Introduction to Film Studies

The 1980s action hero is superficially a sign of masculine power, but on closer examination an anxiety about masculine identity is revealed and addressed in many films of the 1990s. The arrogance and certainty of films in the boom periods of the ‘Yuppie’ Reagan years was replaced by an uncertainty in the late 1980s and early 1990s as a result of economic depression, a downturn in the economy and a developing awareness that capitalism was not infallible. Films such as Risky Business (1983) and Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986) are full of confident, masculine swagger while Wall Street (1987) reflects a much darker view of masculinity, capitalism and corporate greed.

In terms of stars and gender the star is an amplified sign of popularity. The star is larger than life in his physical abilities and looks. The usually white star/hero goes into a dangerous situation, and civilises and makes it safe. Again however, like gender, stardom is not fixed but unstable and shifting. Changes in the qualities of the male hero are evident from the 1980s to the 1990s; the male body in the 1980s was a spectacle of muscle, beauty, toughness and bravery, a body which could carry out extreme physical feats. In comparison the body of the early 1990s man is less a spectacle of male machismo associated with violence, but rather gentler, more questioning, allowed to show self-doubt, and existing in a world where love and family are important: films such as Robin Hood (1991), Regarding Henry (1991) and Boyz N the Hood (1991) try to work out these issues.

She argues that gender is acted, a pretence, a form of dressing up or putting on a show, and that heterosexuality is also a masquerade, a charade, in which there are often homoerotic