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  • An Individualist, Just Like the Rest of Us:The Performance of Hegemonic Masculinities in “The Case of Milo Radulovich”
  • Elizabeth Marquis (bio)

Recent writing on documentary film has begun to suggest the importance of attending to the signifying work of the nonfiction performer. Building on converging lines of scholarship that emphasize the constructedness of documentary texts and the performative nature of identity, scholars such as Thomas Waugh, Leger Grindon, Vinicius do Valle Navarro, and Stella Bruzzi have argued persuasively in favor of viewing performance as a central component of nonfiction discourse. Bruzzi, for instance, underlines that documentaries are founded on the creative interaction between a filmmaker and the reality on which she or he encroaches and that they thus must be seen as “performative acts whose truth comes into being only at the moment of filming” (New Documentary 7). In this respect, Bruzzi points out that all documentaries can be characterized as performances of “reality,” effectively modifying and extending the terms of Bill Nichols’s “performative mode” (92–106) and applying these terms to the whole of nonfiction production.1

This acknowledgement that nonfiction films are themselves performative, however, also opens the door for consideration of a second brand of documentary performance—namely, the communicative work of the individuals who appear within nonfiction films and television programs. Indeed, if documentaries, as performative texts, produce the “truths” that they document, the people who populate such texts contribute significantly to this truth-production process by virtue of the ways in which they enact themselves for the camera. Alongside and in combination with other formal elements such as editing and shot composition, documentary subjects exert a considerable impact on the meanings and effects of the texts in which they figure through gesture, posture, facial expression, word choice, intonation, and the like. To this extent, Bruzzi’s claim that “performance has always been at the heart of documentary filmmaking” (New Documentary 125) is in fact doubly true.

This article seeks to substantiate Bruzzi’s argument by illustrating the way in which performance contributes significantly to one commonly described function of documentary films. In particular, by looking to enactments of masculinity in the CBS News See It Now (1951–57) episode titled “The Case of Milo Radulovich, AO589839” (1953), I will demonstrate that performance figures importantly in documentary texts’ ability to reinforce, inflect, and/or subvert hegemonic social norms.

In the moments before the “The Case of Milo Radulovich, AO589839” was aired on 20 October 1953, Edward R. Murrow is said to have turned to producer Fred Friendly and warned, “[T]hings will never be the same around here after tonight” (Friendly 3–4). In line with this [End Page 39] widely cited bit of television lore, the Radulovich episode of See It Now has often been positioned as a watershed text within the history of small-screen documentary. Shortly after the program went live on CBS, for instance, New York Times critic Jack Gould dubbed it “a long step forward in television journalism” (X13). A. William Bluem later agreed, positioning the Radulovich broadcast as “a turning point in television history” (qtd. in Rosteck, “Synecdoche” 230). The program—a sympathetic investigation of an Air Force lieutenant dismissed from the service on the grounds of his family’s potential Communist sympathies—has been credited with forcing the Air Force to reinstate the dismissed flyer, solidifying new standards in broadcast journalism, speeding the demise of McCarthyism, and demonstrating the public service potential of the television medium for the first time.2

As Dinah Lynn Zeiger points out, however, “[s]uch effusive praise is a double-edged sword: for while it honors the integrity of the producers and the network for revealing the plight of one man, it also creates an echo chamber, obscuring other equally significant messages contained in the visual and verbal narrative” (281). Rarely acknowledged amid what Eric Barnouw calls the “many paeans of praise” (177) directed toward the text, for instance, is the way in which the program showcases and emphasizes gendered performances that repeat, inflect, and ultimately solidify one version of masculinity frequently positioned as normative in 1950s American culture. In this respect, the text is decidedly less groundbreaking or progressive than its...

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