the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

Tracks, Coming Home, The Deer Hunter, and Apocalypse Now, Vietnam veterans (and
soldiers), and more specifically, white male veterans/soldiers are depicted as ‘victims’ and
‘emblems of an unjustly discriminated masculinity’. 27
Hollywood cinematic history is ripe with iconic figures who are broken and damaged male
characters. This occurs across genres and cultural contexts. For example, James Stewart’s
performance in It’s A Wonderful Life (Frank Capra, 1946), and Robert De Niro’s in Taxi
Driver (Martin Scoresese, 1976) belong to different schools of acting and social frameworks,
however, in both films, we are presented with a post-war (whether this is Vietnam or WWII)
account of male crisis. I am not claiming fixity to the figure of the damaged male throughout
these differing contexts, but rather stressing that this figure, through reconfiguring itself, is
capable of transcending generic and artistic boundaries, and is not exclusively associated with
one particular time period or form of cinema. That said, it does seem to be the case that
certainly since at least the early 1990s, Hollywood has experienced an upwards turn in its
utilization of male suffering and corporeal ruination. 28
Masculinity and its relationship to themes of crisis, pain, and victimhood have met with
extended critical attention in the field of film studies. Susan Jeffords examined what she
dubbed ‘terminal masculinities’ 29 in the early 1990s, whereas in Steven Cohan and Ira Rae
Hark’s volume, Screening The Male, we have, in part, an examination of ‘filmed men and male
The Vietnam War and American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991); Marita Sturken,
Tangled Memories: the Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 1997); Robin Wood, Hollywood from Vietnam to Reagan (New York: Columbia
University Press, 1986).
27 Jeffords, Remasculinization, 116
28 David Savran tracks this trajectory in US popular culture by in part pointing to the numerous “hero-as-victim”
roles played by Michael Douglas throughout the late 1980s and early 1990s and the typical heroes in action
movies throughout the 1990s. Please see David Savran, Taking It Like A Man: White Masculinity, Masochism,
and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998)
29 Jeffords, Hard Bodies, 140-177
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