Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film (review)

What was needed was a critical history of the screen detective, something not undertaken since John Tuska’s short 1978 survey. Although a constantly recurring figure of popular cinema throughout its history, the screen detective has either been collapsed into his or her film noir version of the 1940s (Farewell My Lovely) or neo-noir revisions of the 1970s (Chinatown), or else found floating ill-defined in the diffusive crime film genre. What Philippa Gates partly provides is a solid outline of the figure’s earlier film history. She draws out helpful categories (the classical English detective, the hard-boiled gumshoe, the contemporary ‘criminalist,’ etc.). Working from a suggestive periodization, she also draws in some very smart critics to help her. Her interpretive lens, though, eventually comes from the recent feminist discussions of American masculinity and its supposed crises. Begun interestingly with discussions of film noir, the topic has thinned out considerably in the hands of Susan Faludi, Susan Jeffords, Yvonne Tasker, and Chris Holm. It now tends to distort film genre study more than it helps. Gates’s dependency on this criticism hobbles parts of her book. As a result she becomes too speedy with the promising discussion of earlier phases of the detective’s movie history (for example, the 1930s B-film). Overly schematic to the point of misdescribing things, like the Thin Man cycle starring William Powell and Myrna Loy (she says Powell carries a sense of Englishness about him, and that is just not true), Gates can be very helpful at sorting out the apparent contradiction in 1940s detection films between the hard-boiled solitary sleuth (exemplified by Bogart’s Spade and Marlowe) and the blander team player of the ‘police procedural’ (father to tv shows such as Dragnet), but then she rushes through the 1950s and 1960s (the era when Paul Newman and Frank Sinatra played private eyes), skips over signature films, such as Klute and Point Blank, precisely where fresh analyses are most needed, then lets her book bulge at the point when the police detective mutates into an action-film character, starting with the Dirty Harry cycle (starring Clint Eastwood), and rolling toward the Lethal Weapon (with Mel Gibson and Danny Glover) and the Die Hard cycles (with Bruce Willis). The problem here is two-fold. Detecting Men becomes unbalanced and the interpretations depart wholly from detection toward analyzing pumped male stars, leading her to devote wasted pages to Rambo (a combat film), and Fatal Attraction (which has no detective) because its star, Michael Douglas, is so famous a figure of ‘white male crisis’ (and he has played detectives, as in Basic Instinct). It is no doubt true that sexual politics did shift the screen detective, but Gates starts losing sight of her main subject and feels compelled to depend too heavily on other critics’ analyses. The same occurs with discussions of the race component, which takes her through Lethal Weapon and Die Hard, films without any detection. But she ignores other more pertinent films, such as Rising Sun, which also has a mixed-race police team and a Japanese corporation and elaborate detection plot.

When she turns to the intriguing and lately popular figure of the ‘criminalist,’ exemplified by William Petersen on the television series CSI, she fails to pin down the specific development she promised to identify. She misses her main chance when she misreads The Silence of the Lambs and its imitators (Copycat, The Bone Collector) by over-accenting gender politics, and not the more obviously politically intriguing feature of the contemporary film detective: his or her existence in a virtual bubble of specialized expertise and police culture. The professional enclosure becomes almost hermetic and the struggles between criminal (serial killer usually, or, less often, professional crook, or heist gang) are almost closed to social currents. Gates is too preoccupied with derivative discussions of gender and race politics, in the manner of 1980s academic cultural studies, to allow herself...