Nicola Rehling - Extra-Ordinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity and Contemporary Popular Cinema

Extra-Ordinary Men

NICOLA REHLING

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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Rehling, Nicola, 1970
Extra-ordinary men : white heterosexual masculinity in contemporary popular cinema / Nicola Rehling.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-2482-6 (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-2482-X (cloth : alk. paper)
ISBN-13: 978-0-7391-3389-7 (electronic)
ISBN-10: 0-7391-3389-6 (electronic)
1. Masculinity in motion pictures. 2. Heterosexual men in motion pictures. 3. Whites in motion pictures. I. Title.
PN1995.9.M34R44 2009
791.43'6526662
[2 22] 2008042288

Printed in the United States of America

The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information SciencesPermanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/INISO Z39.481992.

To Yiannis

This book would not have been possible without the help, support, and encouragement of many people. However, most thanks must go to Ruth Parkin-Gounelas, who supervised the doctoral thesis on which this book is based. Her questioning mind, intellectual and theoretical rigour, and perceptive readings of my drafts never failed to inspire me. She has taught me the true meaning of being a scholar. I would also like to thank my co-advisors: Elsi Sakellaridou, for her scrupulous reading of my work, and Michalis Kokkonis, for his ongoing support throughout the writing of my thesis. The other members of my examining committeeKarin Lagopoulou, Alexandros Lagopoulos, Nick Kontos, and Effie Yiannopouloualso offered incisive comments which were invaluable during the revision of my thesis.

There are also numerous people who have helped me throughout my academic career. In particular, I am deeply indebted to Steve Watts and Steve Xerri for believing in me at a crucial time and for kindling my interest in gender theory. Mandy Merck has also influenced my work in immeasurable ways, particularly in arousing my fascination with the complexities of popular cinema, gender, and sexuality. I look back on her stimulating and inspiring MA courses at Sussex University (1994-95) with great fondness. I would also like to thank Vicky Lebeau for her challenging MA seminars at Sussex University, and for her helpful comments on an early draft of this manuscript, comments which caused me to question assumptions that I had taken for granted. I am also grateful to Reynold Humphries for his perceptive and enthusiastic reading of this manuscript. Thanks also to my students at Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and City College of Thessaloniki (Affiliated Institution of Sheffield University) for their love of popular cinema, their lively and enthusiastic discussions, and their taxing questions, which have helped me develop my research.

A very early draft of part of chapter two appeared in Gramma: Journal of Theory and Criticism 9 (2001). A slightly modified version of chapter eight, Everyman and No Man: White Masculinity in Contemporary Serial Killer Movies, appeared in Jump Cut: A Review of Contemporary Media 49 (2007), www.ejumpcut.org . I would like to thank both journals for granting permission to reprint versions of these articles.

These acknowledgments would not be complete without thanking friends and family who have encouraged me throughout this project. Warm thanks go to all my friends for their support, especially to Sara Hannam, Sean Homer, Aneta Karagiannidou, and Cleopatra Kondouli for their helpful comments and suggestions. I am also grateful to my sister, Clare, for keeping me grounded and for always being able to make me laugh. I am indebted more than I could ever say to my parents for their unflagging encouragement, ongoing emotional and financial support, and for instilling in me the confidence to realize my ambitions. I will also be eternally grateful to my parents-in-law for babysitting my son, Andreas, and helping make the writing of this book possible. Andreas has provided a constant source of laughter and inspiration, and has given me new insights into the workings of masculinity. Lastly, words cannot express my gratitude to my own white heterosexual male, Yiannis, for persuading me to embark on this project, for demonstrating unlimited reserves of patience when I shut myself in my study for hours at a time, and for always having faith in me. This book is dedicated to him, with love.

One of my pleasures in watching popular films has always been that of watching the extraordinary Hollywood male stars that grace the big screen, from my childhood crush on John Travolta in Grease (1978) to my recent academic interest in filmic masculinities. The title of this book obviously refers to some of the remarkable men that have dominated popular cinema in the last two decades, be he Arnold Schwarzeneggers humanized but invincible cyborg in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991), Keanu Reevess messianic console cowboy in The Matrix (1999), or Russell Crowes unreconstructed, primal warrior in Gladiator (2000).

However, the title also works at another level of meaning. Extra-Ordinary Men: White Heterosexual Masculinity in Contemporary Popular Cinema explores popular cinematic representations of white heterosexual masculinity at a time when its neutrality has been challenged by the politics of identity. The title refers to this process of rendering extra-ordinary what has historically been considered the most ordinaryand therefore the most invisibleidentity. In other words, Extra-Ordinary Men treats white heterosexual masculinity as a specifically gendered, raced, and sexual category rather than the dominant, structuring norm, and views its historical universal status as an ideological formation. It analyzes how the marking of the universal identity, primarily through the identity critiques that have dominated the political arena in the U.S. in the last four decades, has produced a host of anxieties, as well as desires, that are played out in popular films. One of my main contentions is that, while white heterosexual masculinity continues to be the dominant identity in terms of economic, social, political, and representational strength, its very ordinariness means that it is also haunted by the anxiety that it is a vacuous identity. Being ordinary might, after all, place one in the privileged position of embodying social norms, but ordinary is also synonymous with unexceptional, unremarkable, average, even boring. Anxiety concerning the potential sterility and emptiness of white heterosexual masculinity has, I argue, been compounded by the celebration of difference and the investment in minority identity that attends postmodernism and identity politics. This plays itself out in popular films in a myriad of ways. For instance, the ability of white heterosexual masculinity to stand as the , similar anxieties are evident in the images of hypernormative white heterosexual masculinity that abound in cyberfantasies, typified by the blank, uniform, depthless agents in