ABSTRACT
TH E T E R M ‘ A C T I O N - A D V E N T U R E ’ is nowadays mainly used todescribe what was perceived in the 1980s and 1990s to be a new and dominant trend in Hollywood’s output, a trend exemplified by the Alien films (1979, 1986, 1993), the Indiana Jones films (1981, 1984, 1993), the Rambo films (1982, 1985, 1988), the Die Hard films (1988, 1990, 1995) and the Terminator films (1984, 1991), as well as by films like Total Recall (1990), Point Break (1991), The Last of the Mohicans (1992) and Braveheart (1995). This trend encompasses a range of films and genres – from swashbucklers to science fiction films, from thrillers to westerns to war films – and is thus a clear instance of Hollywood’s propensity for generic hybridity and overlap. The term ‘action-adventure’ has been used, though, to pinpoint a number of obvious characteristics common to these genres and films: a propensity for spectacular physical action, a narrative structure involving fights, chases and explosions, and in addition to the deployment of state-of-the-art special effects, an emphasis in performance on athletic feats and stunts. The hyperbolic nature of this emphasis has often been accompanied by an emphasis on the ‘hyperbolic bodies’ and physical skills of the stars involved: Arnold Schwarzenegger, Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis, Brigitte Nielson, Linda Hamilton and others. It is thus not surprising that the two major books published to date on these films – Hard Bodies: Hollywood Masculinity in the Reagan Era by Jeffords1 and Spectacular Bodies: Gender, Genre and the Action Cinema by Tasker2 – both focus on the ideological implications of this emphasis and both contain the word ‘bodies’ in their titles.
