In a way, this essay began in the second year of my master’s program upon a rereading of Laura Mulvey’s “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema” when I began to seriously reconsider Mulvey’s claim that the “male movie star’s glamorous characteristics are thus not those of the erotic object of the gaze;” in another, much more personal way, it began in the winter of 2008 when I was thirteen years old (63). When I think about how to closely read Francis Ford Coppola’s 1983 adaptation of The Outsiders, based on S.E. Hinton’s 1967 young-adult novel of the same name, I find that even as I engage the film in conversation with the work of thinkers like Laura Mulvey and Jacques Lacan, my critical feminist reading of The Outsiders is inextricable from my anecdotal, affective memories of seeing – and falling in love with – this film as a teenage girl. Although the primary methodology in this study is a close reading of The Outsiders through feminist film and psychoanalytical lenses, that close reading is explicitly informed by autobiography and memory. I begin with this prolix methodological disclaimer because while the bulk of this study incorporates The Outsiders as a model to explore a young female gaze at cinema, as the film positions male bodies as age-appropriate spectacles, I am able to conclude that this film can help to train an active gaze in young female spectators through personal experience, which I will periodically call upon.

At first blush, The Outsiders does not look like a text that teenage girls would find romantic interest in, since its core characters are young men who almost never interact with girls, and the narrative is superficially fueled by testosterone. The story follows fourteen-year-old Ponyboy Curtis, his greaser gang in 1960s Tulsa, and their rivalry with the affluent teens in town, called Socs. The story begins with a group of Socs jumping Ponyboy (C. Thomas Howell in the film) on his way home from the movies; shortly thereafter, his friend Johnny (Ralph Macchio) kills a Soc (Leif Garrett) in self-defense. The boys go to their friend Dally (Matt Dillon) for help, and he tells them to run away to an abandoned church. After the church catches fire (and Ponyboy, Johnny, and Dally save some schoolchildren), Johnny breaks his back and dies. Dally, unable to process Johnny’s death, robs a convenience store with an unloaded gun and is killed by police.

Upon the novel’s release in 1967, readers were drawn to, as Michelle Ann Abate writes, “[Its] gritty portrayal of working-class life” (45). In general, this is accurate: The Outsiders may be one of the first realistic fiction narratives aimed directly at a teenage audience, which is often cited as one of the reasons it continues to succeed. As S.E. Hinton, herself a teenage girl upon publication of The Outsiders, has said, “If you didn’t want to read Mary Jane Goes to the Prom, and you were through with horse books, there was nothing to read” (par. 13). But more than fifty years after initial publication and thirty-seven years since the film’s debut, something equally interesting continues to happen: Generations of girls still develop crushes on these characters. For instance, in his letter to fans in the fiftieth-anniversary edition of the novel, Rob Lowe (who played Ponyboy’s middle brother, Sodapop, in Coppola’s film) writes, “To have a gaggle of bright-eyed, excitable thirteen-year-olds scream ‘Sodapop!’ to a fifty-two-year-old man is pretty cool” (par. 5). While Lowe does not specify that these thirteen-year-olds are girls, I figure many of them could be because I would have been one of them, and in my adolescence, I knew many girls who felt the same way. Some of my friends in junior high started referring to pop as soda (despite living in Detroit, where saying pop is an unwritten rule) and insisted on being called “Mrs. Johnny Cade” in casual conversation. In 2014, I published a BuzzFeed article called “The Definitive Hotness Ranking of all the Greasers from The Outsiders” featuring several GIFs of the film’s actors; six years later, it remains my most popular BuzzFeed article and is circulated among young girls discovering The Outsiders (most recently, I found a link to it on an eighth-grade girl’s Pinterest board.). In my adulthood, I have met, in person and online, women who were infatuated with The Outsiders and look fondly on those memories. There are girls’ fan fiction stories and fan accounts on fashion apps like SSENSE with charts predicting what your prom dress would be if one of these greasers was your date (See fig. 1). Narratively, The Outsiders is not Mary Janes Goes to the Prom. Nevertheless, that Coppola’s film puts faces to Hinton’s “hunky male protagonists” tends to make some young women in the audience wish these boys could take us to the prom, anyway (Abate 45).

There is, of course, some historical precedence for young girls’ romantic and romanticized attachment to The Outsiders in addition to what I anecdotally offer. Upon the film’s release, Tiger Beat magazine promised “In-Depth [Interviews], Private Pics, and Gorgeous Pinups” of its cast; Superteen said Ralph Macchio was “so cute [he would] make you cry,” and the October 1983 issue of Teen Beat boasted “Outsiders Update! New Photos! New Stories! New Pin-Ups!” (See fig. 2). Conversely, many critics disparaged The Outsiders. For example, David Denby’s review reads, “It’s a true kids’ movie […] thirteen-year-olds should love it” (73). Similar derogatory sentiments are found in David Ansen’s “Coppola Courts the Kiddies,” and Vincent Canby’s 1984 review of Suburbia (directed by Penelope Spheeris, also about disaffected youth). That teenagers are the clear demographic for this film seems to be the primary reason not to take it seriously, but unstated here is that the film appeared to resonate differently – and intensely – with teenage girls.

Those writers who do acknowledge the bond between The Outsiders and teenage girls generally offer just that: acknowledgement, neither positive nor negative. Denis Wood writes about the “the girls packing the house [who] began to squeal at the spectacle of a BVD-clad Matt Dillon bouncing around on his hospital bed;” this is the only time the girls in the audience are mentioned (7). Michelle Ann Abate, whose article focuses on Hinton’s novel, argues that The Outsiders “caters into [adolescents’] budding sexuality” by “tapping into” the archetypal roles of “all-male pop music groups” (45). Abate’s assessment admittedly bleeds into mine, but where Abate closely reads the passages in the text where Hinton’s greaser boys are ogled like fan magazines once ogled The Beatles, I want to take it one step further. There is a myriad of places in The Outsiders (the film perhaps more than the novel, courtesy of the visual medium) where young female spectators can choose to ogle the young male spectacles, and as we look back to see that this film has become a staple in the teen movie genre, I want to emphasize that this female gazing is a good thing. While I cannot aim to psychoanalyze imaginary audiences of The Outsiders, I do aim to closely consider the elements in Coppola’s film that may attract a specific adolescent female gaze and theoretically account for the longstanding feminine attachment to the film. I view The Outsiders as a film that could give young women the opportunity to train their gazes – something that, according to Mulvey’s paradigm, they are supposedly denied. That we may train a female gaze through the study of a coming-of-age film is additionally powerful, as the hypothetical spectator can learn to form her gaze during her formative years; in other words, the years wherein she has the most time and freedom to make herself what she wants to be.

From the moment The Outsiders begins (specifically the director’s cut, Coppola’s preferred version released in 2005 and officially titled The Outsiders: The Complete Novel), the audience’s attention is drawn to cinematic gazing and the male body. In voiceover, Ponyboy delivers the book’s famous opening line: “When I stepped out into the bright sunlight from the darkness of the movie house, I had only two things on my mind: Paul Newman and a ride home” (3:04-3:20). This voiceover is accompanied by a point-of-view shot as Ponyboy pushes the theater doors open, and the sunlight pours in. For the protagonist to leave a movie theater as soon as the audience sits down to watch a film is an interesting oxymoron, but I think, in terms of how we may use this film to train a female gaze, the oxymoron is fitting. As the jarring movement of darkness to sunlight asks viewers to adjust their literal gazes, the following shot of Ponyboy looking at his reflection in the mirror and pretending to be Paul Newman in The Hustler (“‘This is Ames, mister,’” he says as he checks himself out [3:22]) suggests that viewers may want to adjust their scopophilic gazes, too (See fig. 3). This moment is playful, but it asks the audience to look at this boy like he could be – like he is – a handsome movie star. In other words, the first time the audience sees a male character (or any character) onscreen in The Outsiders, he makes himself into a spectacle. Ponyboy, to borrow a term from Laura Mulvey, “to-be-looked-at-ness” (62, italics in the original). As an audience, we are supposed to look at him here and find him charming or endearing, but that he looks and evaluates himself against Hollywood glamor gives us permission to look at and evaluate him that way, too. For actual teenagers in the audience (often girls, per Denis Wood’s account that in 1983, theaters were packed with them), the framing here encourages the opportunity to gaze. Ponyboy is cute, and here he shows it off, like he would want someone to look at him and mistake him for Paul Newman. This is a sweet scopophilic moment, and its subject is a boy, a trend that persists throughout the film.

The rest of the scene introduces the audience to the other six members of Ponyboy’s gang as they come to rescue him from being jumped, and although their first appearances occur swiftly, each boy appears one at a time in a way that feels tonally similar to the individualized introductions for The Beatles in the trailer for Help! (1965, Richard Lester). That is, the camera lingers just long enough on each boy so that the audience has time to applaud or squeal when their favorite appears for the first time (This could be especially exciting for audiences who may have read the book and already packed bond with a specific character, audiences who were familiar with the 1983 theatrical release and developed a favorite there, or both.). More interesting than these individualized introductions, however, is the order in which the six other actors appear. Emilio Estevez, Tom Cruise, and Rob Lowe appear in quick succession before the camera cuts to a longer shot of Ralph Macchio, which Patrick Swayze joins about a second later (5:12-5:17). The last actor introduced is Matt Dillon as Dally, the only actor with a completely solo introductory shot. There are no other bodies in frame. This is just Matt Dillon hopping a fence (5:18-5:20). Because he is the only actor who does not share the screen, it almost seems like the audience is supposed to wait for him or that the scene has been building to his appearance. This idea is only amplified after the greaser boys scare the Socs away and banter with one another, as Dally is almost always in frame, even when he has nothing to do with the conversation (See fig. 4). The camera’s lingering on Dally, coupled with how long it takes him to move out of frame when he is no longer needed, is part of what influences me to focus the remainder of this analysis on him.

My rationale for focusing the rest of this study on Dally is twofold: Of all the boys, he is most often framed as age-appropriate “eye candy,” and his character most clearly illustrates that in this narrative; men must possess an emotional sensitivity bordering on hysteria. Though Dally is not the protagonist, Dillon receives top billing, and his character motivates much of the narrative. Additionally, he is practically the only character for whom sex with a woman seems like a remote possibility (re: his interactions with Diane Lane’s character, Cherry, who says, “I’d probably fall in love with him” [26:01]). Finally, at thirteen, I trained my own gaze by looking at Matt Dillon in The Outsiders, and now, as an adult who can closely read cinematic language, I deduce that there is something (not necessarily intentional, though Coppola’s thesis in making this film was to make “a Gone with the Wind for 14-year-old girls” [qtd. in Burns par. 6]) in the composition of this film that led me there and could lead other young female spectators to a similar place.

In particular, the composition of Dally’s body may cater to an incipient female gaze because the framing suggests potential for sexual activity without revealing “too much” of his body all at once. That is, Dally’s shirtless scenes are shot so that the audience only focuses on one part of his body at a time, and while the audience will see parts of the body that eventually equal the whole, that we are not asked to look at his full body all in one frame is perhaps ideal for young girls in the audience who are figuring out what it means to be attracted to someone. For example, in one study by J. Dennis Fortenberry, 61% of junior-high-aged girls (about the demographic for a first viewing of The Outsiders) reported having crushes but that these crushes were “unreciprocated [attractions] and not “explicitly sexual;” instead, they were more concerned with “feelings and fantasies” (par. 10). To pivot back to The Outsiders: In Coppola’s own words, this film is made for teenage girls, a demographic reporting crushes in high numbers. It seems logical, then, that girls at this stage in their development would often flock to this film as fodder for romantic fantasies. That the film depicts the half-naked male body in fragments may complement the way many girls develop crushes (i.e. a focus on fantasy and leaving things to the imagination) while concurrently building a bridge toward a more bodily understanding of sexuality. Although Laura Mulvey posits that this kind of fragmentation is “fetishistic scopophilia” and symptomatic of castration anxiety, I maintain that in the context of The Outsiders, the male body, and the incipient female gaze, we should not dismiss the fragmentation as outright fetishism (64). Instead, we may consider this physical fragmentation as an age-appropriate way to work through and develop early romantic fantasies.

I could choose from a surfeit of scenes to exemplify the way this film fragments the male body and makes hypothetical room for an incipient female gaze; in the interest of brevity, I will choose perhaps the most obvious example: the late-night party where Ponyboy and Johnny solicit Dally’s help after Johnny kills a Soc. When they find Dally, the lighting is hazy and deep red, which makes it difficult to focus on the characters’ facial features. In a film that frequently utilizes close-ups, the facial haziness is remarkable. Dally comes to the door in a pair of jeans but no shirt (like he does in Hinton’s novel, from which this study takes its title), but before he gets there, we watch him walk downstairs in a shot from Johnny’s point of view (See fig. 5). With regard to this film’s gaze at the male body, this first shirtless shot of Dally is intriguing for a number of reasons. First of all, that the film takes the time to show Dally through the window at all suggests that seeing him shirtless is a treat; perhaps more interestingly, his “visual presence [works] against the development of a storyline [and freezes] the flow of action in moments of erotic contemplation” (Mulvey 62). In other words, this shot is superfluous to the narrative itself, and all the audience would lose in its absence is the visual pleasure of a young man in his physical prime. Here, a male body receives the same treatment as a female body would in Mulvey’s paradigm. It is not enough, however, to say that this one shot is interesting because it challenges Mulvey’s ideas by reversing them. What matters is the kind of gaze that the shot’s composition encourages in the viewer. As aforementioned, this is a point-of-view shot, and although this lends credence to the popular queer reading of The Outsiders (e.g. Richard Corliss’s assessment that the film is “‘familial, embracing, [and] unself-consciously homoerotic” [qtd. in Lebeau 95]), I want to really consider the “girls packing the house” (Wood 7). The audience, including girls, assumes Johnny’s point of view, so this moment may technically become one of female gazing. More intriguing when we consider the film’s general age demographic is the amount of filtering between the audience’s eyes and Dally’s body. In addition to the screen itself, Dally’s half-nakedness is impeded by the glass in the window, the blinds, and the hazy red light. We see that he is shirtless, though the filtering reminds us of how far away we are. The composition here may allow many girls in the audience to crush on the boy without ever feeling like they would have to touch him. The distance between spectator and spectacle mitigates the threat of sexuality and suggests sexual potential at the same time. This is a visible fantasy; nevertheless, it is a fantasy. Anecdotally, I remember being enthralled with this scene when I watched it with my parents. My father noticed and said, “Maybe we shouldn’t watch this movie together anymore.” At thirteen, I was interested in the idea that a boy could walk around without a shirt without thinking about what that means; at twenty-five, I understand there were sexual underpinnings I was unprepared to articulate.

The scene progresses, the lighting becomes less hazy, and the camera continues to fragment Dally’s body; this time, the framing is somewhat more overtly sexual while still minimizing sexual threat. Dally takes Ponyboy and Johnny into his room to help them get out of town, and he grabs a gun from the dresser. He is shot from the waist down, and the audience watches, for thirteen seconds, while he loads the gun between his legs (See fig. 6). On the one hand, this image is quite sexually threatening, as Dally’s gun is clearly a penile metonym and may suggest that for him, violence and libido are linked. At the very least, that the camera lingers here for so long is a reminder that guns are common phallic symbols. Still, I posit that this fragmented composition of the body, despite being more visibly sexual, caters to an age-appropriate female gaze. While a thirteen-year-old girl might notice the sexual allusion, it feels less threatening because we do not have to see Dally’s entire body; specifically, we do not have to make illusory eye contact. There is no subjectivity here – only legs. Although subjectivity is not crucial to teenagers’ earliest crushes (e.g. Carl Pickhardt’s assertion that crushes are about projection and “signify a lot about the dreamer” [par. 6]), without a face, it is perhaps more difficult to project. Eventually, in the same scene, the camera pans back up to Dally’s face in one of the film’s most intense close-ups; for now, these are legs, no matter how suggestive (40:06). As Denis Wood puts it, “Don’t worry, girls. You won’t see [anything]!” (7). The fragmented shots allow a hypothetical thirteen-year-old girl to experience an emotional crush and her incipient sexuality separately. This way, the sexual undertones remain nonthreatening undertones.

Yet, the relationship between the fragmented male body and the incipient female gaze is about more than disjointed shots of body parts. In The Outsiders, we can think of the fragmented body in Mulveyian terms and in Lacanian terms. Jacques Lacan uses the term fragmented body to describe a man’s “images of castration, emasculation, mutilation, dismemberment, dislocation, evisceration, devouring, [and the] bursting open of the body” (11). Effectively, Lacan’s fragmented body is a visceral metaphor for Freudian hysteria. I invoke hysteria to discuss Dally for two reasons: a., at the end of the film, he slowly undergoes a hysterical breakdown and b., this breakdown is framed in a way that conflates hysteria with sensitivity. More to the point, his hysteria is framed as attractive and admirable. This framing is evident in the infamous “Do it for Johnny” scene. After Ponyboy and Johnny’s hideout catches fire, and Johnny and Dally are hospitalized, Ponyboy and his friend Two-Bit (Emilio Estevez) visit them. In Dally’s visitation scene, the audience’s attention is immediately drawn to his near nudity, as he tells his nurse he “threw [his hospital gown] away” (1:19:15). This is the most naked Dally gets; however, this time, it may be that his near-nakedness is symptomatic of his emotional vulnerability and movement toward hysteria. Girls may squeal (re: Denis Wood’s essay), but the squealing may be for his hyperbolic vulnerability more than his physique. The scene’s first close-up on Dally is only somewhat focused on his physical form. We see him rock back and forth on the bed, mimetic of pelvic thrusting; of course, since we can only see his face and shoulders, his form is still fragmented for an incipient gaze (1:19:56). Nonetheless, his movements are hardly noticeable because we are meant to focus on his worried expression as he asks, “How’s Johnny doing?” (1:20:06). His expression is noteworthy because it is so different than what the audience is accustomed to seeing from Dally, the toughest greaser (See fig. 7). Now, after learning Johnny might die, he takes Two-Bit’s pocketknife, stabs his pillow, and shouts, “We gotta get even with those Socs. Let’s do it for Johnny […] We’ll do it for Johnny!” (1:20:51-1:20:01). His reaction is maudlin and does not match the rest of the scene’s subdued tone. Here, Dally falls apart – fragments himself – into hysterical territory. Since his hysteria is provoked by love, the message here is not that Dally is losing stability; it is that he is more sensitive than we assumed. Granted, his emotional fragmentation is tied to his physical/sexual fragmentation. Even as he dies, his shirt is open (1:40:31). Rather than criticize the film for framing Dally’s hysterical fragmentation as “being sensitive,” I think his emotional and physical fragmentations work together here to create a male character who is, potentially, perfect fodder for a girl’s incipient romantic fantasy. He looks good, and he knows how to feel, all in the same body.

I reference Lacan and hysteria not to unnecessarily complicate my argument at the eleventh hour but because this is where I want to, eventually, continue. In his essay, “The Subversion of the Subject and the Dialect of Desire,” Lacan writes that when we think about how to desire, we ask, “‘Chè vuoi?’” or “‘What [do you] want of me?’” (690, italics in the original). Traditional Lacanian psychoanalysis teaches us that our desire is “the desire of the Other” (Seminar XI, 265). But the idea that we determine what we want based on someone else is inherently fraught because it does not privilege our agency. This is perhaps especially anxiety inducing for women, as the expectation that she will conform to the male gaze strips her of the agency she may have had. As a film that lays the male figure physically and emotionally bare, The Outsiders is a narrative where girls in the audience may be encouraged to do the gazing. When and if a girl becomes an agent of her own (incipient) gaze by interacting with this film, she does not have to ask, “Chè vuoi?” of its boys because its boys ask “Chè vuoi?” of her.

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Works Cited

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Ansen, David. “Coppola Courts the Kiddies.” Newsweek, 4 Apr. 1983, p. 74.

Burns, Sean. “Revisiting The Outsiders After the Immediacy of Adolescence’s Plights Have Passed.” The ARTery, 31 Jul. 2018, https://www.wbur.org/artery/2018/07/31/the-outsiders-coppola-hinton. Accessed 27 Jul 2020.

Canby, Vincent. “Screen: Down-and-Out Youths in ‘Suburbia.’ The New York Times, 13 April 1984.

“Cover.” Superteen Special, no. 6. 1983.

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Denby, David. “Romance for Boys.” New York, 1983, p. 73.

Fortenberry, J. Dennis. “Puberty and Adolescent Sexuality.” Hormonal Behavior, vol. 64, no. 2,  2013, pp. 280-287.

Help! Directed by Richard Lester, screenplay by Marc Behm and Charles Wood, story by Marc Behm, United Artists, 1965.

Hinton, S.E. The Outsiders. Penguin, 2017.

Lacan, Jacques. Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, translated by Bruce Fink, W.W. Norton & Company, 2006.

—. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XI: The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. Edited by Jacques-Alain Miller, translated by Alan Sheridan, W.W. Norton & Company, 1998.

Lebeau, Vicky. Lost Angels: Psychoanalysis and Cinema. Routledge, 1995.

Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” Feminism and Film Theory, edited by Constance Penley, Routledge, 1988, pp. 57-68.

The Outsiders: The Complete Novel. Directed by Francis Ford Coppola, screenplay by Kathleen Knutsen Rowell, Warner Bros., 2005.

Pickhardt, Carl. “Adolescence and the Teenage Crush.” CommonLit, 2012,   https://www.commonlit.org/texts/adolescence-and-the-teenage-crush. Accessed 28 Aug. 2020.

Profitt, Blue. “The Definitive Hotness Ranking of All the Greasers from The Outsiders.” BuzzFeed, 6 Dec. 2014, https://www.buzzfeed.com/bprofitt/the-definitive-ranking-of-all-the-greasers-from-th-v954. Accessed 27 Jul. 2020.

Wood, Denis. “Outside of Nothing: The Place of Community in Francis Coppola’s The Outsiders.” Power, Place, Situation and Spectacle, edited by Leo Zonn and Stuart Aitken, Rowman & Littlefield, pp. 101-117, 1994.