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  • Case Study
  • Delia Caparoso Konzett
Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film. Robert Eberwein. Rutgers UP, 2007. 196 pages; $22.95

Judith Butler’s claim that gender is not so much determined by human biology as by performance and free choice has found wide acceptance and currency these days and is clearly evidenced in the fluid gender boundaries between hetero-, metro- and homosexuality, which inform sexual orientation and cultural lifestyles. Robert Eberwein’s compelling study Armed Forces: Masculinity and Sexuality in the American War Film offers an interesting case study of this cultural phenomenon of fluid gender in a context that is traditionally associated with hyper-masculinity.

War films, it would at first appear, celebrate male masculinity and normative heterosexuality as the traditional pillars of the nation state in which men sacrifice their lives for country and family. However, as Eberwein’s study suggests, a closer look at war films presents us with a surprisingly wide array of creative approaches to the interrelated notions of sexuality, masculinity, and comradeship in war films. Discussing Edward Steichen’s famous photograph of navy soldiers resting on each other’s bodies on the deck of the USS Lexington (1943), Eberwein notes an overlooked element of homoeroticism that is rarely discussed as an active ingredient of war films. The study, built on this stock scenario, raises the question as to how Hollywood war films in fact stage not only war but gender in new and unexpected fashion. Often seen as limited propaganda products with pedagogical intent, war films conversely take on quite liberally genre conventions borrowed from mob films or melodrama and should thus be more properly seen as expressions of Hollywood’s entertainment industry.

Eberwein’s study superbly ranges over cinema history, beginning with the silent era in his discussion of such classics as The Big Parade (Vidor, 1925), What Price Glory and Wings (Wellmann, 1927). Subsequent chapters complicate the interests of male bonding and friendship with rival interests in romance. Many of these films make a point in not blurring gender boundaries or in stressing forms of repressed homosexuality, as is often too readily assumed. Films such as From Here to Eternity (Zinnemann, 1953), Deer Hunter (Cimino, 1973), and Ride with the Devil (Lee, 1999) clearly distinguish between erotic and non-erotic bonds and thus still aim for a conventional and normative depiction of sexuality, while paradoxically invoking its diversity of roles and choices.

Another group under discussion are films that question masculinity as in The Best Years of Our Lives (Wyler, 1946) and The Men (Zinneman, 1950), clearly pointing to a breakdown of traditional norms of gender codes in the 1950s and the burdensome psychological pressure needed to sustain traditional notions of masculinity. Finally, more recent films such as Platoon (Stone, 1986), Full Metal Jacket (Kubrick, 1987), Black Hawk Down (Scott, 2001), and Jarhead (Mendes, 2005) begin to stage the male body in more de-centered fashion as in the context of sexualized weaponry or otherwise [End Page 102] aim for greater visibility of gay men in the army.

The overall impression of this excellent study is one of a much more complicated gender coded cinema than previously attributed to war films. Professor Eberwein revisits with close analysis many classic war films, enters the murky realm of gender, and yet allows us to understand and appreciate these films without the binary reductions that traditionally shape notions of gender and sexuality.

Delia Caparoso Konzett
University of New Hampshire
delia.konzett@unh.edu
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