-
Adapting Men to New Times? Engagements with Masculinism in John Howe’s Why Rock the Boat?
- University of Ottawa Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
Elspeth Tulloch 277 Adapting Men to New Times? Engagements with Masculinism in John Howe’s Why Rock the Boat? Elspeth Tulloch English-language versions of Canada’s “cinema of male crisis,” as critics such as Thomas Waugh term it, were initially understood by evoking the largely unspoken but debilitating psycho-social effects on men of Canada’s colonial relations with Britain or its neo-colonial relations with the United States and linking these effects to the expression of crises in Canadian national identity in the male creative imagination.1 Roundly criticized for their over-simplification , these interpretations were later rethought or extended in terms of either Central Canada’s or English Canada’s marginalization or exploitation of other regions, notably the Maritimes or Quebec (Ramsay; Parpart).2 Critics remain divided, however, in how to tackle this cinematic concern. Waugh has criticized the initial analytical projects for “aligning [the] … heterocentric cinema of male crisis with a monolithically framed conception of national identity formation” (1999, 22) and has called for a “bracket[ing of] the national-sexual that has prematurely and problematically been the animus of Canadian film studies” (1999, 22). Critics like Lee Parpart, however, have continued to find notions of the colonial useful when attempting to account for the negative representations of heterosexual male figures, especially when refined with concepts like “internal colonialism” (Parpart 67). In calling for the study of a queered corpus when investigating the cinema of male crisis, Waugh posited the core problematic as a “crisis in homosociality” (1999, 41), à la Sedgwick.3 He also reminded scholars not to ignore, when interpreting cinematic versions of that crisis, something one would think obvious: the crucial part that the Sexual Revolution played in “the modernization of our cinemas, the eruption of the social and cultural infrastructures of the sex-gender system, [and] the crumbling of the continuum of homosociality” (Waugh 1999, 37). The tendency up until Waugh’s work had been to rethink the symbolic meaning of the purported crisis in terms of factors such as class and region. I see, however, cases in which a film’s thematic treatment warrants taking into account three factors: colonial, or vestiges of colonial, relations (although Engagements with Masculinism 278 not necessarily within the typical strong to weak paradigm); ambiguous expressions of homosociality; and the disruptive effects of the Sexual Revolution , in particular the loosening of sexual mores, the movement of women into the labour force and the rise of feminism. Attention to this constellation of social forces will help tease out the varieties of masculinisms I read in my present study of the film adaptation Why Rock the Boat? The narrative manifests, at best, an ambiguously or tentatively transforming masculinism expressed through the quest for authentic male-female love relations and, at worst, an exploitative form of masculinism. The latter is perpetuated in the film through male mentoring friendships focused on imparting how to manipulate and conquer the woman in male-female relations, all in the name of harmless romantic fun. This heterosexual focus ultimately scuttles any possibility of the main male characters’ consummating what may be latent expressions of male-to-male desire. In short, aspects of masculinism are both questioned and maintained in the film. I am using masculinism as Arthur Brittan defines it, as an “ideology that justifies and naturalizes male domination. As such it is the ideology of patriarchy …. [I]t takes it for granted that there is a fundamental difference between men and women, … assumes that heterosexuality is normal, … accepts without question the sexual division of labour, and … sanctions the political and dominant role of men in the public and private spheres” (4). Thus, more comprehensively than Waugh, who, drawing on Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, contends that the “cinemas of male crisis … , overwhelmingly male-authored, are overwhelmingly not so much about relations of men and women—though images of women may often be at the centre of their iconography—but about relations of men and men, about the patriarchy” (1999, 38), I will argue that they can be about both. Indeed, I would emphasize that one cannot understand patriarchy in feminist terms without careful and concomitant attention to the placement of women within the power structure, an aim in keeping with Sedgwick’s concerns. Certainly, in the texts chosen for this particular case study, these relations are inextricably interacting, even intermeshed. The advancement of the plots in both the selected novel and its film adaptation depends, in part, on a homosocial alliance or, more precisely, a capitalist...