La di da, la di da, la la

I believe I am the kind of person down on one knee and shifting my weight my whole life long but capable of sinking far, and deep, to the bottom of something that might replace the religion I discarded or make me really live in this body or waste my life. I would like to live my way into being someone who stands back up and runs toward that holy forest.

In his essay, “Masculinity as Spectacle,” Steve Neale seeks to extend Laura Mulvey’s work on the male gaze and to challenge her assertion that the male or male-identified spectator can never look upon the male body as an erotic object. To challenge Mulvey’s assertion, Neale identifies the mechanisms mainstream Hollywood cinema uses to represent the male body as erotic. One way of doing this, Neale argues, is by making the male body the target of violence. In the war film, a soldier can hold his buddy – as long as his buddy is dying on the battlefield. In the western, Butch Cassidy can wash the Sundance Kid’s naked flesh – as long as it is wounded. In the boxing film, a trainer can rub the well-developed torso and sinewy back of his protege – as long as it is bruised. In the crime film, a mob lieutenant can embrace his boss like a lover – as long as he is riddled with bullets. Violence makes the homoeroticism of many “male” genres invisible; it is a structural mechanism of plausible deniability.