Seeing double: Stunt performance and masculinity

ON THE WEB SITE FOR STUNTS UNLIMITED, an organization of Hollywood stunt professionals, one finds a reference to "the stuntman's paradox": The successful creation of [the] illusion by sturtmen ensures that audiences will have no knowledge of the Stuntmen involved. They will believe that it was their favorite action star who performed the stunts. This is a stuntman's greatest reward. It is also the stuntman's paradox: the more successful they are, the less they are known. They are truly the faceless heroes of film, the athletic magicians of moviemaking. This statement concisely illustrates how the erasure of stunt work is the traditional practice of Hollywood filmmaking. In this essay I look at moments when the logic of the stunt man's paradox breaks down, when the bodies performing these heroic cinematic acts also have faces, both in films and in the culture at large. In particular, I examine a cycle of films made in the late 19705 that represents the emergence of the stunt performer in a dramatic way. Films such as The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), Hooper (1978), and The Stunt Man (1980) featured the "broken body" of the stunt-man hero, as did the multimedia spectacle surrounding Evel Knievel (billed as "King of the Stuntmen"). I argue that the eruption of the stunt man at this time worked in part to manage historical traumas connected to post-Vietnam America, and that the stunt man in these films became a means of addressing a crisis in masculinity. Read in the context of the late 19705, the hero of the stunt-man cycle can be seen as a transitional Hollywood hero, coming after the genre revisionism of the Hollywood renaissance and before the more complete containment of these cultural anxieties in the "hard body" action heroes of the 19805. The stunt performer's invisibility has extended to film and media studies, where stunts and stunt work have been largely ignored. My paper must begin then, with an overview of some of the central historical and theoretical aspects of stunt performance, with a focus on the stunt man's role in relation to the male film star. I hope this essay can encourage further historical research on this fascinating and understudied area of film labor. Because texts on stunt history and the dynamics of stunt work are few, I've supplemented written works with television documentaries and personal interviews with professional Hollywood stunt performers. Among these is Hal Needham, who plays a central role in the history I tell, and who kindly made himself available to be interviewed. Stunt Theory I want to begin by describing the nature of the stunt, and its relation to film form and narrative. Some remarks by Sergei Eisenstein on the nature of the stunt in the theater will serve as a point of departure. In his 1923 essay "The Montage of Attractions," Eisenstein describes the attraction, a concept that was central to his thought regarding both theater and film, as "any aggressive moment in theatre" that is capable of producing quantifiable "emotional shocks" in the audience (34). These aggressive moments could come in many forms: a roll of the drums, the "color of the prima donna's tights," an explosion or a soliloquy (34). Notably, however, the stunt is excluded. In fact, the category of the attraction relies on its distinction from the stunt: "The attraction has nothing in common with the stunt. The stunt, or, more accurately, the trick ... is a finished achievement of a particular kind of mastery (acrobatics, for the most part)" (35). For Eisenstein, it is the stunt's self-containment that prevents it from doing ideological work or engaging the audience: "In so far as the trick is absolute and complete within itself, it means the direct opposite of the attraction, which is based exclusively on something relative, the reactions of the audience" (34-35). Two dynamics are worth underscoring in Eisenstein's thought: first, his use of the stunt as the Other of the more ideologically potent attraction; second, his reference to the stunt's self-containment. …