Valorised masculinity is young and white, slim and trim. e.g. Brad Pitt.
Clooney, alternatively is the suited hero. Never appearing bare chested. Today’s standards of male beauty are pumped up pecs. Clooney harks back to an earlier era. His sexuality comes across in his mystery.
Fight club. Is an important film in the study of masculine ideals.
Oceans eleven. Contrast between Danny as together, old school sophisticated Hollywood type, respectable, and Rusty; ruffled, vulnerable, a little trashy. However, Rusty is seen as without artifice. He is somewhat safer and more approachable in this sense.
The Gangster style dress is too perfect. Suits represent menace, not like suave promise of the pleasure of hidden physicality. Oceans was very popular with 18-24 year old male. Used by fashion mags to attract young male consumer.
The suit- sheaths and conceals. Renders the body inaccessible. But since ‘60s, womens bodies have been ‘accessible.’ No protective undergarments+ a lot of flesh exposure.
Post ‘80s, male body available. Buff male torso Calvin Klein. Object of commodification and emulation. Makes men consume things which will make them buff- gym. Rough image, like Pitt in oceans, makes male body accessible. Tousled hair, stubble. Jeans- buttocks, shirt-biceps, pecs. Shirt- chest. Tousled hair hints at body hair beneath. Rough star gets naked, but suited star shows physicality through hands, arms, sometimes topless. Rough seems more blue collar.
Suits used to represent a man of leisure or wealth. Pop culture and entertainment media shape leisure wear, more than class differences.
1950s opposition to classic Hollywood man was Marlon Brando, James Dean, Montgomery Clift. Adopted working class dress. Agricultural influence.
Flugel’s great male renunciation. End of 18th C men relinquished fashionable dress, to women.
Because the suit is so contolled, it is sexy.
Youth Cultures. 1960s changed male representation. More macho and cool than Dean, less sulky and antagonistic than Brando. New man: Steve mcqueen.
The Thomas crown affair. 1968. Exchanges chic clothes for sports clothes.
Brad in Thelma and Lousie- homospectorial gaze.
A river runs through it. 1992.
Se7en. 1995. Fight club. Pro anticonsumerism yet thrift shop chic spectacle. Mutilated body, yet still attractive. Snatch 2000.
Clooney. one fine day 1996. The peacemaker, the thin red line. Three kings, out of sight. Parodies: O brother where art thou? Intolerable cruelty. Old fashioned charm and sexuality. Tried to do blue collar roles, including Welcome to Collinwood, The perfect storm.
Suave V rugged in media. Two archetypes. Why?
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