Adam Sandler as (questionable) masculine ‘role model’: towards an analysis of disgust and violence in Adam Sandler's comedian comedy

© 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group Adam Sandler's film work has been critically vilified and paid little attention by academics. This article suggests that his work justifies sustained academic attention, yet I conclude that he offers questionable masculine role models dependent on masculinity being asserted via ambivalent dis-identification with gay men and women. I argue this case via critique of the most sustained analyses of his workand via close readings of aspects of Sandler's films. I dispute Chapman's contextualisation of Sandler's film comedies in relation to thinking about masculinity and gay men. These changes have arisen in response to feminism and the lesbian and gay movement. I argue that Chapman's contextualisation of, and the ambiguities of Sandler's engagement with, feminism and gay men needs more critical attention. Further, I argue that we should actively read Sandler's films using Seidman's idea of comedian comedy and that focusing attention on such comedies’ tensions with narrative film enable us to direct our critical attention on the ambivalences present in Sandler's movies. His films show resistance to relinquishing some privileges of dominant forms of masculinity (physical violence) and demonstrate disgust withthe sexuality, bodies and behaviour of gay men

Auteur meets genre: Rohmer and the rom-com

Eric Rohmer’s influence on filmic chroniclers of love within the auteur canon is widely recognized. This essay seeks to situate his oeuvre within a different cinematic historiography: that of genre cinema in general and romantic comedy specifically. In so doing it answers Celestino Deleyto’s call for a reappraisal of films usually seen as outside mainstream genericity from this perspective.1 Given that genre is a site of exchange between filmic institutions and audiences, both of which—even in the case of the more specialized audience targeted by Rohmer—interact with culture more broadly, the point of such an approach is to examine the role played by Rohmer’s work in mediating historically and locally specific notions about coupling and romance. In other words, this analysis will reinsert into a particular social context films that have most frequently been understood to exist as “pure cinema,” outside histor

Review of working class comic book heroes: class conflict and populist politics in comics edited by Marc DiPaolo Jackson, MS: University Press of Mississippi, April 2018, 240 pages, 45 b&w illustrations, $30 (paperback), ISBN 9781496818188

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