Sean Brayton

Ageing Masculinities and “Muscle work” in Hollywood Action Film An Analysis of The Expendables

In August 2010, the sixty-four-year-old Hollywood icon Sylvester Stallone premiered his latest project The Expendables, an action-adventure film starring a pantheon of “tough guys” from both past and present: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Dolph Lundgren, and Bruce Willis. To understand the resurrection of this vintage Hollywood cast, we take up the title theme of “expendability” within the climate of the economic recession of 2008 and map its representation of masculinity, physical labor, and ageing. We do this by looking at The Expendables as essentially a labor text. In doing so, we find a smorgasbord of working bodies and types of physical labor that reveal multiple intersections among discourses of masculinity, class, ageing, and race that simultaneously reflect the divisions of (physical) labor in the industries in which the stars work—Hollywood film and professional sports.

The Racial Politics of Disaster and Dystopia in I Am Legend

n 12 September 2009 more than sixty thousand supporters of the 9/12 Project and TEA Baggers (Taxed Enough Already) marched on Washington. Although participants in the Taxpayers March decried Barack Obama’s health-care reform, “big government” spending, and corporate bailouts, their placards sent a more alarming message. Bobbing among the crowd of mostly white faces were separate images of Obama with a Hitler moustache and “joker” makeup (made famous by the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight) as well as allusions to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the implied “horrors” of socialism. These symbols evoke a lexicon of fear that frames the current cultural politics of race and countenance of the nation as an omen of “immanent totalitarianism” (Goldberg 1). Swirling suspicions of Obama’s U.S. citizenship, religious affiliation, and middle name (Hussein), for example, work to preemptively discredit his leadership in hopes of exposing the “Obama nation” as an “Obamanation.” Following the September rally, Republican congressman Trent Franks called Obama “an enemy of humanity,” while a writer for Newsmax.com suggested a military coup was needed to deal with “the Obama problem.” While the rallies and rhetoric are inflamed by an unresolved economic morass, they have assumed an increasingly racialized tone in their failure to build multicultural alliances and jaundiced position on immigration reform. The eruption of such hostility and discontent so shortly after the election of a black president marks an open renewal of white male backlash, “Dixiecrat,” racism and anti-multiculturalism, which can be read as a collective response to a perceived political and economic nightmare. Despite the apparent spike in popularity of right-wing media pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, figureheads of a revamped white identity politics, there is O The Racial Politics of Disaster and Dystopia in I Am Legend sean braytOn

Renovating ethnic identity on Restaurant Makeover

Food can be a novel way of understanding and explaining some of the pointed paradoxes of multiculturalism and the ‘management’ of ethnicity. Many studies of culinary culture are attentive to the exoticization of ethnicity in and through food media, which now includes a vertiginous array of cookbooks, travel literature, magazines and, most important for our purposes here, television series. Among various programs is Restaurant Makeover, a popular Canadian reality series broadcast on Home and Garden Television (HGTV) as well as the Food Network Canada. In each episode, dining experts are hired by struggling restaurateurs (often ethnic) to ‘spice up’ the existing menu, ‘modernize’ the décor and, by extension, ensure the welfare of the (immigrants) family. While the series is not explicitly directed at ethnic restaurants, it seems to be increasingly interested in ‘non-white’ establishments (i.e., Mexican, Chinese, Thai, etc.). This participation in culinary multiculturalism may be symptomatic of wider political changes in immigration and ‘diversity’ in Canada. Based on the authors analyses of specific episodes this paper argues, firstly, the growing interest in ethnic cuisine on Restaurant Makeover can be read as a (neo)liberal response to an emerging conservative ‘multicultural’ agenda that recognizes migrants predominantly as laborers (as opposed to citizens) and, secondly, that behind its rehearsal of liberal benevolence is a skewed set of power relations that authorize the experts’ (re)construction, cultivation and containment of ethnicity.

The “madness” of market logic: mental illness and late capitalism in The Double and Nightcrawler

ABSTRACT This paper examines representations of mental illness in popular film, particularly Richard Ayoade’s The Double and Dan Gilroy’s Nightcrawler. As I argue, both films trouble typical Hollywood narratives of mental illness by situating schizophrenia and psychopathy, for instance, within a socioeconomic context, specifically relations of production under late capitalism and the unfettered self-interest of neoliberalism. If mental illness is a product of the postindustrial workplace in The Double, it becomes a prerequisite for success in Nightcrawler, providing a cinematic depiction of mental illness at odds with the “personal pathology” paradigm that dominates the current neoliberal landscape.

Learning to labor with Handy Manny: immigration politics and the world of work in a children's cartoon

This article provides a textual analysis of Handy Manny, a popular Disney cartoon featuring a Latino handyman. Specifically, it explores how the debut of the television series does important ideological work that moderates a more provocative image of Latina/os that appeared less than five months earlier during “A Day without an Immigrant,” a nationwide protest against conservative immigration reform in the US that sought to amplify the importance of migrant workers to culture and economy. While Handy Manny offers a nuanced portrayal of “Hispanics” through a set of Latina/o signifiers like food, festivals, and a Spanish vocabulary, it also draws an obvious connection between ethnicity and manual work, particularly in construction, domestic, and service industries that have historically relied on Latin American migrants. As such, the cartoon promotes a saccharine image of Latina/os as “productive” potential citizens, but mostly within the confines of employment. Although Handy Manny both recognizes and participates in the “ethnicization” of labor in ways that reproduce the relations of production, it contains some disruptive possibilities that arise ironically from the same characters designed to attract young viewers and deflect serious criticism: the anthropomorphic tools.

Mental illness, late capitalism, and the socioeconomic “psychopath” in CBS’s Elementary

ABSTRACT This article focuses on representations of mental illness on U.S. network television, particularly the “police procedural” Elementary. As a modern interpretation of the Sherlock Holmes character, Elementary is unique in emphasizing the detective’s struggles with drug addiction and mental illness, as well as a long road of recovery where intellectual labor is instrumental and “therapeutic” (rather than stressful and alienating). Despite its critical acclaim, Elementary’s progressive portrayals of symptoms of mental illness in Holmes are complicated by the series’s stereotypical depiction of villains that are “mad men,” “lunatics,” and “psychopaths” driven by financial gain and individual greed. The “acceptability” of mental illness in the series is measured by a character’s compliance with the dominant social order. While Elementary provides some positive messages about mental illness, its socioeconomic commentaries individualize “madness,” violence, and the pitfalls of late capitalism to support an increasingly problematic narrative of neoliberalism and mental health.