"Was he slow?": The Performance of Masculinity in Edgar Wright's Action Musical Baby Driver

Abstract

ABSTRACT:Edgar Wright's Baby Driver (2017) has been heralded by critics as a unique generic blend of action and musical. With critical acclaim mostly reserved for the film's cross-generic appeal, little scholarly attention has been paid to how genre in Baby Driver works to represent and explore gender relations. The film's combination of these generic elements (as an "action musical"), I believe, opens up possibilities for a questioning of how the film represents the masculinity of its action-hero as a performance. Applying Judith Butler's theory of gender as a performance, I argue that Baby Driver represents millennial masculinity as a kind of "play" in order to interrogate traditional action-cinema tropes of hegemonic masculinity.