Discuss how historical stereotypes of Australian masculinity are confirmed or challenged in the film Two Hands and Strictly Ballroom.

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“Film is a powerful player in the construction of national identity. In Australian films, men embody particular masculinities such as rugged practicality and anti-intellectualism, ruthless independence against all odds, and a willingness to die. These masculinities have been embellished and perpetuated in film histories as the ideal held as the standard for imitation”

Discuss how historical stereotypes of Australian masculinity are confirmed or challenged in the film Two Hands and Strictly Ballroom.

Introduction

Since the revival of Australian cinema in early 1970s, Australian films have focused on certain themes of social perceptions and representations of masculinity. We see dominant, recognisable male images in our cinema – the bushman, the larrikin, the ‘mate’, and the ‘battler’. Masculinity stereotypes are projected in both Two Hands (1999) and Strictly Ballroom (1992) to varying degrees.

Australia has a reputation for aggressive masculinity. This has its roots when the first settlers, mostly male convicts landed in Botany Bay who raised ‘hell’ when drunk. Then it was the outback pioneer, battling the bush to build a new nation prior to the First World War. The Anzac legend – bold and ferocious males, unwilling to bow to military discipline, never flinched in battle defined the evolution of the image of Australian masculinity. Professor Manning Clark in his opus A History of Australia imaged the bronzed and noble Anzac as males involved in sex orgies, having violent scuffles, and in Egypt burned belongings of local people, brawled, got drunk and rioted and patronised brothels. Hero and larrikin, ratbag and rebel, the Anzacs are an inextricable part of Australian tradition of masculinity. The wars in South Africa, Korea, and Vietnam where Australian men gained a reputation of “roughhouse brawlers on and off the battlefields” further contributed to this sense of masculinity and idea of mateship.

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Mateship

The unique Australian mateship – exclusively male camaderie – pervades all interactions, actively and robustly discouraging those who would be different. Mateship does not acknowledge fear or pain, even when facing death.

In Two Hands true mateship is amply depicted. When Jimmy is in trouble, after losing ten thousand dollars, and Pando’s gang wants to kill, Jimmy’s friends (not fearing to commit a crime for mateship sake) help him to repay Pando by robbing a bank together. One of his mates was shot dead by the police. In the bank robbery one of the robbers fell ...

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