In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Chapter 4 100% Pure Adrenaline: Gender and Generic Surface in Point Break Luke Collins The platform for this chapter is the contention that we experience Point Break (1991) as generic surface. Despite critical efforts to construct the film as a creative play with masculinity or with the action genre, the film remains culturally and politically ambivalent. As is often noted, Point Break repeats the “vessel” of the action genre without rupture, spillage, or slippage. In this sense Point Break expresses an awareness of its cultural/commercial form by filling out the homosocial trope latent in the action genre’s intense male relationships and fetishization of the male body. But, I argue, at no point does it seek to exceed, parody, ironize, or reflect upon its genre. The fullness that this produces is a flatness: a surface. This surface is not a negative construction but provides a way to address the network of relations between film, audience, and industry. Surface becomes a challenge for theory and criticism that traditionally rely on paradigms of cultural depth. As a theoretical proposition, surface asks: How can we assess the importance of a work, whether in generic or gendered terms, if its aim is not to interrupt cultural or political discourse? If its object is not the penetration of this discourse but its repetition? I use such provocative terms intentionally to argue the gendering of value in cultural criticism outwith the director’s biological sex. Academic criticism often reads Point Break within a political agenda—“female director makes action films as political statement”—or emphazises questions around masculinity and male specular desire. Meanwhile Kathryn Bigelow has remained reticent about the political and cultural resonance of her work. This emphasis on gender serves to give Bigelow an auteur’s voice within the patriarchal cultural hierarchy but misunderstands the interest of Point Break, which, significantly, marked her movement from independent to industrial filmmaking.1 This misapplies a model of authorship that has been shown to be unsustaini -xii_1-262_Gled.indd 54 12/13/11 11:17 AM 100% Pure Adrenaline 55 able in relation to industrial film production. While representation of gender in the film adheres to precedents within the genre, as an act of generic repetition Point Break has important gendered implications for cultural theory. This essay’s exploration of generic gender as surface challenges gender distinctions and divisions that define a heterosexual action film as conformist and a homoerotic one as progressive. It proposes a reading of Point Break that attempts to avoid the binary trap of constructing the film (and by implication culture more broadly) as either subversive/progressive or conformist. I am using surface as a critical construct to intervene in how film theory has approached genre and gender. Gender and Generic Surface Surface is the sophisticated and seamless production of a series of recognizable signs made available for consumption by the audience. The audience actively chooses to give themselves over to the ride. These signs (this surface) are engaged as a performance or a production, not an essential reality. Culture is experienced in a context of repetitive social rituals that form a tight circle of engagement between producer and audience. The arena of this engagement (cinema, television, advertising) is negotiated and well understood by both producer and audience, allowing for novelty, or even self-reflection, within the content while leaving extant power relations intact. It is easy to understand how this construction of surface relates to genre as a negotiated repetitious space. The action genre repeats sets of recognizable tropes negotiating a set of expectations in the viewer. We understand these parameters, we read them and they inform our choices well before the opening credits roll. Our enjoyment of a film can be defined in relation to how the film meets or deviates from these expectations. Sometimes we want deviation, challenge, and invention and sometimes our viewing pleasure is dependent on how much the film conforms to a set of parameters negotiated through marketing; or how much a film performs or repeats the tropes of its genre. In approaching gender as surface, do the genders become culturally less differentiated ? This question can be pursued through Point Break, where there is a convergenceofgenderrepresentations.Wereadsignsofmasculinityandfemininity across both male and female characters who physically are thrown into androgynous relief. We also clearly experience both heterosexual and homosocial tension. This gender equivalence might be read as critique of action cinema but I would argue instead that it responds to a changing understanding of demographics and taste...

Share