engleski

The Full Monty: Masculinity Reinstated

In the late 1980's and the early 1990's a number of mainstream/Hollywood films appeared in which the female character was cast the leading role, i.e. the role of the protagonist, even if the films in question were of the traditionally male dominated genres. To an extent this phenomenon did reflect the changed social position and greater visibility of women, but the strategy of making the female the subject of the traditional film narrative was much more a result of an entirely different kind of situation − namely the crisis of the film hero who was no longer able to engender and maintain the cinematic action. The solution was for the female to do it for him. Since the position of the subject of the film narrative in the traditional cinema was not designed for the female character, and since the female character was designed to fit the position of the object, the authors had two possible ways to deal with the problem, that is two basic plotlines that could accommodate such faulty subject were developed: first was to initially instate and then destroy the female protagonist, the process of the destruction being the story/action of the film (Thelma & Louise, a road movie) and the second was to record the process of the female protagonist becoming the subject, which involved stripping the character of its traditionally objective characteristics (Piano). „The Full Monty“, 1997 British comedy, deals with the same problem, that is, with the crisis of the cinematic masculine subjectivity and its inability to engender traditional action. Only this time the director/screenwriter doesn’t turn to the female character to compensate for the lost masculinity by becoming an action (wo)man so that the traditional film narrative might be sustained, but decides to build the male protagonist anew from the shattered remains of his former self. The process of becoming the subject (again) becomes the action/plot of the film, same as becoming the subject for the first time constituted the plot with the female protagonist. The protagonist(s) do not begin as action heroes, but end as such, and the purpose of this paper is to analyse the strategies employed to reinstate shattered subjectivity/masculinity and compare them to the cinematic strategies used to build the female subject from the more traditional female object.

Cinematic subjectivity, female protagonist, male protagonist, film narrative, genre film

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