Action figures: Spectacular masculinity in the contemporary action film and the contemporary American novel

Since the early 1980s, the contemporary Hollywood action film has been the most successful international film genre. At the same time, the U.S. publishing industry has earned huge profits from mass-market fiction in the male-oriented “techno-thriller” genre. My dissertation attempts to explain these related cultural phenomena through analysis of U.S. and Hong Kong cinema from the 1960s to the present as well as popular U.S. novels of the 1980s and 1990s. Bridging popular literary and film genres, my study argues that action films and parallel literary texts offer spectacular resolution of real social and cultural conflicts regarding gender identity and social power. Action films, like their cinematic and literary precedents and successors, define masculinity through visual spectacle and generic codes of action and personal style. Responding to broad cultural trends such as corporate downsizing, the reduced utility of physical labor under capitalism since World War Two, and feminism's perceived encroachments upon areas of patriarchal privilege, action films offer male viewers the experience of mastery over a fantastic but generically limited cinematic environment. Paralleling the action film, the literary subgenre known as the “techno-thriller,” made popular by Tom Clancy and others, uses complicated plots and elaborate technical descriptions to deliver male mastery as a function of reading itself. Readers who feel disenfranchised by multinational capitalism in the 1990s can reaffirm their social position through prosocial narratives in which male heroes overcome threats to conservative paradigms of family and nation. To provide a global context and an understanding of non-western media, my project connects the U.S. action genre and its antecedents to the films of Hong Kong star Jackie Chan, who presents a model of male identity that celebrates physical autonomy while critiquing the constructs of hard, stoic masculinity that continue to hold sway in U.S. texts. Using feminist film criticism, cultural studies, and genre criticism as well as formal, historical, and industrial approaches to film studies, my project studies masculinity and male-oriented film and literary genres to explain how popular commercial texts respond to contemporary crises of gender identity and social position.