Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film

1. Introduction: The Case

3 Introduction: The Case From William Powell to Humphrey Bogart—or debonair to tough; from Bruce Willis to William Petersen—or wisecracking to wise: the celluloid detective has evolved over time, processing society’s fears about crime and articulating debates about law enforcement and justice. The 1980s saw cinematic justice exacted by muscle and firepower; today it is pursued with science and brainpower—or what Agatha Christie’s sleuth Hercule Poirot called using “the little grey cells.” In the mid-1980s, William Petersen starred as detective Will Graham in Manhunter (Mann 1986), the first film adaptation of Thomas Harris’s novel Red Dragon (1981), which introduced the world to Dr. Hannibal “The Cannibal” Lector. The film was ahead of its time, bringing the criminalist and that which he hunts—the serial killer—to the big screen several years before the genre became pervasive in the mid-1990s. Today William Petersen produces and stars in one of the most popular television drama series in the world, airing in 100 countries: CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (Cole 3). Like Manhunter, CSI centers on the investigations of its detectives, including Gil Grissom (played by Petersen), who are criminalists —detectives who specialize in the analysis of physical evidence. The criminalist is a modern-day incarnation of the classical sleuth first envisioned by Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s with C. Auguste Dupin, the hero of a handful of “tales of ratiocination,” and popularized by Sir Arthur C H A P T E R O N E FIGURE 1. Basil Rathbone as Sherlock Holmes. The classical detective: Popularized by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, the sleuth is perhaps most identified with actor Basil Rathbone, who played Holmes in film and radio from 1939 to 1946. Photo from author’s collection. Conan Doyle’s famous detective Sherlock Holmes in the late 1800s. “I always watched Sherlock Holmes movies on Saturday afternoons,” says Petersen. “I think it’s fascinating to deal with people who are smart at something” (qtd. in Dickson 11). And being smart is the defining characteristic of the criminalist : he or she (and often, unlike in previous eras of the fictional detective, the criminalist can be a woman) is a well-educated professional whose most powerful weapons against crime are intelligence, observation, and deduction. In between the classical sleuth and the contemporary criminalist, however, is a long history of change and development in the kinds of heroes that have populated the genre. The genre’s codes have adapted and altered with the changing society that consumes it and the industry that produces it, forming trends or subgenres specific to the social, historical, economic, and political moment. The first type of detective, the classical detective or sleuth, was introduced by Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s with his hero Dupin, and was present on movie screens in the 1930s and 1940s in detective series. In American detective fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, the sleuth gave way to the private detective of the hardboiled variety, created by authors like Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, who made it onto the screen in softboiled versions in the 1930s and hardboiled in the 1940s film noir. The street-wise, solitary detective of the hardboiled story, however, was replaced by the police detective of the procedural by the 1940s. The 1950s saw the hero as neurotic and often corrupt; the late 1960s into the 1970s, a violent vigilante hero; the 1970s into the 1980s, a return to a noir-hero; the 1980s, a cop-action hero; and the 1990s and 2000s, an educated, intelligent, middle-class criminalist. Although other kinds of detectives existed during each of these moments, these were the dominant trends within the overarching genre of the detective film. At the center of each trend, however, has been a preoccupation with investigating the hero and—as the vast majority of detective films have focused on male heroes—with the masculinity of that hero. This study is an exploration of the detective film over the course of the genre’s history in film and its representation of the men of detection. THE CRIME SCENE KIT Detecting the Genre Feminist criticism has exposed the constructedness of femininity in cinema and also explored the relationship of the female spectator to the image, INTRODUCTION 5 which has, subsequently, inspired the exploration of cinema’s relationship to other marginalized subjects. Homosexual, African American, and other types of marginalized masculinities...