the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

the psychology of our central male character. This means that their psychosis/trauma/collapse
cannot help but become spectacular. The film becomes one long drawn out sigh or scream of
despair.
Since the damaged male seems to be a ubiquitous presence throughout cinematic history,
further delineation and fleshing out of this concept is required. It is clear that the concept of
the damaged male is a little simplistic, and so therefore we are more precisely dealing with
what may be considered the determining synecdoche of mainstream US national identity,
namely, the damaged white male, or the white male as victim. 35 Therefore, it is not just his
damage, but crucially the male’s whiteness intersecting with victimhood that encapsulates and
renders authentic his national identity, his Americanness. It has been argued that ‘the history
and tradition of the United States is replete with relentless efforts to retain and guard the
boundaries of nationality with whiteness’. 36 So the exemplary American is one who is white,
but not only this, when this whiteness is allied to notions of ‘hegemonic masculinity’ 37
through the male occupying a conventional or stereotypical gender role (such as the soldier),
then the American in excelsis is born. Whiteness and hegemonic masculinity produce a
normative US national identity, and when allied to the spectacle of pain and suffering, an
authentic and desirable subjectivity of damaged American white masculinity emerges.
35 The synecdochal nature of the white straight male in US national identity has been explored by David Savran,
Taking It Like A Man: White Masculinity, Masochism, and Contemporary American Culture (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1998); Liam Kennedy, Race and Urban Space in Contemporary American Culture
(Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2000); and Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2000).
36
Thomas Nakayama and Robert Krizek, ‘Whiteness: A strategic rhetoric’ Quarterly Journal of Speech. 81
(1995), 301
37 R. W. Connell, Masculinities (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005)
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