Summary
Punch-Drunk Love exposes the complexity and kitsch superficialities of masculine gender constructions. Written and directed by Paul Thomas Anderson, this film deconstructs masculine gender performance without pretending to offer overly simplistic alternatives. The following is an exploratory essay that asks what kind of masculinity Punch-Drunk Love represents. If it is true that men no longer hold the patriarchal sway on a domestic level, then how is masculine gender constructed? In order to elucidate the relationship between the film and post-patriarchal masculinity we will need to explicate an approach to gender and masculinity in general. Having explored post-patriarchy, we can then begin to address what this contemporary film tells us about the possibility of a punch-drunk masculinity.
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Punch-Drunk Masculinity
Punch-Drunk Love, "winner of the best director prize at the 2002 Cannes Film Festival" (Stanton, 2003), "is a romantic comedy as wonderful as it is strange that expands the genre to its absurdist limits" (Turan, 2002, p. F1). In so doing it exposes the kitsch superficialities of masculine gender constructions. This film gives us a masculine gender performance that takes postpatriarchal contexts seriously while at the same time not pretending to offer an overly simplistic alternative. The following is an exploratory essay that asks what kind of masculinity Punch-Drunk Love represents. However, in order to elucidate the relationship between the film and postpatriarchal masculinity, we will first need to explicate an approach to gender and masculinity in general. This will then allow us to introduce briefly our punch-drunk protagonist, Barry Eagan (Adam Sandler). Barry's performance demonstrates what we will, third, describe in more detail as postpatriarchy. If it is true that men no longer hold patri...
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