In film, Men are good and Monsters are bad. In this book, Combe and Boyle consider the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body and regard gendered behavior as a matter of performativity. Taken together, these two identity positions, manliness and monsterliness, offer a window into the workings of current American society. Often, the manly good becomes the ugly bad, while the monstrous bad turns out to be the attractive good. Movie men and monsters, then, offer a critical window into American culture. Specifically, the authors examine movies as complicated markers of and participants within the foundational social discourse of subject formation and hegemonic discipline. Of particular focus are warfare and militarism, neoliberal capitalism-corporatism-imperialism, the infliction of gender, and the agonistic negotiations of power.

In film, Men are good and Monsters are bad. In this book, Combe and Boyle consider the monstrous body as a metaphor for the cultural body and regard gendered behavior as a matter of performativity. Taken together, these two identity positions, manliness and monsterliness, offer a window into the workings of current American society.