Film Quarterly - John P. McCarthy

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Film. Quarterly. Volume 48. Number 4. Summer 1995. Spectacular Bodies. Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema. By Yvonne Tasker. New York: Routledge  ...
Film Quarterly Volume 48 Number 4 Summer 1995

Spectacular Bodies Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema By Yvonne Tasker. New York: Routledge, 1993. $55.00 cloth; $16.95 paper.

The image on the cover of Spectacular Bodies—Jean-Claude van Damme stripped to the waist— suggests that watching handsome bodies, and other pleasures of action cinema, will be explored in depth. But while the book's primary theme is how American action films hinge on the hero or heroine's body, many pleasures go unmentioned or are merely gestured at. This is ironic, since Yvonne Tasker is determined to celebrate the pleasures of the broadly defined genre and defend it against critical disdain and neglect. Still, the book succeeds; everyone who reads it will think twice aboul dismissing popular films. Tasker charges that despite (and because of) its popularity with audiences, action cinema is dismissed by critics and theorists as "both simple and obvious." (166) Much of their hostility and neglect is purely elitist. Some stems from a belief that the form is nol relevant; for instance, Tasker thinks feminist criticism slights "popular texts and pleasures" (5) by assuming they can be quickly analyzed and moved beyond. But detractors are also often looking for other sources of pleasure. Tasker, however, in her "desire to think about, rather, than dis-

miss, or pathologise, the pleasures of the popular cinema," (166) nicely skewers a bias against spectacle or "visual pleasure" (6) in favor of dialogue and narrative development by declaring that "the ci nema as a sensuous experience is too often neglected." (6) Yet surely this dichotomy is overcome by the best and most complex films. Tasker overlooks something more pertinent: the pleasures of action cinema are sometimes simple and obvious, which is nol to say it is easy to create the necessary effects. Although Tasker uses the terms pejoratively, obviousness and simplicity are never dc facto negatives. A more common charge against popular movies is that they lack depth. And unfortunately for Tasker, her attempts to demonstrate ambiguity, complexity, and polysemy—even if successful—don't necessarily imply depth. A film can have many levels of meaning, can be read in a variety of ways, and slill not be profound. The assumption that these films have "something to say" (5) and are in need of "accounts" rather than "explanations" is a necessary starling point. The onus is on Tasker to demonstrate the genre's significance, and .she has mixed success. More often than not, she merely highlights the ambiguity and complexily of what are variously termed action movies, popular movies, muscle movies, and muscular action movies. There are exceptions. Chapter 1, "Women Warriors," looks at the rise of the action heroine in mainslream movies, and provides a good overview of the predominant ways in which female characters function in action movies. The chapter "Black Buddies and While Heroes" is solid on questions of race, and "Tough Guys and Wise-Guys" offers a gently probing discussion of bodybuilding and the male muscle hero as spectacle, in contrast to heroes and heroines with verbal allributes. Tasker does persuade lhal two recent movies, Rambo and Thelma & Louise, don't give dominant ideologies a blank check. The latter is read as Utopian, as a comic action film and not a feminist manifesto. As for Rambo, Tasker shows that its politics are not overdetermined. A film assumed by the cine-literate to be Neanderthal is effectively used to deflate academic criticism that "seeks to politically pin down popular cinema." (5) By virtue of its open-endedness, one of the book's strongest genera! claims and strategies is that while action films and (heir central male characters are often analyzed as political, their meaning is "far from stable or unambiguous"; (71) it's a mistake to automatically read the muscular hero as "a simplistic embodiment of a reactionary masculine identity." (109) Ts it enough to establish a reasonable doubt about whether Rambo espouses a conservative, Reaganite ideology? If Tasker is right about the "multiplicity and instability of meaning," (93) why shouldn't the film be

read thai way? Granted, her main points arc that one shouldn't dismiss a film based on a superficial reading, and that one reading doesn't exhaust the political implications of a film. But she offers no way to rank readings or pleasures. Hesitancy to give a definitive reading is fine; the assumption that all readings arc of equal value as long as they start from some accurate assumptions— e.g., spectacle should not be downgraded in favor of narrative development—is just plain wrong. Assessing the central theme of the body can start wilh the question, What do Rambo and Thelma & Louise have in common? Like Raging Bull, Basic Instinct, and a host of other movies discussed, they hear out Tasker's claim that the defining characteristic of American action cinema is the hero/heroine's body as the primary site of spectacular visual display. More specifically, the damaged body of the hero is "the place of last resort. . . the sole narrative space that is safe" even "when constantly under attack." (!51)The recent hit Speed comes to mind. The female character drives the bus, assuming the masculine role, and then has dynamite strapped to her body. In the crunch, however, the punished and punishing male body is savior, and so Speed bears out another of Tasker's major claims. Namely, there is a double action with regard to gender identity—"popular cinema affirms gendered identities" while undermining their stability with conflicting identifications and desires. (5) In the cover shot, Jean-Claude van Damme is both menacing and alluring. Yet the traditional, masculine, warrior role is not canceled by his status as sex object; the two possible sources of pleasure feed off one another. The points made about the role of the body and muscular cinema are well taken but don't go far enough. Another example: the term "musculinity" is coined in the introduction to describe the phenomenon whereby "physical definition of masculinity in terms of a developed musculature" is not simply male. (3) The payoff comes late in the book. In contemporary action cinema, qualities typically associated with masculinity mark screen women—"signifiers of strength are not limited to male characters." (149) Tasker's preferred examples of films in which gender roles have been destabilized thus are Aliens, Thelma & Louise, and Basic Instinct. But her argument that men are not often sexual spectacles while women characters drive more and more narratives is weakened by being made subservient to her thesis about the body: 'This serves to remind us that the meaning of the body on the screen is not secure, but shifting, inscribed with meaning in different ways at different points." (165) How is this different than the meaning of anything else on the screen? Everything must get caught in this net of ambiguity. Tasker's analyses of the relationship between representation of the body and gender identity are di ffuse and

often lack context. Conclusions in Spectacular Bodies strike this reader as obvious or transparently true, which would be fine if Taskcr took the next step of describing how these conclusions might translate into pleasurable experience for the viewer. The response that exactly how these pleasures are registered cannot or need not be described implies they are simple and obvious. Identifying or uncovering a potential source of pleasure is partly an evaluative act. And while a theorist may not want to generalize from what excites her, she should at least suggest why we may find certain spectacles captivating. Tasker's defensive posture doesn't allow that many of the pleasures of action cinema are basic, unambiguous, and culturally overdctermined. They might include well-orchestrated violence, sex, revenge, good versus evil, triumph of the underdog, and suspense. For all her musings against elitist critics, Tasker shares their assumption that what is simple and obvious is worthless. Spectacular Bodies is not quite academic and not quite popularizing, and it will be read by students of popular culture, film theorists, and action fans. Although well versed in critical theory, Tasker doesn't have a methodological (or theoretical) tact which might have given some structure and sense of progression (in terms of, say, genre or chronology) to a book littered with interesting insights, some alternative readings, and strained analogies. Her way of denying that action films are uniform and univalcnt, "dumb movies for dumb people," turns out to be overkill. Simply by writing Spectacular Bodies, Tasker proves that action films cannot be taken at face value. But the face is part of the human body, and sometimes we quickly read faces and arc deeply moved. J O H N P. MCCARTHY

• John P. McCarthy writes on film and television from New York City.