'Blood, Sweat, Respect:' A Genealogy of Reactionary Hardbody Cinema

This thesis is a unique intervention into the realm of Film, Media, and Cultural Studies, as well as building upon studies of action cinema, masculinity, whiteness, and somatic histories. Sourced in Film Studies, I seek to provide an account for the shifting, building, ageing, and testing of on-screen bodies, celebrity bodies, and the bodies they inspire that has purchase across diverse scholarly disciplines. American action cinema, and more particularly what I have termed “reactionary action cinema” is centralised within my work but I argue that there has been a large-scale interrelation of creative industries, from cinema to social media, within which action stars perform the building of a body that is now synergistic and multi-platformed. These stars then display how said body may function as a powerful, profitable piece of capital which can accumulate in the marketplace. The high profile, highly profitable and culturally influential fitness industry is a key aspect of contemporary body culture and often positions itself as a central site of masculinist ideology, mental health, and normative somatic life. As such, I engage with changes in men’s grooming and fitness cultures, labour discourses and the shift from manual to cognitive to precarious labour over the last fifty years as well as cinematic analysis. My genealogy aims to provide not only insight into the effects of a particular cinematic genre on American culture but also a wider analysis of cultures of male body transformation. Thus, the scope of my project transcends standard genre analysis in that I aim to analyse how one particular genre has influenced cultural and ideological formations of white masculinity and reactionary politics in the U.S and how, in turn, those ideological formations and shifts have influenced action cinema.