Heroism in a Cubicle: The Trappings of the Action Hero in the Anti-Heroic Context of the Office.

Pia Pandelakis (1)

1 THALIM - THALIM - Théorie et histoire des arts et des littératures de la modernité - UMR 7172

I would like to focus here on a very specific case, where space is neither an obstacle nor an ally, but appears as plainly anti-heroic. To do so, I will temporarily move away from the Action genre, to turn to a narrower corpus of films. The space of the office seems opposed to the construction of heroism in every way, firstly because it is a setting that seldom appears in Action films. When heroes want to prove themselves worthy, or when a common man has the occasion to save the day, they usually do so away from their home and work place, in exotic or monumental locales (from the jungles of Commando to the Nakatomi tower in Die Hard).

Keywords: Cinema; Heroism; Body; Masculinity; Action film

Domains: Art and art history; Gender studies

Pia Pandelakis. Heroism in a Cubicle: The Trappings of the Action Hero in the Anti-Heroic Context of the Office.. The Image of the Hero II in Literature, Media, and Society, Society for the Interdisciplinary Study of Social Imagery, Mar 2017, Pueblo, Colorado, United States. ⟨hal-01587448⟩