Ghost Faces: Hollywood and Post-Millennial Masculinity by David Greven (review)

The desire to treat American masculinity in a manner that appears to be LGBTQI inclusive is the focus of Professor David Greven’s latest study. Using a combination of queer theory, psychoanalytic film theory, and a discussion of the importance of the Gothic tradition to American literature Greven makes a compelling case that contemporary Hollywood films, as he states, “have largely been an attempt to put the queer genie back in the bottle of straight masculinity” (4). In many ways this new book could be read as a sequel or extension of Greven’s theorizing of masculinity in his previous book Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush (Univ. of Texas Press, 2009). As the 2000s passed, Greven noticed that the films of the period doubled down on reifying straight white masculinity rather than subverting gender norms, even as Hollywood recognized the economic potential of queer audiences. Yet, as Greven illustrates throughout the book, even as Hollywood filmmakers were paying lip service to queer identities and spectators, they were in reality more invested in shoring up the image of masculinity as straight and white. Such films and their themes and messages, Greven points out, are most often associated with genre..

Building on Linda Williams’ theories about genre and the body, Greven coins the term “male body genres” to explain how these new approaches to genre are designed to show white masculinity in crisis or near “the breaking point” only to be “reassembled and restored at the eleventh hour” (14). The two genres that Greven argues best represent this strategy and narrative pattern are comedy and horror. Taken together, Greven theorizes that these genres serve to “cut and open up masculinity” at the level of content and form; he refers to this process as “dismantling,” a term that could be further developed and applied in film studies and film theory. Greven uses the idea of “dismantling” to explain how straight white masculinity in film can be questioned or challenged but by the end of the film made normal. “Masculinity in the 00’s is a genre suit,” Greven asserts (22). To introduce the reader to his complex ideas he uses brief analyses of Crazy, Stupid, Love (Ficarra and Requa, 2011) and Magic Mike (Soderbergh, 2012), two films which at first glance seem to have little in common. However, as he shows, both films are focused on exploring male nudity and sexuality, which can provide queer spectators and women with erotic pleasures; but in the end, straight white masculinity is once again reified as the normative mode as the film reverts from a focus on male relationships to instead focus on the heterosexual love plot and the values associated with it such as “sacrifice,” “endeavor,” “striving,” and “sexual normalcy” (11).

In chapter one Greven explores cinematic masculinity in connection to the aftereffects of 9/11. These new films, which are filled with violence and torture, are the result of a fascination with the Freudian concept of the “death drive.” Indeed, Greven suggests that for many white American men the only way to reclaim their power and honor is to sacrifice themselves and their bodies, and it is this feeling that led to films such as The Passion of the Christ (Gibson, 2004), Casino Royale (Campbell, 2006), Hostel (Roth, 2005), and 300 (Snyder, 2007), which glorify bodily assault on men.

Chapter Two is one of the highlights of the book, as Greven makes a compelling argument that the current genre of bro-mance comedies follow naturally from the exploration of homoerotic identities in Wes Craven’s horror horror/parody, Scream (1996). The connection between a horror film and the current gross-out teen comedies would seem improbable but, as Greven notes, “what Scream shares with the anarchic teen comedies… is a view of adolescent masculinity as a last gasp before the normalization of adult masculinity sets in—hence the killers’ hatred of father figures and hence too, their indulgence in a state of polymorphously perverse, sexually open-ended, and violent...