Some Critics about Only
Angels Have Wings
[Like Bat] Jeff [sic] Carter
is a man with a past—though in his case the past is sexual, an unhappy
relationship with a woman who couldn’t take the fact of his flying, or so Jeff
tells the tale to Bonnie. Bat’s past and Jeff’s past are thus paralleled with
one another (both had “bailed out”) and the parallelism reinforces the work/sex
analogy posited in the film’s opening sequence.
To be sure, Jeff seems the more courageous of the two, the one least
likely to have bailed out for the wrong reasons. But Jeff’s sexual courage is clearly called
into question through the course of the film.
Thus the girl who couldn’t take flyers turns out to have married one—Bat
McPherson, indeed—which calls Jeff’s version of the story somewhat into
question. And the problematic nature of
Jeff’s general attitude toward women is made very clear early in the film. (31)
That is, Jeff’s fear of women can be read as a
fear of the biological facts which women represent to men: aging, death, and
reproduction. In fact, it is frequently
the case in Hawks that his action-film protagonists are adolescents in some
sense who strive mightily to avoid growing up…
… … …
More commonly, however, the fear of maturity
is expressed through the metaphor of male partnership or brotherhood. Such “male relationships” are not a priori
negative….But it is generally the case that the men use such relationships,
like Jeff Carter in OAHW, as a
retreat from the facts of temporality and sexuality.
… … …
Indeed, by playing “Papa” to
men who are either his contemporaries or his elders Jeff effectively attempts
to deny the facts and implications of paternity and sexuality by reversing
their terms: the older you become the younger you get—it’s the oldest flyer who
is “The Kid.” (33-34)
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In both cases, however, Jeff
is not content to state the general principle in terms such that it equally
applies to everyone, himself included.
On the contrary, in each instance it becomes an opportunity to justify
his own detachment: thus he concludes his advice to Bonnie by ushering her out
the bar-room door, and he tells Judy that her inability “to stick” has removed
any doubts he might have had about bailing out of their previous
relationship. One measure of the
progress of the film’s narrative, then, is precisely the degree to which Jeff
opens himself up to the vulnerability which he urges upon the women, on his
ability, that is, to accept the validity of the woman’s point of view, granting
to her the same prerogative for risk-taking which he naturally assumes for
himself….Rather, he allows Bonnie to share his most intimate space, his office,
the closeup frame, his grief itself—at which point
the weather suddenly clears, as if in acknowledgment of Jeff’s newfound ability
to trust his feelings and to trust Bonnie. Indeed, it is precisely Jeff’s
ability to trust Bonnie which is celebrated when Jeff gives her Kid’s
two-headed coin; he knows she will be able to see “both sides” and will
understand the gift, in its context, as an invitation to stay. (36)
from Leland A . Poague,
Howard Hawks (Twayne,
1982)
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*** ***
Hawks's movies, like the combat films, are often
misunderstood as being simply about groups. In fact, his groups were very
special, capable of accommodating individualism without devouring it, relying
as much on personal acts of heroism as on teamwork. The members of these groups
were carefully particularized: Hawks's ideal world
was a melting pot full of distinctly different individuals. Thus, his films
represented a mythic solution to the individual-community opposition central to
American culture, and as such, were the inevitable model for the combat films
whose propagandistic project was to reaffirm the American myth that, even in
wartime, essential choices could be avoided.
… … … …
1.
The isolated male
group involved in a life-and-death task.
2.
The group,
composed of distinct types, that relies both on teamwork
and
individual exploits.
3.
Professionalism
and stoicism in the face of danger and death.
4.
Outsiders enter
the group and become threats to it.
5.
The outsiders
must win admission into the group.
from Robert B. Ray, A Certain Tendency of the Hollywood Cinema, 1930-1980 (Princeton,
1985)
*** *** ***
***
For Hawks, the process of
integration into the group hinges on issues of emotional and physical
vulnerability. Bonnie is exiled from the group until she learns its codes of
emotional restraint; her task is to toughen herself up. Bat's past cowardice
would seem to be the result of him having once given in to unmanly emotions.
His "cast iron" facade in the present functions as something of a
caricature of the codes of stoic heroism adopted by professional fliers as a
group. Though less of a caricature of heroic masculinity, Geoff is repeatedly
associated with emotional repression--his own and that of others--in his
efforts to control the potentially chaotic spaces and narrative events of the
film. As I noted earlier, Hawks figures both Bat's and Geoff's integration into
the group through the common trope of physical vulnerability. But beneath that
trope lies a deeper, psycho-sexual theme-a masculine fear of the feminine, fear
of being feminized.
…. …. …. ….
Joe had earlier functioned as
a foil for Geoff. Joe was "no good" because he gave in to personal
desires. Geoff errs in the other direction. He represses the personal in favor
of the professional. He eliminates the emotional from his world. Though this is
perhaps necessary for survival in the world of dangerous action, Geoff's
repression of all desire is, in the larger context of the film, seen as
neurotic. Geoff's power derives, in part, from his denial of "the
feminine" within him- self. His emotional stoicism is essentially
psychologically unhealthy. Bonnie's function in the film is to restore his
emotional health, to re-awaken his repressed feminine side. The Kid's death
reprises that of Joe . . . . when the Kid dies, Geoff
weeps over the small bundle of the dead man's possessions. Significantly, it is
only Bonnie who sees this display of emotion. But when Geoff gives Bonnie the
Kid's coin at the end, he tells Bonnie and the audience that he's no longer the
same Geoff who callously declared "Who's Joe?" Both she and the audience
know that he now cares.
John Belton,
“Re-Imagining American Communities: Hollywood, Hawks, and Ford in 1939,” MLN 122:5 (Dec., 2007): 1166-1179.
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Much of the discomfort
experienced in critical attempts to find a respectable approach to Hollywood
results from the hesitation in acknowledging that although the industries of
culture are of central importance to the daily life of all western and most
other societies, they are not important because of any inherent profundity they
may possess. On the contrary, their lack
of profundity is, on the whole, a condition of their status as
entertainment. Only Angels Have Wings
is “about” the response to death, heroic stoicism, imperialism, racism, and
contempt for femininity, but it is not profoundly about those things. It is shallowly, sentimentally, and
inarticulately about them. It is about
the surfaces of these themes and commonplace attitudes and assumptions about
them, and it is about them on its own surface.
But this does not diminish Hollywood’s importance. For if we are to
study a culture, then its sentiments, its commonplace attitudes, its silences,
and its hesitations are a vital part of that study. A criticism that takes Hollywood seriously
can look less to the discovery of profound meanings or concealed purposes in
its texts, and more to the equally difficult task of articulating the silences
and equivocations, the plenitudes, excesses, and banalities of their surfaces.
from Maltby, Hollywood Cinema 521
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"Male homosocial
desire": the phrase in the title of this study is intended to mark both
discriminations and paradoxes. "Homosocial desire," to begin with, is
a kind of oxymoron. "Homosocial" is a word occasionally used in
history and the social sciences, where it describes social bonds between
persons of the same sex; it is a neologism, obviously formed by analogy with
"homosexual," and just as obviously meant to be distinguished from
"homosexual". In fact, it is applied to such activities as "male
bonding," which may, as in our society, be characterized by intense
homophobia, fear and hatred of homosexuality.
To draw the "homosocial" back into the orbit of
"desire," of the potentially erotic, then, is to hypothesize the
potential unbrokenness of a continuum between homosocial and homosexual—a
continuum whose visibility, for man, in our society, is radically disrupted. It
will become clear, in the course of my argument, that my hypothesis of the
unbrokenness of this continuum is not a genetic one - I do not mean to
discuss homosexual desire
as "at the root of" other forms of male homosociality but rather a strategy for making
generalizations about, and marking historical differences in, the structure of
men's relations with other men. "Male homosocial desire” is the name this
book will give to the entire continuum.
I have
chosen the word "desire" rather than "love" to mark the
erotic emphasis because, in literary critical and related discourse,
"love" is more easily used to name a particular emotion, and
"desire" to name a structure; in this study, a series of arguments
about the structural permutations of social impulses fuels the critical
dialectic. For the most part, I will be using "desire" in a way
analogous to the psychoanalytic use of "libido"-- not for a particular
affective state or emotion, but or the affective or social force, the glue,
even when its manifestation is hostility or hatred or something less emotively
charged, that shapes an important relationship, How far this force is properly
sexual (what, historically, it means for something to be "sexual")
will be an active question.
From Eve Kosofsky
Sedgwick, Between Men: English Literature
and Male Homosocial Desire (1986)