Action and Adventure Films

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES: NATION,GENDER, AND RACE

While westerns, war, and gangster films have long generated critical interest, action per se began to receive sustained critical attention in the wake of its commercial pre-eminence during the 1980s. Two early 1990s studies of American action films have been particularly influential, Susan Jeffords's Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era (1993) and Yvonne Tasker's Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema (1993). Both Jeffords and Tasker foreground questions of gender and politics, drawing attention to the genre's importance as a space for the elaboration of new formations of masculinity. Jeffords's analysis situates the muscular action stars of the 1980s against the contemporary neo-conservative context, suggesting a rhetorical association between the white, male "hard body" and the nation itself. Tasker frames the gender politics of 1980s action in related gender terms, emphasizing the class and racial dimensions of the genre. In line with the emphasis on action as a genre staging masculinity, several scholars in Steve Cohan and Ina Rae Hark's 1993 collection Screening the Male: Exploring Masculinities in Hollywood Cinema engage with action cinema, foregrounding the (barely) latent homoeroticism of the 1980s buddy movie in particular.

While action cinema has been much discussed in relation to its presentation of masculinity and male heroism, critics have also emphasized the long-standing role of women within both Hollywood and Hong Kong action cinemas. Tasker's analysis of the action heroine's physicality in terms of "musculinity" serves to foreground the performative dimensions of gender with respect to the buff female figures, like Sigourney Weaver in the Alien series and Linda Hamilton in Terminator 2 (1991), who attracted the attention of feminist critics throughout the 1990s. Although women had long played supporting roles in action and adventure films, and had taken more central roles during the 1980s, toward the end of the 1990s Hollywood cinema began to foreground (or return to the fore) a glamorous, sexualized action heroine in such titles as Charlie's Angels , Lara Croft: Tomb Raider (2001), and X-Men (2000). The toned bodies of these film's female stars—Angelina Jolie, Halle Berry, Cameron Diaz—were markedly different from the more muscular or androgynous incarnations of the action heroine of the previous decade. Just as writers engaged with the tough male heroism of contemporary male action stars consider these images to have a wider cultural significance, feminist writers have been keen to map evolving ideas about women and gender through a discussion of action women. The central contradiction, critics have repeatedly stated, consists of the obviously—for some, excessively—sexualized filming of the female body, on the one hand, and the potentially empowering images of female physical confidence and strength on the other.

As this difference of perceptions perhaps suggests, while marketing copy writers and reviewers might frequently refer to adventure films as "timeless," film scholars have demonstrated the historical and cultural specificity of such fantasy scenarios. Action and adventure films clearly develop over time, engaging with and responding to contemporary themes and concerns in a manner that is sometimes fairly straightforward and at other times more complex. Thus, for example, crime thrillers and cop and gangster films articulate perspectives on law and order, registering the social and ethnic upheavals of the 1970s. Yet while commonplace, it is somewhat reductive to read the vigilante or rogue cop cycles of the 1970s in the context of social upheaval. The muscular cinema and stars of the 1980s have been read as fantasized responses to the defeat of American forces in Vietnam. Similarly, such sprawling war films of the late 1970s as Apocalypse Now (1979) and The Deer Hunter (1978), which began to engage that conflict as a problematic aspect of US history, have been seen to register a cultural uncertainty about US involvement in the region.

Because action focuses on conflict, it is centrally concerned with defining heroism and presenting violence as just in some instances, unjust in others. As such, action and adventure narratives enact scenarios of social power at a variety of registers, whether as a response to oppression, a celebration of empire and conquest, or more generalized images of physical freedom from the restraints of culture (the hero as a commanding figure within a natural landscape, for instance). Yet violence and movement more generally are also presented as sources of formal pleasure within action cinema. Thus while it is important to place action and adventure narratives in their social and historical contexts, it is also necessary to understand their centrality as sites of pure cinematic spectacle.