Core Post - Erin Cooney

The Cohan article on "The Spy in the Gray Flannel Suit" offered a lot of valuable insights into the cultural contexts within which North by Northwest was produced and released. Its historical information, about American society, constructs of masculinity, the family, the Cold War, etc., was useful knowledge to bring to the film, as well as the details it provided into Cary Grant's persona and biography at the time. The details on Cary Grant were perhaps the most useful, at least so far as the author suggested that Cary Grant was considered very attractive at the time of the movie. That was one of the parts of the film that made me raise my eyebrows the most, around Eve's apparent instant attraction to Roger, and what made her initial appearance make a lot of sense to me, but I guess I'm just looking at him from a different perspective that modern audiences were. Regardless, the article had a lot of value from the historical context it provided for the movie.

I feel like I sound like a broken record whenever I respond to any writing about gender ever, especially if it isn't very recent, for this class and all my other classes, but as with most attempts to engage with gender critically that have now become historical, this article is in real need of an update to better grapple with how gender functions, specifically around discourses of transness. It was interesting and valuable to see the author bring in Judith Butler and a conversation on performativity in gender, which I was intrigued to see applied to this movie. Along with the brief aside about Cary Grant's personal life, this article edged towards a conversation around queer sexuality and gender, kind of, but it just doesn't quite get at it in the fully-realized way that I always want to see. I would be hugely interested to talk about how the gender roles of the fifties and performativity of gender in this film particularly could be contextualized in the realm of transness and queerness of the same time, although it would take a lot longer and a lot more thought for me to begin to pull together what those thoughts could look like.

There is no way in which the role of masculinity in the fifties or in this film specifically can be disengaged from other discourses around whiteness, around homophobia, around class, etc., which the article does a fairly solid job of acknowledging and exploring. But it also can't be disengaged from a further context of transness and a more accurate, more specific, and more complex discourse around what gender is and how it functions now and has functioned throughout history. Apologies if this isn't sufficiently specific to the movie and the article itself, but I have real trouble determining how to engage with these conversations when they are coming from a place that is so different from my own perspective and understanding of gender--I hesitate to call that place or that perspective incorrect or inaccurate, since its historically based and engaging in the history of gender and transness is a truly and deeply much more complex discussion, but it is definitely an insufficient place. I need to figure out for myself how to best consider these conversations that are historically based but ring untrue or insufficient in the light of a trans-based understanding of gender and its functionality throughout history, because this is something I feel like I almost always get stuck against throughout my classes that engage with gender. It is not productive to look at texts like this--texts from 1997, it's important to note!--and just respond with "Yikes you forgot about transness, this is now wrong and useless", because that's not true, but the work of bridging the gap between a current and more complex understanding of gender and the understanding within a different context of gender and how it has been considered critically that's presented in articles like this one, is really vast and complicated work that I am just so unsure how to approach.