Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 12, No.

2, 2003

Male Spectatorship and the Hollywood Love Story

KENNETH MACKINNON

ABSTRACT At the heart of ‘classic’ Hollywood movies is the love story. Love is important as a
standard element even in such ‘male’ genres as the war film. Yet, love is seldom mentioned by film studies
theorists. The most influential accounts of male–female relations consider the male both on screen and in
the audience as motivated by the desire to dominate the on-screen female. He is the subject, she the object,
in this sort of transaction. Love is explained as merely a more effective form of subjugation of the woman
in the story. The writings of Sigmund Freud and Roland Barthes have had considerable influence on film
studies. Yet, though both of them have said much about the phenomenon of love, there has been a
surprising lack of interest from film studies in that area of their thought. Barthes emphasises that love
‘feminises’ the male, reducing his autonomy, bringing him closer to the loved female. His line of thought
suggests the unlikelihood of the idea that the sole desire of the Hollywood hero, once he has fallen in love,
is to dominate the heroine, even if a good case could be made for this in the earlier sequences of movies.
The hero may appear to continue to be tough and unfeeling. Yet, ‘appear’ is the operative term. This may
be a pose, designed to protect him from dread of feminisation. Film studies has largely hived off romance
into what is treated as the female territory of melodrama. While Hollywood did make ‘women’s films’,
film studies understands ‘melodrama’ quite differently from the industry. ‘Melodrama’ is treated by the
former as if it were a ‘female’ genre, but many so-called melodramas were expected in their time to appeal
to male as well as female viewers. It is even possible, thus, that both the male spectator and his on-screen
Hollywood surrogate were made aware by the movies of their emotional insecurities and learned to
celebrate, rather than to suppress, them.

To begin with Tina Turner’s plaintive question, ‘What’s love got to do with it?’—the
answer would be ‘a great deal’ if ‘it’ should be referred to the entertainment provided
by Hollywood in its classic period. Heterosexual romance was not just the staple of the
musical and of the ‘woman’s film’ of the 1940s, it was an almost indispensable feature
of every genre. Entire epics—Gone With the Wind immediately comes to mind—were built
around it.
If the same question is asked of film studies, though, even when it concentrates on
Hollywood and what we can learn of male–female relations from experience of its
ISSN 0958-9236 print/ISSN 1465-3869 online/03/020125-12  2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/0958923032000088328
126 Kenneth MacKinnon

entertainments, the answer would be ‘very little’. Scarcely any time is spent in discussion
of spectatorship on the fact that what the spectator is watching is often a love story. The
spectator constructed by the text is taken to be male—regardless of the ‘actual’ gender
of the viewer. He is taken to look through the eyes of the male hero on screen at the
on-screen female, so that the viewer in the auditorium can fantasise the pleasure of
dominating and possessing her, and thus enjoy the visual pleasure of ‘masculine’
conquest.
The female object not only confirms his triumph over her, his mastery, but she wards
off the constant fear of ‘castration’—the term used by psychoanalysis in connection with
men’s fear of ‘feminisation’ through loss of control or mastery—by being the object of
voyeurism or of fetishisation. She becomes the former when she is investigated coldly by
a male who feels emotional distance from her (as in private-eye films of the film noir
genre). She becomes the latter when she is put on a pedestal, ‘overvalued’ particularly
for her spell-binding physical attributes (to gaze at which the film includes luminous
close-ups of the woman star). Whatever the route, the result is the same. She is
objectified. And the female object confirms that the male is the proper and sole subject.

The Male Spectator: from ‘Apparatic’ to Social

The account of spectatorship summed up in the previous paragraph is chiefly created by
a highly influential article, Laura Mulvey’s ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’,
published in Screen in 1975. There has been significant influence from ‘Visual Pleasure’
(Mulvey, 1989, pp. 16–26) on women’s as well as film studies. One aspect of that
influence has been a reading back from what are explained as the male pleasures
achieved by spectatorship to social conceptions of masculinity.
Yet, Mulvey’s original intention seems to have been to offer an account of ‘the
cinematic apparatus’, one that would include attention to the sort of spectatorship that
the use of the camera, for example, enabled. The spectator, in her account, is not
thought of as an actual person so much as a viewing position created by the film text.
In that sense, the spectator is ‘ideal’, not actual, and could be termed ‘apparatic’.
Yet, this important distinction whereby the spectator’s ‘maleness’ is not that of an
actual spectator of either social gender soon gets muddied. What may originally have
been a ‘masculine’ look from ‘apparatic’ spectator, via identification point (screen hero),
at object of desire (screen heroine), seems to evolve into an ‘actual’ male look. While this
mutation is difficult to trace, and while the thinking referred to goes well beyond
Mulvey’s own, encouragement to it is given particularly by her ‘Afterthoughts’ paper of
1981 (Mulvey, 1989, pp. 29–44).
This paper, entitled ‘Afterthoughts on “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema”
inspired by King Vidor’s Duel in the Sun (1946)’, is a response to those who were surprised
that the ‘Visual Pleasure’ essay seems to make no mention of the female spectator, using
only the masculine pronoun. This female spectator is described in ‘Afterthoughts’ as
oscillating ‘between the deep blue sea of passive femininity and the devil of regressive
masculinity’ (p. 30). It is just about possible to see that female spectator as ‘apparatic’.
Yet, she must also at some obvious level be an actual spectator. ‘Afterthoughts’ employs
Freudian accounts of femininity and pre-oedipal infant ‘activity’ to try to depict what
may be the ‘actual’ experience of the socially female spectator in the cinema.
There is clearly a (probably unintended) result from this. Whatever the original
intention of ‘Visual Pleasure’, its spectator from the moment of the ‘Afterthoughts’ paper
becomes, by implication, not just masculine but male and is to an appreciable extent
 Male Spectatorship and the Hollywood Love Story 127
actualised as a socially male spectator. What other sort of spectator could an ‘actual’
female spectator be separated from and contrasted with?
In her account of the female spectator’s experience, Mulvey allows for the distinct
possibility that she may be temporarily ‘masculinised’: she talks, for example, of ‘… the
emotions of those women accepting “masculinisation” while watching action movies with
a male hero …’ (Mulvey, 1989, p. 30). What is surprisingly absent from this account of
the female spectator’s possible masculinisation is another theoretical possibility—that the
male spectator might in some circumstances be capable of feminisation. It is this
possibility that is a particular concern of the present contribution.
A principal assumption of ‘Visual Pleasure’ would seem to be (it is not stated) that
there is such an easy fit between patriarchy and masculinity that the ‘apparatic’ male
spectator might as well be the actual male spectator. Nevertheless, masculinity must
surely be social, and thus must shift as the social itself shifts. Yet, it appears to be
conceptualised in the essay as fixed for all time as active, phallic, sadistic. (The telling
absence from ‘Visual Pleasure’ of consideration of the pleasure of masochism to
complement consideration of sadism has been exploited by several critics, the most
far-reaching of these being Kaja Silverman) (Silverman, 1980).
One obvious objection to the emphasis on masculinity as fixed is that not all male
subjects have equal access to power in social terms. Black men are more easily sexualised
‘spectacle’ (objects of the gaze) than white men in Western society, men deemed
homosexual are less socially privileged than men deemed heterosexual, working-class
men less than middle-class men, and so on (MacKinnon, 1997, pp. 56–62). In this sense,
the maleness of the ‘apparatic’ spectator obviously exceeds the maleness of actual men.
There has been too little influence from this awareness, however, to rein in the
excesses of what has been read about the social male from knowledge of the male gaze
so-called. Indeed, the reading has surprisingly often been outwards from the theorised
male spectator to the social world. The social has been read in terms of the theoretical.
Surely what can be determined about social conceptions of masculinity, or more usefully
of masculinities, must at least be allowed to impinge on theory. This is especially so if,
as is suggested above, the ‘apparatic’ spectator has over time become the actual male
viewer in the cinema and beyond.
There are other assumptions traceable in this foundational account. One of these is
that there is no leaking of femininity into masculinity, no common ground between social
female and social male in terms of their fantasy. Why else would the female spectator
have to be thought to be wearing ‘transvestite clothes’ when she allows herself to be
masculinised even in fantasy? (Mulvey, 1989, p. 37). Yet, Freud, on whom much of the
thinking of ‘Visual Pleasure’ is based, felt uncertainty about the relation of masculinity
and femininity to male and female respectively. ‘For distinguishing between male and
female in mental life’, he said, ‘we make use of what is obviously an inadequate empirical
and conventional equation: we call everything that is strong and active male, and
everything that is weak and passive female’ (Freud, 1964, p. 188).

Developments since Laura Mulvey’s Key Essays

The ideas in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’ have generated much new work,
as well as some dissent, within and beyond film studies. Regrettably, perhaps, the
promise of such titles as The Female Gaze: Women As Viewers of Popular Culture (Gamman &
Marshment (Eds), 1988) has not been fully actualised. Here, the ‘apparatic’ spectator has
been largely left out of consideration altogether; instead, contributors have felt free to
128 Kenneth MacKinnon

discuss actual women’s actual viewing without reference to Mulvey’s arguments about
the possibility of temporary masculinisation.
There have been far more productive lines of interrogation. Much of Queer Theory,
with its refusal to accept commonsense binaries (male/female and masculine/feminine
are radically questioned), must implicitly dissent from key ideas in Mulvey. An example
of more explicit dissent is Jackie Stacey’s celebrated Screen article of 1987, ‘Desperately
Seeking Difference’. This opens up multiple possibilities for queering of the heterosexual
model of visual pleasure. ‘The rigid distinction,’ Stacey observes, for instance, ‘between
either desire or identification, so characteristic of psychoanalytic film theory, fails to
address the construction of desires which involve a specific interplay of both processes’
(Stacey, 1987, p. 61).
Then, too, there has been important work during the last two decades on male
objectification. That both cites evidence from film, television, advertising and pin-ups
and also attempts to theorise the look at, instead of just from, the male (Neale, 1983;
Screen (Eds), 1992; Cohan & Hark (Eds), 1993; Kirkham & Thumim (Eds), 1993, 1995;
MacKinnon, 1997, 1999). Kaja Silverman’s consideration, already touched on, of the
masochism essential to spectatorship and thus of the closeness of male to female
experience in fantasy is also highly important. (Silverman 1980, 1988, 1992).
What unites these disparate approaches may be the decision to turn away from the
questioning of the detail of the most popularised psychoanalytic position in favour of new
attention to alternative positions—some of which may go so far as to contradict key
elements in ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’.
There has been no sustained questioning, as far as I am aware, of the applicability of
‘objectification’ as the most relevant way of understanding the meaning of erotic gazing
in narrative cinema. There has been disagreement with the confinement of the subject
position exclusively to the male, with that of the object position exclusively to the female.
What, though, if erotic looking in, say, classic Hollywood involves psychic positions that
cannot be unequivocally identified with one gender or the other, in the way that they
have been in Mulvey’s work and in theorisations of spectatorship which derive from that
work?

Visual Pleasure: from the Sexual/Objectificatory to the Erotic/(More)

Reciprocal
This article’s principal contribution to spectatorship debate is the outlining of the
possibility that the detailed picture of visual pleasure painted by Laura Mulvey relates
largely or only to the earlier parts of the narratives of dominant cinema. The mastery
aimed at by her male spectator relates to the sexual pleasures of voyeurism and
fetishisation (see above). Regularly, though, distanced sexual desire gives way within the
Hollywood narrative to a love story, and accordingly the operations of the look alter. In
the second part of dominant narrative, where often, depending on the genre, the love
story proper takes over, dominance becomes less evident as the chief aim of the hero.
Thus, submission before him is also diminished in importance. The objectifying look
changes into looks that seem more reciprocal.
When ‘Visual Pleasure’ does touch on the love story area of dominant movies, love is
seen purely in terms of the female protagonist’s possession by both the male within the
movie and, by proxy, the male in the audience. In virtually her only consideration of this
element, Mulvey says:
 Male Spectatorship and the Hollywood Love Story 129
[A]s the narrative progresses she falls in love with the main male protagonist
and becomes his property, losing her outward glamorous characteristics, her
generalised sexuality, her show-girl connotations; her eroticism is subjected to
the male star alone. By means of identification with him, through participation
in his power, the spectator can indirectly possess her too. (Mulvey, 1989, p. 21)
For a writer so concerned to base her ‘Visual Pleasure’ arguments on Sigmund Freud
and Jacques Lacan, this reduction of heterosexual love to an intensification of male
possession seems a notion that is under-explored, anti-psychoanalytic and surprising.
Freud believed that ‘normal’ love, which he differentiates principally from the
transference love regularly encountered in therapy, is vitally linked with sexuality and yet
may be differentiated from it:
[A]ll the emotional relations of sympathy, friendship, trust, and the like, which
can be turned to good account in our lives, are genetically linked with sexuality
and have developed from purely sexual desires through a softening of their
sexual aim, however pure and unsensual they may appear to our conscious
self-perception. (Freud, 1958, p. 105)
It seems apparent, from a glance across the genres of classic Hollywood, that an account
of male–female, subject–object operations has, to be comprehensive, to give due
consideration to this ‘softening of [the] sexual aim.’ The sexual aim is normally found
and stands exposed in the pre-love portions of the dominant narrative. What, then, of
the alleged softening which love brings in its wake?
Freud’s version of ‘normal’ love takes it that only the matter of degree differentiates
it from transference love. The relationship to parental figures is according to Freud
relived in love, just as it also must be relived in transference. Since transference love is
characterised by ‘instinctual ambivalence’ (Laplanche & Pontalis, 1988, p. 458), love can
hardly be free of turbulence. Love in ordinary life was thought by Freud to be ‘more
similar to abnormal than to normal mental phenomena’ (Freud, 1958, p. 168).
The state of love, in its abnormality and even possible violence, may retain in filmic
treatments of it some of the struggle for mastery that characterises the earlier stages of
the narrative, but it must also be ‘softer’. It must indeed soften the male, however
‘phallic’ he tries to be earlier in the narrative. Roland Barthes allows no doubt on the
matter of the change in men under the spell of love: ‘[T]his man [the male lover] who
waits and who suffers from his waiting is miraculously feminised. A man is not feminised
because he is inverted but because he is in love’ (Barthes, 1978, p. 14). Barthes goes so
far as to state that the only way that a lover can love is ‘precisely as he feminises himself’
(Barthes, 1978, p. 126).
This emphasis on love’s feminising influence on the male seems to be recognised as
credible within film studies debates on the genre of melodrama. Masculinity in that genre
is sometimes identified as ‘impaired’—when it might be more useful to think of that
version of masculinity as simply different from the phallic version, to contain an
admixture of what is culturally believed to be femininity. Yet, it is not simply in
melodrama or the woman’s film that men as well as women fall in love. The love story
is part of even the most traditionally masculine of Hollywood genres—the western, the
male action genre, to name but two. Admittedly, it plays a smaller part there, a part
which can even be explained as providing heterosexual cover for what might otherwise
be the homoeroticism of the buddy movie. Nevertheless, the man in love is feminised,
and within the terms of the movie’s depiction of masculinity can no longer be quite the
130 Kenneth MacKinnon

rampagingly individualistic pleasure-seeker of that part of the story before he gives in to

love. (‘Giving in’, with its connotations of struggle and surrender, is a phrase that seems
entirely justifiable.)
At this point in the argument, it should be conceded—readily—that love does not of
course do away with the differentials of gender. The male may be feminised by love, but
he is still depicted as physically superior to (or ‘protective of’) the woman who has
inspired his love. It is possibly only in film noir that this woman seems for a significant time
in the narrative to be ‘unmanning’ the hero, in that his love for her makes him lower
his defences and exposes him to potentially mortal danger. Yet, the noir heroine regularly
simulates her part in the love affair, precisely to gain power over the feminised male. Film
noir normally ends with a restoration of the gendered status quo. Thus, the woman is
rejected for the scheming temptress that she is, rather than the woman in love that she
has impersonated. Mulvey takes what seems to be the highly particular outcome of the
love affair in this genre as if it exposed the workings of male–female love conflict in all
the other genres. What is an exception is treated as if it were the rule, rather than as if
it proved it.
It is evident often in the final stages of the generic-movie love story that the
feminisation of the male is not achieved through, for example, the masculinisation, the
empowerment, of the female. The cliché, ‘This thing is bigger than both of us,’ may be
far more revealing than is usually realised. Both male and female are overpowered, not
so much by each other as by something beyond them, the transcendent power of love
(which might remind the more psychoanalytically minded of the transcendent power of
the phallus) (see, for example, Gallop, 1982, p. 14). Analogously, love seems to teach the
man, whatever his fantasies of control might once have suggested, a consciousness of no
longer being total, at least in and by himself.
The relation between the hero’s machismo and his comparative softening under the
influence of love becomes part of the conflict that falling in love sets up for the male.
Again and again, movies that centre on the man in love depict him as not so much being
the unfeeling, self-absorbed macho man of earlier in the narrative as reviving the memory.
His performance of gender, then—to use the idea of gender performativity so crucial to
Queer Theory—is meant to protect him against charges of weakness that the male might
fear will follow from too open an admission of vulnerability.

The Male Lover’s use of Traditional Masculinity and the ‘Male Gaze’: some
examples
This is particularly well illustrated in two fifties movies starring Frank Sinatra. In both,
he uses flip, ironic one-liners and elements of his hard-drinking, womanising night-club
persona to suggest his being proof against the pain that love, especially unrequited love,
can inflict upon him.
In George Sidney’s Pal Joey (1957), the hero is torn between desire for the sophisticated
older woman played by Rita Hayworth and the less experienced, more vulnerable
character played by Kim Novak. Near the end of the movie, Hayworth has insisted that
he demand of Novak that she perform a striptease number in his club. Despite his
reluctance, he makes the demand. Though hurt and angered by it, Novak agrees to
perform the strip. During the rehearsal, they both present a cool façade of defiance. She
shows no bashfulness but enters gutsily into the performance. Sinatra watches the
performance with such a notably unblinking, hard stare that it epitomises what Mulvey
has claimed about the male gaze. Yet, he suddenly stops the rehearsal and sends Novak
 Male Spectatorship and the Hollywood Love Story 131
back to her dressing room. This switch is generically likely, although minor suspense is
created by his deployment of such a notably ‘male’ look at the erotic object also
temporarily impersonated by Novak.
The point of the inclusion of the stare may be that Hollywood heroes cling to the
fantasised macho image most when that image is on the point of losing credibility. It is
as if the character is at his most aware of the gulf between himself and fantasised
‘masculinity’ so that he makes one last effort to masquerade in that role before
abandoning it as hopeless. Love has feminised him. The feminisation provokes anxiety
that he is ‘unmanned’, or—to borrow from the language of psychoanalysis—‘castrated’.
The movie both demonstrates how fantasies of phallic dominance seem to offer
protection from that anxiety, but at the same time how such fantasies can no longer
command the hero’s own credulity because of the new awareness that love engenders in
him. The hero of film noir appears at his most adamantine and self-obsessed when he
rejects the deadly lure set for him by the femme fatale. Yet, it is difficult to read the noir
movie as if the hero simply feels freshly dominant at the end of the movie, where he
rejects the heroine. The audience is expected to fear that he may slip back into the trap
from which he seems to be extricating himself. He uses his reacquired ‘masculine’ image.
Yet, he shares with the audience the knowledge that an image is what it is.
In Vincente Minnelli’s Some Came Running (1958), Sinatra plays a character divided
against himself. The split is a major thematic of the movie. It is expressed in its mise en-
scène, and particularly in its musical score. When his character, Dave, is with his boozy
pal Bama (Dean Martin), knocking back the whiskies, gambling ‘professionally’, taking on
fights when violence is offered, the settings are garish, Elmer Bernstein’s music almost
literally ‘brassy’ and jazz-oriented. It is in this milieu that he believes dumb broad Ginny
(Shirley MacLaine) to belong. He is at his most ‘masculine’, in Mulvey’s understanding
of the term, in his treatment of Ginny, whom he at worst abuses and in more indulgent
mood patronises.
She is not even deemed by him worthy of being an object of his gaze, on the other
hand. The obsessional gaze is directed instead at Gwen (Martha Hyer), the teacher of
creative writing. Although he sometimes attempts hip flippancy with her, she is immune
to it and he accepts her indifference to it easily, because he has fallen in love with Gwen,
as he repeatedly states. The way that love disturbs even his veneer of tough self-
confidence is shown by the way that he becomes anxious pupil to her tutor, so that in
one sequence he obediently waits outside the summer-house for her verdict as she gives
a critical reading to his short story.
The clearly feminised hero and the wilfully unreconstructed version of him suddenly
come together when he is sufficiently moved by Ginny’s judgment on his story and on
him (she loves both story and writer, but understands neither) to ask her to marry him.
Even then, when he is about to lose his best friend because of the ‘dumbness’ of this
choice, he retains elements of Mulvey’s male subject. When Ginny declares that she will
do anything that he desires to prove her adoration, he asks her to clean the house. Ginny
is glad to take on the chore. However, that he suggests it at all is surely a signal to Bama
(later) and to the audience that he has not entirely relinquished his old attitudes. He
needs to be loved, when he has been rejected and wounded by Gwen, but it is this need
that is emphasised, not a newly acquired fondness for Ginny—or at least nothing that
approaches the love he felt for Gwen.
In these ways, the presence of Mulvey’s male subject is not to be doubted. He is
ubiquitous in Hollywood cinema. Yet, that presence is not proof that the unregenerate
subject continues to play his customary part. It is often a role that he adopts when
132 Kenneth MacKinnon

his feminisation threatens to be exposed for all the other characters to behold and
judge.
One of the most famous erotic scenes of all classic Hollywood is the beach scene from
From Here to Eternity (1953). The kiss between Sergeant Warden (Burt Lancaster) and
Karen Holmes (Deborah Kerr) amid the Hawaiian waves has been and still is found on
popular posters. The beach sequence (divided in two by an intervening sequence at the
Club with Prewitt, the Montgomery Clift character) is remembered today as a daring,
Production Code-defying element in Fred Zinnemann’s movie. It seems to celebrate
sexual freedom. If that moment, the kiss in the breakers, seems fairly to be so typed,
much of the rest of the sequence suggests the insecurities of both characters and the
potential for deep unhappiness in the wake of their falling in love.
When Karen lies back on the towel, enraptured by her lover’s kiss, she delivers a line
which is risibly formulaic (but seems far less so in context), ‘I never knew it could be like
this.’ What begins as a tribute to the special attraction of his kiss and his love turns into
probing and questioning by Warden, who has been subjected to rumours of Karen’s
promiscuous past. He distances himself from her spatially, by towering above her and
firing accusatory questions at her, attempting to devalue her and break her hold over
him. Traumatised by his apparent cruelty, she moves away from him and crouches on
the sand, submitting sufficiently to his onslaught to agree to tell him of her past. As she
does so, he moves towards her, clearly shocked and sympathetic at her mistreatment by
her husband, dismayed to learn that her baby was stillborn and that she can no longer
bear other children. At the end of her narration, he falls to his knees and, significantly,
joins her—literally on her own level. When he lays his head on her shoulder, it is,
notably, she that reassures him.
In this sequence, once again the developing love story involves the use of the former
unalloyed ‘maleness’ of the Lancaster character. Yet, it is consciously donned in a bid to
loosen the potentially damaging, ‘castrating’ hold that this woman has over him. When
the danger seems to be past, when she is the woman that he all the time hoped that she
really was, he abandons his superiority—literally a pose according to the visuals of the
scene—and physically descends to join her in her misery.
Misery is indeed what love brings to him. In a later sequence, she accuses him of no
longer loving her. ‘I wish I didn’t love you,’ he retorts, declaring that he has never been
so miserable as in the past few weeks. Neither, she affirms, has she. Their sharing of the
unhappiness of love is paradoxically a proof of its endurance and validity.
When Terry Malloy (Marlon Brando) is stricken with love for Edie Doyle (Eva Marie
Saint) in On the Waterfront (Elia Kazan, 1954), he has up till then been the working-class
tough-guy boxer seduced into sleaze and corruption by Johnny Friendly (Lee J. Cobb).
The power over him that Edie represents is something that he attempts to fight. When
she offers him her philosophy of caring for others, he tries to dismiss her as a ‘fruitcake.’
‘Maybe you should go back to Daisyville,’ he suggests in mockery of the aspirations that
sent her to a rural teacher-training college.
The power of Brando’s performance, though, is particularly in the transparency of his
tough-guy impersonation, so that we share the heroine’s ability to see through it to the
confusion and vulnerability of the character. In this context, where crucifixes seem to
appear in scene after scene, formed by television aerials or in one sequence by a metal
fence, and where Father Barry (Karl Malden) offers sermons on the power of goodness
and sacrifice in the midst of massive Union corruption, Terry’s love for Edie links up
with his Christ-figure self-sacrifice at the climax of the movie. Here, he is the most
savagely beaten-up of all the characters and thus, paradoxically, the most positive in
 Male Spectatorship and the Hollywood Love Story 133
fighting Friendly’s evil. In other words, it is when he is least ‘masculine’—that is, when
he is most visibly defeated and for a time incapable of action—that he can win.
So it is in his love for Edie. The moment of its consummation seems to be sandwiched
between Edie’s angry beating on his chest and the news shouted from below that his
brother Charlie wants to see him. (The other characters in this environment know what
the audience has already guessed—that Charlie is dead.) Terry could-a been a contender.
His triumph in Kazan’s controversial and probably self-serving movie is that, although
he now cannot be a contender, he has found strength in what some would regard as
weakness. His love strips him of his resources, among them his machismo and shell of
invulnerability. The ‘male subject’ element is there, but only so that it can be abandoned
in favour of a different kind of masculinity.
If this reading is at all persuasive, it helps us to make better sense of Brando’s Stanley
Kowalski in the earlier Kazan movie, A Streetcar Named Desire (1951). It is possible to
believe that Brando’s impersonation of an emotional Neanderthal represents his charac-
ter in the movie. This is what Blanche (Vivien Leigh) claims to believe. However, it
commands more credibility if Stanley and Blanche recognise something of themselves in
each other. Stanley is ironic, witty: in short too intelligent to be the ‘ape’ that he claims
that Blanches sees in him. In the rape scene, he informs Blanche that he has been on
to her from the start. Blanche’s affectations and Southern-belle posturing are not difficult
to see as artificial. At the same time, Mitch (Karl Malden) is completely taken in by them
for a time and has to be tipped off by Stanley to see her in other terms.
Perhaps Stanley’s immediate recognition of Blanche’s masquerade is because he
performs the male version of it. In his sweaty T-shirt, or out of it, exposing the
gym-created body that is still associated with the visual image of the young Brando, the
more knowing present-day glance at him prompts a different sort of reading of him than
might have been prevalent in the context of 1951. Stanley is like a gay icon of
working-class muscled masculinity, like a Tom of Finland drawing, far more self-
conscious than machismo allows itself to be.
Moreover, there is no male look, no female object to-be-looked-at, unless his wife
Stella (Kim Stanley) plays the latter role. Stanley’s look at Blanche is judgmental,
piercing, informed by the best protection that a vulnerable male can have, that she
cannot ‘castrate’ him as long as he sees her clearly for what she is (or, rather, for what
she is not).

The Secret of Male Femininity in Hollywood Movies: Film Studies’ Part in

the Process
Why has the femininity at the heart of Hollywood’s narratives of men in love so long
remained a secret?
Perhaps it is because each time that the secret threatens to come out, the context is
declared female territory. Male femininity is thereby explained as almost narcissistic—
but, startlingly, in terms of female narcissism: one common explanation is that the female
viewer wants the men in her entertainments to be like herself, thus to be emotional,
sensitive, and to an extent, to use Mulvey’s coinage, to-be-looked-at.
Laura Mulvey exempts melodrama from the ‘maleness’ that governs looking in other
genres. In so doing, she seems to claim it as ‘female’, to be part of what Charlotte
Brunsdon, for example, terms ‘films for women’ (Brunsdon (Ed.), 1986). Melodrama is
often subsumed in film studies within the genre of the woman’s film. This process is
encapsulated by, for instance, its collocation with that genre in the subtitle of the key
134 Kenneth MacKinnon

work on melodrama, Home is Where the Heart Is—Studies in Melodrama and the Woman’s Film
(Gledhill (Ed.), 1987).
Yet, if the woman’s film was recognised as a genre within the Hollywood industry,
melodrama was not. At least not in the ways that film studies understands the term.
‘Melodrama’ was applied instead by the industry trans-generically to cover more or less
any straight-faced movie that was not a comedy. Manhattan Melodrama (1934), for
example, is a gangster film, not set in a family or small town and not concerned with love
conflict.
In a number of contributions whose importance it would be a serious error to
under-estimate, Barbara Klinger has shown that movies that have since the 1970s been
labelled by film studies as melodramas, and for that reason further labelled as more or
less ‘films for women’, were in the 1950s understood in quite other terms. Written on the
Wind (Douglas Sirk, 1956), taken today to be perhaps the supreme example of Sirkian
melodrama, was in its original context categorised as an ‘adult movie’ (Klinger, 1989).
Under this label, it was expected to draw in male audiences just as effectively as female.
Indeed, as if to augment the plausibility of this last suggestion, it is surely fair to observe
that the movie’s female characters, though they are of more importance than in many
other 1950s movies, are hardly more prominent than those of Rock Hudson or Robert
Stack.
While Klinger is circumspect about not allowing her claim of historical precision to
blight film studies’ handling of melodrama, there clearly must be repercussions from it.
She believes that the 1950s did not hive off as ‘feminine’ the emotional and ‘excessive’,
to be fare for women only. If she is correct in this, surely then there should be
questioning of the special status of (some or most) melodrama as female fare. The
emotional was not thought to be territory forbidden to or despised by male spectators in
the 1950s, well before the invention of the New Man. Moreover, there was no special
genre—other than perhaps the very ‘adult movie’ which Klinger has highlighted—which
showcased the ‘sensational’ (i.e., erotic and ‘excessive’). Melodrama was a feature of
many genres, some of them being thoroughly ‘male’ in conventional thinking. It was an
aesthetic, rather than a generic, category—discoverable in mise en-scène, in acting, in
background music. It was as much part of later classic Hollywood as it had been of the
works of D W Griffith.
A similar assumption—that it is female territory—seems to be made about television
soap opera.
Charlotte Brunsdon explains the imagined appeal of soaps to primarily the female
spectator by reference to their supposed drawing upon feminine competences. ‘There is
a difference between what was historically feminine,’ she states, ‘and what is considered
essentially or biologically so’ (Brunsdon (Ed.), 1986, p. 4). Yet, in her care to avoid
essentialism, she seems to produce what Linda J. Nicholson refers to as ‘biological
foundationalism’ (Zack et al. (Eds), 1998, p. 189)—meaning that there is more than an
accidental relationship between certain aspects of personality or behaviour and biology.
Brunsdon claims that soaps such as the original (defunct, but now revived) British
Crossroads call upon ‘the culturally constructed skills of femininity—sensitivity, perception,
intuition and the necessary privileging of the concerns of personal life’ (Brunsdon, 1981,
p. 36), so that the genre not only has feminine appeal but is almost exclusively enjoyed
by women.
This belief must surely be the reason why Ien Ang, looking for the raw material on
whose basis to discuss viewers’ enthusiasms in relation to Dallas, advertised in a women’s
magazine. She then points out that only three replies came from boys or men (Ang,
 Male Spectatorship and the Hollywood Love Story 135
1985, p. 10). Surely, though, it is of real significance that as many as three out of 42
replies came from males, given the location of her advertisement. By 1988, we are
informed by another investigator of soap opera that, though women remain in the
majority of soap opera viewers, ‘the men are not too far behind’ (Curti, 1988, p. 60).
Is it not the case that the belief in the strong feminine bias of soap opera is a
consequence of the belief that only women—or almost pathologically feminised men—
watch it? If that is the belief, the evidence does not securely back it up. The case for
melodrama as a female-only area of dominant cinema is shot through with weaknesses,
not the least of these being that melodrama is an invention, rather than a discovery, of
film studies. Its claim of female bias is as tenuously based as is the claim for the genre.

Conclusion
The most forthright case for male spectators as deeply implicated in ‘feminine’ emotion
comes from David Thomson:
[M]en have always watched women’s pictures, just as, invariably, they have
made them. Even if the audience was as much as sixty percent female, the films
would have flopped without the forty percent of men. Cinema’s tortured
attitude to women may only stand for the confused lust and guilt in men, and
some women’s pictures are maddened extensions of the western cult of the
madonna. The form, it seems to me, is manly. It projects and protects men’s
dreams of emotional life and is coloured by men’s private shame—that they do
not feel as intensely as women do … (Thomson, 1978, p. 205)
Or else that they do not dare to express intense feeling socially as women may with a
little more ease.
If there is any credibility in Thomson’s beliefs, then what often looks today like the
monolithic version of male subjectivity attributed to the male spectator of dominant
Hollywood cinema seems a lot shakier than it has been taken to be. It is odd that the
picture has held so many thinkers in thrall, since what it says about men and women is
so clearly what patriarchy would teach as normal. Is patriarchal fantasy all that
Hollywood allows? Or is the love story which finally displaces the sex story of narrative
cinema ignored at the peril of failing to comprehend the appeal of classic Hollywood to
male and female spectators alike?
There has always been something hollow in the final sentence of ‘Visual Pleasure’,
offering the notion that women ‘cannot view the decline of the traditional film form with
anything much more than sentimental regret’ (Mulvey, 1989, p. 26). A fresh consider-
ation of the place of love in Hollywood narrative, and of the feminisation of the former
voyeur/fetishist hero under the influence of love, may help to explain that nagging
impression.

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