Seeing Double: Stunt Performance and Masculinity

Smith looks at moments when the logic of the stunt man's paradox breaks down, when the bodies performing these heroic cinematic acts also have faces, both in films and in the culture at large. In particular, he examines a cycle of films made in the late 1970s, such as The Great Waldo Pepper (1975), Hooper (1978), and The Stunt Man (1980), that represents the emergence of the stunt performer in a dramatic way. He argues that the eruption of the stunt man at this time worked in part to manage historical traumas connected to post-Vietnam America, and that the stunt man in these films became a means of addressing a crisis in masculinity.