Reel Vulnerability

Sarah Hagelin

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780813569901
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Wonder women, G.I. Janes, and vampire slayers increasingly populate the American cultural landscape. What do these figures mean in the American cultural imagination? What can they tell us about the female body in action or in pain? Reel Vulnerability explores the way American popular culture thinks about vulnerability, arguing that our culture and our scholarship remain stubbornly invested in the myth of the helplessness of the female body.The book examines the shifting constructions of vulnerability in the wake of the cultural upheavals of World War II, the Cold War, and 9/11, placing defenseless male bodies onscreen alongside representations of the female body in the military, in the interrogation room, and on the margins. Sarah Hagelin challenges the ways film theory and cultural studies confuse vulnerability and femaleness. Such films as G.I. Jane and Saving Private Ryan, as well as such post-9/11 television shows as Battlestar Galactica and Deadwood, present vulnerable men who demand our sympathy, abused women who don’t want our pity, and images of the body in pain that do not portray weakness. Hagelin’s intent is to help scholarship catch up to the new iconographies emerging in theaters and in living rooms—images that offer viewers reactions to the suffering body beyond pity, identification with the bleeding body beyond masochism, and feminist images of the female body where we least expect to find them.

Part I

The Cinematic Construction of Vulnerability

1

The Furies, The Men, and the Method

Cinematic Languages of Vulnerability

The Furies (Anthony Mann) and The Men (Fred Zinnemann), both released in 1950, mark an important moment in the construction of gendered vulnerability onscreen. The complex negotiation of genre conventions and gender representation in each film helps to define the cinematic languages of vulnerability that post–Cold War popular culture will critique and dismantle. Both of these films show the process by which acting onscreen becomes “naturalized” and therefore invisible. Method acting seems to dissolve the barrier between the body of the actor and the art of performance, and the seeming authenticity of the resulting emotions onscreen enables sentimental vulnerability. Tracing the cinematic precedents for the transgressive women of contemporary film and television shows that an iconic female character like Uma Thurman’s Beatrix Kiddo does not emerge solely from Quentin Tarantino’s pastiched artistic imagination any more than HBO’s tolerance for violence and profanity on the small screen wholly created Robin Weigert’s Calamity Jane. Thus Kill Bill and Deadwood owe a complicated debt to iconic female figures in an earlier era of cinematic representation. Barbara Stanwyck’s performance as Vance Jeffords in The Furies is a fascinating early example of what I will define as resistant vulnerability, though Stanwyck is certainly not alone in creating iconic images of female power during this period in film history. We can see in both of these films an early trace of the counterintuitive images that resistant vulnerability will depend upon: not fragile but triumphant women and not victorious but penetrable men.

This process happens most viscerally when bodies are captured on film in motion, enacting a certain set of codes that audiences are trained to read as indicators of vulnerability. Three facets of The Furies and The Men help to establish these codes: a protagonist who transgresses gender norms, a logic of racial substitution where the white protagonist replaces the vulnerable nonwhite body, and the narratives of homecoming that are central to each film’s plot. Although each film resists strict genre identification, The Furies operates as a western and The Men as a dour, aggressively realist drama about injured veterans. Both genres have thematic similarities to the American captivity narrative tradition in which racial otherness is a threat and traditional gender roles must be reinscribed in order to purge the sexual, religious, and cultural threat posed by civilization’s confrontation with a “savage” other.1 These films share the captivity narrative’s interest in gender and race, but instead of the logic of extermination—the captivity narrative’s solution to the problem of racial difference2—these films propose a logic of substitution. In each case, a noble, family-oriented Latino character dies in order to midwife the white protagonist’s rebirth. Thus Vance is reborn as a female avenger in The Furies, and Marlon Brando’s Bud is reborn as a husband in The Men.

In order to understand the logic of racial substitution in these films, we must unpack the complex ways that gender operates in these genres. In a 1957 interview, Furies director Anthony Mann opined on women in westerns:

[Borden Chase and I] always throw a woman into the story, because without a woman, a western wouldn’t work. Even though she isn’t necessary, everyone appears to be convinced that you cannot do without a woman. But as soon as you get to fighting against the Indians, or to the chase scenes, or when the heroes discover the traitor, then the woman gets in your way. So then you have to come up with a clever trick to send her somewhere so she won’t be in your way, and you won’t need to film her. It’s sad to say, but women do not have much importance in westerns . . . On the other hand, maybe someone will make a western some day with a woman as the main character.3

Mann, who had begun his film career as a director of B-movie film noirs and cemented his reputation as a director of westerns in the 1950s, reveals here several levels of assumption about genre, about action, and about gendered bodies onscreen. He understands “fighting against the Indians” as a male activity undertaken in defense of absent women and suggests that the spectacle of the chase depends upon a form of physical prowess and control unavailable to the female body. Certainly the set pieces Mann describes—fighting, chasing, and discovering treachery—in which “the woman gets in your way” are at the heart of the western as a genre. These tense and pleasurable spectacles are also the most central to the genre’s construction of vulnerability onscreen. Mann’s insistence that the female character must be hustled offscreen in these moments belies her centrality to the forms of violence, flight, and betrayal in this genre. Westerns rely upon but remove women, figuring them as symbols of a more widespread vulnerability. But Mann’s point also illustrates the logics of erasure and replacement in U.S. culture’s depiction of femininity. Most strikingly, perhaps, Mann seems unaware that he himself directed a western with a female protagonist in 1950. Perhaps Mann does not consider The Furies a western; Robin Wood labels it “part western, part woman’s melodrama, part excursion into Freudian psychoanalytic material.”4 Wood is right about the film’s hybridity, but these categories are not as separate as he seems to assume. The western is always part melodrama and part investigation of the characters’ and the culture’s murky unconscious, more implicated in the melodrama’s emotional excess than Mann likes to acknowledge.5 Certainly, the returning-veteran films of the postwar years—The Best Years of Our Lives (1946), The Men (1950), White Christmas (1954), Sayonara (1957)—acknowledge their debt to the romance plots and contested domestic spaces of the woman’s film.

In 1950, Stanwyck was a four-time Academy Award nominee, and Brando was at the start of a promising career, having just completed a two-year run as Stanley Kowalski in the debut production of A Streetcar Named Desire on Broadway opposite Jessica Tandy. Brando’s emergence into film stardom in The Men, a position his performance as Stanley in the 1951 film version of Streetcar (Elia Kazan) would solidify, figures the iconic man of the new decade as a darker, more troubled figure than his prewar screen counterparts. Meanwhile, The Furies (1950), with its lurid violence and sadomasochistic desire, finds Stanwyck and Mann creating out of the archetype of the western heroine the blueprint for the female transgressive power that I will call “resistant vulnerability.” These two films, disparate as their ideological strategies appear, show that popular culture nearly always defines vulnerability by replacing one body with another—thus the child Debbie in The Searchers stands in for the bodies of her murdered mother and sister, and the dying female sniper in Full Metal Jacket replaces the bodies of the dead American soldiers. This logic of replacement works differently in the two films; The Furies conflates the oppression of its ethnic minorities with the subjugation of its female protagonist, while The Men replaces the idealized nonwhite body with the specific kind of white masculinity valorized by Method acting.

Like the domestic novel tradition and the “woman’s” films of the 1930s and 1940s,6 The Men and The Furies, despite their generic and tonal distinctions, construct vulnerability around distinct conceptions of “home.” While the characters of The Furies refer to their contested home as an “empire,” The Men provides a deeply ambivalent portrait of postwar suburbia and its inability to provide a home to the returning veteran. The Men’s bitter, alienated protagonist exemplifies an emerging style of masculinity marked by Brando’s identification with countercultural politics, fluid sexuality, and notions of acting as a craft. Brando, of course, was an early and prominent example of the Method acting taught at the Actors Studio. The debate in film studies about the politics of the Method falls into predictable lines, with some arguing that the Method poses a real challenge to gender norms and others suggesting that it “enforces the passive habits of viewing associated with realism and with bourgeois ideology in general.”7 Of course, this is a commonplace debate in cultural studies of popular film; however, Method acting, like continuity editing and linear narrative—which have also been accused of reinscribing patriarchal power dynamics—is a “realist” artistic strategy but also, as we will see in the next chapter, a vehicle for some fairly transgressive investigations of male vulnerability.

Method Acting and Film Realism

The Men shows how resistant male vulnerability is written into the DNA of Method-acting masculinity, particularly as practiced by Brando and inheritors of his style like Robert De Niro, Sean Penn, and Vincent D’Onofrio, whose performances in Vietnam films of the 1970s and 1980s I investigate in the next chapter. “The Method” is a system of actor preparation popularized in the United States by Lee Strasberg and associated with the Actors Studio, founded in 1947 by Elia Kazan, Cheryl Crawford, and Robert Lewis, where Strasberg taught in the 1950s.8 Based on Konstantin Stanislavski’s “System,” codified in his trilogy The Actor Prepares, Building a Character, and Creating a Role, the Method encourages actors to use the raw material of their own memories and experiences to create psychologically plausible characters on stage or screen.9 Through a series of exercises and work inventing a background for the character, Method actors attempt to disappear into their characters using a process Strasberg labels “affective memory.”10 While performances like Stanwyck’s get their power from clear, declarative readings of dialogue and the deployment of iconic imagery, the Method’s reliance on the hidden emotional work of actor preparation and its preference for deflection are exemplified by Brando’s buried face and mumbled dialogue in his first hospital scene in The Men.

Method acting has enjoyed a long run as the primary acting style taught in American theater departments, and its attention to realist detail and elevation of emotional authenticity have made its conventions the primary markers of realism in U.S. film.11 Arbiters of middlebrow taste like the Academy Awards and film critics from Pauline Kael to Roger Ebert have celebrated Method performances so consistently that the majority of film and television audiences seem to conflate “good” acting with the specific markers of the Method—a combination of nuance and raw emotionalism that American audiences are trained to understand as “real.” In addition to codifying a set of visual and vocal performance strategies, the rise of Method acting in postwar America also helped to solidify acting as a profession and a craft, as an artistic form in its own right. Braudy argues that “post-war ambiguity about the actor’s authority [is] rooted in the fragility of male self-definition,”12 and, from its earliest moments, the Method has been associated with male actors and codes of masculinity, despite the importance of female actors like Uta Hagen and Cheryl Crawford to the Method’s development and dissemination. As we will see in chapter 4’s investigation of queer vulnerability in 1990s American film, the Method becomes so effectively sutured to our sense of vulnerability onscreen that female actors most associated with the Method (such as two-time Academy Award winner Hilary Swank) win acclaim for “masculine” performances that depend on very traditional notions of gendered vulnerability. Meanwhile, the performances of female actors like Demi Moore, Linda Hamilton, and Sigourney Weaver, which do not attract the same critical praise as Swank’s, offer the 1980s’ and 1990s’ most radical revisions of female vulnerability. Barbara Stanwyck’s transgressions of gendered vulnerability could be rewarded in the 1930s and 1940s, but by the time the Method takes over the Academy in the 1950s, Stanwyck’s performance style is no longer an available model of “good” acting. Having been nominated for Best Actress in a leading role by the Academy four times between 1930 and 1949, after her nomination for Sorry, Wrong Number, Stanwyck is never nominated again.13

The Method style embodied by Brando was merely the clearest example of a long historical trend toward greater “naturalism” in actors’ performances, as James Naremore and others have shown.14 This movement toward naturalism over a codified set of gestures, working from the inside out instead of the outside in, is most famously associated with Konstantin Stanislavski and his Method. Naremore associates the older tradition (“pantomime” tradition) with François Delsarte, saying that in the last quarter of the nineteenth century the Delsarte System was “so deeply embedded in the culture that a good many actors could be described as Delsartean whether or not they ever studied him.”15 The “cultured” style of diction, pronunciation, and carriage taught by Delsarte’s system remained influential long after Stanislavski’s Method replaced it as the primary model of acting as a craft.16 Naremore challenges the dismissal of “stagey” acting and the celebration of naturalistic acting, pointing out that “[Stanislavski’s] own ‘theory’ had been little more than a distillation of commonplaces that governed Western theater since the seventeenth century, combined with strictures against pantomime and a series of training aids adapted from behaviorist psychology.”17 But to describe the semiotic, Delsartian model as “bad” and the psychological, Stanislavskian model as “good” is merely to place value judgments on a historically specific set of codes. If we watch these codes change, we can see how cinema constructs male vulnerability onscreen post–World War II and how it becomes sutured to faces like Brando’s and De Niro’s. But while the Method comes to be associated most intensely with male actors and a specific kind of rough-hewn masculinity, the Method performance was not the vehicle for signifying female strength onscreen.

When Mann speaks of shuffling the female character offscreen at moments of conflict or heightened emotion, he assumes a sentimental vulnerability in which men perform violence in defense of offscreen women. But his own 1950 film provides a bracing example of resistant vulnerability in Vance, who wields the weapons, drives the plot, and refuses to be driven offscreen. Analyzing both Brando’s and Stanwyck’s performances—Brando at the beginning of his film career and Stanwyck in the middle of hers—and investigating the visual and narrative structures of these underanalyzed films reveals the early construction of vulnerability onscreen at two levels: the narrative structures of these films trade in sentimental vulnerability, while their iconographies suggest something more complicated. At both levels—narrative and iconographic—these films rely on strategies of displacement that will become the language popular culture uses to talk about vulnerability. Both films structure their narratives and their emotional arcs around the search for home—its boundaries, its currency, and the possibility of ever returning to it. Whether that home is The Furies’s cattle ranch in the American Southwest or the domestic space and national family from which The Men’s injured veterans are exiled, the films work out the tension of banishment through the death of an idealized, sacrificial Latino character. In terms of the vulnerability juncture, contra Mann’s suggestion that “the woman gets in your way” when your characters “fight against the Indians,” nonwhite characters function as conduits and proxies for the relationship between violence and gendered vulnerability. This troubling dynamic is not unique to these films nor to this historical moment; U.S. film history has been and remains a repository of the stories the dominant culture tells itself about race and gender. These stories vary historically, but these films are narratives of displacement—from a family home and from the land in The Furies and, for the orphaned Bud, former football hero and reluctant husband, from both postwar society and from the alternative space of male bonds.

These films and their radically different treatments of the star body raise questions about what constructions of vulnerability owe to the Method. Though Naremore reminds us that “all forms of actorly behavior have formal, artistic purposes and ideological determinants,” he also acknowledges that association of naturalistic, Method performances with whiteness and masculinity: “Though it is true that movies have helped to foster a restrained, intimate style, it is wrong to assume that ‘good’ film acting always conforms to the low-level ostensiveness of ordinary conversation. As a general rule, Hollywood has required that supporting players, ethnic minorities, and women be more animated or broadly expressive than white male leads.”18 Debates about acting style are important to an investigation of vulnerability because they question audience access to the body and emotions of the performer and the extent to which we are invited in to (or denied access to) identification with the image onscreen. In contrast to Marianne Conroy, who sees Method acting in Cold War America as a precursor to postmodernism in its style-mixing and fracturing of highbrow and lowbrow tastes, I see the Method and the visual and vocal strategies it enshrines as both defensively “realist” and the central technique through which American popular culture will construct vulnerability onscreen in the secon...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Unmaking Vulnerability
• Part I. The Cinematic Construction of Vulnerability
• Part II. Resistant Vulnerability after the Cold War
• Part III. Vulnerability beyond the Body
• Notes
• Bibliography
• About the Author