the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

to make consuming images of pain and violence a pleasurable sensation, and also to portray the
damaged male as a seductive and desirable subjectivity to adopt. I wish to explore why there is
an emphasis on the damaged male in contemporary war cinema, how this damage is
communicated to us, and ultimately, in the course of the textual analysis in my chapters, to
investigate how spectators are sited in relationship to this portrayal of masculinity. The
damaged male soldier or war veteran is postulated as a victim par excellence and is deployed
in these films in order to disavow the belligerent neo-imperialism of US power. This process
compels the spectator to ‘desire’ victimisation and self-abandonment, and hence posits a
masochistic spectatorship, a spectatorship that can be read as either transformative or status
quo confirming. Always though, whether this masochism is used in radical or conservative
ways, there remains the ebb and flow of the ideological reserve 2 that endorses and seduces
spectators into the masochistic fantasy of power and subjugation. To corrupt one of Kaja
Silverman’s key phrases 3 , the subject in popular US visual culture is recruited to a ‘submissive
fiction’; a hegemonic mode that lauds victimhood, weakness, crisis, and self-abandonment as a
means of formulating a contemporary national identity that discharges itself of culpability for
the US’s neo-imperial violence. This process conveniently entails the erasure of gender, race
and class in formulating US national identity, replacing it with a monolithic image of crisis and
suffering. This thesis will therefore attempt to reinsert questions of race, gender and class into
the discourse of US national identity through examining the narratives of victimhood to be
found in its depictions of damaged men in contemporary war films. Through using radical re-
thinkings of masochism, masculinity studies in contemporary cinema, and the recent turn to
players. See Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 2000).
2 Louis Althusser asserted that ideologies require an element of a belief in them, and this belief is manufactured
and maintained outside of conscious thought processes. An ideological reserve then, is a pool of collective ideas,
propositions, facts etc. that assist in the maintenance of this belief and hence perpetuate the dominant ideology.
See Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays,
trans. Ben Brewster (London: Monthly Review Press, 1971), 171-172
3 “The dominant fiction”, meaning the ideological reserve informing and constructing normative and compulsory
patriarchal culture, used throughout Male Subjectivity at the Margins (London: Routledge, 1992)
2