| This project examines the action movie genre through the interrelated aspects of city space, technology, and masculinity. I use popular and critical discourses, production contexts, and textual analysis to argue that it is the urban action cinema of the 21st century that most vividly affirms the cultural masculinization of technology as an ongoing process, reflecting social, spatial, and racial power relations on and off the movie screen. I trace the ways in which the action movie franchise reflects the speed and spectacle of the contemporary global city through a shared mediascape of digital display, industrial/economic strategies, and in the masculine geographies of spatial and technological mastery. This signals the mapping of urban space by the action protagonist (and by the male filmmaker), which I discuss through optical mechanisms such as cellspace technologies, data/text/graphics, and through the simulated computer screen embedded inside the cinematic frame. The vision and motion inherent to transportation and communication networks is part of this perspective and helps me explore the reification of, and potential resistance to, the cultural dominance of white masculinity in both globalization and in the action movie genre. By focusing on the action characters aligned against central power structures, especially the corporate, commercial, medical, media, and military articulations of command-and-control infrastructures, I explicate multi-raced/gendered contemporary action bodies. In motion on city streets, these figures deploy power relations through looking, so I examine the aesthetic and narrative of the surveillance screen as it captures the action genre city, specifically through heavily mediated chase and pursuit scenarios. These bring together media and architecture in a mobile, transnational urban imaginary, made visible through hypermediation as hypermasculinity in the tactile digital action of the Los Angeles-based Crank films where production, text, and author intersect in the accelerated metropolis. This dissertation examines the following films and franchises: Bourne, Mission: Impossible, Bad Boys, The Fast and the Furious, Gamer, Equilibrium, I, Robot, Resident Evil, District 9, Live Free or Die Hard, Enemy of the State, Eagle Eye, and Crank.. |
