Devin Glenn - Core Response #3

        In “The Spy in the Gray Flannel Suit,” Steven Cohan examines the highly performative qualities of both Cary Grant’s and Eva Marie Saint’s characters (Roger and Eve) in North by Northwest (1959). Cohan begins by approaching this primary object from a historical perspective, looking at the ways in which it mirrors the larger masculinity crisis felt in the U.S. following WWII and continuing into the Cold War. After explaining the ways in which this crisis essentially collapsed manhood into nationhood, Cohan explores how heteronormative marriage and the structure of the nuclear family stood as signs of maturity, progress, and Americanism. Cohan then discusses the ideology of domestic containment within the context of the Cold War and how this same policing framework sought to contain the threat of femininity within the domestic space of the home.

    Cohan subsequently reads blondness (especially within Hitchcock films) as a mask that “reflects the supremacy of white masculinity,” representing perhaps the most unambivalent sign of whiteness (12). By the same token, however, Cohan acknowledges that the artificiality of manicured blondness calls attention to itself, alternatively connoting “the unnaturalness of whiteness, the way the color signifies an absence, as in bleached fabric or a face drained of color” (13). From there, Cohan turns to viewing the corporate style of Roger in North by Northwest as well as his momentary transformation into George Kaplan as representations of masculinity not as expressivity, but as modes of performativity (23). As Roger almost solely inhabits his “the seemingly indestructible gray business suit,” his mere presentation connotes a “packaging of masculinity” that appears, even unintentionally, as a meta form of criticism (17-18).

    As I read Cohan’s work, I was struck by something we’ve brought up in class before regarding Harry Styles’… well, style. Although many applaud Styles for experimenting with more androgynous modes of fashion, others have argued that his presentation is very much calculated in an effort to appeal to a target demographic that can simultaneously view him as desirable and nonthreatening. Near the end of his piece, Cohan (drawing upon Dyer) argues that all stars could be viewed as drag performers insofar as they cultivate specific personae that can cross “rigid binarized categories” (26). If this is indeed the case, then is the concept of authenticity fundamentally incompatible with the image of the star? Is all we can hope for the illusion of “the real?” Or can a truth about a star be manifest through their persona, regardless of how manicured it may be?