the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

ironically ingrained into the aesthetic style) the new post-Gulf War visual regimes for
representing war, and narrates anxieties regarding the shifting nature of the US’s geo-political
position and the transforming nature of war itself.
The Damaged Male
Steve Neale argues that war films are contemporaneously being studied ‘in light of the fact that
the war film is one of the few genres, as Saving Private Ryan (1998) has recently confirmed, in
which male characters are regularly permitted to weep as a means of expressing their physical
and emotional stress and hence their physical and emotional vulnerability.’ 22 So the current
cycles of war films can be seen as the site of what might be dubbed, an unblocking of male
emotion, and are therefore an appropriate form for making a spectacle of male suffering.
Historically, Hollywood war films are the foremost vehicle for emblematising US national
identity. In their iconographies of soldiering and male interaction, they ‘produce a
mythologised version of America and Americanness’, and a ‘privileging of male experience.’ 23
Therefore, it is clear that, as John Newsinger has declared, ‘all war films are tales of
masculinity.’ 24 Therefore, in the war film throughout history we have the crucial collision of
violence, suffering and masculinity, where the site of this collision is a privileged space in
which the representation of the damaged male can flourish.
War films, therefore, perform or work through the masculinities pertinent to their cultural
context. This is because war films are, by their nature, historical films (since they mainly deal
in historical events) and also draw on film history to inform their mise-en-scene and
22 Steve Neale, “War Films”, 29
23 Guy Westwell, War Cinema, 112
24 John Newsinger, ‘“Do You Walk The Walk?’ Aspects of Masculinity in Some Vietnam War Films,” You
Tarzan: Masculinity, Movies, and Men, ed. Pat Kirkham and Janet Thurim (London: Lawrence and Wishart,
1993), 126
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