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FDU PRESS
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| Scholarly Review |
 | Love, Tears, and the Male Spectator
ISBN# 0838639550
Reviewed by: M. Yacowar
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MacKinnon (University of North London, UK) challenges the assumptions that male spectators necessarily differ from female, that the male is excluded from the feminine in fantasy, and that genres are firmly defined by gender (e.g., the women's melodrama, the men's war). His provides fresh analyses of major films that reflect the insecurities of the early 1950s US. In Rear Window, Vertigo, and Marnie Hitchcock pits a "castrated" male power against active, forceful women. In Sunset Boulevard, Joe evades the subject role while Norma is "a subject in obessional pursuit of object status in the movies." In The Men, "survival depends ultimately on . . . adjustment to new versions of masculinity and femininity." In A Streetcar Named Desire, Stanley and Blanche are "playing their gender roles to the hilt to deflect attention from their growing panic." For their genres, From Here to Eternity and On the Waterfront exhibit maleness surprisingly "lacking in machismo, so physically limited, so prone to self-doubt and anguish." As Frank Sinatra's persona demonstrates, "unreconstructed machismo" is a "posture by which to evade recognitions of feminization," and "the male subject's is taken as usually a performed rather than lived identity. Summing up: Recommended. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
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