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David Greven University of Texas Press, Austin, 2009, 297pp., paper, $20.10 (purchased from publisher's website), ISBN 978-0292725645; cloth, $36.85 (purchased from publisher's website), ISBN 978-0292719873
The final lines of David Greven's Manhood in Hollywood from Bush to Bush reveal much about the book's aspirations:
Flying into the sunlight, Superman [in Bryan Singer's 2006 film Superman Returns] soaks up the rays, revivifying and restoring himself, embodying the Life Drive as he recalls the beautiful, youthful classical God Apollo, whose beauty is lit by the sun. Images like these live beyond the reactionary patterns of conventional Hollywood film and inspire fresh hopes in the ever-desiring viewer. (p. 245)
It comes as something of a surprise at this late point that Greven finds conventional Hollywood films on the whole “reactionary,” because each of the films he treats in detail emerges as at least ambiguous, if not positively advanced ideologically. These include Casualties of War, Silence of the Lambs, Fight Club, The Passion of the Christ, and Brokeback Mountain – not everyone's idea of the most progressive fare American movies had to offer from 1988 to 2006. Less surprising is that the image in question – from a minor film that Greven declares “flawed but glorious” – is said to “inspire fresh hopes for the ever-desiring viewer.” Greven's book recounts how, in the field of film studies, masochism became a dominant paradigm for envisioning radical possibilities of film texts and spectatorship. Arguing that masochism has been turned to the uses of patriarchy, Greven prefers the model of narcissism, and he makes the case for this counternarrative in a series of imaginative