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=** A ‘Real Man’: The Masculinity of James Dean **= =& **Homoeroticism and Homophobia: The Consumption of '300'**=


 * // A ‘Real Man’: The Masculinity of James Dean //**

Analysis of James Dean and the discourse surrounding his masculinity pose two questions that relate to the subject of authenticity: Who was the ‘real man’ behind Dean’s star persona, and what kind of ‘real man’ was he in terms of the masculine codes of the 1950s? The observation that Dean embodied the alienated male and rebel hero, with whom confused adolescents could readily identify, is typical of critical evaluations of his persona. However, problematically, Dean’s cultural function as an actor, his premature death and his extraordinary fame have turned him into an enigma - and as such, assertions and conclusions about his masculinity and sexual identity are continually challenged and contested. Therefore, in seeking to analyse the historical production of Dean’s specific masculinity, there are three identities to consider:

a) the man himself: James Dean the human being, the person, the actor; b) the mythical persona: James Dean the Hollywood star - the image or ‘version’ of Dean constructed and marketed by studios and PR firms; and c) the quintessential role and character: Jim Stark, the character in //Rebel Without A Cause.//

Because these three ‘James Deans’ differ yet share overlapping qualities, Dean’s masculinity becomes subject to multiple readings of what and who he was, as agency and control over his image shift from the realm of production to reception, and the desires of narrators and readers come to determine and control the meaning of his life and gender identity. The following study provides an overview of Dean’s life and explains the historical context in which his gender identity was constructed, in order to understand Dean’s own masculinity, and how it challenged the masculine codes that prevailed in his era.




 * // A brief biography //**

Born 8 February 1931 in Marion, Indiana, Dean and his family moved to Santa Monica, California when he was a child. Dean was close to his mother until she died of cancer when Dean was nine years old, and he was sent back to Indiana to live on his aunt and uncle’s farm where he was raised as a Quaker. Being short, wearing glasses, and struggling with various issues, Dean was bullied and struggled to make friends, yet found success as an athlete and actor in high school. He returned to California after graduating to attend college, and landed his first acting job in a Pepsi commercial. From 1951 to 1954, Dean found bit parts in films, worked in over forty television shows, and landed his first leading role on Broadway, until 1954 when he was cast in //East of Eden//. In 1955 he filmed //Rebel Without A Cause// and //Giant//, both of which were released following his death in September that year. In 1955 and 1956 he was nominated post-humously for Academy Awards and in 1961 he was honoured with a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Since then his legacy has continued to grow through the proliferation of countless biographies, articles and memorabilia and he has become one of the most popular, iconographic figures of masculinity of the 20th century, as well as a key symbol of social change in the 1950s.


 * // Masculinity, Hegemony and Identity in the 1950s //**

While there was no single, coherent norm of masculinity in the 1950s, hegemony as a concept is useful for understanding the prevailing, dominant social norms of certain periods, including the mid 20th century. In the 1950s, traditional ideals and a heteronormative gender regime provided the environment to which Dean, through his career choices, public statements and sexual practices, was to rebel against and become symbolic as the antithesis of 1950s conformity.

However, the ‘crisis’ of masculinity had become a central preoccupation of the decade before Dean achieved success in the mid-1950s and he must be situated and contextualized in this setting. This was an era in which the notions of masculinity were already being revised, expanded and transformed. Both the literature of the early 1950s, including popular novels such as //Catcher in the Rye// and //East of Eden//, along with many television dramas about vulnerable boys corrupted by urban lifestyles and criminality (1), preceded the emergence of the ‘new generation’ of troubled young males who were sensitive, easily influenced and insecure about their identity.

While social commentators appear to have been complaining about the feminisation of culture and subsequent degeneration of society in every period of American history, 1950 was a significant year in that the United States census found that women were outnumbering men for the first time (2). The following decade became particularly notable as a time when sociologists and historians began to isolate masculinity as a subject for study and discuss notions of male selfhood, responsibility and identity in gendered terms (3). Writing in //Look// magazine toward the end of the decade in 1958, social commentator Arthur Schlesinger looked back and wondered:

‘What has happened to the American male? For a long time, he seemed utterly confident in his manhood, sure of his masculine role in society, easy and definite in his sense of sexual identity…Today men are more and more conscious of maleness not as a fact but as a problem…something has gone badly wrong with the American male’s perception of himself.’ (4)


 * // Masculinity and Relativity in the 1950s //**

Popular commentaries on Dean often linked him to this ‘crisis’ of American masculinity and compared him to his peers to make this point. In 1957, a writer for //New// //Republic// magazine analysed the appeal of two of the most prominent members of ‘The New Lost Generation’: Marlon Brando and James Dean. While sympathizing with Brando, observing that in his films and character ‘there is a right and a wrong’, the writer Sam Astrachan was scornful of the popularity of Dean’s offscreen and onscreen persona:

‘In each of the Dean roles, the distinguishing elements are the absence of his knowing who he is, and what is right and wrong. Dean is always mixed-up and it is this that has made him so susceptible to teen-age adulation….In James Dean, his movie roles, his life and death, there is a general lack of identity.’ (5)

As Mrinalini Sinha has noted in a study of the historiography of masculinity, and as evidenced by Astrachan’s comments on Dean and Brando, masculine identities are constructed in relationship to other men no less than to women (6). Dean can be understood in context as part of a group of young male actors, including Brando and Montgomery Clift, who achieved fame in the 1950s and represented the new archetype of the sensitive, troubled young man who challenged the traditional ideals of masculinity while maintaining an accessible star presence for heterosexual audiences. Dean did not invent this new, sensitive masculinity (after Clift came Brando, and after Brando came Dean) but he came to epitomise it. With his slight figure, small height and pretty face, Dean was neither a typical 1950s muscle-bound, beefcake matinee idol, nor did he share much in common with the masculinities of the leading men of previous decades, such as Humphrey Bogart, James Stewart or Cary Grant (who, while also often playing outsiders or tortured souls struggling with society or their own dark sides, generally expressed heteronormative masculinities). The social conflicts and challenges to dominant masculine codes of the 1950s are deftly illustrated by the differences between the portrayals of masculinity in Hollywood film: it must be noted that along with Dean, Clift and Brando, actors such as John Wayne, Gary Cooper and even Rock Hudson still projected a popular, traditionally masculine presence. Dean, however, represented the biggest challenge to the political and social order of the decade.




 * // Contingencies: The Cold War, the family, pathologised sexuality and the policing of sexual boundaries in the 1950s //**

Dean achieved stardom during a period when notions of citizenship and national character were being challenged and debated. National attention was focused particularly on the potential corruptibility of impressionable adolescent males, whose sense of morality was still in development, and thus susceptible to suggestion and conversion. In the political context of the Cold War, it was popularly believed that the Russians could destroy the United States not only by atomic attack but through internal subversion: the nation was on moral alert, and family stability was the antidote to these dangers. The stable family was characterised by the persistent moral influence of both parents in the home, as well as the strict division of gender roles. The social division between the dominant heterosexual majority and the subordinate homosexual minority was particularly extreme: homosexuality was pathologised and considered a threat to the integrity of the nuclear family as well as the nation as a whole. Amid the Cold War hysteria of the era, homosexuality revealed a weakness of character at a time when it was deemed crucial to maintain a ‘moral fibre’ strong enough to ward off corrupting external political influences such as communism. The personal was political – an individual’s sexual orientation could be determined, if not by their lack of conformity to the norms of male and female behaviour, then by their politics. (7)

Social, political and legal agencies regulated masculinity and sexuality in the name of national identity and patriotism. Homosexuality was included, along with other sexual ‘disorders’, in the first //Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders// published by the American Psychiatric Association in 1952, and this report was used to influence public policy decisions (8). Alfred Kinsey’s research in 1948 suggested that many American men had had homosexual experiences and that a surprising number of men were consistently attracted to other men (9). For many social authorities of the 1940s and 1950s, Alfred Kinsey’s research into the commonality of homosexuality, which aimed to legitimise male diversity, fed into the concern about the decline of masculinity.

Dean’s own homosexuality was thus central to the construction of his masculinity in the Cold War era. Studios held close control over the construction and circulation of accessibly heterosexual star images, and even after his death, his sexuality could only be hinted at. In //The James Dean Story//, Robert Altman’s studio-sanctioned documentary of 1957, a starlet named Arlene Sachs reveals, in apparently scripted dialogue, that when she told Dean she loved him, he said ‘You can’t love me, because I’m bad.’ (10) His supposed affair with starlet Pier Angeli, who supposedly broke his heart in 1954 when she married another man (but claimed before her suicide in 1971 that Dean was the only man she’d ever loved) was the most publicised of the ‘relationships’ the studios constructed. Whether this was to hide Dean’s alternative sexuality or was simply another arranged PR exercise for the studios’ young heterosexual stars – quite common in the era – is still debated today. Since Dean’s death, biographers and fans have devoted considerable time to determining the ‘truth’ of his sexuality. Grappling with ‘evidence’ that ranged from Dean’s sexual involvement with noted television and film producers to his reputed appearance in a pornographic film to the pleasure of having cigarettes extinguished on his flesh in S&M bars (11), commentators have repeatedly questioned whether Dean was gay. Conceding that Dean did have sex with gay men, some argued that he did so only for survival early in his career, others asserted his behaviour marked him as bisexual, while a third group has asserted that Dean was incontestably and exclusively gay:

‘Homosexuality was so far off the suburban radar that Jimmy Dean could give us all the visual clues, and we would see nothing. He could flirt outrageously with the camera, and get away with it….young men growing up different had no easy way of identifying what it was that troubled them.’ (12)



Accounts regarding Dean’s involvement in the military generally suggest he declared himself to be homosexual in order to avoid the draft for the Korean War (apparently later stating ‘No, I am not a homosexual. But, I’m also not going to go through life with one hand tied behind my back.’ (13 ) Ultimately, rather than asserting Dean’s sexuality, and reading this public denial of his own homosexuality as self-censorship, his relationships and the contrasting stories must be simply seen as part of the popular construct of his masculinity that fascinated and confounded audiences. His premature death and the subsequent, voluminous discourse surrounding his identity will enable him to continually emerge as a figure whose ambiguity and rebellion extend to the realm of sexuality.


 * // Masculinity and Criminality: Teenagers and ‘Juvenile Delinquents’ //**

In addition to homosexuality, the alienation, rebellion and criminality of youth emerged as a social problem of the 1950s. Configured as ‘juvenile delinquency’ this discourse arose from public concern over the presence of a teen culture that had been developing since World War II. The combination of population growth, and the rise of adolescents entering the workforce while still in school, created a trend of adolescent consumerism. These premature consumers also represented a threat to the heteronormative order and nuclear family structure because of their emerging financial independence from their parents. (14)

As with homosexuality, government committees designed to address juvenile delinquency gave national attention to the issue, and the juvenile delinquent was typically constructed as male. The problem of isolating, containing and defining the then ambiguous categories of both homosexuality and juvenile delinquency resulted in more widespread concern over their proliferation, and they were repeatedly described through the metaphors of infection and contagion - similar to descriptions of other phenomena in the 1950s that were characterised by an invasion from the outside. (15)

Hollywood’s exploitation of social problems and contemporary issues in the 1950s was a response to increasing demands for realism, and the representation of the delinquency problem appealed to both concerned parents and teenagers, who had become the largest audience for the movies. //Rebel Without A Cause// was the first film of many to explore the life of a teenage ‘delinquent’, emphasising the struggle of becoming an adult and a man, and the trials of conforming to gender expectations. While 24 years old when he played the character of Jim Stark, Dean came to exemplify this particular identity that rebels against the mainstream expectations for the American male. ‘What do you do when you have to be a man?’ he asks the father character (16). Off-screen, having lost both parents – his mother to cancer, and his father, who sent the nine year old Dean back to Indiana on a train with his dead mother’s body, and then later kicked him out again when Dean told him he was going to be an actor rather than attend business school, Dean was typically constructed as a ‘youth’, and a lost soul in search of parental figures. ‘It is hard to see how the quintessential boy-hero could have ever been allowed to grow up.’ (17)


 * // Masculinity and Strength //**

Dean is a paradox as his persona embodies conflicts and contradictions: for some, Dean represents eternal youthfulness, while for others, his very appeal was his maturity. ‘Dean was vulnerable and sensitive, but he never suggested youthfulness or callousness. On the contrary, he seemed older, sadder and more experienced than the adults in his films.’ (18) His appeal also lay in a combination of confidence and insecurity, and of strength and weakness. Both Dean and the characters he played represented, to many, a ‘real man’. In //Rebel Without A Cause//, Natalie Wood’s character Judy states that her ideal man would be someone ‘who doesn't run away when you want him…that's being strong.’ (19) Dean’s masculinity, immortalised on film, was accommodating in its vulnerability, rather than being overly imposing or threatening; Dean himself is said to have remarked, ‘only the gentle are ever really strong.’ (20)




 * // Key themes and conclusions //**

Due to studio propaganda, his insecure onscreen persona and his controversial personal life that lends itself to multiple readings, James Dean the man has become as fictional and mythological as the characters he played. Hollywood paints him as the rebel, the teenager, the lost soul, while gay biographies have claimed him as part of gay history. There are, however, certain undeniable qualities that have shaped the construction of Dean’s masculinity and enduring legacy.


 * Dean personified the restlessness of American youth in the 1950s and a specific type of masculinity that contrasted with previous generations. Through his portrayal of a rebellious, angry teenager, he became an important symbol for young people and outsiders who were struggling against the hegemonic order of the times.


 * Through his performances in mainstream Hollywood films, he challenged the ideals of appropriate gender behaviour by playing sensitive and sexually ambiguous characters such as Jim Stark in //Rebel Without A Cause//.
 * Along with several other upcoming actors, he challenged the practices of filmmaking with his improvisational style and dedication to ‘method’ acting, a technique emphasizing psychological realism and emotional authenticity.


 * In his personal struggles and search for masculine identity, he embodied the title role of his most famous film //Rebel Without A Cause//. Indeed, Dean personified the very notion of the ‘crisis of masculinity’ and his image accommodated ‘straight, gay, male and female subject positions, as many people within each of these categories perceived social pressures of conforming to assigned roles as constraints on individuality’. (21)

>
 * His personality and image conformed to some specific, normative ideals of masculinity such as ‘ruggedness’ and ‘toughness’ and as such was able to present the image of an accessible, heterosexual identity. Meanwhile, in the process of becoming a rich, powerful movie star, he simultaneously pursued an alternative sexuality, sleeping with gay men, and through the emergence of these stories his identity challenged the dominant morals and ideal of the ‘monogamous heterosexual relationship’ appropriate in the 1950s.

As such, in both his personal life and in the characters he played onscreen, Dean broadened the range of what constituted the dominant construction of socially acceptable masculinity at a specific historic moment. Regardless of whom he really was, his enduring legacy suggests that the appeal of the conflicts and contradictions invoked by his specific construct of masculinity transcend nationality, time, gender and sexual orientation. Ultimately, Dean’s personal struggles and his search for meaning and masculine identity illustrate that masculinity is not an essential ‘truth’ but a changing, ongoing performance, and a question of subjectivity. As Dean himself famously said:

“Being a good actor isn’t easy. Being a man is even harder.’ (22)



(1) Greer, G. (2005) ‘Mad about the boy’ in //The Guardian//, Saturday 14 May 2005 17.22 [] Retrieved 10 May, 2011.

(2) ‘Numerical predominance of women over men in the United States’ in //The Journal of the American Medical Association’// (1952) 150 (12):1222-1223 [] Retrieved 4 May, 2011.

(3) Gilbert, J. (2003) //Men in the middle: searching for masculinity in the 1950s//. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, p. 3

(4) Schlesinger, A. (1958) ‘The Crisis of American Masculinity’, //Look// magazine, in Cuordelione, K. A. //Manhood and American Political Culture in the Cold War.// New York: Routledge (2005)

(5) Astrachan, S. (1957) ‘The New Lost Generation’, //New Republic//, 4 February 1957, p. 17. in Hofstede, D. //James Dean: A Bio-Biography.// Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 1996

(6) Sinha, M. (1999) ‘Giving Masculinity a History: Some Contributions from the Historiography of Colonial India’, //Gender & History//, Vol. 11 No.3 November 1999, p. 450

(7) Corber, R. (1993) //National Security: Hitchcock,// //Homophobia and the Political Construction of Gender in Postwar America//. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 19-59

(8) Abelove, H. (1985) ‘Freud, male homosexuality, and the Americans’ in Abelove, H., Barale, M. and Halperin, D. (1993) //The lesbian and gay studies reader.// New York: Routledge, p. 381

(9) Kinsey, A. (1948). //Sexual behavior in the human male//. Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 1988

(10) Greer

(11) Anger, K. (1984) //Hollywood Babylon II//. London: Arrow Books, p. 127

(12) Greer

(13) Riese, R. (1991) //The Unabridged James Dean: His Life and Legacy from A to Z//, Chicago: Contemporary Books, Inc. p. 239 in ‘James Dean’ in //Wikipedia//. Retrieved 15 May, 2011, from []

(14) DeAngelis, M. (2001) //Gay Fandom and Crossover Stardom//. Duke University Press, p. 24

(15) Ibid, p. 26

(16) // Rebel Without A Cause // (1955) (video recording) London: Warner Home Video, 1992

(17) Greer

(18) Thomson, D. (2002) //The New Biographical Dictionary of Film//. Britain: Little, Brown, p. 212

(19) // Rebel Without A Cause // (1955) (video recording)

(20) Chandler, J. (2007) //James Dean: A Rebel With a Cause: a Fans Tribute.// United Kingdom: AuthorHouse, p. 38

(21) DeAngelis, p. 16

(22) Chandler, J. p. 38

= **Homoeroticism or Homophobia? The Consumption of '300'** =



The development of culture studies and its approach to rethinking the role of cultural products has provided a useful model for understanding popular cinema - such as the action-adventure film //300//, and Hollywood movies in general. As du Gay et al have suggested, any cultural product can be critically examined through the model of a ‘circuit of culture’ to reveal the process through which meaning is produced within a circuitous system of production, regulation, representation, identification and consumption (du Gay et al 3). Film theory (including auteur theory, genre theory, screen theory and psychoanalytical feminism) has traditionally examined the conditions of power within which popular culture operates, and the strategies producers use to assign meaning to products and reinforce specific values, beliefs and ideals within popular culture.

However, more recent approaches, including this study, focus on the agency of consumers, in order to understand how meaning is constructed and invested in texts through a more complex process. To view popular cultural products such as //300// as nothing more than a site for the reinforcement of dominant ideologies risks entirely disregarding the activities, identifications and desires of mass audiences, ignoring the polysemic nature of culture and erasing the agency consumers possess to resist, appropriate and subvert meanings when reading problematical texts such as genre films like //300//. Approaching the film from the viewpoint of consumers, as well as structuralist theorists, critical film theorists, popular culture theorists and the producers of the //300// phenomenon (writer Frank Miller, director Zack Snyder, and the production studio Warner Brothers), enables a more thorough and satisfying reading of the film, one that explains its popularity with diverse audiences in a more comprehensive manner.

Like most action films, //300’s// pleasures and politics have been dismissed as obvious. This is understandable: itis a successful US blockbuster that, as Louis Althusser might suggest, ‘hails’ or ‘interpellates’ a certain identity: primarily males aged from 15-30. Following the all-conquering success of the Hollywood epic //Gladiator// (2000) and the less victorious //Troy// (2004)and //Alexander// (2004), its profits were enormous, but most interestingly, its politics appear regressive and its intentions seem apparent (although, despite the rich history of the subject matter, the film has apparently little intentional subtext). //300//’s depiction of the Battle of Thermopylae has been described as a representation of ‘gay panic’, a fascist work of right wing, militaristic propaganda, ‘the most racially-charged film since Birth Of A Nation’ (Obasogie). It certainly appears to glorify war, combat, strength and masculinity, while insidiously disparaging women, homosexuals and Middle Eastern cultures (however this is nothing new, according to Jack G. Shaheen’s //Reel Bad Arabs: How Hollywood Vilifies A People// (Sheen 1-7.) Some critics have suggested that:

Hollywood films serve the interests of the ruling class by assisting in the maintenance of the status quo: they throw a sop to oppressed groups who, because they are unorganised and afraid to act, eagerly accept the genre film’s absurd solutions to economic and social conflicts (Hess Wright 41).

Althussar’s identification of the media as an ideological state apparatus that determines the identity and consciousness of subjects, and Roland Barthes’ suggestion that mythologies such as literature and film have the effect of ‘transform(ing) history into nature’, support this view, arguing that art insidiously naturalizes and universalizes myths which are in fact humanly contrived and historical (Althusser 50-51 and Barthes 39). This approach has been reinforced by other critics such as Andrew Williams who has suggested that Hollywood films are ‘contemporary myth’ which function as:

…the ritualisation of collective ideals, the celebration of temporarily resolved social and cultural conflicts, and the concealment of disturbing cultural conflicts behind the guise of entertainment (Williams 22).

Barthes’s work on representation and the symbolic, political and intentional message of art (Barthes 39), as well as Althussar’s theory of Ideological State Apparatuses (Althusser 50-51), are useful here for understanding and acknowledging the conditions of cultural production, the role that the author or producer may play in the production of a text’s meaning, and the accusations of propaganda and irresponsible filmmaking which //300// has been subjected to due to its troubling depiction of various subjects. The processes of representation and consumption are inescapably linked through the practice of identification, through which many consumers construct social identities that are influenced by the images and discourse of popular culture. Made by a country at war with the Middle East, many have seen //300// as a piece of right wing, militaristic US misinformation that distorts history and reinforces racist bourgeois ideology.[1] The film’s unflattering portrayal of Persians, Asians and other groups outraged both Iranian authorities, liberal Western commentators, as well as, interestingly enough, anti-semitic extremists who described it as neoconservative racial propaganda for an upcoming war on Islam, Arabs and Iran (the modern name of the ancient nation depicted in //300//: Persia), pointing to the Jewish heritage of the original and current heads of the Warner Brothers studio (Duke).

The //300// phenomenon (both Frank Miller’s original comic and Warner Brothers film) must also be understood as only the latest in a long line of diverse readings throughout history which have distorted, appropriated, understood or ‘read’ the culture of Sparta and the Battle of Thermopylae for specific agendas and purposes. Oscar Wilde cited the ‘Greek’ approach to sexuality in his defense of his homosexuality during his trial in 1895 (Wilde). Somewhat differently to Wilde’s use of the Greek legend, but similar to accusations leveled against //300//, Adolf Hitler’s writings similarly ‘Nordified’ Greek culture and glorified the militaristic culture and eugenic practices of Sparta. Meanwhile, European writers such as Lord Byron and John Stuart Mill, along with modern writers of the Reagan/Thatcher/Bush decades (1980’s ‘//Thermopylae: Battle For The West’//, 2006’s ‘//Thermopylae: The Battle That Changed The World’// and of course Frank Miller’s 1998 graphic comic) have all claimed Thermopylae as the birthplace of European civilization.[2]

The imagery and dialogue of the film has also been widely condemned by critics and gay audiences for its homophobic re-envisioning of events (Jenson). The well-established pederastic culture of Ancient Greece, particularly that of the Spartans, is ‘straightened out’ in //300//; the hero’s romantic relationship with his wife (though admittedly a ‘queen’, the wife is female) and the smirking, contemptuous characterisation of the Athenians as ‘boy-lovers’ quickly establishes King Leonidas’s and the film’s heterosexual credentials from the outset. In marked contrast to the tough, masculine image of the Spartans, the invading Persian king Xerxes is coded as stereotypically homosexual: an effeminate, shaved, pierced, bejeweled evil-doer who, in a deep but affected voice, orders the hero to ‘submit’ to the Persian empire. Director Zack Snyder has cheerfully admitted to using homosexuality as shorthand for ‘evil’: that the film’s sexual undertones were intended to make young straight males in the audience uncomfortable.[3] For gay audiences familiar with the history of sexuality in ancient civilizations,[4] the ‘straightening’ of the Spartans, the feminisation of the Xerxes[5] and the filmmakers’ cynicism and deliberate distortion of events and people for the sake of profit has been described as reprehensible (Jenson).

In his examination of masculinity, masochism and white male paranoia in the film //Gladiator//, Martin Fradley suggests that the Hollywood epic has long been interpreted in allegorical terms as an historical displacement of contemporaneous fears, desires and discourses. For Fradley, ‘spectacles of heroically suffering white men have perhaps become the key trope in recent Hollywood action cinema’, and in //300//, the melodramatic spectacle of white male suffering is similarly expressed through a masochistic aestheticisation of physical wounding and bodily punishment of the white male protagonist or victim, leading to a ‘process of regeneration and remasculinisation’ through which anxieties and paranoia about the disempowerment of the average white male in contemporary American culture and society are regulated and reassured (Fradley 242).[6]

However, while these critical approaches have merit, //300’//s popularity among gay, female and culturally diverse audiences, and the reality that genres such as ‘action-adventure’ alter over time, undergoing periods of popularity and demise, suggests that films do more than merely maintain the status quo or pacify audiences through the reinforcement of a specific, inherent ideology. As Stuart Hall and the work of culture studies theorists suggest, ‘culture is not so much a set of //things// – novels and paintings or TV programmes and comics – as a process, a set of //practices’// (Hall, 2) - and the significance and meaning of //300// or any cultural product lies not within the text or object itself, or the producer’s intentions, but //how// it is produced, represented, regulated, consumed, and identified with by audiences. Controversial and divisive films such as //300// possess the ability to fascinate and confound us by, as Schatz notes in his discussion of genre films, ‘playing it both ways’ (Schatz 35) – they both criticise and reinforce ideologies, often within the same narrative context, and must be analysed and understood within a cinematic as well as a political context: in many cultural products, especially in the language of the action film, form and spectacle are as important as content and narrative; indeed, form can be understood as the content itself.

It is Barthes’ and Michel Foucault’s work on narrative, consumption and the ‘death of the author’ that have an essential bearing on this issue of how meaning is produced within popular culture (Barthes 142-145 and Foucault 108-109). The extraordinary variety of responses to //300// demonstrate the problems with the intentionalist approach to theories of representation or authorship/auteur theory, which, while proving its usefulness in establishing film’s importance as a form of individual expression and legitimising cinema as a serious art form, ignores the relationship between audiences and texts, which is crucial to the issue of how meaning is shaped and determined. This is particularly well demonstrated by the producers of popular and controversial cultural products who claim that their creations have ‘no meaning’ as 300’s director Zack Snyder has suggested, revealing that the author of a text is often the least useful source to interrogate when attempting to understand an artwork’s significance and popularity. [7]

//300// has, in fact, been widely celebrated by homosexual viewers for its ‘homoerotic’ visuals and subject matter. [8] Since the development of psychoanalytical screen theory, particularly Laura Mulvey’s seminal work on the dominance of the ‘male gaze’ (Mulvey 746-757), cultural theorists have been reassessing the process of spectatorship and consumption in popular culture. In contrast to Mulvey and Fradley’s understanding of the process of viewer identification, in her analysis of the success of the muscular male hero in Hollywood film since the 1980s, Yvonne Tasker suggests that ‘the meanings of the different bodies displayed, paraded and commodified in contemporary action cinema are complex, and far from being the transparent signifiers of a simplistic sexual and racial hierarchy that some critics take them to be’ (Tasker 165). Janice Radway’s seminal study of reader responses to romance novels has also explored the way that consumers construct meanings that resonate personally with them (Radway 14).

That gay men have applauded 300 suggests that, while one throwaway line about ‘boy-lovers’ and the effeminate characterisation of Xerxes can satisfy mainstream audiences that they are not watching an gay movie of ‘epic’ proportions, many homosexual viewers are perfectly happy to negotiate their way through popular culture and take the good with the bad, reading between the lines and celebrating homosocial behaviour and displays of male flesh as gay-coded, or knowingly appreciating the disallowed and unspoken but perhaps unconscious desire of mainstream filmmakers and society in general to enjoy the pleasures of looking at men as sexually desirable subjects. Judith Butler’s work on the permeability of the body suggests that the meaning of subjects on the screen is not secure, but shifting, inscribed with value in different ways at different points (Butler 139). In this sense, //300// and itsreputation as a mindless piece of racist, homophobic war propaganda that reassures straight white males, existing alongside itsreconstruction as an object of camp derision/celebration for gay men and culturally diverse audiences,both ‘affirms gendered identities at the same time as it mobilises identifications and desires that undermine the stability of such categories’ (Tasker 5).[9]

Finally, the following variety of responses to //300// demonstrate that the approach of cultural studies to film theory (in particular that of Hall and the work emerging from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies at the University of Birmingham in the 1970s) perhaps currently provides the most satisfying account of the relationship between audiences and narratives: it recognises the profound investment that consumers have in certain texts without disregarding the conditions of power within which popular culture operates. While it must be noted that these respondent’s accounts cannot be regarded as giving transparent, unmediated access to their opinions and responses must be treated as ‘texts’ themselves - as Ien Ang has noted when examining how viewers interpret soap operas such as //Dallas// (Ang 30), general patterns about film consumption can be derived from comments as diverse as ‘it reminded me of gay porn’ and ‘I didn’t see any gay references in it’, as well as ‘this movies (sic) is fuckin bad ass! i (sic) defines brutality I have never wanted to beat someones (sic) ass so bad after I saw this shit!’, and of course, ‘it’s just a movie’ (Newitz). Indeed, as queer screen theorist Richard Dyer suggests, at times, entertainment can be, for both critical and uncritical viewers, simply that – only entertainment. Dyer acknowledges that there is real pleasure to be had from material that is ideologically irresponsible (Dyer 2).

Despite the director and Warner Brother’s attempts to downplay and disown responsibility for the ideology of //300//, [10] this immense variety of extreme responses to the film reveal the important role that cultural products play in shaping identities, reinforcing ideologies and affecting discourse. Movies are powerful and important: it is through discourse, knowledge, art, the media and all cultural products, that consumers develop ideologies that shape and regulate their identities and give meaning to life. Filmmakers, like everyone, have a responsibility not to incite hatred, as cultural products can communicate ideological messages to consumers, whether intentionally or not - and propaganda never announces itself.

However, the popular approach of film criticism that seeks to define ideology, judge popular culture by the standards of ‘more responsible’ high culture, limit and regulate the power of consumers to engage with texts critically and creatively, and denounce, resolve and transcend products as ‘dumb’, can be unhelpful. Comments from the producers and consumers of //300// suggest that like many films, //300// successfully ‘plays it both ways.’ Understanding, forgiveness, appreciating context, and selective, critical response and consumption can be more helpful for truly understanding the process through which meaning is created within popular culture.


 * Works Cited**

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[1] The author Frank Miller’s well-publicised, stereotypical comments on Middle Eastern culture exemplify this troubling aspect of //300//’s racial politics: ‘It seems to me quite obvious that our country and the entire Western World is up against an existential foe that knows exactly what it wants … and we’re behaving like a collapsing empire…For some reason, nobody seems to be talking about who we’re up against, and the sixth century barbarism that they actually represent. These people saw people’s heads off. They enslave women, they genetically [sic] mutilate their daughters, they do not behave by any cultural norms that are sensible to us. I’m speaking into a microphone that never could have been a product of their culture, and I’m living in a city where three thousand of my neighbors were killed by thieves of airplanes they never could have built.’ (Borden) [2] Or, as the rest of the world saw it, suggests Hamid Dabashi, a predatory form of colonisation: ‘The more European imperialism, it seems, was modeling itself on what it called the Persian Empire, the more it claimed the embattled heritage of a tiny archipelago it misappropriated as its point of civilisational origin.’ (Dabashi) <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">[3] ‘What’s more scary to a 20-year-old boy than a giant god-king who wants to have his way with you? Some people have said to me, “Your movie is homoerotic,” and some have said, “Your movie’s homophobic.” In my mind, the movie is neither. But I don’t have a problem with people interpreting it the way they’d like to. As long as they buy tickets first’ (Snyder). <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">[4] In particular, the 300 Sacred Band of Thebes - a troop of picked soldiers, consisting of 150 age-structured male couples, which formed the elite force of the Theban army in the 4th century BC – while a different ‘300’ to the Spartans of Thermopalyae, the number is synonymous with Greek homosexual warriors. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">[5] By all other accounts, especially portrayals in Greek artifacts – vases, murals, reliefs - the real Xerxes had a beard and resembled Gerard Butler, the actor playing Leonidas, more than any other figure in the film. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">[6] Unlike the occasional recent film such as ‘Fight Club’ which has more critically addressed the popular anxiety over the state of masculinity, the aesthetics, narratives and rhetorical strategies of action-adventure films such as //300// displace this social trauma and the threats of femininity, ethnic/foreign identities, black masculinity and male homosexuality into fictional melodrama, where they can be safely addressed and regulated. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">[7] "The bad reviews are so fun. Stuff they say, like, 'Zack Snyder has made homoeroticism safe for homophobes,' is priceless. As soon as I hear 'neocon' or 'homophobic' in the review, I laugh to myself and say, 'OK, this person has lost their inner child somewhere along the way, too much time in film school' " (Snyder, MTV interview) and ‘300 director Zack Snyder says he feels no resentment towards the critics who pummeled his movie. "Nah, I love 'em, they were funny," he told Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick Goldstein in today's (Tuesday) edition. "The reviews were so neo-con, so homophobic. They couldn't just go see the movie without trying to over-intellectualize it"’ (Snyder, Contact Music interview). <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">[8] The film does consist of two hours of mostly naked, hairless, oiled, bulging muscle men obsessed with the ‘thrusting of swords’, ‘hardness’, and affectionate camaraderie between big strong men, not to mention the overarching storyline of ‘driving’ the Persians into a long, tight crack known as the ‘Hot Gates’ where the ‘hard’ Spartans will get ‘em, leading some commentators to suggest that the movie’s tagline should have been ‘Prepare for gloryholes’ rather than ‘Prepare for glory’ (Newitz). <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">[9] Furthermore, the confusion over 300’s alleged homophobia or unintended homoeroticism is complicated by attempts to, again, analyse the intentions of the author. In ‘The Dark Knight Returns’, 300’s author Frank Miller mentions a gay porn star named ‘Hot Gates’, and Miller has also written a sympathetic gay character in ‘Robophobe’. Discourse around director Zack Snyder’s own sexuality and Jewish heritage have also influenced responses to the film. These factors make it difficult to dismiss these producers of the //300// phenomenon as intentionally homophobic or unaware of any homoerotic connotations in their products. <span style="font-family: 'Times New Roman','serif'; font-size: 13.3333px;">[10] Following the film’s reception, Warner Bros. was reportedly forced to release a statement: ‘The film //300// is a work of fiction inspired by the Frank Miller graphic novel and loosely based on a historical event. The studio developed this film purely as a fictional work with the sole purpose of entertaining audiences; it is not meant to disparage an ethnicity or culture or make any sort of political statement.’ (Leupp)