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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.

In 1990s America, the question of what made a ‘real’ man was at the forefront of debates about sex and gender. During this pivotal moment in American history, hegemonic masculinity in particular was experiencing numerous threats to its ontological security. For instance, masculinity was infamously pronounced in crisis, the advent of the ‘new man’ betrayed anxieties about an image-conscious and feminine performance of masculinity, and there was mounting social pressure from civil rights, feminist, and queer groups for straight, white, masculinity to be challenged as the centre of the patriarchal stage. In short, the issue for masculinity in the 90s was that of legitimacy. The response from Hollywood was an influx of films which featured leading men in costume, disguise, or masquerade. John Woo's Face/Off is one such film that betrays anxieties about the constructedness of hegemonic masculinity. Face/Off does so through the motif of plastic surgery. In this article, I will explore how Face/Off uses the image of plastic surgery to represent the masculinities of its male protagonists as masquerades. I will demonstrate how plastic surgery in Face/Off is a device which transforms hegemonic masculinity so that it may adapt to the climate of crisis and secure its continuation. Face/Off demonstrates that masculinity is a construct which masquerades as an ontology.