The Dysmorphic Masculine Body of Hollywood: Tarzan, Rocky, and Creed

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes1 See Michael Rogin. 1996. Blackface, White Noise: Jewish Immigrants in the Hollywood Melting Pot; Richard Dyer. Citation1997. White; Daniel Bernardi. Citation1996. Ed. Race and the Emergence of U.S. Cinema; Bernardi Citation2001. Ed. Classic Hollywood Classic Whiteness.2 See James Baldwin. Citation1975. The Devil Finds Work; bell hooks.1996. Reel to Real. Race, class and sex at the movies; Cedric J. Robinson. 2007. Forgeries of Memory & Meaning: Blacks & The Regime of Race in American Theater & Film Before World War II; Ellen C. Scott. 2015. Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era3 The Devil Finds Work 1975, 41.4 See Donald Bogle’s extensive study of minstrelsy stereotypes informing the representation of Black characters in Hollywood: Toms, Coons, Mulattoes, Mammies, & Bucks: An Interpretive History of Blacks in American Films.5 See Susan Courtney’s discussion of Jack Johnson’s prize fights and their public reception as well as the ensuing censorship of them in 1912 ending their national dissemination, particularly chapter 2 “The Mixed Birth of ‘Great White’ Masculinity and the Classical Spectator” (Hollywood Fantasies 2004, 30-61).6 Johnny Weissmuller came on the scene as a white swimming miracle, beating the Native Hawaiian Duke Kahanamoku, the reigning Olympic champion, at the 1924 summer Olympics in Paris. Kahanamoku, known as the father of modern surfing, had dominated the swimming sport, not unlike Jack Johnson in boxing, since 1912. After ending his swimming career, he also went into the film industry and played minor stereotyped roles, most notably in Wake of the Red Witch (1948), starring as the head of a Polynesian tribe alongside John Wayne. Unlike Weissmuller, he was never given a lead role in line with Hollywood’s racially divided casting practices.7 See my essay “The South Pacific as the Final Frontier: Hollywood’s South Seas Fantasies, the Beachcomber, and Militarization,” 13-25. Cinematic Settlers: The Settler Colonial World in Film. Eds. Janne Lahti and Rebecca Weaver-Hightower. 2020. The beachcomber, as I maintain, is an expression of a civilizational drop-out indulging in a fantasy of South Seas escapism. The 1930s also gives birth to the Charlie Chan series with its attempt, not unlike Tarzan’s dominance of Africa, to subsume Asia and Asian Americans under the imperial hegemony of the US. While it may give increased voice to its Asian detective mostly uncovering white crimes, it also contains his work in Western fantasies of Orientalism. Earl Derr Biggers, similar to Edgar Burroughs, invented a new way of seeing Asia as both exemplary and subservient to Western interests. See my discussion of the conflicted race and global mapping in the Chan series and its articulation of an Asian action body, “Yellowface, Minstrelsy, and Hollywood Happy Endings: The Black Camel (1931), Charlie Chan in Egypt (1935) and Charlie Chan at the Olympics (1937),”84-103. Delia Malia Konzett. Citation2020. Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity.8 See Ryan Jay Freedman’s Hollywood’s African American Films: The Transition to Sound. Citation2011. This study offers an extensive discussion of studio initiatives to incorporate African American themes and actors in the new sound era. See also Freedman’s “By Herself: Intersectionality, African American Specialty Performers and Eleanor Powell,” in Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity, 122-140. Ed. Delia Malia Konzett. 2020. This chapter illustrates the practice of African American stand-alone specialty performances that could be cut in Southern theaters without any compromise to the film’s narrative.9 Ellen C. Scott, for example, mentions how New York state censors did tone down “one scene of Black-white racial conflict,” (89) namely the noise of white people being strangled by natives in W.S. Van Dyke racial adventure film Trader Horn (1931), preceding his Tarzan the Ape Man (1932). Cinema Civil Rights: Regulation, Repression, and Race in the Classical Hollywood Era. 2015. No such efforts were made to censor the sounds of natives dying violent deaths in the Tarzan series.10 See Ellen C. Scott’s discussion of Charlotte Crump’s NAACP protest against this film and its blatant violation of OWI guidelines in Cinema Civil Rights, 165.11 The trope of recuperating or reterritorializing white masculinity “in response to the white men’s perceived loss of authority” can still be found in contemporary popular culture according Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker (Negra and Tasker Citation2019, 111). While inflected with some diversity, recent culinary shows, they claim, tend to be white male centric (e.g. Chef by Jon Favreau or current TV series like Diners or Drive-Ins and Dives) with food truck culture and road trips evoking the white rugged masculinity of the pioneer days.12 See Krin Gabbard’s “Marlon Brando’s Jazz Acting and the Obsolescence of Blackface,”19-50. Black Magic: White Hollywood and African American Culture. Citation2002. Gabbard makes the compelling argument that Brando’s acting style is heavily indebted to the African American hipster of the 1950s. “White Americans,” Gabbard notes, “especially when they are from the working class, base their expression of joy, anger, and sexual desire almost entirely on what they perceive to be the behavior of black Americans” (19). Rocky’s character and his social protest, it can be said, is similarly immersed in and indebted to the Black world of boxing.13 This iconic sequence of Rocky conquering the exclusive space of the art museum is expanded in Rocky III when a bronze statue of the character is unveiled at the same site. Eventually the statue was gifted to the city of Philadelphia and provoked controversy when placed at the museum site. The statue was moved several times and was on display in front of the Spectrum arena. Since 2006, it has been permanently given a space at the bottom of the Philadelphia Museum of Art adjacent to the steps and has become a major tourist attraction and landmark. The history of the statue’s debated location reflects the ambivalent relation of art and social class.14 According to Pamela Robertson, “[the] typical Berkeley number showcases scores of beautiful white women who form intricate, fairly abstract patterns, who do not necessarily dance but walk and smile, and/or are mechanically transported; it kaleidoscopes female form in ever changing cinematic designs” (Hollywood Musicals, 129). To capture this display of a mass ornament, Berkeley frequently used high aerial shots. Judith Mackrell observes, “Berkeley’s overhead shot became his signature device (it was significant perhaps that he’d been an aerial observer with the US air corps)” (The Guardian, Thu 23 March 2017).15 Defining films of this era by Black directors include 12 Years a Slave (2013; Steve McQueen), The Butler (2013; Lee Daniels), Selma (2014; Ava Du Vernay), The Equalizer (2014: Antoine Fuqua), Moonlight (2016; Barry Jenkins), Get Out (2017; Jordan Peele), Mudbound (2017; Dee Rees), BlacKkKlansmen (2018; Spike Lee) and of course Coogler’s own films Fruitvale Station (2013), Creed (2015) and Black Panther (2018). In fact, most of these filmmakers write, produce, and direct their own projects. Powerful Black producers like Shonda Rhimes and Tyler Perry also point to a significant shift in the film and TV industry. Coogler’s Black Panther, which features an all-Black cast and superhero, made history by securing an unprecedented billion-dollar box office profit, having a US Black film go mainstream globally.16 See Chris Holmlund’s Impossible Bodies: Femininity and Masculinity at the Movies (Citation2002) which in its discussion of diverse body images in recent Hollywood reflects a shift towards the intersectional understanding of “impossible” bodies. See also my edited volume Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity (2020) where contributors restore contexts of intersectionality across Hollywood film history.17 In his interview with Variety, Coogler mentions a personal connection to this disability: “My fiancée is a sign language interpreter and her mother has hearing loss. Her younger sister has hearing loss. So it was great to kind of bring awareness to those folks” (Tapley Citation2016, 5).Additional informationNotes on contributorsDelia Malia KonzettDelia Malia Konzett is a Professor of English and Cinema Studies at The University of New Hampshire. She is the author of the monographs Ethnic Modernisms (2002), Hollywood’s Hawaii: Race, Nation, and War (2017) and the editor of Hollywood at the Intersection of Race and Identity (2020).