Ghost Faces

David Greven

Description

Finalist for the 2017 Lambda Literary Award in the LGBT Nonfiction category presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation

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.
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Disrecognitions

1. Ghost Faces, Genre Bodies

2. The Murderous Origins of Bromance: Genre, Queer Killers, and Scream

3. “I Love You, Brom Bones”: Beta Male Comedies, Bromances, and American Culture

4. Apparitional Men: Masculinity and the Psychoanalytic Scene

5. Trick-or-Treating Alone: Rob Zombie’s Halloween

6. Torture/Porn: Hostel, Homophobia, and Gay Male Internet Pornography

Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Sujets

• Gay Studies
• Película fotográfica
• Popular culture
• Visual culture
• History of film
• Film

Informations

• Publié par: State University of New York Press
• Date de parution: 09 février 2016
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781438460086
• Langue: English

Extrait

Ghost Faces
Also in the series
William Rothman, editor, Cavell on Film
J. David Slocum, editor, Rebel Without a Cause
Joe McElhaney, The Death of Classical Cinema
Kirsten Moana Thompson, Apocalyptic Dread
Frances Gateward, editor, Seoul Searching
Michael Atkinson, editor, Exile Cinema
Bert Cardullo, Soundings on Cinema
Paul S. Moore, Now Playing
Robin L. Murray and Joseph K. Heumann, Ecology and Popular Film
William Rothman, editor, Three Documentary Filmmakers
Sean Griffin, editor, Hetero
Jean-Michel Frodon, editor, Cinema and the Shoah
Carolyn Jess-Cooke and Constantine Verevis, editors, Second Takes
Matthew Solomon, editor, Fantastic Voyages of the Cinematic Imagination
R. Barton Palmer and David Boyd, editors, Hitchcock at the Source
William Rothman, Hitchcock, Second Edition
Joanna Hearne, Native Recognition
Marc Raymond, Hollywood’s New Yorker
Steven Rybin and Will Scheibel, editors, Lonely Places, Dangerous Ground
Claire Perkins and Constantine Verevis, editors, B Is for Bad Cinema
Dominic Lennard, Bad Seeds and Holy Terrors
Rosie Thomas, Bombay before Bollywood
Sudhir Mahadevan, A Very Old Machine
Ghost Faces
Hollywood and Post-Millennial Masculinity
DAVID GREVEN
Published by State University of New York Press, Albany
© 2016 State University of New York
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission. No part of this book may be stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means including electronic, electrostatic, magnetic tape, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission in writing of the publisher.
For information, contact State University of New York Press, Albany, NY
www.sunypress.edu
Production, Eileen Nizer
Marketing, Fran Keneston
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Greven, David.
Ghost faces : Hollywood and post-millennial masculinity / David Greven.
pages cm – (SUNY series, horizons of cinema)
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4384-6007-9 (hardcover : alk. paper)
ISBN 978-1-4384-6008-6 (e-book)
1. Masculinity in motion pictures. 2. Homosexuality in motion pictures. 3. Motion pictures—United States—History and criticism. I. Title.
PN1995.9.M46G73 2015
791.43'65211—dc23 2015015566
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Disrecognitions
Chapter 1 Ghost Faces, Genre Bodies
Chapter 2 The Murderous Origins of Bromance: Genre, Queer Killers, and Scream
Chapter 3 “I Love You, Brom Bones”: Beta Male Comedies, Bromances, and American Culture
Chapter 4 Apparitional Men: Masculinity and the Psychoanalytic Scene
Chapter 5 Trick-or-Treating Alone: Rob Zombie’s Halloween
Chapter 6 Torture/Porn: Hostel , Homophobia, and Gay Male Internet Pornography
Coda
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Illustrations Figure I.1 A secondary mirror stage: Bateman as Reynolds stares at himself in the mirror . Figure I.2 Homoerotic doubling: The “changed-up” Bateman and Reynolds stare at themselves and each other in the mirror . Figure I.3 Carell’s character stares up at Gosling’s amply displayed body . Figure I.4 Gosling looms above Carell, his phallus signified by its absence . Figure I.5 Gosling remains standing, visually dominant and demanding to be admired . Figure 2.1 Edvard Munch, The Scream . Figure 2.2 Homoerotic menace: Stu traces a line with his finger across Randy’s ear . Figure 2.3 Ghostface both proclaims and obscures an opposition to heterosexual desire . Figure 2.4 Billy, the beautiful boy as destroyer . Figure 3.1 I Love You, Man begins with a proposal and ends with marriage between the heterosexual couple . Figure 3.2 Homosocial comfort and intimacy in I Love You, Man . Figure 4.1 Monty and the mirror stage . Figure 5.1 Trick-or-treating alone . Figure 5.2 Portrait of the artist as a child monster: Michael’s masks . Figure 6.1 Theatrical poster for Hostel (2005) . Figure 6.2 Theatrical poster for Hellbent (2005) . Figure 6.3 The three backpackers, hardly innocents and on the verge of a nightmare . Figure 6.4 Paxton, the Hispanic-American as the Ugly American . Figure 6.5 Josh and the Dutch Businessman are paired and doubled . Figure 6.6 “And what is your nature?”
Acknowledgments
Previously published versions of two of the chapters exist. I want to thank Taylor and Francis for giving me permission to reprint “I Love You, Brom Bones: Beta Male Comedies and American Culture,” which was published in Quarterly Review of Film and Video , Issue 30.3, May 2013, and Wayne State University Press for the permission to reprint “Fears of a Millennial Masculinity: Scream ’s Queer Killers,” Reading the Bromance: Homosocial Relationships in Film and Television , ed. Michael DeAngelis (Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press, 2014), 79–108. These articles have been revised and expanded for this book. This book has its conceptual origins in a paper that I delivered at the Society for Cinema and Media Studies annual conference of March 2011, “I Love You, Brom Bones”: Beta Male Comedies, Homophobia, and the History of American Masculinity.” I was invited to be on this panel by Amanda Lotz and Brenda Weber, and it included another panelist, Anna Froula. To be on a panel with such distinguished and insightful scholars was an honor, and to have the chance to learn from their provocative work a privilege. I also had the chance to work with Brenda Weber and contribute to her collection of essays, Reality Gendervision (Duke University Press, 2014), much to my delight and gratitude. I am also most grateful to Michael DeAngelis, a truly insightful critic who is also an exceptionally generous and warm mentor. I am honored to have been able to work with him and contribute an essay to Reading the Bromance . I extend my thanks to Timothy Shary for inviting me to contribute to Millennial Masculinity (Wayne State University Press, 2012) and to Jennifer Greiman and Paul Stasi for having done so with their reader on Deadwood, The Last Western (Continuum, 2012). These editors and fellow scholars have taught me an inestimable amount about good writing and the inspiring potentialities of collaboration. I want to thank my SUNY Press editor Beth Bouloukos immensely for her support of the project, and the SUNY team for their excellent work. I also thank Tony McLawhorn, my department’s Computer Support Manager, for his tireless and expert help with the images for this book. I have learned so much over the years from the great critic Tania Modleski, and I am grateful to have had the chance to learn from her work on bromances as well. I have many dear friends to thank, but a special note of gratitude to James Bogdanski, not only for getting me to give Man of Steel (Zack Snyder, 2013) another chance, and therefore benefit from the love I discovered for the film, but for his loyalty, kindness, and love of movies, television, and the popular culture gamut. As ever, I thank my family for their love and support, my friends for being the embodiment of these values, and, most of all, my partner Alexander Beecroft, whose love and support gives my life its sustaining joy.
Introduction

Disrecognitions
Ghost Faces argues that the representation of masculinity in mainstream films of the twenty-first century is both marked by an awareness of queer visibility and reflective of the irreducibly difficult problem that queerness poses to United States culture, however much progress has been made for LGBTQI rights in the past two decades. Even as the traditional cinematic model of straight, white masculinity buckles under the pressure of an ever-more-visible queer presence, mainstream films continue to maintain this model as the standard. What has resulted is a straight, white, male image reflective of queer potentialities and closed off from them. The divided nature of normative screen masculinity—striving to be current in its acknowledgment of queer desire, on the one hand, but maintaining its resistance to queerness in order to remain a coherent version of itself, on the other hand—has lent itself to suggestive levels of scrutiny with some disturbing implications. As I outline in chapter 1 , my contention is that this period’s filmmaking is sadomasochistic in its treatment of male characters. Through a queer reframing of Laura Mulvey’s and Gilles Deleuze’s paradigms, among others, I argue that this sadomasochism and its relationship to queerness find expression through a voyeuristic fascination with male bodies and a fetishistic one with the male face. A preoccupation with Deleuzian “faciality” intersects with Mulvey’s theories of gendered cinematic representation when applied to the male forms offered for spectatorial consumption. The focus of this book is on genre film, comedy and horror especially, because of genre’s close ties to the representation of masculinity, a historical trend that has become only more apparent in contemporary moviemaking, devoted in the main to franchise films, sequels, and action epics that all proceed from the basis of genre classification.
My close readings of films begin with Wes Craven’s Scream (1996), which I establish as a crucial text both for the horror genre that it innovated and for its early exploration of the kind of ambiguous male-bonding that would come to