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Chapter 3: The Man Was Mad—But a Genius!: Gender, Genre, and the Ballet Film through 1947, Part II
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104 3 The Man Was Mad—But a Genius! Gender, Genre, and the Ballet Film through 1947, Part II For an artist [love] is fatal. He must have his whole soul, his whole being, in his art—nothing else. —The Mad Genius, 1931 The Great Petrov doesn’t dance for fun. —Shall We Dance, 1937 I’m going crazy! I’m insane! —Gold Diggers in Paris, 1938 That guy went crazy the last time he danced, and loonies like him have a way of repeating themselves. —Specter of the Rose, 1946 The number of classical Hollywood films with male ballet artists as protagonists can probably be counted on one hand: The Mad Genius (1931), with John Barrymore and Donald Cook, explicitly “based in some respects upon the life and work of Serge Diaghileff”; Shall We Dance (1937), a Fred Astaire– Ginger Rogers vehicle in which Astaire plays a tap-dancing American ballet dancer masquerading as a Russian; and Specter of the Rose (196), written, produced, and directed by Ben Hecht, about an American dancer who is purportedly “a genius” but who is also psychotic. In addition, as discussed in the previous chapter, there are several male impresarios and teachers hovering around the edges of other films, most notably Ralph Bellamy’s Steve Adams in Dance, Girl, Dance (190) and Conrad Veidt’s Rosing in The Men in Her Life (191), as well as any number of uncredited dancers and dancing partners. Here I examine the ways that men have been positioned onscreen not simply as dancers performing ballet but as a different sort of filmed T HE M A N WA S M A D—BU T A GENIUS! 105 spectacle, as representations of a cultural and historical ambivalence about the aestheticized performing male body. Women’s status as spectacle in classical Hollywood cinema has been voluminously theorized since the 1970s, and recently some of the scholarly attention has shifted to spectacular men. But, as the editors of a 200 anthology on masculinities in Hollywood and European cinema put it, the “systematic exploration of masculinities” developed as an “afterthought” of feminist film theory of the 1970s and 1980s.1 It never constituted a field in the same way that feminist film analysis did because, among other things, the attention that was paid to masculinities occurred predominantly through gay and queer studies and was interested less in “representational ‘norms’” of masculinity than in deviance therefrom, “thus sidestepping the investigation of heterosexual masculine structure.”2 In his 1983 essay “Masculinity as Spectacle,” however, Steve Neale had already concluded that commercial films of virtually any genre had always depended on the display of male bodies .3 While these bodies were no less fragmented or stylized or even scantily clad than those of women, there was “no trace of an acknowledgment or recognition of those bodies displayed solely for the gaze of the spectator” because the straight male would then have to confront his pleasure in erotically gazing at his onscreen ideal. So, according to Neale, there is always a sound narrative reason for the characters in a film, and through them the film’s audience, to look at a male body, and these looks “are marked not by desire, but rather by fear, or hatred, or aggression.” If a male body is spectacularized , in other words, it is often beating something up or being beaten up itself. When a male star or actor is singled out for spectacular display that is not tied to violence—in a musical, for instance, or Rock Hudson’s image in any Douglas Sirk melodrama—Neale concludes that the spectacularization is accompanied by, or coded in terms of, feminization, and the look of the spectator is therefore coded as feminine as well. One strategy for countering the discomfort produced by this process is to make sure that the spectacularized male is “doing something,” in Richard Dyer’s words, and that what he is doing has a compelling narrative function so that the erotic pleasure the gazing man feels at the sight of the male body does not come to the fore.5 Several anthologies on masculinities in film appeared in the early 1990s, all explicitly engaging or taking off from Neale’s analysis.6 They were also partly a result of concurrent developments in the American film industry , a resurgence of the male star as a marquee name in action cinema, neonoir films, “postmodern westerns,” and so on. The new anthologies focused on several similar...