excerpts from a work in progress
This book examines issues of gender and identity, with an emphasis on the representation of masculinity, within a historically wide range of Hollywood genre movies, ultimately countering the accepted wisdom within film studies that particular periods and films represent a crisis in the American male psyche. Through a series of close readings of selected genre movies and directors, I argue that to understand the history of American cinema as a series of masculine crises is a serious distortion of both Hollywood filmmaking and its genres, and that, in fact, genre movies constitute an ongoing dialogue with their audiences about gender definition.