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Diane Negra and Yvonne Tasker
male-centred corporate melodrama
Neoliberal frames and genres of inequality: Recession-era chick flicks and

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European Journal of Cultural Studies
16(3) 344 361
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DOI: 10.1177/1367549413481880
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E UR OP E A N J OUR NA L OF
Neoliberal frames and genres
of inequality: Recession-era
chick flicks and male-centred
corporate melodrama
Diane Negra
University College Dublin, Ireland
Yvonne Tasker
University of East Anglia, UK
Abstract
Media forms play a vital role in making cultural and political sense of the complex
economic developments and profound ideological uncertainties which have
accompanied the global recession. This article analyses how popular genre cinema
tackles the inequalities in particular, gender inequalities that follow from the
financial crisis, situating Hollywoods representational strategies in the context of
recessionary media culture. It posits and analyses two sub-genres which demonstrate
different approaches to an altered socio-economic climate: the recessionary chick
flick and the corporate melodrama. Amid the financial crisis these sub-genres shift
emphasis to respond to changing circumstances, notably in relation to the once-
ubiquitous trope of choice central to post-feminist media culture; neoliberal choice
rhetoric is now considerably harder to maintain. The two case studies contrast the
different ways in which female-centred chick flicks and male-centred corporate
melodramas address unemployment, downward mobility and the challenges of
worklife balance.
Keywords
Chick flick, corporate melodrama, crisis of masculinity, gender, neoliberalism, post-
feminism, recession
Corresponding author:
Diane Negra, School of English, Drama and Film, University College Dublin, Belfield, Dublin 4,
Ireland.
Email: diane.negra@ucd.ie
481880ECS16310.1177/1367549413481880European Journal of Cultural StudiesNegra and Tasker
2013
Article
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Negra and Tasker 345
In a culture where neoliberal ideas represent a widely circulating
current, the free, ubiquitous and all-encompassing character of wealth is a
dominant theme. (Hall, 2011: 722)
While it might not be at the forefront of financial journalism or even wider media cover-
age of the downturn, gender is a key term in thinking about the consequences of the
post-2008 financial crisis. To the extent that this unfolding recession has impacted on
men and women in different ways, how are these differences being articulated by media
culture? Given the tendency for gender to fall out of the picture and indeed the frequent
implication that equality and diversity are issues to be reserved for times of affluence
rather than adversity feminist scholarship at this particular moment needs to reiterate
the ongoing influence of gender politics and make gender visible, particularly alongside
other determining categories such as class and citizenship. While fields including eco-
nomics, sociology, equality studies and others have much to contribute in the work of
analysing the recessions social economics, media studies offers a unique disciplinary
pathway for interpreting recession culture, given its focus on the analysis of collective
symbolic environments that hold enormous sway in shaping public views.
The news media in the UK and USA alike seem confused with respect to the differen-
tial fate of men and women in the so-called Great Recession. Certainly, there has been
plenty of interest in scenarios of male crisis against a context of female achievement:
interest which has focalised around Hannah Rosins (2010) much-remarked Atlantic
magazine article, The End of Men, which was developed in 2012 into a book, The End
of Men and the Rise of Women. Suggesting the end of male dominance in education and
management, Rosins dramatic, compelling catchphrase denotes fears of broad male eco-
nomic and cultural obsolescence. Such eye-catching strategies are widely used in mak-
ing sense of complex economic and social developments. Under the title Men Hardest
Hit by Recession, a feature in the British Sunday broadsheet The Observer (Batchelor,
2010), is illustrated with an evocative image featuring a man cleaning the home while
clutching a bemused-looking baby under his arm. As the baby looks out at the reader, the
mans face is not shown, suggesting a representative, everyman status, while capturing a
sense of male diminishment. The caption reads: Debt-ridden and jobless, more men are
left holding the baby while partners go off to work. Not that surprising perhaps, but for
the fact that the accompanying story includes neither statistics on, nor discussion of male
unemployment; similarly, the role of women or mothers as breadwinners is absent from
the feature. Instead, the focus is on an apparent decline in male incomes within a reces-
sionary context: the chair of the charity Consumer Credit Counselling Service, Malcolm
Hurlston, is quoted as saying: Men have been hard hit by the recession and are emerging
as the new underclass This deterioration in the economic circumstances for men, still
the main breadwinners in most homes, has serious implications for many households
(Hurlston, in Batchelor, 2010). Whatever the content of the article itself, the usurped
male breadwinner serves as a handy visual reference point, the image evoking an absent,
haunting scenario of a father left holding the baby while his female partner takes his role
in the workplace.
Such commonplace representation in news media suggests the extent to which unfold-
ing economic events are filtered through capsule images and soundbites that, in turn,
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346 European Journal of Cultural Studies 16(3)
draw on longstanding cultural assumptions about men, women, work and parenting.
Scholarly studies are drawn into this emerging narrative of disrupted gender norms and
patterns of family life. News of a symposium on gender equity in the recession held at
Cambridge University in 2009 was reported via news agencies such as Reuters. Making
recourse to familiar gender scripts, the Fox News website used the event to anchor a
feature headed Recession Harder on Men Than Women, Study Says (Fox News, 2009).
The thrust of the argument is not that men are more likely to become unemployed, but
that they are more anxious about that possibility, more prone to depression and less likely
than women to recover psychological security on finding an insecure job. The sociolo-
gist Brendan Burchell is quoted thus: men retain traditional beliefs that their masculinity
is threatened if their employment is threatened (Fox News, 2009), a commentary that
underlines the centrality of gender hierarchies in making sense of the effects of reces-
sion. Such tropes have proved a persistent feature of media coverage. In March 2011
Time magazine ran a feature speculating Why the Recession May Trigger More
Depression Among Men (Park, 2011). The piece offers commentary on the kinds of
employment hit by recession for example, construction trades along with longer-term
trends such as technological innovation and outsourcing, processes that are forcing
more men than women out of work. Drawing this time on psychology, the piece sug-
gests that: With men culturally shouldering the role of primary breadwinner for their
families, unemployment hits men particularly hard, as their self-esteem, an important
factor in depression risk, is often contingent on their role as provider (Park, 2011).
Across a wide rhetorical spectrum, then, the notion of men as particularly and singu-
larly impacted by economic adversity has become culturally commonsensical and affec-
tively potent. Yet as Heather Tirado Gilligan (2011) has pointed out, this is hardly a new
phenomenon:
[E]nd-of-men crises have cropped up repeatedly since the late nineteenth century, until they
have assumed almost mythic stature. They are most acute whenever there is an economic
slowdown, often resulting in a backlash against women in the workforce, instead of a focus on
the factors that lead to such downturns in the economy. (Tirado Gilligan, 2011)
Similarly, Hamilton Carroll has noted that white male injury, phantasmagoric though it
may be, is a phenomenon that attempts to recoup political, economic and cultural author-
ity in the face of a destabilized national consensus (2011: 2). Rosins arguments on male
decline have been skilfully rebutted by the social historian Stephanie Coontz, who shows
that if anything, such accounts mask an increasing convergence in economic fortunes,
not female ascendence. She asks:
How is it, then, that men still control the most important industries, especially technology,
occupy most of the positions on the lists of the richest Americans, and continue to make more
money than women who have similar skills and education? And why do women make up only
17 percent of Congress? (Coontz, 2012)
Pointing to an apparent cultural inability to critique the privileged male meaningfully, we
argue here that many recessionary texts mobilise and give new force to longstanding
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Negra and Tasker 347
tropes of white masculinity in crisis. For scholars concerned with gender and culture
(such as Tirado Gilligan), the concept is familiar by now that crises of masculinity (like
those of the economy) are a cyclical phenomenon. Indeed, it is possible to say that con-
temporary cinema regards masculinity as constituted by crisis. The priority accorded to
male suffering is, we argue, particularly telling. In particular, the focus of attention on the
middle-aged, middle-class white guy as the sign, symptom and victim of recession is a
prominent feature of current media imagery of economic crisis. Put simply: women and
young people who are impacted significantly by economic events do not have the media
or cultural visibility that their situation warrants. Recessionary femininity is not rou-
tinely associated with crisis in the manner of masculinity; rather, it is presented often as
adaptive and resourceful, if typically in domestic and consuming rather than public or
professional contexts.
Our focus in this article is on the mediation of recession: the process of making the
experience of insecurity, redundancy and the economic inequalities that are such an
apparent feature of the recession culturally meaningful via genre cinema. While the news
media use images such as the house-bound father as hooks to make sense of employment
trends and cultural responses to them, such concerns are registered in Hollywood cinema
in rather more elaborate ways. It is worth reiterating here that what the majority of us
know (or think we know) about economic matters is garnered from a variety of popular
media forms. Crucial to our argument is that journalism and the news media constitute
only one dimension of this process. We maintain that it would be a mistake to attribute
recessionary inflections only to news formats and those genres and forms historically
associated with objectivity and neutrality. As the examples above testify, news media
make extensive use of a visual/ideological repertoire which depends on conservative
cultural assumptions. Moreover, fictional forms have proven to be particularly adept at
rationalising the inequalities that thrive within neoliberal economies. Indeed, the ease
with which women and young people have been marginalised within, or erased from, the
cinematic discourse of recession, is striking.
With respect to gender, the presentation of an individuals economic or social status
as a result of choice is particularly remarkable. Notably, the representation of the at-
threat male worker picks up on already established cultural themes of professional dis-
satisfaction. Building upon over a decade of cinematic representation in which crisis of
masculinity has been a ubiquitous Hollywood formulation, and taken together with a
neoliberal emphasis on choice and self-fashioning, male downsizing is refigured fre-
quently as an opportunity for personal development. Male redundancy has functioned
also as a source of comedy, presumably since being without productive labour renders a
man ridiculous. For women, by contrast, work is not figured as an issue of identity in
quite the same way. As Laurie Ouellette and Julie Wilson observe, US self-help com-
mentators such as Dr Phil McGraw take for granted that todays women work outside
the home to provide for their families (2011: 552), even while downplaying careers
and paying only minimal attention to paid jobs. In media discourse, that is, womens paid
work is presented as an activity undertaken primarily on behalf of others.
Our focus here is on US popular culture, both for its concentrated power and appeal
to privileged constituencies and its high transnational circulation. American popular
forms play a significant role in shaping not only US but also European understandings of
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348 European Journal of Cultural Studies 16(3)
the recession, its significance and consequences. These two elements are not easily dis-
entangled. To put gender into the frame of recessionary culture means taking account of
both official reports and their presentation in news media; we need to factor for underly-
ing trends and patterns, but also to understand the contradictory ways in which media
commentary makes sense of these developments. As we hope to show, when it comes to
gender this has as much to do with the elision of certain features of the recessionary
picture, as it does the foregrounding of others.
In order to elaborate these concerns, we explore two emerging sub-genres of American
cinema, each of which foreground a distinctly gendered account of recession: the reces-
sionary chick flick and the corporate melodrama. The former showcases new feminini-
ties, while the latter centres on reshaping men and masculinity for a recessionary context.
Each makes use of the downturn as a setting in which the central characters must respond
to the cultural and economic uncertainties of recession. Each adapts already familiar
generic conventions those of the post-feminist romance, American melodrama and the
office movie for a recessionary context, characteristically turning to well-worn gen-
dered scripts to make sense of changing times. Evidently aware of contemporary eco-
nomics and culture, yet with an eye fixed on the past, both the recessionary chick flick
and the corporate melodrama are simultaneously nostalgic for, and discontented, with
traditionally gendered hierarchies and spaces (the masculine workplace, the feminine
domestic sphere). For example, although the corporate melodrama insists on the vitality
of male labour and the culturally destructive consequences of white-collar male redun-
dancy, typically it is predicated on assumptions about the bleak emptiness of a corporate
world which is aligned with greed and the pursuit of wealth. Recession-era corporate
melodramas such as The Social Network (dir. David Fincher, 2010) and Wall Street:
Money Never Sleeps (dir. Oliver Stone, 2010) do not reject wealth and status by any
means (indeed, they are obsessed with it), but the most sympathetic male figures are
always those for whom money itself is not the primary goal.
In their recognition of inequalities and attempt to insist that these can be overcome via
a combination of tried-and-tested gender scripts and US entrepreneurial spirit, these gen-
res exemplify both post-feminist media culture and the contortions of neoliberalism.
Indeed, post-feminism proclaims for gender what neoliberalism advocates in a broader
sense: both assert that the individual bears ultimate responsibility for their social status.
The prevailing cultural emphasis on individualism and choice whether expressed via
self-fashioning or entrepreneurial endeavour seems increasingly tenuous when it is
made without reference to the economic conditions in which choices are made. Yet, the
cultural investment made by post-industrial societies in these values, and the consumer-
ism that underpins them, have proven difficult to dislodge. It is apparent that choice is a
fundamentally gendered domain, not least when women are expected to be enterprising
subjects who work for pay [as] well as caring for families (Ouellette and Wilson, 2011:
560). As numerous commentaries on post-feminist culture have demonstrated, popular
culture schools women (and indeed men) in making the right choices around work,
domesticity, reproduction and relationships. As economic circumstances become so
intensely straitened, we must ask whether these gender scripts are being modified, and if
so how: to what extent do conservative cultural forms such as Hollywood genre cinema
acknowledge the contradictions of contemporary gender culture when they are placed
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Negra and Tasker 349
under stress? Moreover, we suggest that these particular sub-generic forms distinctly
articulate some of the ways in which the promise of the good life no longer masks the
living precarity of this historical present (Berlant, 2011: 196).
One of the most distinct representational trends in contemporary Hollywood has been
the centralisation of the boy-man. Played by a succession of stars including Adam
Sandler, Seth Rogen, Owen Wilson, Vince Vaughn, Matthew McConnaughey and Hugh
Grant, the boy-man arguably operates as the most distinctive prototype of contempo-
rary media masculinity. While the boy-man type in comedy has been persuasively ana-
lysed by Brenda Weber as centralising fraternity-type puerile humor in stories geared
toward adolescent male audiences (2011: 70), neither the centrality of such characterisa-
tion in melodrama, nor the fate of this figure in the recession, have received particular
scrutiny. Clearly, the outsider or underdog status of the archetypal frat-pack construction
of masculinity chimes with the melodramatic iteration of ordinary men as the biggest
losers, in recession-themed films such as The Company Men (dir. John Wells, 2010).
Writing just before the onset of recession, David Denby (2007) astutely shows how the
couple comprised of the infantilised male and his hyper-responsible, high-achieving
female partner is founded on economic cynicism. In the slackerstriver romance for-
mula, the male figure recognises that contemporary aspirationalism is a rigged game and
withdraws from playing it; his female counterpart has not yet realised this. We contend
that such fictional representations must be situated within a broader discursive matrix of
falling white men which has made political and economic jeremiads on cable television
news (performed by histrionic figures such as Glenn Beck and Jim Cramer) a prominent
form of contemporary spectacle. Given the new urgency attached to economic responsi-
bilities and roles, there is a need to investigate how popular genres and forms such as
Hollywoods slackerstriver couple signify in dramatically changed global circum-
stances, and indeed shed light on particular national conditions of reception for texts of
this kind. US film and television is characterised frequently as being globally hegem-
onic, but as scholars such as Barbara Klinger have shown, such straightforward assess-
ments need to be significantly complicated, subject as they are to diverse decodings
(2010: 112) as they circulate through international markets.
Once one pays attention to the gender implications of recession, there rapidly accu-
mulates an expanding amount of material which can be considered under the rubric of
recessionary culture. Surprisingly, discourses of gender have been just as significant, if
not more so, within these texts than those of class, which might be expected to dominate
(Hollywood cinema continues to actively suppress racial inequalities and take a roman-
ticised approach to issues of class). Some of the texts we discuss here, such as The
Company Men, have a clear relationship to the recession: downsizing and corporate job
losses are the overt content of this film. Other examples have a less explicit or obvious
relationship to recession. Whether the recessionary context is implicit or explicit, we
seek here to foreground the centrality of discourses of gender in the way that the finan-
cial crisis is figured, and in the sorts of fantasies of accommodation and resolution
offered in certain forms of popular cinema.
Clearly, it is not the case that the economic unravelling of September 2008 inaugurated
a series of entirely new representational tropes, but one of the premises of this analysis is
that new modes of gendered expressivity are coming to the fore in recessionary popular
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350 European Journal of Cultural Studies 16(3)
culture, and that pre-existing archetypes are being inflected in new ways. In short, we
argue that there are significant continuities with the gender discourses of boom culture as
well as features that seem more particular to a recessionary moment. Media forms as
diverse as feature films, reality television, financial journalism and advertising manifest
highly gendered responses to the global financial crisis. Of course, any comprehensive
mapping of the complex media ecology of the recession is impossible here. Instead, we
focus on two developments that we take as indicative of wider representational changes,
and which media studies has yet to account for: the emergence of male-centred corporate
melodrama, and the highly routinised production of chick flick romantic comedies and
dramas that acknowledge but maintain a strange dissonance with their recession context.
While these are not necessarily the generic sites that critics might immediately turn to for
an articulation of themes of power and inequality in recessionary times, we contend that
they constitute crucial forms within which a process of cultural sense-making currently is
being conducted. As a system that produces entertainment through exploiting familiar
conventions in novel ways, genre cinema has long been understood as revealing both
cultural anxieties and the fantasised solutions which emerge in response to them. Our
formulation of genres of inequality attempts to pinpoint popular cinemas naturalising of
gender hierarchies, a process that we take to be particularly acute in recessionary times.
The restatement of traditional gender scripts forms one response to a challenging eco-
nomic context. Within the contemporary chick flick, inequality is increasingly part of the
recessionary social landscape in which the female characters must operate.
The recessionary chick flick
In many respects, the cinema of the recession can be seen to be redoubling its efforts to
secure conservative ideological territory, with recent themes and tropes focusing on the
reconstitution of the insecure midlife couple, the vigilantism of male patriarchs and
female post-feminist crimes of ambition. In Hall Pass (dir. Bobby and Peter Farrelly,
2011), Date Night (dir. Shawn Levy, 2010) and Couples Retreat (dir. Peter Billingsley,
2009), middle-class couples whose lives are being incrementally impacted by recession
undergo experiences of exoticism that confirm their preference for suburban domesticity.
In one of the recessions largest word-of-mouth hits, Taken (dir. Pierre Morel, 2008), and
in films such as The Next Three Days (dir. Paul Haggis, 2010), avenging fathers and
husbands track missing daughters and wronged wives while highlighting the economic
travails and insecurities of their own position. Female-centred narratives in prestige cat-
egories such as Black Swan (dir. Darren Aronofsky, 2010) seek to make art out of the
pathologisation of female ambition and rigor; more pedestrian productions such as How
Do You Know? (dir. James L. Brooks, 2010) suggest that when work is no longer avail-
able, women face compulsory marriage. Perhaps the most striking element across the
vast majority of these films is the way that they register a desire to get away, and the
necessity of coming back (a narrative dynamic also at work in some of the most high-
profile female-centred films of the post-boom, including Sex and the City 2, dir. Michael
Patrick King, 2010, and Eat Pray Love, dir. Ryan Murphy, 2010).
The urban romance, the most recurrent form of the contemporary chick flick, is poorly
suited on the whole to conceptualise new social and economic inequalities. Such concerns
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Negra and Tasker 351
are out of sync with the typical commitments of a genre whose female protagonists teeter
with alarming frequency between euphoria and melancholia. A category still heavily pop-
ulated by variants of the manic pixie dream girl type whose exuberance, vibrancy and
light-hearted relation to life counterbalances a serious, burdened male protagonist, the
chick flick typically generates an affective economy in which the achievement of roman-
tic intimacy forecloses all other concerns.
1
In general, the chick flick has maintained an
imperviousness to the recession, largely continuing to trade in hyper-consumerist specta-
cle, situating itself exclusively and unself-consciously in environments of urban affluence
and privilege, and glorifying the elimination of feminism from the life-scripts of its
female protagonists. This all may seem unsurprising; indeed, it complies perfectly with
conventional wisdom that in periods of economic duress, Hollywood renews its charge to
gratify audiences through escapism. However, it should be noted that female unemploy-
ment and underemployment is on the rise in the chick flick.
2
The most prominent example
is Bridesmaids (dir. Paul Feig, 2011), whose protagonist Annie as seen in Figure 1
stands disconsolately outside her failed Milwaukee bakery early in the film, contemplat-
ing her financial and emotional losses, and whose subsequent chronicle of misfortune
proceeds in tandem with her loss of rewarding paid work.
3
More recently, Whats Your
Number? (dir. Mark Mylod, 2011) opens with its protagonist Ally being let go from her
job, a development about which the film is studiedly neutral. This event factors only inso-
far as it gives her opportunities to spend more time with the neighbour who will become
her partner, and helps her to realise that her calling is to make small figurines staged into
urban scenes. In both films we come to understand the female protagonists unemploy-
ment as effectively a manifestation of her relationship failures, and although neither Annie
nor Ally find work, they are placed proximate to weddings in conclusions that suggest that
they themselves will soon be economically and ideologically stabilised through marriage.
Yet both conclusions are marked by an over-the-top performativity that renders them ten-
uous and unpersuasive. This performativity is also nostalgic, encompassing the surreal
Figure 1. In recession romances such as Bridesmaids, female unemployment
signifies chiefly as a route to romance.
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352 European Journal of Cultural Studies 16(3)
reassembly of 1990s pop act Wilson Philips in Bridesmaids, and in Whats Your Number?
the performance of the Cars 1980s hit Just What I Needed by the central couple. These
films trite recourse to the imagery of earlier eras belies the social optimism that charac-
terises functional romance. The chick flicks strained efforts to resolve female downward
mobility through bridal fantasy bear noticing, if we are to understand fully its current
shape and structure.
Strikingly, the recession is separating the contemporary chick flick from one of its
most beloved tropes, the woman who gives up her job. For example, one of the most
commercially successful chick flicks of the recession, The Proposal (dir. Anne Fletcher,
2009), culminates with a last-minute reversal in which the male protagonist declares his
love for his female boss, clearing the way to a green card marriage that enables her to
keep her position as a publishing executive. In a film such as I Dont Know How She
Does It (dir. Douglas McGrath, 2011), adaptational change is key, as great liberties are
taken with the ending of the bestselling book on which the film is based, in order to allow
the protagonist to keep her demanding banking job rather than resigning and moving to
the country, as in the source text. Thus, one of the chick flicks manifestations of aware-
ness of a changed economic climate is that it can no longer blithely separate women from
work in the fashion of numerous earlier films in the genre, from Youve Got Mail (dir.
Nora Ephron, 1998) to 13 Going on 30 (dir. Gary Winick, 2004).
It may be that the chick flick is beginning to relinquish the most obvious manifesta-
tions of the commitment to idealised retreatist domestic bliss which has anchored it ideo-
logically for 20 years. However, its conclusions remain characteristically artificial and
highly unconvincing. The strained romances of many recent chick flicks (where the cou-
ple manifest an obvious and sustained awkwardness with one another, or where a trans-
parently hollow ending is put across), show signs of an increasing desperation to codify
heterosexual intimacy.
4
Customarily attributed to the deficient skills of creative person-
nel and/or the lack of discernment of their female audiences, the genres shortcomings
might be understood more productively within a broader contemporary crisis of how to
conceptualise intimacy. Lauren Berlant usefully observes that intimacy is formed around
threats to the image of the world it seeks to sustain (2000: 7), and in this regard the
genres creative limitations may be broadly linked to a new sense of precariousness. The
chick flicks typical isolation of its female protagonist and placement of her within a
devaluing social world are gestures that amount to a kind of narrative privatisation: neo-
liberal manoeuvres that emphasise the social security of coupledom. In this respect, the
recessionary chick flick strikingly substantiates Henry Girouxs point that within dis-
courses of privatisation, there are no public or systemic problems, only individual trou-
bles with no trace or connection to larger social forces (2011: 592593).
That being said, there are signs that the chick flick might be losing a degree of confi-
dence in the couple as a symbolic unit charged with the resolution of social problems.
The industrys inability to generate couples who are plausible and interesting enough to
carry a film in recent years is hinted at in the recent trend toward compendium romances
either pre-sold in every conceivable way, such as The Jane Austen Book Club (dir. Robin
Swicord, 2007) and Hes Just Not That Into You (Ken Kwapis, 2009), urban branded, as
in Paris, Je TAime (dir. Olivier Assayas et al., 2006) and New York, I Love You (dir. Fatih
Akin, 2009), or based on holiday-timed marketing premises substituting for narrative
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Negra and Tasker 353
concepts, as in Valentines Day (dir. Garry Marshall, 2010) and New Years Eve (dir.
Garry Marshall, 2011). Such cinematic pan-romances hysterically assemble and reas-
semble numerous couples of various ages, ethnicities and social class positions in an
apparent bid to cover all demographic bases.
We might go further and note that the chick flick of recent years manifests significant
uncertainty about the broader social sphere out of which, historically, the romantic cou-
ple has emerged. The simulated and emotionally neutral nature of cinematic romance in
the recession is typified by a film such as Friends With Benefits (dir. Will Gluck, 2011),
in which the male and female members of the central couple summon a flash mob of
strangers at different points, in a display of social capital that serves only to demonstrate
the estrangement of the couple from any plausible notion of the public sphere. Through
gestures such as these Friends With Benefits contrives a civic endorsement of the couple,
but such gestures ring hollow, serving only to illustrate the couples utter disconnection
from civic life. Here, the couple do not emanate from or transcend the crowd through
their uniqueness, talent or any singular qualities; they are simply apart from it. Films
such as this bespeak the hard edge of the chick flick in recent years, as the form moves
away from the destiny clichs and scenes of enchantment that were ubiquitous in the
1990s and early 2000s.
5
Standard denunciations of the chick flick as a bankrupt narrative
form rest on obliviousness to a key fact: staging the egalitarianism of the couple and
presenting it as representative of a broader unified public has become a more difficult
narrative task in an era marked by the conspicuous proliferation of social inequalities.
The recessionary corporate melodrama
In contrast with the chick flicks tentative engagement with recessionary conditions, the
corporate melodrama, a sub-genre preoccupied with the power dynamics of the work-
place, is a site which explicitly grapples with the inequalities of a recessionary context.
While the boom years celebrated wealth, achievement and conspicuous consumption in
sites from lifestyle television to celebrity culture, typically cinematic representations of
corporate endeavour have been less ostentatious in character. Indeed, as we have sug-
gested, the figure of the frustrated white-collar male worker already had become a rec-
ognisable type in Hollywood films of the 1990s. Films such as Fight Club (dir. David
Fincher, 1997), In the Company of Men (dir. Neil Labute, 1997) and American Beauty
(dir. Sam Mendes, 1999) have been extensively analysed by film and cultural studies
scholars (see Giroux, 2001). Such scenarios exploit an evident mismatch between an
alienating experience of white-collar work and the celebration of wealth and consump-
tion which characterised boom culture. In these films, mens jobs do not fuel opulent
lifestyles or provide fulfilling work. Of 1990s office films, Latham Hunter writes:
[W]e can be sure that while these films successfully recreate the dehumanizing conditions of
office work, they offer no plausible way out of these conditions (aside from escaping the office
altogether, which effectively silences the possibility of dissent in corporate culture). (2003: 84)
6
A decade later, the comic book adaptation Wanted (dir. Timur Bekmambetov, 2008)
demonstrates the continued resonance of these conventions. The movies downtrodden
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354 European Journal of Cultural Studies 16(3)
male office worker, Wesley Gibson, is terrorised by a harridan female boss who is
figured as overweight, drawing on a culturally familiar repertoire aligning excess con-
sumption and physical disgust. Gibson is rendered simultaneously grotesque and
pathetic unmanly before discovering an unsuspected and fantastical capacity for
action and violence as an assassin.
7
Corporate melodrama represents Hollywood cinemas most persuasive articulation of
workplace frustration. It presents scenarios of victimised men, whether they are sub-
jected to corporate corruption, conspiracy or the more mundane scenario of redundancy.
Like the fantastic and equally melodramatic form of action cinema (as in the scenario of
Wanted), corporate melodrama situates a hardworking male hero against forces which
stand for a ruthlessly unyielding economic context.
8
In corporate melodrama, anxieties
about recession are displaced onto and articulated through contradictory gendered dis-
courses which suggest that the corporate environment is both a site of power and author-
ity, and fundamentally incompatible with American manhood. A short scene midway
through the film in which two executives share a cramped elevator with a female cleaner
evokes the uncomfortable class hierarchies of financial corporations (Figure 2).
Significantly, while films such as The Social Network (dir. David Fincher, 2010) and
Margin Call (dir. J.C. Chandor, 2011) suggest that the corporate world is unfulfilling or
uninteresting to men, they remain unwilling to cede positions of authority to women.
Thus in Margin Call, it is the female executive Sarah Robertson, rather than Jared Cohen,
who is sacrificed in a reckoning with the markets.
9
Such a dilemma plays out somewhat
differently in The Social Network, where Mark Zuckerbergs ambition is both tempered
by a seeming indifference to the Harvard business model, and underpinned by casual
misogyny.
10
The films final scene conveys both vast personal wealth and personal isola-
tion, as Zuckerberg is imagined obsessively refreshing his ex-girlfriends Facebook page,
indecisively hovering over the decision to send her a friend request. Such a dual
Figure 2. Margin Call: Corporate melodrama demonstrates a persistent
unwillingness to cede power to women who are conspicuously visualized as either
low status to the point of invisibility or threateningly assertive.
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Negra and Tasker 355
position, suggesting both a desire for material success and dissatisfaction with the terms
of the corporate world, comes to define corporate melodrama with its evocation of, in
Linda Williams phrase, a hero who is also a victim (Williams, 1998: 58). In this man-
ner the corporate melodrama echoes some of the strategies evident in the recessionary
chick flick, displacing economic anxieties onto emotional turmoil.
When the financial collapse occurred, Hollywood had developed powerful tropes
already by which white-collar work was figured as deeply alienating, indeed effectively
feminising, for men. A film such as Michael Clayton (dir. Tony Gilroy, 2007), preceding
the economic meltdown, mobilises many of the tropes through which subsequent corpo-
rate melodramas would operate. Clayton is a corporate fixer in financial trouble who
finds himself enmeshed in company politics and personal danger. The film embodies
corporate intrigue in the figure of Karen Crowder, dwelling on her ruthlessness and inse-
curity, and suggesting how firmly established an equation between female achievement
and male disempowerment had become. The opposition of Clayton and neurotic com-
pany executive Crowder maps male disempowerment against the figure of (undeserved)
female success in now-familiar ways.
11
At the same time, Claytons gambling and family
debts render him financially vulnerable, casting him as both corporate insider and sym-
pathetic economic outsider.
Contemporary gender culture tends to assume that gender equality is achieved, that
women face few or no social and institutional obstacles. Such an assumption is accom-
panied frequently by an implication that having achieved the right to equality in work
and relationships, what women desire most often is something else: that professional
success is not fulfilling in and of itself. Particularly relevant here is Diane Negras (2008)
work on retreatism: a formulation which, as argued previously, has become increasingly
unsustainable in the contemporary economic context. If, as Negra argues, retreatist sce-
narios in womens films and romantic comedies suggest womens choice to install them-
selves as subservient partners in couples indeed, a suggestion that they discover their
true selves in doing so then are men correspondingly positioned as compelled to take
up a place of authority? As these questions suggest, the coupling of male frustration in
work to female achievement or even female presence takes on new resonance in the
context of corporate downsizing. This is crucial, since so many recession-era films focus
on middle-class men as the prime subjects of economic uncertainty.
Significantly, just as post-feminist media culture plays on middle-class womens
sense that professional success does not deliver, films and media culture betray a sense
that for men, work is not a space that is particularly compatible with the sort of gender
identity to which they aspire. Media invitations to man up in the recessionary context
seem ambiguous in their appeal. Male-centred comedies, as in The Hangover franchise
(dir. Todd Phillips, 2009, 2011), frequently celebrate at least a temporary flight from the
sort of responsibility which defined traditional breadwinner masculinity. Of course,
flight is only a relief if the comic male characters are making a choice to avoid working
life and domestic responsibilities. Anxieties regarding the consequences of male redun-
dancy not an escape, but a rejection extend already existing discourses in contempo-
rary gender culture by which representations of high-achieving female workers function
as a sign of social crisis. However, they also chime with the theme of corporate environ-
ments as unmanly sites of subjection. Thus, if the recessionary chick flick typically
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356 European Journal of Cultural Studies 16(3)
avoids sustained commentary on female unemployment (often figuring financial prob-
lems as relationship problems for protagonists), within the corporate melodrama redun-
dancy is portrayed frequently as a life-changing experience for male characters.
The Company Men explicitly addresses a recessionary context via its focus on three
male executives who are made redundant during the downsizing of the company for
which they work; in the process each must manage the personal and financial conse-
quences. Ultimately, redundancy is refigured as an opportunity for the male protagonist
to reconsider his priorities and to reconnect with his family. Thus, choice and control are
central themes. The films tagline is indicative of an emphasis on agency in times of
austerity: In America, we give our lives to our jobs. Its time to take them back, and as
may be seen, its key promotional image thematises the precariousness of labour in deci-
sively gendered terms (Figure 3). Each of the three male protagonists are at different
points in their careers and articulate different responses to redundancy. The youngest,
Bobby Walker, is the films main character. A somewhat self-satisfied figure, Bobby is
initially in denial on losing his job. Imagining that he will secure a new position imme-
diately, he refuses his wifes attempts to adopt thrifty practices of the kind associated
with recession-era femininity. Subsequently Bobby must sell the family home, move in
with his parents and accept a job offer from his brother-in-law, builder Jack Dolan, with
whom he has a hostile relationship. In a somewhat hackneyed move, manual labour
proves redemptive for Bobby, who comes to appreciate his wife and children and to
understand the true value of home and family. Jacks status as a good man in hard times
is signalled by a quiet willingness to lose money on contracts rather than stop working or
let his employees go. An ordinary American writ-large, Jacks blue-collar labours sup-
port Bobby, effectively facilitating a melodramatic transformation narrative that culmi-
nates in a reinvigorated return to the (suitably downsized) corporate workplace.
Bobbys narrative of transformation through unemployment and manual labour is
played out against the other stories explored by the film. In a pivotal scene, fellow execu-
tive Phil Woodward, unable to deal with unemployment or to find another position, takes
Figure 3. The Company Men: recessionary corporate melodrama articulates a
renewed nostalgia for a productive era in American industry.
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Negra and Tasker 357
his own life. This event in turn forces into action the third of the three men on whom we
focus in the film, Gene McClary. For him, the crisis brought about by downsizing is less
to do with financial uncertainty, and more about disappointment at his exclusion from the
company that he had worked to build, as well as regret at the passing of heavy industry.
Following Phils suicide, Gene tours Bobby around deserted shipyards, mournfully
remarking: We used to make something here, back before we got lost in the paperwork.
Genes humanity is contrasted with the values of his erstwhile partner, James Salinger, a
figure whose enslavement to the share price results in waves of job losses, even while
money is poured into a new high-status headquarters building. In a nostalgic fantasy
resolution, the film concludes with Bobby arriving to work at the small shipbuilding
company established by Gene (ironically enough, using a credit card). Such a hopeful
ending is far from the norm within corporate melodrama; yet the rather more cynical
Margin Call similarly features an evocation of a more productive past, with redundant
risk analyst Eric Dales reflective lament on his former life as an engineer.
As a corporate melodrama, The Company Men tellingly repositions the figure of the
boy-man of Hollywood comedy as an innocent victim of the Great Recession. Its focus
on middle-class, mid-life white men as the primary victims of the downturn is notable,
as is its barely suppressed anger towards women in the workplace. Once again, these
themes are variations on existing scenarios. George Clooneys role as Ryan Bingham, a
dismissal specialist in Up in the Air (dir. Jason Reitman, 2009), involves the performance
of a now-familiar double-move that characterises Hollywood cinemas construction of
suffering or dysfunctional elite men. Bingham grows up, after a fashion, in the film.
Initially cast as a tragic boy-man figure, with his relevance called into question by an
upstart young female colleague, Natalie Keener, Binghams way of working is reinstated
at the films conclusion, even though it is also called into question to some degree. The
tension between Bingham and Keener stems from whether the work of firing people
should be managed in person or via video link. It is clear that Binghams commitment to
the former is in part a selfish desire to continue his life on the road, to avoid the office
and the computer screen: his sideline as a motivational speaker extolling the virtues of
travelling light emotionally is a clue to his questionable moral status. Yet it is telling that
the films women are both ruthless and inconsistent. Alex Goran is first revered and then
reviled for her role as a female version of Bingham, taking pleasure in sexual encounters
during business travel; his impulsive desire for a romantic connection with her results in
a shock discovery that she has a life and a family of her own, and that she exists beyond
their hotel liaisons. Keener, by contrast, seems flawed in being inconsistent in her ruth-
lessness. Accompanying Bingham on a business trip to fire personnel, Keener is unset-
tled by the consequences of their actions (a woman commits suicide following
redundancy) and by events in her personal life (her lover rejects her in a text message, an
echo of her own advocacy of technology to enact redundancies). Thus she ultimately
departs the business that she had been so keen to rationalise, paving the way for a conclu-
sion that re-secures, albeit in melancholy fashion, Binghams corporate way of life.
The appropriate attitude of women towards the child-man across numerous films and
several Hollywood genres is one of unstinting support coupled with moderate critique. The
Company Mens recessionary tale of downsizing enacts a scenario of transformation and
redemption which depends on highly conventional gender performance. Bobbys refusal of
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358 European Journal of Cultural Studies 16(3)
his new status as just another asshole with a resum is expressed in terms of refusal to
accept offers of help and his wifes attempts to cut family expenditure or to seek work.
Significantly, this is allied to a deeply problematic attitude towards women: an attitude
evident in other Hollywood films dealing with recession-era culture (such as Up in the Air).
Bobbys most vocal anger is reserved for women. Indeed, this has become conventional
within the lexicon of commercial cinema, where female executives given any prominence
are codified as cold and unfeminine. Bobbys disdain is directed at two women in particu-
lar: Joyce Robertson, an African American recruiter who looks over his application for a
position, and Sally Wilson, the GTX executive who oversees the downsizing programme.
Bobby repeatedly leaves abusive phone messages for Sally, while his brief meeting with
Joyce Robertson ends in him shouting, swearing and angrily walking out, after making an
acerbic comment about her weight. Bobby clearly bridles at being considered for a position
at half his previous salary; when it becomes clear that Joyce is not looking at him for the
vice presidency that he considers to be his entitlement, Bobby protests (Im a highly quali-
fied applicant for that position). Good women in corporate melodrama are those who
nurture and support childish men; they make few demands in their own right and their
professional advancement is not at issue. So The Company Men draws a clear contrast
between high-flying Sally Wilson and supportive wife Maggie Walker. Phil Woodwards
wife, by contrast, insists that he conduct a pretence that he is still in work: her lack of sup-
port implicitly contributes to his suicide. The patient support and love offered by Maggie
Walker seems to represent the films model of appropriate recessionary femininity.
Similarly, in Wall Street: Money Never Sleeps, Winnie Gekko, troubled and angered by her
fiancs fascination with her discredited and estranged financier father Gordon Gekko, is
ultimately a supportive and nurturing rather than challenging figure.
Christine Gledhill writes that melodramas challenge lies not in confronting how
things are, but in asserting how they ought to be (1987: 21). In this context, corporate
melodrama articulates if not a wholehearted critique of consumer culture, then at least an
anxiety that financial success is an empty marker of status. Thus the primary problem for
Bobby, Phil and Gene in The Company Men is that they have too much: their possessions
and financial commitments oppress them, removing them from labour as an activity that
is meaningful. The opening montage moves from exteriors of vast homes through shots
of luxury cars to interiors filled with consumer goods. Bobby has borrowed heavily to
pay for a lifestyle of lavish holidays, a large house, golf club membership and a Porsche;
his melodramatic transformation involves being gradually stripped of these signs of sta-
tus. However, the moral here is not to do with the dangers of a credit-driven economy,
but the dangers of mens dependence on consumption to define their sense of self. When
Bobby tells Maggie, I need to look successful, we understand that his appearance-
focused priorities are all wrong hence the films nostalgic recourse to manual labour as
a process that redeems the melodramatic protagonist. In a less upbeat ending, Margin
Call portrays Sam Rogers bitterly agreeing to another two years of service because he
needs the money, while executives who have been fired are paid to stay in a room while
the company covers its tracks. Earlier in the film, Trading Desk Head Will Emerson
casually explains to two awestruck junior analysts just how easy it was to spend the $2m
he earned the previous year. Thus, while men seemingly take money for granted in the
corporate melodrama, nonetheless its loss is a source of regret.
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Negra and Tasker 359
Conclusion
In the years since the global financial crash, conservative cinematic institutions such as
Hollywood have acknowledged persistent inequalities of necessity, at least to some degree.
We have begun here the work of considering Hollywood genre filmmaking in this light,
attending to its ability to articulate or disarticulate conundrums of class, downward mobil-
ity, economic uncertainty and the increasingly evident limitations of global capitalism in its
current incarnation. Highlighting two recurrent generic formulations in recent Hollywood
output, the female-centred urban romance and the male-centred corporate drama, we have
sought to map some of the ways in which broadly-felt social experiences of contingency
and states of uncertainty are being grafted onto established narrative formulae. While the
recessionary chick flick broadly downplays the significance and consequences of female
unemployment (sometimes sketching female work struggles as significant only insofar as
they correlate with relationship problems), the corporate melodrama presents male redun-
dancy in dramatic terms, both as a tragic scenario and as an opportunity for personal rein-
vention. In this way, economic citizenship is significantly gendered: financially-beset male
characters in the corporate melodrama oppose female chick flick protagonists whose work
is not sufficiently valued for economic concerns to carry real narrative weight. Yet for all
their differences, these two sets of films are alike in the ways that they join together a
muted, frequently tentative, but nevertheless distinct acknowledgement of the dissatisfac-
tion, and even dissent, of citizens. They also share a habit of trying out fantasy resolutions
to the structuring inequalities of a neoliberal society.
Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial or
not-for-profit sectors.
Notes
1. The term, coined by film critic Nathan Rabin, appeared in an obscure commentary. It has
gained traction to the point that it was explored in a lengthy National Public Radio segment
and has attained status as a shorthand reference to contemporary Hollywoods inability to
generate complex female characterisation (see Rabin, 2007). The manic pixie dream girls role
in facilitating the self-discovery of a male character has led to wide application of the label to
characters as diverse as Susan Vance in Bringing Up Baby (dir. Howard Hawks, 1938), Holly
Golightly in Breakfast at Tiffanys (dir. Blake Edwards, 1961) Summer Finn in 500 Days of
Summer (dir. Marc Webb, 2009) and Maude in Harold and Maude (dir. Hal Ashby, 1971).
Caryn Murphy has shown shrewdly how the type is deconstructed in Ruby Sparks (2012).
2. The 2012 One for the Money, an adaptation of the Janet Evanovich novel, opens with
Katherine Heigls character Stephanie Plum losing her job and having her car repossessed.
3. The name of the failed bakery, Cake Baby, suggests that Annies commercial endeavours
are a substitute for her lack of a partner and children. One of the ways in which Bridesmaids
seeks narrative innovation is by separating its protagonist from a long history of women as
proficient or magical cooks in other chick flicks, from Simply Irresistible (dir. Mark Tarlov,
1999) to Waitress (dir. Adrienne Shelly, 2007). The films bleak Milwaukee setting also dif-
fers markedly from depictions of cities such as New York and Chicago, which underpin the
urban enchantment customary to the genre.
4. Tamar Jeffers McDonald writes cogently about such endings in her book Romantic Comedy:
Boy Meets Girl Meets Genre (2007).
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360 European Journal of Cultural Studies 16(3)
5. Arguably, another mode of recessionary response in some chick flicks has been an empha-
sis on unemployment or employment-related mobility that forces the couple to separate or
travel in ways that strain their relationship. Such is the case not only in Friends with Benefits
which moves continuously between the US East and West Coasts but also Going the Distance
(Nanette Burstein, 2010) and Wanderlust (David Wain, 2012).
6. Thus in American Beauty we see a perverse comic reversal whereby the male protagonist
acquires the accoutrements of wealth only when he ostensibly rejects the rules of the white
collar world and takes a low-status job in the food industry.
7. The final scene of Wanted briefly suggests that Gibson has returned to his subordinate office
role before triumphantly enacting a spectacular defeat of the forces ranged against him. The
absolute familiarity of this dynamic, contrasting masculine action with the constrictions of
the office environment, is evident in the dual identities associated with the Superman and
Spiderman characters. Indeed, this contrast underpins the humour of animated feature The
Incredibles (dir. Brad Bird, 2004), in which a poignant and comic scene features the gigantic
form of Mr Incredible crammed into a cubicle of an insurance company, bullied by a tiny boss
and pressured to refuse legitimate client claims.
8. Paul Cohen writes of action in this context: Mainstream Hollywood films reveal an abid-
ing tension in post-industrial America between the reality of entrepreneurial success and the
mythic conceptions of masculinity (2011: 72).
9. That Sarah Robertson is played by Demi Moore allows evocation of the stars 1990s roles as
an aggressively ambitious figure, notably in Disclosure (dir. Barry Levinson, 1994), a film
which certainly falls within the ambit of corporate melodrama.
10. Lisa Nakamura (2011) argues that the film depicts Asian women as idle hands in the digital
industry, valued and included only for their sexual labor as hypersexualized exotic sirens.
11. Taunya Lovell Banks takes the film to task for its portrayal of Crowther, contrasting a chang-
ing gender profile in the US legal and corporate worlds with the ways in which Hollywood
represents these spaces as a decidedly male environment (2011: 119).
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Biographical notes
Diane Negra is Professor of Film Studies and Screen Culture and Head of Film Studies at
University College Dublin. She is the author, editor or co-editor of seven books, and together with
Yvonne Tasker has edited Gendering the Recession (forthcoming, Duke University Press).
Yvonne Tasker is Executive Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Humanities, University of East
Anglia. She is the author, editor or co-editor of eight books, and together with Diane Negra has
edited Gendering the Recession (forthcoming, Duke University Press).
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