Out of adjustment: Forging masculinities at the intersection of postwar American drama and film

Drama and film provide an especially clear picture of the ways in which previous sets of masculinities are displaced, transformed, and exchanged in the postwar period. Using a cultural studies approach, the focus here is limited to performance texts in an effort to explain how masculinities evolved on the American stage and screen, but also to theorize how drama and film intersect. The five chapters of this dissertation, which cover a broad range of interrelated social, economic, and political history, locate their arguments in gender, intertextual, and historical materialist theory. Beginning with the cultural debates in the postwar 1940s about the meaning of the war and the conflicting sets of masculinities informed by them, the first chapter examines how these arguments constructed male reassimilation, particularly in terms of race and gender. With a specific focus on the figure of the returning veteran, this chapter looks at plays by Arthur Miller, Arnaud d'Usseau and James Gow, Robert Ardrey, Maxine Wood, Elsa Shelley, and Arthur Laurents, as well as several Hollywood movies and government public service films. In the context of labor issues, HUAC, and the Blacklistings, chapter two interrogates the marketplace limitations for critiques of capital in American film noir and how these limits were policed and also resisted within the strictures of masculinity. Focusing on the 1970s to the present, chapter three argues for a materialist foundation for the reemergence of the film noir aesthetic, as it examines the neo-noir strategies in the construction of masculinities in the plays and films of David Mamet in post-Boom America. Chapter four examines the renaissance of classic Hollywood Westerns: the postwar 1940s to the 1960s. With the Cold War as its frame and ranging from the Marlboro Man to President Kennedy's New Frontierism, this cultural analysis looks at the shift from film to television as the dominant medium for the frontier myth, which parallels the commercialization and politicization of the figure of the cowboy. Chapter five theorizes an intertextual relationship between the postwar Hollywood Western, the Frontier Myth, and the plays and film work of Sam Shepard in terms of how the cowboy, perhaps the most distinctively American masculine icon, evolves from the 1960s to the present. As the chapters on Shepard and Mamet suggest, one aim of this project is to show the unusually powerful effect postwar drama and film exerted not only in the 1940s and 50s, but also on our present senses of masculinity.