ABSTRACT
The point that I have been wanting to make here is that action movie narratives, as those of Eastwood illustrate, tend to represent for the viewer a kind of masochistic trial of masculinity and its body-the kind of narrative that Nina Baym (1985) has described as “melodramas of beset masculinity.” But this masochistic testing is perhaps most accurately seen as a kind of preening display attendant upon the narrative impulsion toward a different kind of state: a state where the body has in fact disappeared, and the masculine insolence of objectification and display in the masochistic scenario has been renounced. The renunciation is in the service of a conventional and verisimilitudinous morality At the same time, the passage of the body through that process of eroticization, testing, and final hypostasis is not seamless; that is, at the edges, as it were, of this dialectic there remain hysterical residues-marks and memories of the intuition that this masculine process is in a sense out of control.
