From its very beginnings, America has been a masculine nation, built on the myth of the "Self-Made Man. "This hegemonic position is often in contradiction with a far more nuanced reality, resulting in feelings of malaise among white heterosexual American males. Throughout the history of American literature and film, this malaise has been expressed in part via the aesthetics of the grotesque. During the period between 1969and 1980, changes in the film industry, coupled with the social and political upheaval of the sixties and seventies, led to the production of a series of controversial films which reflected the instability of hegemonic masculinity at the time. The choices involved in the production of these films and the way they were received by the American public reflect an intense feeling of masculine malaise, linked to the undermining of an American "masculine mystique." In the films studied, hegemonic masculinity is called into question via a number of tropes, including the grotesque and penetrable body, sexuality, violence, madness and religion. Through the multiple prisms of culture studies, gender, literature and film, this study attempts to examine the links between a generalized feeling of masculine malaise in the seventies and the aesthetics of the grotesque in six film adaptations produced between 1969 and 1980.
Masculine Malaise, the Grotesque, and American Film Adaptations of the Seventies