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Ghost Faces: Hollywood and Post-Millennial Masculinity
Ghost Faces explores the insidious nature of homophobia even in contemporary Hollywood films that promote their own homo-tolerance and appear to destabilize hegemonic masculinity. Reframing Laura Mulvey s and Gilles Deleuze s paradigms and offering close readings grounded in psychoanalysis and queer theory, David Greven examines several key films and genre trends from the late 1990s forward. Movies considered range from the slasher film Scream to bromances and beta male comedies such as I Love You, Man to dramas such as Donnie Darko and 25th Hour to Rob Zombie s remake of the horror film Halloween . Greven also traces the disturbing connections between torture porn found in such films as Hostel and gay male Internet pornography.
314 pages, Hardcover
Published March 1, 2016
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Displaying 1 of 1 review
November 16, 2018
Greven's look at masculinity in Hollywood films from 2000s is an important study for anyone interested in representations of masculinity and homosexuality. It is a well informed study that looks at few films in particular, Scream, I Love You, Man, Halloween, and Hostel, but Greven's nuanced approach situates these films not only in a larger film context but also a larger cultural contest. It has to be the most exciting book I have read about film in years.
"One of my chief arguments in this book is that the re-entrenchment of masculinist power in Hollywood films has taken the form of and has its foundation in a desire to flay open males, specifically straight white males on both a somatic and psychic levels." 20
"As Williams theorized, melodrama, horror, and pornography all have the central overlap of being genres that have a physical effect on the spectator's body." 21
"What remains continuous is the emphasis on male sexuality as a battleground for the fate of the nation and a testing ground for its current state of health." 35
"Post-millenial films, in their rejection of beauty and embrace of savagery, ugliness, and pessimism, make the masochistic trends in the films of the 1990s the dominant mode of representation-make, in other words, the death drive central." 46
"Like Athena at the climax of the Aeschylus's tragic trilogy The Oresteia, she appears in order to speak out on behalf of patriarchy and to establish its laws as binding. Siding with the male rather than the female, Athena is the feminine face of the father's law, perhaps appropriate for a goddess who bursts forth fully armed not from her mother's womb but her father Zeus's head." 92-93
"Perhaps most interesting of all, this emerging interest in the denuding of men socially and psychically-which stems, perhaps, from what Mark Setlzer has described as the "wound culture" of contemporary America, fixated on flaying open both bodies and psyches-has produced, simultaneously, the proliferation of seemingly distinct genres, comedy and horror." 115
"Ghost Face masculinity is a Gothicizied and psychoanalytically inflected form of male subjectivity. Psychoanalysis, which some might argue is a Gothic form itself (with its bored secrets, morbid preoccupations, penchant for sexual violence, and so forth) is well-suited to exploring this gendered uncanny..." 138
"As Deborah Linderman observes, many have noted the "auspicious connection between psychoanalysis and the cinema, their joint emergence around the turn of the century, their commensurate involvement in phantasmic production, their mutual address to the unconscious, etc.," 139
"One of my chief arguments in this book is that the re-entrenchment of masculinist power in Hollywood films has taken the form of and has its foundation in a desire to flay open males, specifically straight white males on both a somatic and psychic levels." 20
"As Williams theorized, melodrama, horror, and pornography all have the central overlap of being genres that have a physical effect on the spectator's body." 21
"What remains continuous is the emphasis on male sexuality as a battleground for the fate of the nation and a testing ground for its current state of health." 35
"Post-millenial films, in their rejection of beauty and embrace of savagery, ugliness, and pessimism, make the masochistic trends in the films of the 1990s the dominant mode of representation-make, in other words, the death drive central." 46
"Like Athena at the climax of the Aeschylus's tragic trilogy The Oresteia, she appears in order to speak out on behalf of patriarchy and to establish its laws as binding. Siding with the male rather than the female, Athena is the feminine face of the father's law, perhaps appropriate for a goddess who bursts forth fully armed not from her mother's womb but her father Zeus's head." 92-93
"Perhaps most interesting of all, this emerging interest in the denuding of men socially and psychically-which stems, perhaps, from what Mark Setlzer has described as the "wound culture" of contemporary America, fixated on flaying open both bodies and psyches-has produced, simultaneously, the proliferation of seemingly distinct genres, comedy and horror." 115
"Ghost Face masculinity is a Gothicizied and psychoanalytically inflected form of male subjectivity. Psychoanalysis, which some might argue is a Gothic form itself (with its bored secrets, morbid preoccupations, penchant for sexual violence, and so forth) is well-suited to exploring this gendered uncanny..." 138
"As Deborah Linderman observes, many have noted the "auspicious connection between psychoanalysis and the cinema, their joint emergence around the turn of the century, their commensurate involvement in phantasmic production, their mutual address to the unconscious, etc.," 139
Displaying 1 of 1 review