Chapter 7 - The (Un)bearable Weight of Gendered Genre: Richard Linklater’s Post-Boyhood Masculinities

Summary

Since the release in 2014 of his multi-award-winning Boyhood, the once under-examined filmmaker Richard Linklater has come to greater public prominence and begun to attract amplified critical scrutiny. That film’s innovative approach to filming the same child actor growing up in “real time” over nearly two decades won rapturous praise for its apprehension of the quick of transient life, while its attention to the struggles of a single mother garnered a Best Supporting Actress award for Patricia Arquette at the 2015 Oscars and commendation of Linklater for feminism. Yet rather than building on Boyhood’s overtly realist project, Linklater’s subsequent work refuses to sediment into such easy classifications. This is perhaps not surprising for a director whose association with fare as varied as the experimental feature animation Waking Life (2001) and the mainstream blockbuster The School of Rock (2003) has always led audiences to expect the unexpected; the two films produced after Boyhood in any case appear on the face of it to initiate a major change of direction— if not a reactionary volte-face. Everybody Wants Some!! (2016) spends three days in 1980 following the social interactions of a college baseball team played by actors in several cases pushing a decade older than the characters they incarnate and who look “initially […] so pristine as to seem not real.” Their principal activity is showing off, to each other and the opposite sex, and there are no substantial female roles—although in the tradition of lascivious “frat boy” films initiated by Animal House (Ramis, 1978), women do feature as underwear-clad mud-wrestlers, airheads fit to be subjected to jokes about “studying cunnilinguistics” and, on one occasion, a topless conquest in a small dark space. Last Flag Flying (2017) casts three heavyweight, popular, older actors, Bryan Cranston, Steve Carell, and Laurence Fishburne, as Vietnam veterans Sal, Doc, and Mueller who reunite in 2003 in order to accompany Doc in transporting for burial the body of only his son killed in Iraq, propelling them on an all-male odyssey that gently echoes Vietnam War-era buddy road movies among the best-known of which are Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid (George Roy Hill, 1969), and Midnight Cowboy (John Schlesinger, 1969).