ABSTRACT
The success of the muscular male hero, both in the cinema and as a wider cultural icon, has been read as signifying a variety of phenomena. The title of this chapter offers a choice between two polarised understandings of the muscular hero, whose over-developed and over-determined body has been taken by some to indicate the triumphal assertion of a traditional masculinity, defined through strength, whilst for others he represents an hysterical image, a symptom of the male body (and masculine identity) in crisis. Within both critical perspectives, the figure of the muscular male hero could be considered as a site for the re-inscription of difference. The appropriation of the image of the bodybuilder into a camp repertoire which itself problematises gendered identity, indicates the extent to which this figure can be decoded in a range of ways, is positioned between and across different understandings. The analysis offered in Chapters 4 and 5 of particular star images, and of the deployment of the bodybuilder as hero, reveals a complexity of signification at work in the action film, a complexity that mitigates against the understanding of the muscular hero as a simplistic embodiment of a reactionary masculine identity. Whether critics view the muscular male body on the screen as triumphal or crisis-ridden, he is generally taken to represent a ‘new’ man, functioning as a symptomatic figure who can be read as a sign of the times. The central question for many critics has, consequently, become one of whether such images reassert, mourn or hysterically state a lost male power. An ‘either/ or’ opposition has tended to frame critical discussion of images of mas-culinity. In thinking about the historical context from which these images of men emerge, as well as the extent to which they draw on and are part of discourses of class and race, it is more appropriate to frame an analysis in terms of ‘both/and’, a phrasing which allows for a discussion of the multiplicity and instability of meaning. Rather than understanding the muscular male hero as either a reassertion, or a parodie enactment of masculinist values, we can examine the ways in which he represents both, as well as being produced by the ongoing and unsteady relationship between these, and other, images of masculinity.
