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Arnold Schwarzenegger has been a part of the American landscape for so long that the improbability of his story is all too easy to take for granted: An immigrant bodybuilder from Austria with a long and unwieldy name, a heavy accent and a physical appearance unlike that of any other major movie star became one […] More
The idea of the pregnant man has long been mined for Hollywood comedy. This summer, he becomes a menace.When I was four months pregnant, just as my midsection had grown vast enough to convert my pregnancy into a public event, I escaped to the movies. I saw “Men,” Alex Garland’s May horror film about the young widow Harper (Jessie Buckley), who sets out on a restorative countryside getaway only to be terrorized by a village full of unsavory male archetypes — pervy vicar, passive-aggressive nice guy, condescending cop — all played by Rory Kinnear.Near the end of the film (spoiler alert), one of these men spontaneously sprouts a distended belly much like my own. A slimy slit ruptures between his legs, and one of the other guys slithers out of the hole. He grows a belly and births a third guy, who grows a belly and births a fourth guy, and so on, until the film’s full cast of men has replicated at Harper’s feet.A few weeks later, I was beached on my bed at home, watching a screener on my laptop for Andrew Semans’s “Resurrection,” when I was again confronted by the specter of a menacing pregnant man. The thriller, which debuted in theaters last week, follows the tightly wound corporate hot shot Maggie (Rebecca Hall), who unravels when she spots David (Tim Roth), a man from her past. Maggie reveals (more spoilers!) that 22 years ago, David lured her into an abusive relationship, impregnated her and ate their baby. Now he informs her that the little boy he gobbled is gestating in his gut and missing his mommy. “He’s moving,” David tells Maggie, handling his middle-aged paunch like a baby bump. “Would you like to feel him?”In Alex Garland’s “Men,” a young widow (Jessie Buckley) is terrorized during her countryside getaway by a village full of unsavory male archetypes (all played by Rory Kinnear).A24Andrew Semans’s “Resurrection” follows a corporate hot shot, Maggie (Rebecca Hall), who unravels when she spots a man from her past (Tim Roth).IFC MidnightSo the horror villain of the summer is the pregnant man. He represents the patriarchal domination of women, or maybe the cyclical nature of male violence, or maybe the surreal outer edge of psychological trauma — but whatever he’s supposed to signify, he implicates me. My pregnant state, grafted onto these men, is pitched as the apotheosis of grotesque social commentary, a sight meant to be so bizarre, disturbing and deep that it is preserved for the crowning spectacle of a horror film.Pop culture has long been obsessed with the prospect of male pregnancy, though it has mostly been used as a comedic gambit, as in the dismal 1978 farce “Rabbit Test,” the sentimental 1994 rom-com “Junior,” or the elaborate rollout of Lil Nas X’s 2021 album “Montero,” during which he traipsed around the internet sporting a photorealistic bump before simulating birthing an LP. Of course, some men can and do become pregnant — trans men — but works that exploit the idea of the pregnant man rarely acknowledge the reality of the pregnant man. He must exist purely as a fantasy, a counterfactual, a metaphor. Like a mythical boogeyman, he has stalked the culture for generations, occasionally appearing to impart a lesson on gender relations in his time. Now he has shape shifted from a clown into a creep — a visceral interpretation of male control over women’s bodies.Over the past several weeks, I watched many of the artifacts of the pregnant man genre. I started with “Rabbit Test,” Joan Rivers’s misanthropic comedy in which the aimless bachelor Lionel (Billy Crystal, in his first movie) miraculously conceives after a one-night stand with some pushy broad. Released at the tail end of the second-wave feminist movement, “Rabbit Test” is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are.Its “first pregnant man” conceit is just a setup for a carnival of broadly racist and sexist scenarios that evinces little interest in the reality of pregnancy itself. Lionel hardly looks pregnant, he hardly feels pregnant, and as his due date approaches, he is not concerned about how he is going to become un-pregnant. “Rabbit Test” is so incurious about women’s experiences that it doesn’t even bother exploiting them. It’s just a movie about a guy with a pillow under his shirt.“Rabbit Test,” starring Billy Crystal and Doris Roberts, is a movie about the scrambling of gender roles that only reinforces how rigid they still are.AVCO Embassy Pictures, via PhotofestThat shifted a little with “Junior,” the 1994 rom-com in which an embryo is implanted into Arnold Schwarzenegger’s musclebound abdominal cavity. “Junior” is from the “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus” era — a time when men and women were pitched as fundamentally different organisms, but when men who attempted interspecies communication were praised for accessing their “feminine sides.” Schwarzenegger (playing, naturally, a scientist) literalizes the trend when he is impregnated as a part of a clandestine medical experiment, pumped with estrogen and reduced to a maternal cliché. Suddenly he is craving pickles with ice cream and weeping at Kodak commercials.“Junior” is built on a sight gag: pregnancy as a laughable twist to Schwarzenegger’s herculean form. But pregnancy has the power to render any body ridiculous. And yet, as I trudge down the street, my increasingly preposterous dimensions inspire such affirmational outbursts from strangers that I feel at the center of an immense gendered conspiracy, where the self-evident absurdity of my physical situation is instead pitched as the cheerful apotheosis of my life as a woman.Maybe that’s why, watching “Junior,” I was struck by the sensitivity of Schwarzenegger’s performance. Though he is dropped into a parade of offensive scenarios (there is an interminable sequence of shoddy drag) and fitted with a limited emotional range (pregnancy is uncomfortable and confounding, never degrading or grim), he endures his ludicrous situation with unexpected grace. His pregnancy makes him not into a joke, but a father, and a plausible love interest for Emma Thompson. And when he hurls a rival scientist across a laboratory and fashions an abortion rights slogan into a steely Austrian-accented catchphrase — “My body, my choice” — it feels earned.In “Junior,” Schwarzenegger’s surprisingly sensitive performance as a pregnant man makes him a plausible love interest for Emma Thompson.Universal PicturesIf Schwarzenegger’s baby in “Junior” were real, she would be older than the 23-year-old Lil Nas X, whose own interpretation of pregnant imagery exists on an elevated plane. The campy visual world of “Montero” — which also finds him riding a stripper pole into hell — seems unbothered by gendered expectations at all. Like Billy Crystal’s in “Rabbit Test,” Lil Nas X’s prosthetic belly is just a costume, but this time it’s worn by a queer pop star rapaciously churning cultural shibboleths into internet chum.Now, just as Lil Nas X has chucked the pregnant man into the recycle bin, the movies have reclaimed him and primed him for a heel turn. Hollywood’s comic interpretation of the pregnant man always masked some deeply misogynistic ideas, and now they have emerged from the subtext to define the character himself.“Men” is a film that does not challenge the gender binary so much as wallow in it. Harper’s ill-fated getaway is suffused with dour shots of fertility idols and portentous biblical references; before she is terrorized by a pack of pathetic and violent men, she chomps an apple she’s plucked from someone else’s tree. Garland, the film’s director, has said that “messing around” with ancient masculine and feminine symbols led him to the image of “a guy with a vagina on his chest.” When that vagina births a succession of bad guys, rendering them all as laboring parents and mewling babes, it reads as a kind of misanthropic final judgment, as if men abusing women is a grotesque but ultimately inevitable cycle.The imagery of “Resurrection,” on the other hand, originates from nowhere. There is no mythical antecedent to David smugly carrying his beer gut like a womb. He requires no padding or prosthetics. He just asserts that there’s a baby in there, and he does it with such psychological intensity that Maggie starts to believe him. Watching Roth’s riotously unsettling performance, I felt freed from the reality of my own pregnant body, and also a little bit won over. David’s claims are ridiculous, but so is pregnancy. Though I am of course aware of the biological process through which babies are made, it still feels so supernatural that if you told me that people get pregnant by gobbling up live infants, I might believe it.After plodding through decades of pregnant-man tropes, “Seahorse” — a 2019 documentary that follows Freddy McConnell, a British journalist and trans man, as he conceives, carries and gives birth to his first child — came as a welcome relief. Finally, the image of the pregnant man is freed of the distortions of comedy, horror and metaphor and presented simply as a human experience. As McConnell endures the physical and mental trials of pregnancy, he must also contend with intense social pressures: He feels alienated from other men, patronized by women, ignored by medicine and estranged from his own identity.The backlash against gender-neutral language like “pregnant people” — and the assertion that it somehow “erases” women — is unintelligible to me. It is the coding of pregnancy as the paramount expression of femininity that make me feel expunged. The gendered constructs of pregnancy work differently on McConnell’s body than they do on mine, but I identified closely with him. He describes pregnancy as a process, and that is clarifying. It is not an extension of my personality. It’s just the wildest thing I’ve ever done.For me, the most unsettling image in the annals of pregnant-man movies came at the end of “Men” — not the birth scene, but the one that followed. Throughout her weekend of horror, Harper is in touch with a friend, Riley, who becomes so concerned for Harper’s safety that she drives overnight to find her. When Riley steps out of the car, we get the film’s final reveal: She’s pregnant! If pregnancy represents horror in a man, it is meant to signal the opposite in a woman — she must be nurturing, preternaturally understanding, good. I don’t know what I’m supposed to think about that, but I know how I felt: like a punchline to an old joke. More
Renato Casaro’s hand-drawn art has hooked movie audiences around the world since the 1950s. Tarantino and Stallone are big fans. One secret to his success? “You can’t cheat.”TREVISO, Italy — Renato Casaro was taking a trip down memory lane, a long journey in a career that extends from the 1950s, when Rome was known as Hollywood on the Tiber, to the last decade when Quentin Tarantino asked for his help on the 2019 film “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood.”“I constantly adapted,” said Mr. Casaro, who is a few days short of his 86th birthday. “That’s why I kept working when others stopped.”Over more than six decades, his hand-drawn movie posters have hooked audiences into theaters, acting as abridged portends of the delights to come.“The important thing was to capture the essential: that moment, that glance, that attitude, that movement that says everything and condenses the entire story. That’s the hard part,” Mr. Casaro said, adding an admonishment: “You can’t cheat. You can’t promise something that isn’t there.”The essential might translate into the tender embrace he depicted on the poster for a 1955 Russian ballet version of “Romeo and Juliet.” Or it could be a terrified eye lit by a candle for the 1969 thriller “The Haunted House of Horror.” Or maybe an impossibly brawny Arnold Schwarzenegger brandishing a sword as “Conan the Barbarian” in 1982.Although his art has been seen by untold millions, Mr. Casaro himself is mostly invisible, his work largely uncredited (save for his neatly printed signature discreetly tucked in a margin). He is known primarily to collectors, and to the many producers and directors who sought him out to plug their pictures.The Santa Caterina complex in Treviso, one of the venues for the exhibition of Mr. Casaro’s work.Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times“It’s a bit of a sore spot,” Mr. Casaro said during a recent interview in Treviso, the northeastern Italian city where he was born and where he returned to live a few years ago. As far as he knew, he said, he’d been credited in the end titles just once, in 1984, by Sergio Leone for his work on “Once Upon a Time in America.”But now Mr. Casaro is getting his moment in the limelight as Treviso celebrates his art through an ambitious retrospective: “Renato Casaro. Cinema’s Last Poster Designer. Treviso, Rome, Hollywood.”“We’re very proud to celebrate the maestro who gave emotions to so many people,” said Treviso’s mayor, Mario Conte. Many of Mr. Casaro’s posters had become icons, “forever lodged in our memories,” he said.The show’s title traces the trajectory of Mr. Casaro’s career — from crafting movie posters as a teenager in exchange for free tickets to Treviso’s Garibaldi Theater, to the days when extravagant sword-and-sandal films set in ancient Rome were shot in the modern Italian capital, to his brushes with A-list Hollywood actors.Mr. Casaro said he’d been “born with a paintbrush in my hand,” a natural talent who got better “with a lot of experience.”He moved to Rome in 1954, just as it was becoming a favorite of international filmmakers, who took advantage of the city for its unparalleled setting, the production expertise at Cinecittà Studios and the allure of rising local stars like Sophia Loren.He found work at a well-known advertising design studio specializing in movie posters.Mr. Casaro, who is about to turn 86, working in his studio this month in Treviso.Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times“You learn on the job,” said Mr. Casaro, who eventually went out on his own. “You have to be able to draw everything, from a portrait to a horse to a lion.”It really was la dolce vita, he recalled.“We’d come out of the trauma of the war, and Rome was full of life,” he said, with movie stars and tourists swelling the swanky restaurants of Via Veneto. He was out of that league, but he tried to sneak into the hottest places.“We lived on the margins, but come on, it was marvelous to be young and go to Rome and discover this world,” he said in the deconsecrated church of Santa Margherita, one of the venues for his exhibition. His mother, he noted, was less thrilled with his vocation and location. Growing up in provincial Treviso, Rome might as well have been on another planet. “She thought Rome was the city of perdition,” he said. “She cried, she fretted, ‘I’ve lost my son.’”In Rome, he worked constantly. Roberto Festi, the curator of the exhibition, estimated that during this first phase of his career, he was making about 100 posters a year.To better understand the mood of a film, Mr. Casaro often went on the set. Sergio Leone wanted him in New York to witness a key moment in “Once Upon a Time in America.”“They were filming the scene where the youngest boy gets killed,” Mr. Casaro recalled, an image that eventually evolved into the movie poster. “It was stunning, and the highlight of the first part of the film.”At the exhibition in Treviso. Conan and Bond were among Mr. Casaro’s subjects. Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesThe turning point in his career, which brought attention outside Italy, came when Dino De Laurentiis hired him to make the poster for the 1966 blockbuster “The Bible: In the Beginning…” It was the start of a long-lasting collaboration with Mr. De Laurentiis, and the friendship helped put him in Hollywood’s sights.Mr. Casaro drew the posters for the Conan trilogy, breakthrough films for Mr. Schwarzenegger, who in 1982 was known mostly as a bodybuilder. For the first film, Mr. De Laurentiis, one of the producers, told Mr. Casaro to focus on the actor’s face, not just his muscles. “Dino wanted to launch him,” Mr. Casaro said. “He knew that Schwarzenegger would explode as an actor.”Another big star of the day, Sylvester Stallone, loved how Mr. Casaro had depicted him in his role as the troubled Vietnam vet Rambo. “Stallone said that I had entered into his soul,” Mr. Casaro said.Mr. Casaro’s early style, which he described as “impressionistic,” became increasingly realistic in the 1980s when he began using an airbrush. That made his technique more photographic but also “more magical,” he said.A poster for Rambo III. Mr. Casaro said Sylvester Stallone told him he had “entered into his soul.”Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times“When he began working in hyper-realism, that was the big change,” said Nicoletta Pacini, the head of posters and movie memorabilia at Italy’s National Museum of Cinema. “That was pure Casaro, and others began to copy him.”The artist isn’t sure how many movie posters he created in total but estimates it’s close to 2,000.“He always understood the spirit of the film” creating images that were “special and distinctive,” said Carlo Verdone, one of Italy’s most famous comedic actors and directors who hired Mr. Casaro to make posters for several films. Mr. Casaro stopped making posters in 1998, when the taste for hand-drawn images had waned in favor of digital and photoshopped renderings. Not for him, he said.He shifted his focus to African wildlife drawings — and elaborate re-workings of famous Renaissance paintings populated with movie stars.In a reimagining of Michelangelo’s “Last Judgment,” Marilyn Monroe holds court. “She’s always been the ultimate myth for me,” Mr. Casaro said. “With all her weaknesses, she still represents a special moment in the history of cinema.”Mr. Casaro showing a drawing of Marilyn Monroe. “With all her weaknesses, she still represents a special moment in the history of cinema,” he said of her.Alessandro Grassani for The New York TimesThen, out of the blue, Mr. Tarantino called, asking for posters in a vintage spaghetti-western style for “Once Upon a Time … in Hollywood,” the director’s love letter to 1960s Los Angeles.He designed two posters featuring Leonardo DiCaprio, who plays an on-the-way-out actor who goes to Italy to make spaghetti westerns and revive his career. One of the posters is for a fictional film called “Kill Me Now Ringo, Said the Gringo.”“Those films always had incredible titles,” Mr. Casaro laughed.Mr. Tarantino sent him a signed photo of Mr. DiCaprio posing for the poster with a message that reads: “Thanks so much for your art gracing my picture. You’ve always been my favorite.”For Mr. Casaro’s admirers, the Treviso exhibition is long overdue.“The history of art has tended to marginalize posters because they were conceived for the masses, and the illustrators were seen more as craftsmen,” said Walter Bencini, who made a documentary about Mr. Casaro. “But movie posters can be popular art in the true sense of the word, because they’re part of the collective imagination but also evoke so many personal feelings tied to specific moments.”The feelings evoked in his poster for “The Sheltering Sky,” lushly filmed by Bernardo Bertolucci in 1990, make it one of Mr. Casaro’s personal favorites. “It captures the mystery,” he said, “the notion of immersing oneself in the desert.”If movies are primarily about entertainment, then Mr. Casaro’s summary of his career is apt.“I had fun,” he said. “A lot of fun.”Mr. Casaro in his studio. “I constantly adapted,” he said of his long career.Alessandro Grassani for The New York Times More
The industry was decimated by the pandemic, with theaters shut across the country and new films delayed by Hollywood studios. But now cinemas are ready to fill up their seats again. Will audiences follow?LOS ANGELES — It’s time to go back to the movies! Now!That was the message sent on Wednesday over and over and over again when all five of Hollywood’s major studios, their independent subsidiaries and the stand-alone indie labels like A24 and Neon gathered in person at an AMC theater to show off their coming summer films and remind moviegoers who have become used to streaming their entertainment during the pandemic why they liked going to the movies in the first place. More
