Core Post - Unstable and Fragile Masculinity

 “North by Northwest calls into question whether masculinity can ever be assumed to be a coherent and singular, not to say authentic, condition in culture.”

- Steven Cohan

I watched North by Northwest for the first time in class last week and I really liked it, but I liked it even better after reading Steven Cohan’s “The Spy in the Gray Flannel Suit”. I was fascinated by how much about masculinity Cohan was able to unpack from the Hitchcock film. Reading this article, I realized how, when watching the movie, I missed a lot of what Cohan writes about masculinity in Cary Grant’s character; a lot of it just passed by unnoticed. This made me question if we are trained not to question or observe masculinity closely, which maybe we are because, as Cohan’s analysis points out, star personae and their representations show the contradictions of masculinity and how fragile it actually is.

We are so used to stories in which the female is defined by marriage and domestic life that I found it refreshing how Cohan shows that Roger Thornhill, Carry Grant’s character in North by Northwest, ultimately finds his masculinity in marriage. Cohan brings up how in the 1950s the norm was that a mature and responsible man was a married one and that a single man was considered irresponsible, immature and weak. Masculinity is very much connected to strength, virility, thus, in this case, masculinity is defined by marriage. Linked to marriage, masculinity was also defined by the idea of togetherness and the domestic ideology of men and women, breadwinner and homemaker, living together. I found it interesting how these terms have very much been used to characterize women – women have to get married, women have to pursue a domestic life, etc. –, but were here, in this text and in the movie, characterizing a man. There appear to be several contradictions in masculinity, as it is often constructed with superiority towards femininity, but is actually rooted in similar ideologies to those of the female gender.

When we watched Now, Voyager, we talked about how Charlotte’s femininity was only cured after she looked beautiful and had a man. There appear to be some similarity to that in Cary Grant’s character in North by Northwest. As Cohan argues, Eve is a sort of cure for Roger’s masculinity: “the film discloses that Eve is neither helper nor vixen but the double agent, then she represents both the cause of masculinity’s crisis and its means of cure” (11). It is also pointed out in this same text that Roger is almost always well dressed, almost always “clean and freshly pressed regardless of circumstances” (17). Thus, both Charlotte and Roger reach some sort of gender cure in between good looks and a love interest of the opposite sex.

How different can masculinity and femininity be, then? Among all the contradictions surrounding the star image, gender appears to involve many, which are well represented by Cary Grant’s persona as pointed out by Cohan. For a gender that has a historical “brand” encompassing strength, virility, power, solidity, hardness, it is contradictory to see how masculinity is actually not that different from its “opposite” and is more fragile and unstable that we, superficially, perceive it to be.