I decided to post another update on the Payne manuscript, since the last one a week ago was more helpful than I realized at first in helping me to reflect and organize the larger goals of the project after a couple of months being lost in the minutiae of researching and writing (getting lost in a book-length project for months at a time it can be nice to get back to the audience once in awhile)--in particular, how the book's working title encapsulates the thematic contradictions of Payne's cinema. Revisiting Dean MacCannell's notion of the "tourist" (which I only did originally as a way to talk through ideas for the blog post) ended up helping me focus some of the revisions I've been working on this past week.
As I noted last time, I finished a complete first draft at the beginning of this month, but the manuscript still has a long ways to go. One glaring absence in the first draft was a sufficient accounting of the gender representation and dynamics in his films. It was always intended to be a primary focus of the manuscript but I struggled through the drafting with the question of both how to narrow such a broad topic down, and also where to place it within the individual chapters.
I always wanted to do a section on gender and (unseen) domestic labor to compliment the broader discussion of family and class in the third chapter "Takes the Pressure Right Off: Class, Work, Family." However, I hadn't yet found the sources I need to help me focus the theoretical framing of that section. My plan later today and tomorrow is to pursue that research angle again.
The bigger question of course has been how to articulate the depiction of masculinity in Payne's films. I am not attempting to do the definitive gender study of this body of work, but accounting for this dynamic is still central to the manuscript. But the challenge has been how to narrow it down--what I found specific to Payne were solid sources on aging, which has been a promising lead (Laura Beadling's article "Aging Women on Screen: Alexander Payne's Depictions of Older Women in About Schmidt and Nebraska" in Midamerica and Sally Chivers' book, The Silvering Screen).
A useful breakthrough this past week came in revisiting scholarship on the Hollywood western, a genre Payne has often expressed interest: this not only allowed me to narrow down the search for sources on cinema and masculinity, but also got me looking more closely at scholarship regarding its modern day incarnation: the road movie. For being a book on "travel narratives" in Payne's cinema, I'll confess I'd not been thinking about that specific formula too much in particular--Steven Cohan and Ina Rae Hark's collection of essays, The Road Movie Book--in particular, Shari Roberts' chapter "Western meets Eastwood: Genre and Gender On the Road"--has been especially useful recently.
The discussion of masculinity in the context of the Western and road movie also provided me with an opening to put that particular section right in the introductory chapter--since its the one that's most explicitly structured as a "travel narrative" and the one where I explain the different meanings of the phrase: "stranger from Omaha" (one of which is the intended evocation of an old Hollywood B western-type title).
(I already do write about the western genre in the fifth chapter--"The Day After Yesterday: Time, Nostalgia, History"--but its function there has less to do overtly with representations of gender and more with the presentation of US frontier history within Payne's cinema).
I looked at a lot of scholarship on masculinity and the western to help expand that section--Jane Tompkins' book West of Everything, Steven Neale's "Masculinity as Spectacle" (particularly the classical notion of masculinity defined by not only power but also omnipotence) and Laura Mulvey's revisiting of her work on the "male gaze" in the context of Dual in the Sun (1947). The latter's notion of a split masculinity was especially useful:
the tension between two points of attraction, the symbolic (social integration and marriage) and nostalgic narcissism, generates a common splitting of the Western hero into two [. . .] one celebrating integration into society through marriage, the other celebrating resistance to social demands and responsibilities, above all those of marriage and the family, the sphere represented by woman.
That tension echoes nicely with Robert Ray's notion of the western's competing heroes: the outlaw and official, which I explore in the aforementioned fifth chapter. Payne's characters struggle with this split, but what the road movie formula exposes (while the western concealed) is the failure of a travel narrative to alleviate this split between narcissism and integration. The road movie, writes Roberts, "transforms the frontier into a metaphorical road, the horse into a car, and the cowboy into an illusory and elusive metaphor."
I still want to do more with masculinity and humor (Payne's films are comedies after all)--Peter Lehman's Running Scared has been on my shelf for a few days now, thinking in particular about how nudity and comedy challenges or deconstructs traditional notions of masculinity, which seems apt for a cinema wherein male bodies are frequently on display in awkward and/or embarrassing ways.
Gender is not something I've discussed too much in my past work (my discussion in regards to such in my previous work on Paul Thomas Anderson was largely influenced by articles on the melodrama and by Donna Peberdy's excellent essay on "wimps and wild men" in contemporary cinema). That was partly why it wasn't a theoretical framing that can as easy to be on a first pass as nostalgia and tourism did--but it's been satisfying to finally dig a little more in-depth on that scholarship in recent weeks.
The Stranger from Omaha is beginning to acquire the added layers, the greater depth, that only revision can bring to a draft. Some ideas still need to be tightened, and some probably need to be cut all together, but newer ones will also buttress what remains in time. It's been liberating to let go of the stresses that just finishing a first draft can bring and to begin having the freedom to explore new ideas and angles as they emerge.
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