Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era

By Susan Jeffords

Book Overview

Hard Bodies is about Ronald Reagan, Robert Bly, "America," Rambo, Dirty Harry, national identity, and individual manhood. By linking blockbuster Hollywood films of the 1980s to Ronald Reagan and his image, Susan Jeffords explores the links between masculinity and U.S. identity and how their images changed during that decade. Her book powerfully defines a distinctly ideological period in the renegotiation of masculinity in the post-Vietnam era. As Jeffords perceptively notes, Reagan was most effective at constructing and promoting his own image. His election in 1980 and his landslide re-election in 1984 offered politicians and the film industry some insight into "what audiences want to see." Audiences--and constituencies--were looking for characters who stood up for individualism, liberty, anti-governmentalism, militarism, and who embodied a kind of mythic heroism. The administration in Washington and Hollywood filmmakers sensed and tried to fill that need. Jeffords describes how movies meshed inextricably with Reagan's life as he cast himself as a hero and influenced the country to believe the same script. Invoking Clint Eastwood in his speeches and treating scenes from movies as if they were real, Reagan played on his image in order to link popular and national narratives. Hollywood returned the compliment.

Through her illuminating and detailed analyses of both the Reagan presidency and many blockbuster movies, Jeffords provides a scenario within which the successes of the New Right and the Reagan presidency can begin to be understood: she both encourages an understanding of how this complicity functioned and provides a framework within which to respond to the New Right's methods and arguments. Rambo, Lethal Weapon, Die Hard, Robocop, Back to the Future, Star Wars, the Indiana Jones series, Mississippi Burning, Rain Man, Batman, and Unforgiven are among the films she discusses. In her closing chapter, she suggests the direction that masculinity is taking in the 1990s.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0813520037
• ISBN13: 9780813520032
• Release Date: December 1993
• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.86 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

Not Entirely Convincing, but a Fascinating Analysis of Action Films in the 1980s

In many respects "Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era" is a fascinating book. In other respects it is maddening; for every example that the author used to demonstrate a provocative and useful thesis there are counterexamples that could be used to refute it. In "Hard Bodies" Susan Jeffords, professor of English and director of Women's Studies at the University of Washington, offers an entree into the ideology of the Reagan era of the 1980s by unpacking several blockbuster film series, especially "Rambo," "Lethal Weapon," "Die Hard," and "Robocop." For Jeffords, these films display an underlying masculinity. As she put it: "The depiction of the indefatigable, muscular, and invincible masculine body became the lynchpin of the Reagan imaginary; this hardened male form became the emblem not only for the Reagan presidency but for its ideologies and economies as well" (p. 25). The incredibly "buff" bodies of the actors in these films, always on display, according to Jeffords stood for the aggressive militaristic and hard power strategies of the Reagan administration. At the same time, as these various film series unfolded over time Jeffords tracks the changes in the "hard bodies" involved and their place in the schema of the era. For example, in the first of "The Terminator" series Arnold Schwarzenegger's cyborg is a brutal, single-minded killing machine, the prototypical "hard body" of the Reagan era. Jeffords argues that in the second film in the series, Schwarzenegger's cyborg has become a protective, nurturing father figure for the young John Connor. In Jefford's characterization, the second film was reflective of a different version of masculinity as espoused in the George H.W. Bush administration (1989-1993). She concludes that the second film presented "male viewers an alternative to the declining workplace and national structure as sources of masculine authority and power--the world of the family" (p. 170). This is a powerful thesis which has much to recommend it. And Jeffords marshals strong evidence to support it throughout this intriguing book. At the same time Jeffords overstates her case in two fundamental ways. First, she fails to account for the very many other films of the Reagan era which do not support her thesis of masculine aggressiveness on display. The Oscar winners for best picture between 1981 and 1988 were "Chariots of Fire" (1981), "Gandhi" (1982), "Terms of Endearment" (1983), "Amadeus" (1984), "Out of Africa" (1985), "Platoon" (1986), "The Last Emperor" (1987), and "Rain Man" (1988). Of those, none displayed aggressive masculinity as epitomized by Jeffords as the dominant theme of the era. With this as the case, does Jeffords offer a convincing thesis of aggressive masculinity as a dominant theme of the Reagan era? A second concern is Jeffords suggestive relationship between the film and the Reagan presidential style of leadership. She seems to read Hollywood's interest in producing these blockbusters, an