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Detecting Men
Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film
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Book Presentation:
Looks at how detective films have reflected and shaped our ideas about masculinity, heroism, law and order, and national identity.
Detecting Men examines the history of the Hollywood detective genre and the ways that detective films have negotiated changing social attitudes toward masculinity, heroism, law enforcement, and justice. Genre film can be a site for the expression and resolution of problematic social issues, but while there have been many studies of such other male genres as war films, gangster films, and Westerns, relatively little attention has been paid to detective films beyond film noir. In this volume, Philippa Gates examines classical films of the thirties and forties as well as recent examples of the genre, including Die Hard, the Lethal Weapon films, The Usual Suspects, Seven, Devil in a Blue Dress, and Murder by Numbers, in order to explore social anxieties about masculinity and crime and Hollywood's conceptions of gender. Up until the early 1990s, Gates argues, the primary focus of the detective genre was the masculinity of the hero. However, from the mid-1990s onward, the genre has shifted to more technical portrayals of crime scene investigation, forensic science, and criminal profiling, offering a reassuring image of law enforcement in the face of violent crime. By investigating the evolution of the detective film, Gates suggests, perhaps we can detect the male.
About the Author:
Philippa Gates is Associate Professor of Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University, Ontario, and is the coeditor (with Stacy Gillis) of The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film.
See the publisher website: State University of New York Press
> From the same author:
Resetting the Scene (2021)
Classical Hollywood Revisited
Dir. Philippa Gates and Katherine Spring
Subject: Countries > United States
Criminalization/Assimilation (2019)
Chinese/Americans and Chinatowns in Classical Hollywood Film
Subject: Sociology
Transnational Asian Identities in Pan-Pacific Cinemas (2015)
The Reel Asian Exchange
Dir. Philippa Gates and Lisa Funnell
Detecting Women (2011)
Gender and the Hollywood Detective Film
> On a related topic:
The Hero's Trail (2022)
Myth and Art in the American Western, 1903–1953
Destructive Sublime (2018)
World War II in American Film and Media
Conspiracy Films (2011)
A Tour of Dark Places in the American Conscious
Hollywood's West (2008)
The American Frontier in Film, Television, and History
by Peter C. Rollins and John E. O'Connor
Screening Sherlock (2025)
A Cultural History of the Great Detective on Film and Television
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