeWitt murdered by the villain Major Force, her body stuffed into the refrigerator.

The abundance of examples of this trope throughout superhero comics inspired Simone and other writers to document the phenomenon and discourage its use, but it is by no means limited to either the genre or its medium.4 The James Bond films contain perhaps the best known on-screen examples of women in refrigerators, via the films’ ubiquitous ‘Bond girls’: attractive women who serve as potential sexual partners for the iconic British super spy. There is a formula for the appearance of Bond girls in many of the films: the first potential (or actual) sexual partner will end up dead at the hands of the story’s villain, and a different woman will be revealed to be the film’s ‘final’ Bond girl.5 The Man with the Golden Gun (Guy Hamilton, 1974), starring Roger Moore as Bond, typifies this trope. Bond’s doomed first ‘girl’, Andrea Anders (Maud Adams), is killed halfway through the film, propelling the protagonist into a climactic second half

accompanied by his second sexual partner of the film, the subtly named Mary Goodnight (Britt Ekland).

Like the examples documented from comic books, these deaths are there, narratively speaking, to advance the emotional arc of male protagonists. It is not coincidental that they are women – the narrative device relies on the affect produced by violence against female characters, affect that would not be produced in the same way if the characters were men. The ideas I have explored so far, of differently gendered bodies being coded as vulnerable or not, go some way to explaining that affective

MR CANNON FODDER Before we return to the implications for masculinity posed by these difficult questions, I want to follow a different – but related – thread, and return to Schwarzenegger and the climax of Commando. There is another, no less sexist reason for the presence of hordes of nameless men that allows for the heroprotagonist to commit large-scale murder without the affective consequences that would arise if his victims were women.

In a study commissioned by the Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media – established in 2007 by the eponymous actor and producer – in 2014 to analyse gender representation in films, a surprising finding involved crowd scenes: on average, just 17 per cent of people featured on screen in these scenes were women. Davis speculated that cinema was training its audiences to believe that this ratio is a normal representation of humanity, linking it to similar percentages of women represented in a number of elite professions.8 (Coincidentally to this discussion, Davis also starred in one of the great cheesy action movies of the 1990s, The Long Kiss Goodnight (Renny Harlin, 1996), a refreshing spin on the male-dominated action movies of the previous decade.)

The point here is that, at least when it comes to cinema, men are the ‘default humans’. This is an idea explored in detail by media critic Anita Sarkeesian in her well-known video series ‘Tropes vs Women in Video Games’. In an episode devoted to a trope she calls ‘Ms. Male Character’, Sarkeesian notes that many female videogame characters are merely visual variants of established male characters sporting stereotypical feminine identifiers.9 Ms. Pac-Man is the quintessential example: she is

Men can make up the waves of cannon fodder for the hero to gun down in a film like Commando because it is the only way to incorporate that kind of violence without it creating undue affect, and therefore undue moral consequences for the protagonist. identical to the famous yellow dot-gobbler except for the addition of a red bow on her head, red lipstick, bigger eyelashes and a beauty spot on her ‘cheek’.

The positioning of men as the ‘default’ means their existences – and therefore their deaths – carry less inherent meaning. Men can make up the waves of cannon fodder for the hero to gun down in a film like Commando because it is the only way to incorporate that kind of violence without it creating undue affect, and therefore undue moral consequences for the protagonist. Another genre in which a lack of morally consequential affect shapes gendered violence on screen is comedy. While men are frequently the ‘victims’ of slapstick violence in screen comedies, the affect produced by almost any violence against female bodies on screen makes such scenarios entirely unfit for comedic purpose.

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disparity. Just as important a question as why is: who is this affect for? Who is the presumed audience for a gaze that presents men as powerful and women as vulnerable?

Of course, the presumed gaze – at least, for products of popular culture not specifically coded as ‘for women’ – is a male one, as Laura Mulvey argues in her influential 1975 essay ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’.6 Thus, the affective spectacle of gendered violence can be said to exist for the benefit of a male audience.

Just as this violence against women propels the stories of male protagonists, the affect it produces is designed to work on male audiences. The male spectator becomes a proxy for the hardbodied hero, evoking a man’s role as ‘protector’ of the vulnerable, agency-less women.

Bleeding between popular culture and the real world, these narratives emerge again and again within the context of political responses to the #MeToo movement. Conservative commentators like Miranda Devine invoke notions of ‘chivalry’ in response to increasing reports of violence against women, calling on a return to a time when men protected women.7 Within this frame, women remain passive objects, whether physical or emotional. They are either victims of violence or in need of men’s protection.

To turn back to images and the question posed at the outset of this essay: if the threat or depiction of violence against women on screen is a powerful source of affect, why doesn’t violence against men on screen elicit the same responses? And, more importantly, what does that mean for the ways these depictions shape masculinity? In other words, if women’s bodies on screen are vulnerable in two senses of the word, both to violence and as a site for emotional affect, does it mean that affectless depictions of violence against men reinforce the idea of men as invulnerable, or without meaningful emotional lives?

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THIS SPREAD: Violence as catharsis in Fight Club (two images)

THE FIRST RULE OF HEGEMONIC MASCULINITY

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To get at the heart of what affectless violence against male bodies on screen might mean for constructions of masculinity, we need to think for a moment about how masculinity operates.

There are a wide range of theories for analysing masculinity, but one of the most influential and enduring – and, for the purpose of this topic, illuminating – is the notion of ‘hegemonic masculinity’. Coined by Australian sociologist RW Connell,10 the term refers to an ideological framework in which masculinity is defined in terms of comparison to an imagined masculine ideal.

While that idealised archetype will vary throughout history and across different geographical contexts, that process of comparison is masculinity’s recurring ideological core.

This idea – that comparison, or even competition, between men is central to how we situate ourselves within discourses of masculinity, how we define ourselves as ‘masculine’ – provides a useful tool for thinking about the kinds of violence discussed throughout this essay. Even better, one particular film renders literally (if ironically) the idea of masculinity defined through violent competition with other men.

David Fincher’s 1999 cult classic Fight Club follows the strange relationship of its unnamed protagonist (Edward Norton) with the mysterious Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt). The two of them establish the film’s titular fight clubs – underground groups in which men

can meet and physically beat one another, often to the point of severe injury. While the film remains famously opaque on what exactly the fight clubs represent, the men who participate in them share a dissatisfaction with their everyday lives, finding only humiliation and emasculation in consumer capitalism. Through physical violence, depicted on screen in shocking brutality, the men believe they are reconnecting with some authentic part of themselves that has been lost. To relate this back to hegemonic masculinity, Fight Club depicts the comparison to other men at the heart of the theory as literal, physical violence.

Importantly for hegemonic masculinity, the masculine archetype that exists as an unachievable ideal has an opposite – a feminine ‘Other’ situated as a point of favourable comparison.

The men’s opponents in the fight club have to be other men, because under the terms of hegemonic masculinity it would be meaningless for the men to test themselves against women. In a class system structured along gender lines, men are at the top, categorically speaking, and women are at the bottom. Under these terms, ‘masculine’ men shouldn’t need to prove themselves against those deemed ‘weaker’ than themselves. The way this can play out in public and political discourse is perfectly illustrated by comments from high-profile male politicians on the issue of men’s violence against women. In 2015, then–prime minister Tony Abbott weighed in by proclaiming that ‘real men don’t hit, they don’t threaten and they don’t bully women or children’, a comment that was criticised by many working to end gendered violence.11

With the picture of masculinity painted by Fight Club in mind, the image of a muscled Schwarzenegger fighting through waves of armed gunmen in Commando appears in a different light: the fact that those deaths do not produce affect is crucial. Hegemonic masculinity requires these action-movie protagonists, these male perpetrators of violence, to test their mettle against other men and come out victorious, unencumbered by the baggage of empathy. In other words, perhaps the unequal distribution of affect when it comes to gendered violence on screen helps reinforce hegemonic masculinity as an ideology, naturalising the violence in which our masculinity is forged.

The challenge in picking apart what affectless violence against male bodies on screen means for masculinity is the contradiction at the heart of the issue: that men are both a default subject and source of agency and an apparently acceptable object for violence. The discourses that inform constructions of masculinity are complex, and, yes, often contradictory, but there are a few key ideas that a gendered analysis of affect and on-screen violence can provide.

When violence against male bodies by other men fails to produce the same affect as similar violence against female ­bodies, it valorises the violence of men as a worthy, even necessary part of the project of masculinity. That violence becomes recognisable as part of the ur-myth of masculinity – the competition involved in climbing the ladder towards an impossible masculine ideal.

Tropes of all kinds in media naturalise what is, in reality, accumulated social and cultural detritus built up over millennia in the particular ways of telling stories. What tropes obscure, then, are other ways of being and of relating to one another. The ideas explored here are part of a much larger cultural whole, one in which men’s violence against women is far too acceptable, and in which men are given shockingly few ways of being in the world without the need for violence.

Critiquing a trope like affectless violence against men on screen can provide a starting point for thinking about what other ways of being might be possible when we are not subject to the oppressive violence of masculine ideologies. Through analysing our own affective responses to violent images, whichever gender that violence is being done to, hopefully we can begin to understand how we can better respond to violent masculinity in all its forms.

Benjamin Riley is a freelance writer and journalist based in Sydney, writing about politics, HIV, queerness, masculinity and mental health. Benjamin has previously worked as Victorian editor for national LGBTI newspaper Star Observer, and he co-hosts and produces Queers, a podcast about critical queer politics. SE Endnotes See Susan Jeffords, Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era, Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 1994.

2 ‘Kevin Bolk’s Bootylicious Avengers Movie Poster Takes On Superhero Sexism (PHOTO)’, The Huffington Post, 11 May 2012, <https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/11/ avengers-movie-poster-sexist_n_1507914.html>; see also 1

Kevin O’Keeffe, ‘The Problem with How Superhero Movies Treat Women, in 11 Posters’, Mic, 7 August 2015, <https://mic. com/articles/123525/how-superhero-movies-treat-women-in -11-posters>, both accessed 11 September 2018.

3 Gail Simone, ‘Fan GAIL SIMONE responds’, Women in Refrigerators website, <https://www.lby3.com/wir/r-gsimone. html>, accessed 11 September 2018.

4 Shannon Cochran, ‘The Cold Shoulder: Saving Superheroines from Comic-book Violence’, Bitch Media, 28 February 2007, <https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/comics-cold-shoulder>, accessed 11 September 2018.

5 Joe Anderton, ‘This Is the Sexist Formula Bond Writers Were Given for How to Write Bond Girls’, Digital Spy, 6 July 2017, <http://www.digitalspy.com/movies/james-bond-007/news/ a832520/james-bond-007-writers-sexist-formula-female -characters/>, accessed 26 September 2018.

6 Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen, vol. 16, no. 3, 1 October 1975, pp. 6–18.

7 Miranda Devine, ‘Chivalry Isn’t Dead, It’s Been Criminalised’, The Daily Telegraph, 17 December 2017, <https://www.daily telegraph.com.au/rendezview/chivalry-isnt-dead-its-been -criminalised/news-story/5aff45d60c162dda3b94eef80a cd8401>, accessed 11 September 2018.

8 ‘Largest-ever Global Study of Gender in Film Illuminates a Persistent Sexism Problem’, Feminist Majority Foundation blog, 24 September 2014, <https://feminist.org/blog/index. php/2014/09/24/largest-ever-global-study-of-gender-in-film -illuminates-a-persistent-sexism-problem/>; for full report, see Stacy L Smith et al., Gender Bias Without Borders: An Investigation of Female Characters in Popular Films Across 11 Countries, Geena Davis Institute on Gender in Media, 2014, available at <https://seejane.org/wp-content/uploads/ gender-bias-without-borders-full-report.pdf>, both accessed 11 September 2018.

9 Anita Sarkeesian, ‘Ms. Male Character – Tropes vs Women’, Feminist Frequency, 18 November 2013, <https://feminist frequency.com/video/ms-male-character-tropes-vs-women/>, accessed 11 September 2018.

10 See RW Connell, Gender and Power, Polity Press, Cambridge, 1987, pp. 183–90.

11 See Michael Salter, ‘Real Men Do Hit Women’, Meanjin, Autumn 2016, <https://meanjin.com.au/essays/real-men-do -hit-women/>, accessed 26 September 2018.

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WORTH(LESS) THROUGH VIOLENCE

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