Ageing Masculinities and “Muscle work” in Hollywood Action Film

Abstract

In August 2010, the sixty-four-year-old Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone premiered his latest project The Expendables, an action-adventure film starring a pantheon of ''tough guys'' from both past and present: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Bruce Willis. To understand the resurrection of this vintage Hollywood cast, we take up the title theme of ''expendability'' within the climate of the economic recession of 2008 and map its representation of masculinity, physical labor, and ageing. We do this by looking at The Expendables as essentially a labor text. In doing so, we find a smorgasbord of working bodies and types of physical labor that reveal multiple intersections among discourses of masculinity, class, ageing, and race that simultaneously reflect the divisions of (physical) labor in the industries in which the stars work-Hollywood film and professional sports.

Declining to Decline: Aged Tough Guys in 'The Expendables' and 'The Expendables 2'

“…Except for Christmas and Hale Caesar, the team do not seem to have partners, families or, in fact, any friendships apart from the homosocial relationship to the other team members (Boyle and Brayton 2012). Hale Caesar's family ties are not elaborated while Christmas' rocky relationship is all the more a topic of discussion between Barney and Christmas.…”

“…The revival of tough guy action films in the 21 st century can be seen as a reaction to changes in the social construction of masculinity provoked by socio-historical events such as fear and insecurity after the 9/11 attacks on the WTC and the crisis of white collar male employees after the financial collapse in 2008 (Boyle and Brayton 2012, Lennard 2014, Donnar 2016b). On the surface, none of these films are a surprise at all.…”

“…Within this context, the 'Expendables' and their macho-masculinity must be seen as representatives of a dying out species in the imaginary world of the films as well as in the real world of the Hollywood film industry (Donnar 2016a, Treme andCraig 2013). As actors who rely on their hard-boiled bodies for employment, ageing and changes in the cultural understanding of masculinity threaten their professional careers in an industry which is obsessed with youth and highly dependent on sensing and following current cultural standards (Boyle andBrayton 2012, Chivers 2011). Having somehow exceeded their expiry date, these musclemen now perform and employ their masculinity, 'interpassively', in the service of and in place of (Pfaller 2003) the hegemonic group of men such as Church in the two films or film producers in the real world (Connell 2009, Pyke 1996.…”

“…Hollywood action films typically portray men as active while women are staged as passive subjects who need male protection and rescue (Tasker 2002(Tasker , 1993b. Although both films are typical examples for the revival of the tough-guy action films of the 80s (Boyle and Brayton 2012) and female characters are therefore a rare phenomenon, archetypically much younger than most male protagonists and very attractive (Lauzen 2015, Tasker 2012, when they appear they are predominantly neither passive nor weak. They follow in the footsteps of Ripley in Alien, Lara Croft or Sarah Connor in Terminator and are staged as resourceful, active and physically as well as mentally strong heroines whose muscularity and behaviour match and sometimes outperform their male counterparts' (Tasker 2002(Tasker , 1993b.…”

Requiem for a “Tough Guy”: Representing Hockey Labor, Violence and Masculinity in Goon

“…This is the context of postrecession America where the economic collapse of 2008 known as the Great Recession left in its wake mass unemployment and considerable unrest in the form of labor disputes across sectors from manufacturing and service industries to sports and Hollywood film. Most notable about the popular discourses that emerged from this economic disaster was how the crisis in unemployment became distinctly cast in terms of a crisis of masculinity (Boyle and Brayton 2012;Brayton, 2012). The general premise of this discourse is that maverick masculinity-purportedly unchanged for the past Century and at the core of which man is protector and provider-is under siege (Rosin, 2010).…”