the damaged male and the contemporary american war film

whereby white masculinity attempted to muscle in on identity politics and pronounce itself
“victimized”. 41
So what are the cultural manoeuvres that allow the privilege and advantage of white
masculinity to be circumvented and posit in its place a narrative of victimhood and crisis?
Richard Dyer has stated that ‘whites are everywhere in representation’ 42 , suggesting that
whiteness is a pervasive and ubiquitous presence in mass visual culture. Dyer goes on to
specifically state that this ubiquity is a product of the white male insisting he is ‘not of a certain
race […] just the human race’. 43 Accordingly, this ‘equation between white and human secures
a position of power.’ 44 So whiteness possesses a centrality in representation, but it is not just
this centrality that affords whiteness its power, it is also the fact that it invisibly occupies this
position, due to it not being raced. Therefore, as Sara Ahmed reminds us, ‘whiteness is only
invisible for those who inhabit it.’ 45 This simultaneous invisibility and centrality means that
‘whiteness has to be read critically, rather than simply assumed as a fact of life.’ 46
Despite whiteness’s centrality, invisibility and cultural power, Sally Robinson identifies a
narrative of ‘white decline’ which has emerged post 1960s in which the alleged
disenfranchisement of the white man has symbolized a ‘decline of the American way.’ 47
Through claiming a ‘symbolic disempowerment’, normative white masculinity may ‘negotiate
its position within the field of identity politics’ 48 – an identity politics which has emerged due
41 Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 12
42 Richard Dyer, White (London: Routledge, 1997), 3
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid., 9
45 Sara Ahmed, “A Phenomenology of Whiteness.” Feminist Theory 8.2 (2004), 157
46 Alice Bardan, ‘“Welcome to Dreamland’: The realist impulse in Pawel Pawlikoski’s Last Resort.” New
Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film 6.1 (2008), 52
47 Sally Robinson, Marked Men: White Masculinity in Crisis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000), 2
48 Ibid., 12
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