ABSTRACT
Concluding his article about Tightrope, Ron Burnett says that it “reveals the burden of male fantasy as simultaneously blind, unmoving, empty, yet, as it were, the geographic site where change must begin” (84). His point agrees with the one I have just been making insofar as he recognizes that the film profers itself as an investigation of heterosexual male fantasies, and yet at the same time can emerge with only the most superficial and generic-that is to say, “blind, unmoving, empty”—ways of closing the books on the investigation. While indeed the film may lay out the problematic of a particular masculine sexual construction —and even suggest the need for that to be changed-it can work that terrain at best partially (in abrogating the investigation as it does) or at worst cynically (in replicating the titillating exhibition of the contents of the investigation).
