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- Title
Cruising, hysteria, knowledge: The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956).
- Authors
Greven, David
- Abstract
The protagonists of Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) are a married couple who each chafes against normative gender roles. While the film has its reactionary side, in its insistence on exploring the various threats to gendered normativity from within and without, it's one of the most ideologically unstable and unclassifiable films of the 1950s. This essay treats the film as an exploration of women's discontent with 50s American ‘Mommyism’ and as an allegory of Cold War-era homosexuality, especially cruising. Critics such as Robert J. Corber have read the film's construction of motherhood as misogynistic; in contrast, this essay argues that the representation of Jo McKenna's maternal ambivalence registers dissatisfactions with normative gender roles assigned to women. Analogously, her husband's growing attraction/repulsion to encroaching homoerotic energies signals discontentment with post-war codes of American masculinity. These paired gendered revolts – what I call gender protest – are linked to Hitchcock's deployment of the cinematic star both to camouflage and intensify his parodistic skewering of iconic myths of American manhood and womanhood.
- Subjects
ESSAYS; MAN Who Knew Too Much, The (Film); GENDER role in motion pictures; FEMININITY in motion pictures; MASCULINITY in motion pictures; MOTHERS in motion pictures; HITCHCOCK, Alfred, 1899-1980; HOMOSEXUALITY in motion pictures
- Publication
European Journal of American Culture, 2009, Vol 28, Issue 3, p225
- ISSN
1466-0407
- Publication type
Article
- DOI
10.1386/ejac.28.3.225_1